***TRISTAN POV***
"Damnit Tristan, why the hell are you going to the Drama Club meeting?" I heard my fullback and best friend Craig Richardson snarl at me in his fake, thick, hick twang as I stood up to head to Mr. Montelioni's classroom. "You must have lost your damn mind. If you need me to find it while blocking for you, I will!"
"I've told you, I need the English credit," I replied. "Being a shit during our freshman year got me absolutely nowhere, and this is something that Mrs. Youngblood told me that will fix it."
That got me thinking about what my life had become.
The part about Mrs. Youngblood saying I needed to get my transcript fixed to the best of my ability was 50% true. The half about me needing to make up an English credit? Totally true. There was no lie there.
When you are handed the keys to a powerhouse football team as a freshman in high school and you're told you're the best quarterback at my age the head coach–who spent 11 seasons in the NFL as a quarterback, four of them as the primary starter with a Pro Bowl appearance–had ever seen, that goes to your head. Going to all the parties with all of the hot, slutty girls and all the beer I could drink? Sold. I'm there every single time, every single day.
But it burned me out, and it meant that my grades were awful.
My freshman year, I flunked my English class at the semester with Mr. M., and it wasn't close. I turned in the syllabus sheet that my parents had to sign and acknowledge what my textbook number was, the first crossword puzzle of the first unit, and that was it.
For the semester.
English was the first hour of my day, so that meant I slept off whatever hangover from whatever substance I consumed the night before instead of actually focusing. By the time the rest of the day was over, I had shrugged off 90% of the effects of the night before and I was able to pass the rest of my classes with a D average, but I could never motivate myself enough to get my English grade straight, regardless of whatever carrots Mr. Montelioni put in front of me to try to get through my thick German skull.
That whole year, my parents were on my ass because they knew I was so much smarter than what my grades said I was. Middle school was so easy, I ended up in an accelerated math class to get a high school credit out of the way. But I continued down the road of being a screw up, valuing various whiskeys and beers than textbooks and computers.
My sophomore year, I started to get things figured out and all of my classes were solidly in the C's, but my drinking continued. Oh, hell, it didn't just continue, it got worse. Immediately after getting my license, I stole a bottle of Johnnie Walker red out of my dad's liquor cabinet and snuck it into the trunk of my car. Every lunch, I'd sneak out to my car and sip on it. That would be the only thing I would ingest until I'd sneak five cans of RedBull before practices to get me fired up. That year, we won the state championship, and I threw six touchdown passes in that game.
The wheels came off, however, during the June training camp prior to my junior year.
That bottle of Scotch was so second-nature to me that I had totally forgot it was there. Well, when you pick up a puncture in your right rear tire and it goes flat, you'll need to mess with it and change it. Luckily, there were two things that held my attention away from the football field and away from all the booze I was drinking. One of them was cars. I was able to get my car jacked up and on jackstands when my head coach, Teddy Foster, came over to me to see if I needed help.
Right as he turned around, the unholy bottle of Scotch got his attention.
"TRISTAN MARTIN VOSS, WHAT THE FUCK IS IN THAT BOTTLE?!" Coach roared at the top of his lungs. It scared me so much, I jumped up and hit the head on the underside of my car. Rubbing my head, I scooted out from under the car to see what Coach was talking about and I almost puked.
The brand new bottle (the 17th since my habit started the previous year) was in his hands, and Coach's face was so red, I thought he was going to take a coronary.
"My little secret," I whispered.
Coach Foster grabbed me by the arm and dragged me all the way to the principal's office. Unluckily for me, Principal Brit Lawrence was in a closed-door meeting with the assistant principal, Tom Diaz, and the CEO of the whole school, Dr. Colleen Atherton. The secretary muttered something that we couldn't go in there, but Coach threw the door open so hard that a piece of wood at the bottom corner of the door splintered off.
"Coach Foster, this is highly unprofessional," Principal Lawrence growled. "What the hell is going on?!"
"This is what the fuck is going on," Coach replied and slammed the bottle on Lawrence's desk. "Our championship-winning quarterback has been playing football and coming to class drunk, and had this in the back of his car."
Dr. Atherton looked at the bottle, looked at me, and shook his head. "I cannot believe this," she whispered. "I'm going to have to take this to the school board. The chances of you playing football this year are gone, and you are probably going to be banned from any and all extra curricular activities this year. Now get out of this office and get yourself put together."
That was last year.
I just told my teammates in our group chat that my heart wasn't into the game for this year, and surprisingly, Coach backed me up on that. Granted, he also helped my parents pay for the rehab I went to for the rest of that summer (7 weeks, all told) and that center is also where I spent my spring break.
But that's when I discovered something else that made me just in awe. It was the only other thing that, with cars, I could honestly say I cared about besides cars, booze, and the sport that didn't want me for the year. It also explained the other 50% I didn't want to tell Craig about when I traipsed over to Mr. M.'s classroom.
Theatre.
