Chapter 26 Jaxon

“Tate, after your shower, come and talk to me,” Coach said Monday morning as he passed me in the locker room. He vanished into his office, shutting the door behind him, and my team turned to heckle me.
“Somebody’s in trouble,” Tyler said. “What did you do?”
“I haven’t done anything,” I muttered, stripping down so I could wash the sweat and dirt off from practice. “He probably just wants to give me a trophy for kicking so much ass this season.”
“Dream on,” Jake, another player, said, hitting me in the arm. I laughed along with them, but inside I wondered what I could have done wrong. As far as I knew, nothing much had happened between the homecoming game and now. We’d done decently in practice, and our next game was only a few days away. Just like always, we were planning to kick ass and take names.
When I finished my shower and had dressed, I knocked on Coach’s door. He called me in, and I shut it behind me.
“What’s up, Coach?” I asked, taking a seat across from him. “Is everything okay?”
“You tell me,” Coach said. He leaned back in his swivel chair, hands crossed over what seemed to be the start of a beer belly. He was staring at me as if waiting for some confession I didn’t know I had to tell.
“Um,” I said.
“Is everything okay, Jaxon?” Coach asked when I couldn’t come up with anything else to say. I shrugged and nodded.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You’ve seemed a bit . . . distracted recently,” Coach said. “Don’t get me wrong, you’ve still got it, but it doesn’t seem like your head is in the game anymore.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you mean,” I said. His comment was harmless, but I felt a twinge of despair clutch at my chest. I had never been called out for being mediocre instead of excellent in my entire football career.
“Is it a girl?” Coach asked. “Sometimes, with my players, I notice a lack of interest when they acquire other focuses. Women, you know, can take up much of our time.” He scoffed. “I would know; I was married four times.”
“I’m not dating anyone,” I said, but Grayce’s face popped into my head for some bizarre reason. I pushed it away. “There’s no girl.”
“It is a . . . guy?” The words rolled off his tongue hesitantly like they were toxic, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“No, sir. I said there wasn’t a girl; I didn’t say there weren’t girls.”
He looked relieved at this and stood up and clapped me on the shoulder. “Are you ready for the game on Saturday?” he asked.
“I was born ready,” I said, and Coach nodded in approval.
“Get out of here, kid, I’ll see you in the morning for practice.”
I was mulling his words over when Tyler greeted me outside his door, eyebrows raised in puzzlement.
“So, what was that all about?” he asked as we walked. We were heading to the library for study time, despite Tyler’s insistent pleas to skip out only hours before. Since both of us were starting to fall behind in our classes, I’d convinced him earlier it would do us both good to at least try. The library, terrifyingly unfamiliar territory for Tyler, was still a great spot to talk without being interrupted every fifteen seconds by silly girls. After all, you didn’t see many of our type of ladies hanging out in the library after class, so it was a win/win.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Coach seems to think I’ve been distracted recently.”
“Yeah, well, he’s right,” Tyler said. We sat at an empty table, and I stared at him, waiting for him to go on. “You have been distracted,” he said. “And we all know why.”
“Enlighten me.”
“For starters, the photo of you with the pussy on the paper's front page is hot,” Tyler said. He reached into his bag and yanked out a rumpled copy of the Denver Times, tossing it onto the table in front of me. Sure enough, hamming it up on the paper's front page with the inflatable vagina in one hand and the feminist sign hanging on my neck, I was giving the camera a thumb up. Grayce was next to me, hanging over my left shoulder as she flashed the peace sign, and Alex was on the other side, making an outrageous duck face. I picked up the paper and laughed.
“That’s a great angle.”
“Let me guess . . . did Grayce talk you into doing that?” Tyler asked.
“It was for a Women’s Rights parade.” I dropped the paper onto the table and shrugged. “What’s the problem?”
“I know what it was for,” Tyler said. There was no amusement on his face, which was odd because women’s private parts always seemed to make Tyler giddy. “That was a risky thing to do, man.”
“What are you talking about, dude?” I glanced down at the paper, then back up at him. “It was just a stupid parade advocating women’s rights. It wasn’t a rape rally.”
“You’re turning into one of them,” Tyler said. “Don’t let a bitch like that ruin your reputation.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“What do you want me to call her?”
“I want you to call her by her name, Ty because she’s a person like you and me.”
“What are you doing, man?” Tyler leaned across the table, folding his hands in front of him. “You’ll lose everything you’ve worked to become in this school if you’re not careful.”