Spontaneous. Aaron Starmer
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avoid the buttery butt.
And that’s what I did. I ran a hand across the seat a couple of times while Dylan was watching the referee flip a coin. As I sat, I flicked the butter down into the chasm beneath the bleachers. “What the, what the—?” muttered some poor dope who must’ve been beneath me, but that was all I heard because the crowd went absolutely apeshit when our team won the coin toss. The coin toss. It was going to be that kind of game.
“So,” I said once the cheering petered out. “You prefer the bleachers to, I don’t know, somewhere we don’t have to actually watch the game?”
“I’m looking forward to the game,” he said without even a hint of sarcasm.
“You are?”
“Sure. I’ve been a fan of the Quakers since I was a kid.”
Yes, you heard that right. We are the tenacious, the proud, the fearsome . . . Quakers! It goes back over three hundred years to when this area consisted of a few scattered communities of Quakers who didn’t make it as far as Pennsylvania. The lazy Quakers, if you will. We’re a public school now, without any religious or philosophical affiliations, except for a mascot who basically looks like the guy from the oatmeal box, except with a Quakerly sneer in place of a Quakerly smile.
“So always a Quakers fan, huh?” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say to something like that. And then it dawned on me. “But wait, didn’t you move here during sixth grade?”
“I’ve always been here,” he said. “Sixth grade was when I started taking classes. I was homeschooled until then.”
“Oh. That’s news to me.”
“News to most people,” he replied, and as he spoke, he kept his eyes on the Bloomington players preparing to kick off, sizing them up like my grandpa used to size up horses at the track. “My dad died of a stroke that year. Out in a field while laying down some fertilizer. He was a dairy farmer, but he also helped my mom teach me. Once he was gone, it was too much for Mom to do alone, so I was transferred to the general population.”
He put his hands out and motioned to the crowd, which leapt from the bleachers as Jalen Howard caught the opening kick and returned it to the forty-yard line.
“That must have been tough,” I hollered over the noise.
Dylan shrugged. “Another Hovemeyer for your dad’s favorite graveyard.”
It was a callback to the night at my house. And it was funny. Not because Dylan’s dad was dead and buried, but because my dad is definitely the type of guy who would have a favorite graveyard. After all, he has a favorite public restroom (Covington Town Library, second floor), a favorite fire hydrant (the shiny blue one on Gleason Street), and a favorite park bench (the warped beauty in Sutter Park he calls Ol’ Lucy).
So I laughed. And Dylan smiled.
“I never pegged you for a football fan,” I said.
“Drama,” he said. “There’s always a different story. I like drama. I like stories.”
Our quarterback, Clint Jessup, threw an errant pass that went into the bleachers and the crowd let out a collective sigh. “What’s the story this time?” I asked.
“Depends on your religion.”
“Meaning?”
He turned to me and his beaming face opened him up like a sunrise opens up a landscape. “This is a resurrection story. We’re back.”
the thing about comebacks
We were back. Our team had gone into the game as underdogs. Bloomington was a perennial powerhouse and we’d missed far too many practices to realistically compete. But compete we did. Leads were exchanged, and new numbers were constantly lighting up the scoreboard.
There was a certain amount of excitement and it was fascinating to see Dylan glued to every pass and tackle, but it confirmed to me that no matter how much drama there was, I still didn’t care about sports.
What I did care about, however, was Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox. They were players on our team. Benchwarmers, basically. Which was important. More than any touchdown, I wanted to see the three of them sit next to each other on the bench.
Why ever would you want to see something so mundane, you ask? Well, it goes back to junior year. In general, I don’t have a problem with football players. At Covington High, they’re mostly nice guys. They don’t beat up people in the bathrooms. They don’t cheat their way through classes (as far as I know). They don’t record their dalliances with cheerleaders and post them on RaRa-Bang.com or whatever the amateur porn site du jour is called. Sure, they’re not saints, but they’re usually too busy being football players to be much of anything else. Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox were the exception. Or at least they were for a brief moment, and sometimes all it takes is a brief moment.
It was a Friday last fall and they were wearing their jerseys, as is the custom on game days. They were sitting together in the cafeteria when I walked by them and I heard Perry say, “Oh, what a glorious fag he was, the faggiest fag in all the land, and his fagginess will be missed, the fag.”
Or something to that effect, give or take a fag or two.
It made the two other guys burst out in laughter and made me immediately want to wring their necks. It wasn’t really Perry’s choice of words, which were more or less baby shit—gross, but juvenile and inconsequential. It was the target of his slurs. It had to be Mr. Prescott, our art teacher. He had passed away the week before and the school newspaper was planning to run an obituary. Perry was the editor and I had it on good authority (the authority being Tess, who worked on the paper too) that Mr. Prescott was gay. Not closeted, but not exactly advertising his lifestyle. The staff had been discussing whether to include this fact in his obituary. He was survived, they’d learned, by a partner named Bill. The two had been together for years, but they didn’t bother to get married, even when they were legally allowed. Maybe they didn’t care about marriage. I don’t know.
Now, the death of Mr. Prescott was undoubtedly sad. But he was old. In his eighties, I think. Retirement was like marriage for him, I suppose. Never in the cards. Being an art teacher is a pretty mellow gig, after all. And it wasn’t like he was my mentor or even my favorite teacher. But still, there’s something about young men making fun of old men that really gets to me.
Go ahead and make fun of people your parents’ age. Make fun of your peers. Make fun of babies, even. Old people, though? Completely off-limits. And recently dead old people? Please. Why would I even have to explain how fucked up that is? Which— flashing forward to my football date with Dylan—is why I wanted to see them lined up together on the bench. Harper Wie, Perry Love, and Steve Cox, in that exact order.
Still don’t get it? Let me explain.
Football players have their last names sewn on the backs of their jerseys, and it may not be the world’s perfect pun, but when you get Wie (pronounced We), Love, and Cox lined up and you snap a pic and post that shit on Instagram . . . well, it isn’t exactly justice for them being a triumvirate of homophobic, ageist pubes, but there’s a certain poetry to it. At least that’s what I was telling myself.
So there we were, Dylan and I on a date—him watching football and me watching the bench. My phone was set to camera and resting on my thigh like I was a regular gunslinger. I couldn’t settle for Wie Cox, which actually happened a couple of times. Because while that might have played well in Scotland, I needed the bingo, especially since Perry Love was the ringleader of the bunch.
During the moments my eyes weren’t poised on the bench, they were resting on Dylan. For most of the game, he was calm, studying the action and—when there wasn’t any action, which was most of the time—studying the coaches or the huddles. He seemed to be analytical about it all at first, subtly shaking or nodding his head as he dissected decisions. But as the game went on, and the crowd got