Chapter 5

The rest of my first day went well, even though I did not have a single class that did not have one of Elijah’s group in it. Notably, Miguel and the rest of that group were not in the remedial classes. Only a handful of the other freshman players were in all the remedial classes, which I think showed again how bad of an influence they had been on me. It also meant that once I was out, I wouldn’t have any required classes with them anymore. I would still see them in conditioning, which is what football players had instead of PE, and if I kept taking shop class, I would see them in those classes, too.

But I could at least limit how much I saw them. Thankfully, my history teacher was Coach Wilson, the special teams coach. There was no remedial social studies class, but there were AP classes. I was not sure if “doing better” was the same thing as trying for AP, but I told him I might be interested in working for that. He was ... indifferent about it. Like most of the coaches, they wanted us to do well enough to be eligible to play, but beyond that, they believed that football should be our priority.

Still, he wasn’t going to stand in my way, and if worse came to worst, I could stay in the regular history classes. Beyond that, I had woodshop, for which I had already submitted a course change. One of the big things I could remember from my dream was how important computers were going to be.

They were just picking up steam now, and I remembered the big Windows release next year, where people lined up at midnight to buy a copy of it. Then there were the smartphones, the iPhones, the tablets. In ten years, computers would rule the world. In fifteen, you would have to know computers to get any job that was not straight manual labor, and even some of those would need computers.

Since I had decided to just go with the dream and all the stuff that was coming true, I was going all the way. So I was dropping woodshop for typing. I knew there were computer science classes and I think some kind of business computer classes, but I did not know what kind of grades or other classes they required, and we only had a week to change classes before everything was locked down. Besides, I assumed typing would be helpful in all those other courses.

It was a good first step.

“Blake! Wait up!”

I looked up to see Brandy jogging towards me from the track where the cheerleaders were gathered after their practice finished.

“Hey,” I said, slowing my pace just enough for her to fall into step beside me.

“Oh my God, you will not believe what happened at practice today,” Brandy launched into her story without preamble. “So, Tiffany was trying this lift she learned at the camp she went to, right? But like, no one else knew it and she did not explain it well, and she nearly dropped poor Melissa on her head. Coach was furious...”

I kind of tuned her out, just making the appropriate noises of interest when required. Instead, I thought about seeing all the little signs every time she had been near Mason throughout the day. When she had gone back to their table at lunch, she had sat next to him. When I had come out to the field and everyone was gathering up, she was off to the side, talking to him, her hand on his arm. They had practically bounced apart when they noticed me watching them. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion, knowing exactly how it would end but being powerless to stop it. Worse, I was not sure I wanted to stop it.

“ ... and then Jessica said we should try a pyramid, but after the whole Tiffany disaster, I was like, no way...” she was saying, as she reached down to grab my hand.

Something she had done a bunch of times before. I don’t know why, but I pulled away, shoving my hand into my pocket. She noticed and faltered mid-step.

“Blake? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Everything is fine.”

“What is your problem?” she demanded, stopping in her tracks.

I stopped to face her. “I do not have a problem.”

“Yes, you do. You have been acting so weird lately. You don’t talk to Elijah, you don’t sit with us at lunch, and now you are hanging around with all those losers. What happened to you?”

“Nothing happened to me. I just realized I’m done with all the drama. And Miguel, Connor, and the rest are not losers. They are just trying to get by, same as everyone else.”

“Please,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “They are a bunch of nobodies. You think they are going to help you get anywhere? If you keep this up, you are going to be just like them. You are throwing away everything. Don’t you care about being popular? About being respected?”

“Respect from who? Elijah? Mason? They are just a bunch of users, Brandy. They only care about you as long as you are doing what they want. The minute you’re not useful, they are gone.”

“What are you talking about? They’re your real friends. You guys have been together forever.”

“Real friends?” I snorted. “They are not my real friends. I used to think that way, yeah. But I was wrong. I was a jerk. I am not going to keep being that guy. I have had enough of all the games.”

“I liked you when you were that guy. This new version of you? I don’t know who you are anymore. If you keep going down this path, you are going to end up being a loser, too. Just another nobody who never makes it anywhere.”

“Is that why you are messing around with Mason? Because you think he is going somewhere?”

Brandy’s face went blank, her voice going up just a little too high. “What are you talking about? I’m not doing anything.”

“Yeah, you are. I have seen you two together. It is pretty obvious something is up. My guess? It started sometime after the last school year. Maybe early in the summer, before you left for camp.”

“You’re paranoid. You don’t know what you are talking about. Mason and I are just friends.”

I sighed. I didn’t want to have a fight about this. I just didn’t want to have to deal with her anymore.

“You don’t have to pretend, Brandy. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m breaking up with you, whether there is something going on or not.”

She did not say anything for a second. Just stared at me open-mouthed, like she had never even considered this as a possibility.

“What?” she finally managed.

“Come on, Brandy. You had to have seen this coming. You have got Mason now. Does it even really matter?”

I guess she decided that surprise was not working, because she switched tactics on me.

“Please, Blake,” she pleaded, stepping closer, reaching for my hand. “Think about this. You do not have to do this. I can talk to Elijah, fix things. You can be a part of everything again. Just ... do not do this.”

I shook my head, stepping back. “I have already made up my mind. I can’t go back, Brandy. Not to that.”

With that tactic failing, she flipped her personality again. Which just went to show none of it was real anyway.

“Fine. You want the truth? Yeah, I have been seeing Mason. And you know what? He is better than you in every way. Stronger, tougher, everything you are not.”

“Good,” I replied. “I hope you two are happy together.”

I turned and started to walk away, but she was not done.

“Blake, you are making the biggest mistake of your life,” she called after me. “You think this doesn’t matter? I will make sure everyone knows what a loser you have turned into. I can ruin you at school. You will be nothing.”

I didn’t even look back. I just kept walking, heading toward the road, leaving her standing there, yelling after me. Whatever she had to say next did not matter to me. I was done with all of it.

It turned out, the hardest part of wanting to be better in school was not trying to convince teachers to help me. It was doing all the extra work they were assigning. I had never been a homework person, either in my dream life or in middle school, so getting into it now was a serious challenge. Even four days into school, I was finding it was not just learning the extra material; it was learning how to learn.

I had to go to the library and check out some books on study strategy, which was extra annoying since I remembered from my dream life a time when I could just open a browser and type questions into a search engine. One thing was clear. This was not going to be easy. Or fast.

And then I had all the studying to do for football. That was, at least, closer to what I remembered from my dream, although then I did not really do much of it until after my freshman season was over and I got over the stigma of my bad performance at tryouts.

I was also going harder at it than I had in my dream life. In it, I still treated football like a game. And it was, but it was also more than that, and I did not realize it until dream me was an adult and I spent more time learning about football. There was so much strategy to the game that I did not realize, or at least connect with, as a kid in the dream life. We weren’t really exposed to it in middle school, and I had the impression they only touched on it a little bit with freshmen, leaving most of it for junior varsity.

The only reason I was getting more of it was I had shown active interest and requested to learn more about it. Coach, I guess, figured that if I was wanting to learn about it, then it was worth it.