“We were all ‘distracted,’” grumbled Norris, not looking at me, but blaming me all the same.

“Whatever’s going on in your personal lives, you forget it when you get on the field. All of you.”

“Football’s about football,” said Layton, echoing his asshole opinion from before—but in the current context it lost the asshole quotient and just sounded like he was endorsing the coach.

“Right. Listen to your quarterback,” the coach said. “Of all of you, he’s the one who was on point today. If it wasn’t for his last-minute Hail Mary, we would have lost the game. To the Pythons. Let’s all give the man his due.”

The team congratulated Layton, applauding him, and he pretended like he didn’t want the attention. Pretended to be gracious. I hated the fact that he was the hero of the game.

“Reporters should be talking to him,” I heard someone grumble.

“Enough of that!” the coach said, shutting him down. “One thing has nothing to do with the other.”

As for me, that offside tackle got me yanked from the game, and got us a twenty-yard penalty, giving the Pythons a first down at their forty-yard line. Could have been a disaster if they scored because of it. If they had, no Hail Mary could have saved us. In that case, I wouldn’t just be the linebacker who’d lost the game, I’d be the gay linebacker who’d lost the game. From now on, I would always be “that gay football player.” Why the hell did the world have to be that way? Slapping labels on us, rather than allowing us to just be who we are?

“Bowman, hold up, I want to talk to you,” the coach said. I figured I was in for more brow-beating for what I did on the field.

“Coach, I’m sorry,” I told him.

“I know you are. And I know it wasn’t like you to slip up like that. To be honest, though, I should suspend you for at least a week . . . but I won’t. You have enough to deal with already.”

I appreciated his empathy. I had never considered him much of an empathetic person. But then, I never had a reason to even think about it before. It wasn’t a coach’s job to feel your pain.

“Those reporters are still out there,” he told me. “But if you went out the back way and didn’t talk to them, I wouldn’t think any less of you.”

Well, he might not, but I would.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Once I give them a couple of good sound bites, they’ll move on. I’ll be yesterday’s news in no time.”

He took off his cap, scratched his head, and sighed. “I think it’s going to be a while until you drop into yesterday, Ash.”