Everyone thought his disagreement with Rick was political, but it wasn’t. Nor was it the kind of machismo jealousy Lisa always suspected. There were deeper subterranean features that allowed Bill to feel no particular regret about sleeping with Kaylyn—why, in fact, he’d almost engineered it. His resentment began with this thing—this bizarre, fucked-up, only-in-Ohio story about a girl who’d once laughed at him.
Junior year, uneasy rumors circulated about Tina Ross. Rumors are immaculately fucked things in small towns. Embers often make the jump across roads and spark fires in other forests. Bill and Rick were spending the night at the home of poor Dakota’s teen tormentor: Ryan Ostrowski—Strow, as he was known. Bill had planned to go to Harrington’s, but the kid was again at war with his father, so he called Rick looking for something to do. This was after the T-shirt debacle, when it seemed like they were finally getting back on decent terms. Many drinks into the night—a group of maybe ten jocks from different grades hammering back cheap gin with lemonade—Ostrowski took out a digital camera.
“Check this out,” said Strow, and they gathered around the squat, powerful senior, a living, breathing concrete abutment on the offensive line. Though Bill saw the others laughing, covering their mouths in disbelief, when the camera landed in his hands, he wasn’t ready. To his wild surprise, it was the girl he’d tried to court in middle school with a Vicky’s milk shake. He couldn’t remember what he thought at the time, he was so wasted, nor did he recall Rick’s reaction.
He did remember Strow saying, “We got a video of her first time too.”
Bill woke on a sticky sofa in the basement, Rick nudging him, first light spilling through a ground-level window. Driving home with Rick, a hangover throbbing between his eyes with each beat of his pulse, he had to be reminded of what he’d seen.
“We should say something to someone.” Rick’s eyes traveled from the road to Bill. It was as much uncertainty as he’d ever heard in his friend’s voice.
“What?” This made his head thud harder. “To who? Why?”
Rick rubbed a hand over the stubble of his skull. He had a way of furrowing his brow where he could go from looking mean and handsome to genuinely distressed, the expression of a young boy about to burst into tears.
“Because they’re still doing shit like that to her regularly.”
“Didn’t look like she was objecting, if I recall.”
“That’s not the point.”
Rick’s self-righteousness pricked his headache. “You’re going to tell who? MacMillan? Coach Bonheim?”
He was thinking ruefully of his T-shirt ordeal. MacMillan, Bonheim, even Coach Napier, whom he loved like an uncle, no way would they make trouble for Beaufort, the star linebacker who was going to sign at a D-1 program. Rick didn’t get that the people in charge could be as cloistered and gutless and frightened as teenagers.
“It’s not that I want to snitch,” said Rick. “But you think she deserves that?”
He could feel the blood in every single vein in his skull. “Brink,” he snapped. “Those guys are your fucking friends. That was your call to hang out at Strow’s place last night. I don’t see how this is our problem.”
Rick let it alone after that and dropped Bill off. He managed to chat amicably with his dad for five minutes before he retreated to his room with a glass of water and a flask of spit-stirred whiskey to get a little hair of the dog in him. As he lay in the dark beneath his poster of Malcolm X, he mused that his objections to making this a federal case weren’t exactly on the up and up. Truth was, he had gotten a thrill from the pictures. He’d thought of Tina laughing at him in the hallway after Beaufort put him on the floor, and here was proof the snotty, Jesus-loving brat was more deep-down pathetic than he would ever manage to be. He recalled drinking a milk shake with her, the way a head of large brown curls spilled over each shoulder onto her varsity jacket. An air of fragility surrounded her, not only of her porcelain features or compact frame, but her very presence in the world, small and thin with dusty skin and large owl eyes. She played her part as the ingenue, the chaste. These Jesus kids all got away with this facade, dripping with self-righteousness while they pulled all the same shit the rest of the sinners did (and occasionally much worse). A few of the images of Tina did create a certain feeling, like spiders scuttling on the inside of his stomach, but he enjoyed them nevertheless: not for any sexual reason but for the gratification of discovering hypocrisy in exactly the place he expected. If he did harbor any guilt, Stacey’s older brother helped relieve him of it. He was friendly with Matt Moore, who’d been impossible to miss in the pictures, so he simply asked.
“Aw, that mother-frickin Ostrowski.” Matt rolled his eyes. “He should not be showing those off.”
“But it’s…” Bill searched for the word. In one snapshot, Stacey’s brother had worn a Jags football shirt and nothing from the waist down. “She’s okay with it all?”
Matt arched two red-blond eyebrows. He could never decide if he thought Stacey was weird-looking because she looked so much like her older brother or if Matt was weird-looking because he looked so much like his little sister. “That girl,” he said, nodding each word, “is the craziest little freak ever. Ever, Ashcraft.”
Fall progressed to winter. Football season ended and basketball season took over. Beaufort signed to play for the Buckeyes. Bill and Rick had another conversation.
“Curt Moretti was drunk the other night,” said Rick. They stood outside the Brinklans’ house by the field overlooking town. “He got to talking.”
Bill glared at the ground, not wanting to have this conversation again. He’d eaten dinner at his friend’s house, Jill Brinklan’s glazed salmon that he always scouted out days in advance so he could come over. It had long been Marty’s joke that Bill was their third kid on salmon night.
“We gotta tell someone.” But Rick sounded anything but certain.
“Tell them what, dude? What is it you’re planning to say?”
“Alls I know,” said Rick, “is I keep thinking about Kay, you know? She and Beaufort went out in middle school. Like it’s not out of the question that a few years back maybe things go different and she ends up with Beaufort instead of me. And he tries that on her. It makes me want to kill him just thinking about it.”
He still felt nips and pinches and fleabites of jealousy at the way Rick had to reassert, out loud, again and again, that Kaylyn was “his girl.” Like he’d conquered mountains, slain dragons, dedicatedly collected enough proofs of purchase from cereal boxes to win her. My girl was Rick’s incantation of possession, and though Bill first told himself his loathing of it was somehow feminist, he knew his reason to be baser: he coveted Kaylyn and always had.
“This isn’t grade school where you can just tattle to the adults and all your problems go away. Fuck, man, most of the people in charge at that school are the fucking problem.”
The sound of dishes banging around in the sink reached them from the kitchen window, and they both silently agreed to move farther down the road, past the Brinklan mailbox with an American flag etched into the metal. They stood in light jackets, watching a dense fog twist and distort the distant lights of the town.
“I know why you’re not bugging Harrington with this shit,” Bill grumbled, then told him what Matt Moore had said. A helpful reminder to Rick that whatever had gone on—was going on—could affect a lot of people.
“Beaufort and Ostrowski,” said Rick. “They call Tina their ‘fuck pig.’ ”
Those words made a gristly, nauseating sound together. Bill would not forget them for as long as he lived.
“I’m planning on having kids someday, which probably means a daughter or two. How do I live with myself knowing this about guys I play with? That I high-five every day?”