Getting Played

As he moves to go, Long lifts his chin in the direction over my shoulder. “Hey Coach—Dork Squad’s looking for you.”

I turn around and spot three of my students standing at the fence.

I teach Honors and Advanced Placement Calculus around here. I have a genius level IQ—some guys will say that just to get in your pants—but for me it’s actually true.

Math was another thing I was good at in high school. I loved it, I still do—the symmetry and balance, the patterns I could see so easily. There’s a beauty to a solved equation—like a symphony for the eyes. It’s another reason teaching ticks all the boxes for me.

“Lay off the Dork Squad.” I stare hard at Long. “Any of you screw with them, I will drill you into oblivion. If you guys act like dumbasses, trust me, I will run you like dumbasses.”

My students are considered the easy kids by other teachers. They’re invested in their grades and they’re smart—but they’re also fragile. Because they’re different. At a place and time in their lives when different isn’t an easy thing to be.

So I make it my mission to look out for them.

Long shows me his palms.

“Nah, Coach—the Dork Squad’s cool. The Mathletes are the only reason I passed algebra last year.”

The Mathletes is an academic club I supervise. They tutor other students free of charge and travel from school to school to do battle in mathematics competitions. Sometimes, the math games are just as brutal as the football games—sometimes more.

“Good. Make sure you spread the word.”

I turn and trot over to the fence.

“Hey, Coach Walker.”

“Yo, Coach W!”

It’s Louis, Min Joon and Keydon—juniors—I had them all last year and they’ll be in my class again this year.

“Students.” I nod. “How’s it going? You guys still have a few days of summer left, what are you doing here?”

“We wanted to check out the renovations to the private study rooms in the library. They’re dank—Miss McCarthy didn’t scrimp.” Keydon answers.

“How was your summer?” Min Joon asks. “Did you play with the band?”

“I did. And it was awesome as always. How about you guys—did you do anything cool?”

Most teachers have to ride their students’ asses to make sure they do their schoolwork. I have to ride mine to make sure they do something—anything—besides schoolwork. So they have fuller, fleshed-out lives—and so they don’t consider offing themselves if they don’t make valedictorian.

I joke around, but . . . that’s a genuine concern for my kids. One I take serious as fuck.

“I took a couple summer classes at Princeton,” Louis says. “Just to keep myself fresh.”

“O-kay. Did you meet anyone interesting?”

“The professor was nice. On the last day I gave him a list of strategies that I thought would make him a more effective instructor.”

“I’m sure he appreciated that.”

Right before he set the list on fire.

“I did the YouTube Up All Night challenge,” Min Joon offers. “I was awake for forty-nine hours, thirty-seven minutes. It’s a record.”

“You gotta sleep, Min. At your age, you grow when you sleep—that’s why you’re so damn short. Sleep, dude, it’s not hard.”

I look to Keydon. “What about you?”

“I did a physics program in London with a hologram of Stephen Hawking.”

“You spent your summer in a basement in England with a computer-generated image of Stephen Hawking for company and you’re happy about it?” I ask.

He smiles broadly. “It was righteous.”

I press my thumbs into my eye sockets.

“I have failed you. Utterly and completely failed you.”

They laugh—they think I’m being funny.

“But it’s okay.” I clap my hands, regrouping. “We’ll work on it this year.”

“Are we gonna go over the summer packet on the first day?” Louis asks excitedly. “It was way hard—I loved it.”

“Yes.” I breathe out heavily. “We’ll go over the packet on the first day.”

Louis holds up his hand with his pinky and pointy finger extended and his tongue sticking out—the nerd version of the heavy-metal horns gesture.

I shake my head. “Don’t do that.”

Garrett blows the whistle behind me and the team takes the field.

“I gotta go—get out of here.”

“Okay—bye, Coach!”

“Go play a game that’s not Fortnite,” I call after them. “Swim in the lake, talk to a girl—not about school.”

They wave, nodding—most likely not listening to a damn word I just said.

~ ~ ~

“Rockstetter’s worried about his grades—and Jerry agrees. The kid’s not the brightest bulb in the box. We need to get him a tutor for his real classes and some easy-A electives to build up his confidence. He needs to keep his GPA up so he can play the full season.”

After practice me, Garrett and Garrett’s wife—Callie formerly known as Carpenter—are hanging out in his office.

Garrett and Callie were the “it” couple back in high school. If the dictionary had a word for first-love that ended up being true-love, Garrett and Callie’s picture would be right next to it.

They broke up when she went away to college, then picked up right where they left off when she blew back to town a few years ago. They’re married now and didn’t waste any time on the procreation front. They have an awesome eighteen-month-old son, Will, who thinks I’m the shit and Baby D number two is already on the way.

Garrett looks up from the papers on his desk. “What do you think, Cal? Can you fit Rockstetter into one of your classes?”

Callie worked for a theater company in the years she lived in San Diego—and now she’s the theater teacher at Lakeside.

“What are you saying? That theater isn’t a real class?” She crosses her arms—a classic female warning sign. The equivalent of a dog showing its teeth, right before it bites you on the ass.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You think it’s an easy A?”

Garrett hesitates. Like any guy who doesn’t want to lie to his wife, but knows if he tells the truth it could be days before he gets another blow job. Possibly weeks.

“Maaaaybe?”

“My class is demanding. It pushes emotional and intellectual boundaries. It gets the kids out of their comfort zone.”

“Of course it does.” Garrett nods. “But . . .”

It’s the “but” that gets us in trouble. Every fucking time.

“. . . they’re just singing and jumping around on a stage. It’s not rocket science.”

“Tossing a ball around on a field isn’t rocket science either.”

“Wait, wait, hold up—what do you mean, ‘tossing a ball’?” He puts his hand over his heart, like he’s trying to keep it from breaking. “Is that what you think I do?”

Callie rolls her eyes. “No, Garrett. I think you are master of gravity and propulsion.”

“Thank you.”

“And your arm is a lethal, precise weapon of victory.”

“Okay, then.” Garrett grins. “Glad we got that straightened out. You had me worried, babe.”

Callie hops off the desk. “I’ll talk to McCarthy. We can put Rockstetter in my fourth period theater class—but he’s got to do the plays. I always need more guys on stage.”

I lift my hand. “And I’ll set him up with some nice, patient, tutors.”

Callie nods, then says to Garrett, “I’m going to head out, pick up Will from your parents and stop at Whole Foods to grab something for dinner.”

“You shop at Whole Foods?” I ask, grinning.

“Yeah, all the time.”

You can tell a lot about a person from where they do their grocery shopping. You got your basic, no-nonsense, working-class grocery-shoppers—teachers, cops, anyone who comes home from wo

rk dirtier than when they left. They stick with ShopRite, Krogers, Acme, maybe a Foodtown. Then you got your Wegmenites and Trader Joe-goers—housewives, yoga-class takers, nannies and their whiney charges. And finally, there’s the Whole Foodies. We’re talking hard-core high-maintenance—the vegans, the gluten-frees, artists, people with life coaches and personal trainers, and apparently . . . the Callies.

Garrett pinches the bridge of his nose, ’cause he knows he’s about to get ragged on.

“Do you guys, like, make goo-goo eyes at each other over an organic quinoa avocado salad at the café?” I ask.

Callie’s brow furrows. “Sometimes. Why?”

I look down at my best friend. “That’s adorable, D. Why didn’t you tell me you were a Kombucha-man? Now I know what to get you for your birthday.”

Garrett flips me off.