All The Glory (27 page)

“Yes, you do. Totally fab-u-lous. I can actually see your muscles in your arms and legs. You’re like … fit. Fitter than fit. Shakira-fit.”

I grinned like crazy. “Thanks for noticing. I had to buy new jeans again last week.”

“I saw.” He leaned back to look at my butt. “They’re good for your buns. Very flattering.”

Happily crunching away on my nachos, I didn’t even notice Brittney coming up on us until she was practically stepping on my toes.

“Excuse
me
,” she said in a bitchy tone. She was all decked out in her cheer uniform, a small gym bag over her shoulder holding her pom-poms; I could see pieces of their plastic strips in our black and orange school colors peeking out from the partially open zipper.

“Sometimes there just is no excuse,” Bobby said, raising an eyebrow at her in challenge.

My chip-crunching slowed as I came to grips with the fact that I was facing Jason’s ex after spending nearly three months with him non-stop — a fact that the newspapers were still reporting fairly regularly. Was she mad about that? Jealous? I guessed we were going to find out.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, looking first at Bobby and then at me.

I shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know? I’m just eating nachos.” Having those reporters outside Jason’s door for months had made me a lot more circumspect about engaging people in public. Before, I would have met a situation like this toe-to-toe, bitch-to-bitch; but today, not so much. I just wanted to claim our seats in the nosebleed section and pretend to enjoy football for an hour or so before I begged to be released from the boredom.

She turned her attention fully on me. “You know, everyone knows what you’re doing,” she said, her face all twisted up. “So
pitiful
…”

“She’s not doing anything, Brittney,” Bobby said, getting all riled up.

I waved my hand in the air between them. “Hey, listen, I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but these nachos are already working their magic, so I suggest you be on your way, Britt.”

She wrinkled her face at me. “What does that even mean?”

Bobby looked at me, his expression kind of blank. “Did you just threaten to pass gas?”

I shrugged. “I can’t be held responsible for all these beans.” I lifted up my paper box to show them how generous the lady behind the counter had been this evening. “Beans, beans, good for the heart…”

“Oh my god, you are so
weird
,” Brittney said, before leaving in a hurry.

Bobby started giggling and eventually had to bend over to keep from busting apart.

“I can’t believe you,” he gasped out.

“What?” I crunched on another chip, waiting for him to recover. I was already bored with football and they hadn’t even hiked the ball yet.

“You just … you just …”

My eyes scanned the entrance to the stadium and landed on a group of reporters surrounding some players. There were a few kids mingling with them, all of them wearing smaller versions of the team’s jerseys.

I stopped crunching my chips.

“You just scared Brittney away with threats of farting on her!” Bobby was still laughing.

“No, I didn’t. I issued threats of farting in her
general direction
. Not the same thing.”

I left him there and started walking first slowly and then pretty quickly over to the group of players standing around. Some of them were posing for pictures with the kids, while others were tossing balls around. It looked like a publicity event.

When Bobby finally realized I’d left him behind, he jogged in my wake, arriving at my side panting for breath. “Where’d you go? You totally ditched me back there.”

“What’s going on here?” I asked, gesturing with my nachos at the scene before us.

Bobby pointed to a banner that had been strung up on the chain link fence next to them. “Charity thingy. You remember … Jason used to be involved in it too. It’s a team thing.”

My eyes bugged out as I recognized one of the kids from the photos I had on my computer. It wasn’t the one I’d seen with Jason, but that didn’t stop me from being insanely curious about him.

“What’s the big deal?” Bobby asked. “Can we go now? Have you finished ogling yet? The game’s going to start soon.”

I nudged him again. “The game can’t start without all these guys out there. And besides, I’m not ogling the players, fool, I’m ogling the kids.”

“Oh, that’s not disturbing at all.”

I sighed loudly. I used to have so much patience for Bobby’s silliness but now I was just anxious to move on from it. “I’ve seen that kid before.” I nodded towards the group.

Bobby moved in closer and dropped his voice. “Which one?”

“The one with the jersey. The black kid.”

“Which black kid with a jersey? There are five of them over there.”

