That green Bisonette nail on the table: tap-tap-tap. “You’d have to ask Dad.”

WEDNESDAY

PATTERNS

JOEL

Lying in his room, a thin square of hot sunlight burning his thigh, Joel felt unmoored. He had a body of sorts, an impossible heavy thing, but he had no conscious will, no desire to eat or drink, no idea how he had ever done anything as strenuous as walk or bathe or breathe. He had heard of people being broken by grief, consumed by it, but he had never realized before that so much of grief was guilt: guilt for not doing more (not doing anything) to help the people who needed you, back when helping could have been done. Guilt, and beneath it, a sadness at realizing you were more alone than you had been before. And then fresh guilt, for thinking of yourself and your own sorrows when someone else was dead on a slab.

He found himself slipping, quite unwillingly, into a memory he thought he had dammed and drained and forgotten. Apparently not. A decade wasn’t long enough to obliterate the sort of summer he’d had back when he was Dylan’s age: the delirious hot afternoons, the bitter fall that followed. How hopeless, how embarrassing, to think he could ever put those days behind him.

There was that guilt again, reminding him how he only ever thought of himself. Perhaps. But anything was better than thinking of the present.

The announcement had come in early June, a few months before the start of Joel’s senior year. In addition to their summer practices, the Bison would now play exhibition games to raise money for the football program. The team, still suffering after the injury and then graduation of Troy Clark—their once-brilliant star of a running back—had failed to even qualify for play-offs in the past season, but the town was enthusiastic about these new games. Maybe, the men at the bar murmured, playing in the heat would put some spine in those soft boys.

Joel had worked for two seasons as an athletic assistant on the football team—one of the gangly nerds who’d picked up towels and squirted water into players’ mouths on the sidelines—but he had retired before the start of his junior year. He wanted to devote more time to his tennis game, Joel had told the coaches, but this excuse had sounded flimsy even to his own ears: tennis practice began in the spring, long after the end of the football season.

The fact that Troy Clark had graduated the spring before Joel quit the team was definitely, certainly, entirely coincidental. Never mind that from Joel’s two seasons on the sidelines he remembered Troy’s every “Thanks,” and “More water,” and once (miraculously) “Can you get the knot out of these laces?” Never mind that Joel remembered every time Troy’s startling green eyes had settled on his own, every glimpse of the soft brown hairs of his thigh when Troy had stepped from the showers. Surely, Joel assured himself, other boys felt a similar thrill in moments like these. Surely there was nothing wrong with him.