Hand-painted posters covered every wall. Bison stickers clogged the lockers. No wonder the school didn’t have the money to bring in grief counselors, Jamal thought. The cost of all this green tinsel alone would have paid for his lunch for a month.

The door of Dylan’s locker was so loaded down with ribbons and pennants and bouquets of flowers it almost seemed to be gloating. His photo, the one you saw everywhere around town, was stuck in the center, and beneath it was printed “RIP Leading the Big Herd in the Sky.”

Jesus. Dylan. One of the few guys on the team who’d ever been decent to Jamal had been reduced to a poster as sweet and sad as flat soda.

Wait: someone already scrawled a line of graffiti on a corner of Dylan’s photo. Could nothing in life stay good anymore?

Jamal leaned in, squinted at the words.

help it feeds help

The fuck?

Jamal’s locker stood almost bare beside Dylan’s, untouched but for the words WE BELIEVE IN YOU scrawled across the metal in green Sharpie. It was nice to know someone did. The sloping handwriting, he recognized, with a little smile, was Kimbra Lott’s.

His body ached from the pummeling he’d taken all week at practice—that fat fuck Parter had made a special project of Jamal. Never mind that a good quarterback behind a solid line is only sacked a handful of times in a season. For the last two days, Parter had sent his heaviest tackles after his new QB at every opportunity until Jamal was now half-certain the man had broken something in his brain.

How else could Jamal explain everything he saw when he slept?

He felt a fist strike his shoulder. Garrett and Mitchell ambled by, laughing to themselves. For the hundredth time this week, Garrett asked, a little singsong lilt in his voice, “Where were you last weekend, Reynolds?”

Jamal massaged the pain flaring down his arm. He wondered how much more of this treatment he could take.

He thought (as he’d been thinking all week) of Bethany, and immediately he was livid. “You should go for it, bro,” Dylan had said last month. “I think she’s really into you.”

“I’d never!” Jamal had protested, his face flushing, his heart in his throat. “I’d never do that to you, D.”

“Please, it’s nothing. My girl and me, we’ve got an understanding.”

“You what?”

“Go for it, seriously.” Dylan had laughed, then gotten mock serious, the Grand King of the Gridiron, joking in the way he did when he wanted something. “You have my blessing, Reynolds.”

So Jamal had finally responded to Bethany’s unanswered text messages:

OK. Let’s do it.

And yet when they’d finally gotten down to business Friday night she’d called the whole thing off the second his hand had touched her chest. She’d said she had a headache. Maybe it was her period coming on, she wondered.

Hell, Jamal had thought bitterly. Maybe it was Ebola. The girl had been made of excuses.