One of the field trips the center went on was to see a production of the musical Les Miserables, and the singing and acting made my imagination run wild. The sacrifice the characters made during the show, the way the characters carried themselves, the choreography, all of it…just so impressed me. So much so that last week I was there prior to school starting, all of the kids my age getting treatment did a little play, and I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed that musical. I was also good at it. The last curtain call made trying out for the fall play something I wanted to do.
That, and Mr. M. and Mrs. Youngblood, my school's guidance counselor, told me the only way to make up that English credit I pissed away my freshman year was to take the Drama elective class at school and do the show, so I really didn't have a choice, especially if I wanted to go to college and play football. I had to make that F be balanced out to an A and get my GPA to a high enough mark for decent schools to pay attention to my applications for scholarships. That, and in order to play football again, per an agreement I had to sign with the board and basically everyone who worked at the school, I'd have to maintain straight A's and get drug tested and before every game and breathalyzed before every school day in order to make it in the building in the first place.
I was going to have to balance sober living, weekly AA meetings, practice, games, straight A's in classes, and rehearsals the same year my friends, who despite partying almost as much as me weren't total assholes when they were 14, could dick around and not have to worry about much of anything as they had offer letters, applications, and funding all lined up to anyone who gave a crap.
Fuck my life and everything else in it.
"Whatever, dipshit," Craig laughed, shaking me out of my reflective mood. "It's not like we need to go to college. This town has everything we might need or ever want. Life outside of Decatur doesn't really matter."
That made me realize that he knew all along about me having booze in my car, and he wanted me to just simply stay here for the rest of my life because apparently that's what students who have alcohol in their cars can do.
"Yes, the world outside of this hellhole does matter," I fired back. "You think playing on this team is the peak of what your life is going to be. I want more, and I'm going to do my best to take it." With that, I stormed off, obliging myself to the conditions placed in front of me for me to actually have a chance at making something of myself.
So there I was, with my hood up in the back of the room waiting for everyone else to show up. I saw a lot of familiar faces from the nerds group and the rejects group in the school. I figured these kids to be part of wanting to be on stage right away. What caught my attention, though, was when Evie Marlowe, whom the starting wide receiver of the team, Jake Ricketts, called the junior class whale because of all the weight she put on as a result of her father killing himself when he found his mom bent over her desk by the local judge, trudged into Mr. M.'s room, hot on the heels of her bestie Gianna. More than a small part of me always felt bad for Evie. She didn't deserve what happened to her family. She didn't deserve how her stepfather treated her, according to what I heard from those close to her. She deserved the chance to heal and grieve in peace.
However, none of the other jocks around school wanted to give her that peace.
She was mocked MERCILESSLY for her size by just about everyone who played sports in the school. Sadly, me included, especially when I was well into my sips of Scotch and when there were some of "my boys" hanging around me, wanting to glean some of my fake aura.
Alcohol made me a complete asshole to anyone and everyone around me, and it was the one thing I didn't like about how booze made me feel. There was something in alcohol that just made me so unpleasant, and Evie was the main person I decided to torment, exclusively making fat jokes at her expense. It was awful. Every time I sobered up and thought about what I said, it made me sick to my stomach.
And yet, the guys on the team still wanted me to terrorize her at every opportunity I got. It was one of the things that my teammates made me do in order to win back their trust from having sat out the previous year and causing them to go winless. It was a double-edged sword that I was psychologically unprepared to deal with. I had to win back the trust of the team, but I also had another specific reason that made me not want to harass her.
It was a simple enough reason. One that would make me a social pariah but one that pained my heart each time I dealt with the feelings.
I was madly in love with Evie Marlowe and had been since the day she moved next door to me 11 years prior.
If anything, her size made her more attractive to me. I figured it was some sort of medical reason because the weight more or less appeared out of absolutely nowhere one day, but to me, it simply filled her out. In a way, she looked physically healthier. One of my favorite golfers once said that some people just don't look that good skinny, and maybe that's how I felt about Evie.
But mentally, she was so strong. I heard some of the things her stepdad told her about her size. I heard some of the cruel things she had to deal with because of him. And yet, there she was. Still fighting. Still surviving. I vowed to myself that when I was done with this school, I'd figure out some way to make amends for how I treated her, to profess my love for her, to put her stepdad in his place, and to provide her the space she clearly needed to recover from her life being turned completely upside-down.
I knew that underneath the facade I manufactured for myself, there was the person that understood her and wanted to make sure that she was going to be okay, but the facade meant I needed to keep myself in the good graces of my teammates.
Just then, Mr. M. and Mr. Weber walked in, holding applications and audition packets for everyone. Mr. Weber then explained that the show was his choice, and he wanted to do a Shakespeare classic, Much Ado About Nothing. The two leads, Benedick and Beatrice, were so fascinating. They had known each other for most of their lives and constantly picked at each other. Most of their conversations, from what I understood about the show, eventually turned into roast battles when all was said and done. I figured that Benedick would be a fun part to try out for, so when the meeting concluded, I stood up to get a packet.
What wasn't on my bingo card for that day was Evie, with her piercing green eyes, turning to face me and force me to choose which side of my persona I was going to have to deal with.
So, of course, because I was a coward, I chose my public side.