“Don’t worry,” Jimmy said, leaning into my ear. “Luke was a good running back, but everyone knows he’s a jackass. Even his own mom could see that. That play where we let the D-line through, I swear, we thought it was a screen.”

I sat on the bench and tied on my cleats.

“This should be Cole’s position,” I muttered back to Jimmy.

“Don’t even start,” Jimmy scoffed. “Cole’s a baby who only got the QB spot because his daddy made a big contribution for the new scoreboard. My nana throws a tighter spiral.”

The large lineman turned to the group and banged his fist against his locker.

“Listen up! Y’all saw what Conners did out here. That was some serious shit. And I’m talkin’ ’bout his play on the field, not what happened in the locker room. He’s the genuine article, and if anybody in here has a problem with him, you can go through me. I don’t want to see any more ‘accidental’ hits on him on the field, and I swear to the baby Jesus that there won’t be any more off the field, either, or I’m gonna take care of it. Unless Conners decides to put you in the hospital, too. Got it?”

Everyone in the room nodded.

I gave Jimmy a fist bump, and he muttered, “Keep throwing the ball straight and running past people, and we’ll be good.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

Maybe things would turn out all right after all.

CHAPTER 14

Maggie

WE SHOWED UP at the mortuary early in the morning as always so we wouldn’t overlap with any funerals or viewings. Mr. Marsh met us with a rolling steel table, and Mom and I unloaded Nerf’s and Tiger’s bodies from the van and placed them atop it. As Mr. Marsh rolled the cart with the dogs away, he told us to return in an hour. Human cremation can take up to two hours, but neither of these bodies weighed more than thirty pounds. My assumption was that he would cremate the dogs together.

Mom took me across the street to Lydia’s Diner, and we ordered breakfast. It was our cremation tradition, though this was the first time we had eaten at the diner since we’d returned to town.

The way cremation works, in case you’re curious, is the dogs are put onto a big grate, and Mr. Marsh turns on the incinerators. It gets close to two thousand degrees in there, so the animals don’t burn so much as vaporize in the high heat. You may think of cremated remains as ashes, but nope, not really. Most of the ashes get sucked up into air filters, and what’s left are bone fragments and whatever small amount of ash falls through the grate onto a slide. That all goes into a big blender and gets pulverized.

“Like a smoothie,” Jordan said when I explained it to him a couple years back.

“Needs yogurt,” I responded. Sometimes I don’t know why I humor that guy.