Chapter 2

I was lying on my bed, listening to the ceiling fan go round and round, both tired but also not wanting to just lie here because I would have to deal with my own thoughts too much.

Today had been another brutal practice, so much so that one of the sophomores had gotten heat stroke and started vomiting by the stands. I had drunk a lot, more than most of the guys actually, and it had been hell on me. I couldn’t figure out why none of the other guys were bringing much water with them and were just trying to push through, even though we were running all day without shade in the glaring sun.

It was another thing on the long list of things I had started noticing, and it was really bugging me. It had been two days since the dream and I still couldn’t shake it. I hadn’t had it again, but I could still remember every damn detail of it.

Every time I looked at my dad, I remembered the funeral I had gone to in the dream, and every time I looked at my brother, I remembered seeing him in court. Weirder than that, though, was that I was remembering some stuff that happened over the last two days from the dream, which meant I had dreamed it before it happened.

Like, I remembered that kid getting heat stroke, ‘cause he puked partially on the track and Coach Wilson had gotten on him for it, and sure enough, as soon as he started, the coach was yelling for him to get off the track. The exact same words.

I also remembered all the hazing Elijah and the guys were doing to the new guys. If anything, the run-in between Miguel and Elijah on the first day had only made things worse, with him, Mason, and the rest taking every opportunity to get digs in on them or show them up. It was exactly as it was in my dream, except in my dream I had participated rather than been upset by it. It was like everything was playing out how I remembered it, except for me.

Today, Mason had been going off on Tyrell for practically the whole game, until he said something about Tyrell’s mother and Tyrell almost threw a punch. He would have had Connor not grabbed him and pulled him back. I wanted to say something. To step in and defuse it, but I hadn’t.

I had been friends with Elijah and the rest since all the way back to elementary school. We had all been in the same grade, and the same class, since we were little kids, and they had been my friends the whole time. We had had our birthday parties together, and we had hung out at each other’s houses. We were our own little gang.

And I hated it.

Even a week ago, I had still been on board with all the dumbass shit we did. Hell, it had only been a month since we snuck out one night and took all the street cones they had around the holes they were fixing on Broad Street and carried them over to Main Street, using them to divert traffic into the oncoming lane, like the workers had done that one time they had repaved all of Main Street. I had laughed with the other guys when cars would follow the cones and then have to swerve to avoid the cars coming the other way, whose drivers had no sign or cones to warn them they would suddenly be head-on with another car.

It was obvious to me now how stupid and dangerous that was. Had there been an accident and they discovered we had done that, I could have gone to jail, but at the time, I had thought it was hilarious.

That was bad and obviously I was a jerk; but why, all of a sudden, did I realize how stupid it was when I knew for a fact it wouldn’t have fazed me a few days ago? It seemed crazy that this dream would mess with me like this, especially days later.

And it left me in a dilemma as to what to do about Elijah and the rest of the guys, one that I hadn’t decided what I was going to do about yet. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to be able to keep standing off to the side and hope no one noticed me, but I wasn’t going to be able to join in with them either.

That really only left me with one choice, but that one kind of sucked, too.

I was just starting to think about how I’d go about dealing with this when I heard something, pulling me out of my head. I knew it wasn’t Joshua. He’d been in his room, next to mine, and I hadn’t heard him come out, and the noise was coming from downstairs. It took a few more seconds to realize I was hearing my dad raising his voice, which was notable by itself.

My dad had never been one of those ‘scream at the top of your lungs’ kind of parents. Honestly, he never even gave us spankings. He usually went with the ‘I’m really disappointed in you’ thing, and sometimes stacked groundings on top of it.

Looking back at the moment, after my realization of what a shit I’d been, I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, but I guess it was just his personality. He was always the mediator, always the one telling everyone we’d figure it out.

Which made him yelling notable. More so because it was clear he was yelling at my mom. I got out of bed and crept to the top of the stairs, leaning against the wall out of sight and listening hard, since it sounded like they were in the kitchen, and the stairs led right to it.

“ ... to shout. I was just saying we need to address this before school starts,” Dad was saying. “Joshua’s grades tanked last year, and now he’s been kicked out of the Y program. I’m not sure what we’re going to do. You’re having a tough time with sick days. You can’t start taking off to pick him up every day. We need to deal with this behavior before it gets worse.”