“The little one. With the red shoes.”

We both watched him smiling at one of the players and nodding.

“How do you know him?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t
know
him, I’ve just seen pictures of him.”

“In the news? In a magazine? In your dreams? Where?”

“Just … hold these.” I handed him my nachos and left him standing there, my eyes focused on the kid.

The boy didn’t see me coming until the player he was talking to lifted his gaze and glared in my direction.

The boy turned around, his eyes going wide, probably trying to figure out why I was about to get pounded.

“Hey,” I said to the boy.

“What’re you doing here?” the player asked me.

“You’re Jamahl, right?” I asked, turning my attention to him.

“Yeah? So?”

“So? Seen Jason lately? Your friend, Jason, remember him?”

The kid switched his bodyweight to the other foot and started looking around like he was trying to find an escape route.

“Fuck that,” Jamahl said, putting his hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Come on, kid, let’s get outta here.” He turned them both around and looked over his shoulder at me, lifting his lip in disgust. “Don’t want you getting involved in some bad shit.”

I reached out and grabbed the kid’s hand before he could get too far away. “Wait! I want to talk to you.”

Jamahl dropped the kid’s shoulder and turned around to face me, his chest puffing out. He seemed to grow about three inches taller. I tried not to let it intimidate me, but it was difficult.

“You need to get gone, girl, before you get hurt.”

“You’re gonna hit a girl?” the kid asked, sounding shocked and maybe a little impressed.

Jamahl faltered. He looked embarrassed. “Nah, man, I don’t hit girls. Never hit girls. That ain’t cool.”

I smiled as genuinely as I could at the kid. “I saw a picture of you once. At the boy’s club place where you hang out sometimes. You were with these guys. You looked really cool in your new red shoes.” I looked down at his feet.

The boy smiled a little. “Thanks. Coach got these for me.”

“Really?” I nodded, acting impressed but inside feeling really sad that the coach wouldn’t be able to do that for these kids anymore. “That’s cool. He was a cool guy, huh?”

Jamahl let out a long hiss of air that sounded like steam escaping. He turned slightly away to signal to a couple of his friends. I knew I had to hurry if I wanted to accomplish anything with this kid.

“So there was this
other
kid in all the pictures I saw too, but I don’t know his name. Do you know who he is? He has a big afro, maybe about a couple inches taller than you?”

The boy smiled a little. “That’s Leo. He’s got some big ol’ hair. He likes to pick it out all the time. Says the chicks like it that way.” He rubbed his head from the back to the front. “My momma says no way can I walk around gettin’ all kinds of lint in my hair like that. She says I play too hard to pay the right amount of attention to my head.”

I laughed. “She’s probably right. I think it’s more fun to play sports than brush your hair all the time.”

“Yeah. I guess.” He looked at Jamahl and the three other football players who were approaching us. They were like a wall of angry muscle.

“I’d like to talk to Leo,” I said in a rush. “Do you know how I can contact him?”

The kid shrugged. “He doesn’t come ‘round no more. But he lives near me. I never see him, though.”

“Where do you live?” I felt like a total creeper, asking this little dude where he lived, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I was on the verge of
getting to the bottom of things
and that kept me going even when Jamahl and his three friends stood there like Little Man’s personal body guards.

“You need to get gone,” one of them said to me.

“You need to ease up on the steroids,” Bobby said from behind me.

I turned around to warn him away but I was interrupted.

“What’d you say, gay boy?”

“Gay boy? Seriously? What decade are you living in, anyway? That is
so
not p.c.. It’s not even creative.” Bobby rolled his eyes. “But I’m going to let it slide since you’ve obviously been injecting the ‘roids right into your nut sack, and it’s affected your ability to think properly.” He turned to me. “Are we finished here?”

I looked at the kid who was now partially hidden behind Jamahl.

“She wanted to know where I live,” the boy said in a tiny voice.

They all frowned at me, making me instantly feel like a total perv. Why did I want to know where he lived? What was I going to do … stalk his friend? My brain wasn’t putting all the pieces together yet, so I just ran on instinct until it was able to catch up.

