“Oh, God,” I said.
Brody nodded once, leaning back and sinking into the couch. “Apparently Easton Daniels does not like the idea of losing to a team with a gay guy on it. Especially not one who tackled him twice in the second quarter. I think he used about three different slurs in the video.”
“You saw the video?”
“A couple of players on my team were hanging out with some people from their school last night. They recorded it in case I wanted to do something about it.”
“Christ,” I said. “What does that mean? ‘Do something’ about it?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “I want to go sock him in the face.”
“Oh.”
“But I’m not going to do that.”
He clenched his jaw. It was finally dawning on me why Brody might not want to go for pro football anymore. It was bad enough what he had to deal with on a college football level. I couldn’t imagine having to deal with little public fiascos like this, let alone ones on a national scale. Hell, if one video like that was made about me, it would ruin my entire year.
And yet Brody took it in stride. He clearly wasn’t happy about it, but he shouldered things like this all of the time just for being an out, gay football player.
“I’m going to try to ignore him. Usually, that’s all I can do,” Brody said, running a hand through his hair. “But I’m so tired of it, bro.”
“I can imagine.”
Suddenly it felt hard to swallow. I wasn’t sure what I was doing with my hands, my legs, my whole damn body. They all felt out of place. What I really wanted to do was lean in and give him a hug, but there was no chance in hell I had that amount of confidence with him.
I hated seeing him like this, though. I’d only known him for a few weeks, but already I knew that Brody didn’t take well to being upset. The guy was like a big, beefy golden retriever. He just wanted to be happy and make everyone else around him happy, too.
And I wanted to see Brody happy now, too. I liked the way it made his eyes light up. It was irresistible. Not dull and defeated, like he looked right now.
He sighed, sitting back up and giving me a small, forced smile. “Okay. So. The Revolutionary War.”
My heart squeezed. He was trying. Even under the stress, he still wanted to keep our study date.
“Right,” I said. “You sure you’re okay to study?”
“Studying sounds like the perfect distraction to me right now,” he said. “As long as it goes better than when I study alone.”
I nodded. “I think it’ll even be fun,” I said. “So, if you’re having trouble remembering things from just memorizing dates, it’s probably because you don’t have any context for it. When you think about things like wars, or really anything in history, it helps to imagine the real people of the time.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Okay…”
“So let’s make up a guy. Just some random person who happened to be around in the States during the revolutionary war. What should we name him?”
“Um… how about Jimmy?”
“Jimmy, great,” I said. “Maybe his name was James, but he hated being called James because it was his father’s name.”
“And maybe his father was a total dick,” Brody added.
I smiled. “Exactly. Now, it’s the night of The Boston Massacre. And guess what? It’s Jimmy’s birthday. He’s turning twenty years old, which is a big deal for him. There was no real drinking age in the States back then, so Jimmy’s gone out to party a little too hard, just like I did last night.”
Brody’s expression lit up. “One too many beers, huh? Maybe he even spilled a pitcher like you?”
“He sure did,” I said. “So now, Jimmy’s trying to walk home, all drunk and with the front of his shirt all wet. And then he hears church bells ringing and sees British military men running toward a mob. He can’t believe what he sees. He doesn’t even know that he’s witnessing the beginning of The Boston Massacre—something people will read about for centuries after the fact. When he sees the crowd mobbing the soldiers, their insults remind him of how shitty his dad was.”
I could see the gears turning in Brody’s mind. “God, that would be so wild,” he said. “I really haven’t ever thought about it in that way. What it would be like if you were actually just a regular person during that time.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” I said. “I actually didn’t like history that much at first, either. When I was a kid, it all felt so boring. A bunch of names of war generals, a bunch of dates that just felt impossibly long ago. But when I started imagining myself in those times, what it would feel like, it unlocked something in me.”