“It’s probably just a phase, Tom. Besides, I’m not sure why we’ve singled Joshua out. Blake’s had his own problems and you don’t seem to have an issue with him, or did you forget the night the sheriff brought him home drunk this summer?”

“And we punished him for that. But this is different, Heather, and you know it. He scared that woman, and if what she said is true...”

“It isn’t. She just doesn’t like him because he’s shy. If he’d really told her that, she would have called the sheriff and she didn’t. She just wanted to be able to kick him out without giving us our deposit back.”

“Come on, Heather. If this was the first time, okay. But combined with the thing at school last year, it’s not. And you know it.”

“Why are you always on him but giving Blake and his hoodlum friends a pass. We’ve talked about this, Tom. I will not treat our children differently just because they act differently. I know you relate to Blake more ‘cause he’s into sports and Joshua’s the sensitive and quiet type, but that doesn’t make him worse.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I think it is, and I won’t stand for it. Joshua’s fine. Yes, he’s very imaginative and I’ll admit he might not be as good with people as we’d like him to be, but he’s still a kid.”

“Which is the time he should have friends or be out playing. He’s always in his room and when he does come out, he just wanders off by himself. I’m worried he’s too cut off.”

I could hear Dad wanting to say weird, but not saying it. He wasn’t wrong. Joshua was weird. The things he said sometimes, or the way he looked at people, like he was plotting. And I remembered the thing at school last year. He brought a note with the names of some of the other kids in class on it, and some of the kids said he told them it was the order he’d ‘take each of them out.’

The school had called Mom and Mom had blown it off like she always did. At the time, I just kind of ignored it except to make jokes about my creepy little brother, since word had reached the middle school, which was across the street from the elementary school and all the kids rode the same buses. There’d been jokes comparing him to that guy at UT back in the sixties and Carrie, but honestly it had helped my notoriety having the crazy brother, so I just rolled with it. Besides, he and I had never been exactly close.

Of course, that was then. After the dream and what he’d done in it, I’d started looking at him differently. Watching him. He was creepy. It put everything he’d done into a new context, and I honestly thought Dad wasn’t going far enough.

Not that Mom would listen. Joshua was the baby of the family, and he’d always been special to her. Also, I hadn’t made it easy. Like the realization I was having about Elijah and my friends, I was also having some thoughts about myself and how I’d been behaving at home, too. As much as I’d been a dick to other kids, teachers, and pretty much anyone else I could find that would get a laugh out of my friends, I’d been worse to my parents.

The visit from the sheriff was because we’d set fire to the nativity scene in front of First Baptist Church the previous Christmas for ... I actually couldn’t remember why we’d done it. Probably, someone made a stupid joke or something. The Sheriff caught us and took us to my dad, to let him settle it instead of arresting us, out of professional courtesy to a fellow cop.

Mom had been pissed. She’d always been super religious, more so than Dad, who went to church on Sundays and special occasions but otherwise didn’t have much to do with it. Mom had been outraged. She’d demanded I stop hanging out with Elijah and the other kids and made me talk to Pastor Green about how I was going to go to hell if I didn’t shape up.

“Just ... leave him be. He’s getting to that age, and will calm down eventually,” Mom said. “I have a headache and need to go lie down.”

I heard Mom leave, probably to go to their bedroom which was downstairs, and I could just picture Dad standing there, arms crossed with that look he got when people were being stubborn. His cop face.

I made my way back to my room as quietly as I could. I honestly didn’t know if Mom was right or Dad was, although I suspected it was Dad. Either way, Josh wasn’t my problem. I had enough to deal with without having to worry about him.

“Alright, let’s see how it looks,” Coach Heidemann said, waving us back onto the field.

Everyone was keyed up for today’s practice, and we’d been running hard all day. Today was the last full day of practice, with team selections to be announced the following day and school starting on Monday. Everyone wanted to make the team, although Elijah had this idea that he was somehow going to be one of the few freshmen to ever get selected for junior varsity.

He’d been good all week, there was no doubt about it, but I knew we were all going to end up on the freshman team. Well, I didn’t know, but I remember that being what happened in my dream life, as I thought about it. True, it was only a dream, but nearly everything was happening exactly as it had in the dream life, which was making me just accept that things would end up the same as they did in my dream life.