“I just wanted to send them some gift certificates for more shoes, Jesus, ease up.” I probably should have been a little disturbed at how easily that lie appeared and then rolled off my tongue, but I wasn’t. It was time to be a super-spy, CIA-style, and I wasn’t going to get there by playing a nun.

“If you want to donate shoes or whatever, you do it at the center,” one of the less-intimidating looking guys said. “You don’t get to pick which kid gets the money; it goes into a group fund.”

I pointed to the boy now standing next to Jamahl. “He got shoes in his size. Looks like they were bought specifically for him by the coach himself.”

The boy’s head dropped, his chin resting on his chest now, but not before I saw the look of abject horror on his face.

I was completely confused.

“I gotta go,” he said, right before he took off running.

“Where’s he going?” Jamahl asked, sounding just as confused as I was.

“How the hell should I know?” answered the non-p.c. ‘roid lover.

“Go get him and find out what his problem is.” Jamahl turned his attention to me. “And you can take off too. Ain’t nobody around here got any love for that murderer you’re hanging out with.”

He turned to go, so I raised my voice to make sure he could hear me.

“That guy used to be your
friend
. Don’t try to lie and say he wasn’t!”

“Everybody makes mistakes!” he yelled back.

“EXACTLY!” I screamed. I might have sounded like a deranged mental patient, but it didn’t matter. He just kept walking and the rest of the crowd turned their backs on us. None of them were willing to forgive the kind of mistake that Jason had made, and I really couldn’t blame them. I still wasn’t exactly sure what made it so easy for me.

Chapter Forty-Three

“WHAT IN THE HELL WAS that all about?” Bobby asked, handing me back my nachos when we were climbing the stairs to the stands.

“I need to find that kid.” I was running through my options in my mind, not paying any attention to where we were going.

“What kid? The one with the shoes?” Bobby pushed me to the right, selecting a row for us to sit in. Several kids saw us sitting down and got up to move, leaving the entire section empty except for Bobby and me.
Bastards
.

“No. The other one who wasn’t there.”

Bobby sat down and pulled me down with him. “Explain yourself or I’m taking all your nachos away.”

I handed him the paper box. “Here. Take them. I don’t want them anymore anyway.”

Bobby took the paper and stared down into it with the saddest look on his face.

“What? What’s the problem? You don’t want them?” I started to take them back, but he pulled them out of my reach.

“You have changed, like
completely
.” He looked up and stared at me. “You used to say I’d have to pry the nachos from your cold dead hands before I could have any. Now you’re just giving them away.”

Hearing I’d changed completely should have been a compliment, but the way he said it, it didn’t feel that way. There was definite condemnation in his tone.

Trying not to get annoyed, I leaned back a little and asked, “What’s going on with you?” This was my little deflection technique I brought out during those times I didn’t feel like talking about me. The subject of
me
was too complicated right now for self-examination and Bobby picking at me was sure to bring out the angry version of my new self.

“It’s not
me
that has things going on, soul-sister, it’s
you
.” He looked me up and down. “You’re all buff and you’re not eating nachos and you’re picking fights with football players twice your size, and now you sound like you’re considering stalking a child. I’m seriously worried about you.”

The anxiety that had built up inside me over the confrontation with Jamahl and his meat-head buddies spilled over. “I haven’t changed that much, okay? My eyes have been opened, but that’s a good thing! And I’m not stalking anyone!”

Several heads from three rows down turned around to see what all the fuss was about.

I lowered my voice. “I’m fine. I’m better than fine. I would have thought you’d be proud of me for all the weight I’ve lost. I can bench almost a hundred pounds now.”

Bobby put the nachos down on the seat next to him and pulled me into a hug. “I
am
proud of you. You look amazing, like I’ve already told you about ten times. And I know Jason is behind it, so I’m really happy towards him too.”

“And yet you say he’s a bad influence.” I felt like all the wind had been taken from my sails. Jason had changed my life for the better and everyone in the world hated him except for me and his dad. In a sick and twisted way I saw that as the world preferring I’d stayed fat and alone.