Over the End Line (2 page)

My mom's a hard woman. A survivor, she'd say.
A survivor of what?
I've wondered, but I don't know the answer. She had her day, I'm sure, though she doesn't seem to have many friends now. She talks to Mrs. Saint-Claire from time to time, and once a month some man or another shows up at our front door to take her to dinner, stinking of cologne and trying way too hard to talk to me. Mostly though, my mom goes to work at a bank in Chatham, and reads novels, and takes care of our house well enough. It's just the two of us, so we try to get along. And we pretty much do.

What's there to fight about anyway? Bad things never happen in Short Hills. That's what people have said for as long as the town's been this exclusive community in northern Jersey populated with individuals driven to accumulate, then spawn offspring, educated and ambitious. Who are these people? A blend of nouveau riche with just enough "old money" to preserve the town's status.

Think wealth and privilege don't make a difference? Don't fool yourself. Rich-bitch parents like to plaster the rear windows of their Porsches and Mercedes with stickers from MIT, Amherst, Stanford, and the Ivies. Millburn High is a direct beneficiary of the town's wealth. Sky-high taxes build the best facilities, purchase cutting-edge materials, hire teachers with master's degrees and Ph.D.s, and recruit guidance counselors who are on a first-name basis with admissions directors at the most competitive colleges.

Top of the food chain.

Don't think this is idle, self-important bullshit so I can feel better about myself. Sure, I'm a product of this environment, but I don't give a damn about pedigree. Besides, in this town my mom and I are the ones looking up the money tree. Anyway, in eight months I'll be done with Millburn High. Right after graduation I'll bolt from Short Hills. When I do, I won't come back.

I stretched out my legs, hardly noticing that the cuts on my shins had tightened and semiscabbed. None deserved much more attention than a cursory look anyway. By tomorrow morning, they'd just open up again. I eased back into the cushions, closed my eyes, and tried to drift away. I didn't know where. Just away. Away from the day's heat. Away from my sore and tired body.

Instead, Kyle's voice echoed in my head. "It's gonna be a good year for us..."

Was he joking? How could he even hint at something as ridiculous as his senior year and my senior year being similar? Maybe, if everything fell into place for me, I'd sub in for fifteen minutes or so a game this season. Kyle, of course, would enjoy another year of being Millburn's superstar athlete. I'm not sure what he was thinking, but I was damn sure his senior year and my senior year would be worlds apart.

"A good year..." I muttered.

I'd never had a good year. I prayed I would when I got to college. Then I'd get respect, covering the sports teams for the school newspaper or working in the athletic department. And after I graduated, I'd be hired by
Sports Illustrated
or the Yankees or maybe even ESPN. Then every year would be a damn good year. Right now, I was just in the wrong town, the wrong high school.

I sometimes imagined what it would be like to live in another town and play on its high school soccer team, with someone other than Pennyweather as coach and Kyle as the resident soccer star. Then I'd get my rightful playing time. And with more playing time I'd score eight, nine, maybe even ten or eleven goals a season. Then it'd be a good year. And when I was really thinking crazy, I wondered if at another school
I
could be the Kyle Saint-Claire of the upcoming senior class, while some other guy would be its Jonathan Fehey. Short of that, could I at least be on equal footing with the others, or—as was my reality at Millburn—would I be a casualty of an omnipotent ranking system beyond my control?

Jacob's Ladder.

That's what it's called.

The rumor is that someone thought the wretched lost souls of our class should be "given their due." So, at the end of our sophomore year, a ladder was drawn on a sheet of paper. The wretched lost souls were hung from the lowest rungs; those in the crowd from the highest rungs; the rest of our class, somewhere in between. The hierarchy had been there all along. Now it had been made real. At least on paper.

They said the original and only copy of the ladder was hidden in the stacks on the second floor of the town library, neatly folded inside a book so obscure it would never be borrowed. But it's all a mystery. Or a myth. It's kind of like the Bible in that way. I mean, does anyone really know who wrote the Bible? Yet millions live by its words, if only to pass judgment on others. The same was true with the ladder. The creator intended to be anonymous, and through that anonymity, gave the ladder authority.

But these vagaries don't imply that the ladder's existence is in question. It's not. It's tangible, even if it can't be held and examined. It's the material from which our class's social fabric is woven, securing the fate of each of us. And don't mistake my frustration for resignation. A thousand times I've thought,
I'm better than that.
In fact, every day of my junior year, I walked the crowded hallways and sat in the classrooms, praying that something, somehow, might change—hoping against hope that I might be moving up a rung or two, that someone in the crowd might recognize that I'm more than where the ladder—

Glass shattered.

"Damn it," I heard my mom say.

"You all right?"

She let out a long sigh. "Just being clumsy."

"Need help?"

"I'm fine."

Holding on to the countertop, my mom picked up the glass pieces, then tore off a handful of paper towels to soak up the wine. She had a slightly bothered look on her face. From more than just spilled wine. Was she thinking about my dad? A strange thought, but the first that came to mind. I think about him sometimes. I don't remember much, though. I only knew him for a short time, when I was a little kid, before he left us. I suppose I should be thankful for any time I had with him. I've kept some of his stuff. Rather, I've taken things that my mom stored away in the attic or hid in the secret drawer of her vanity. A watch with his initials and the date 3-5-1974 engraved on the back. A light blue button-down shirt he wore to work. Ticket stubs from a Cosmos-Rowdies NASL game he took me to.

Thinking about my dad is like opening my eyes in the middle of the night and not being able to distinguish dreams from reality. So I try to fit these vague memories together, like puzzle pieces, with the hope of seeing some kind of truth. A bigger picture. But that's never really worked.

I wondered how often my mom thought about him. She's never said anything, except once when we were driving down the parkway to my aunt's house for a holiday dinner. She told me her life with him, for a time, was nice.
Nice.
That was it, nothing more. I always thought she said it just to appease me, because when I looked at her eyes, I saw something that she never revealed in words. Pain.

I've asked questions like, What does "nice" mean? Was it ever better than that? Why isn't he here? But no one is around to hear me, and so the questions remain lost in the silence between my mom and me, and I go back to being an only child of a single mom in this rich town, much of the time feeling way out of place. I think she knows I feel like this—my mom kind of reads me really well. Who knows? Maybe she feels the same way.

My mom finished cleaning the floor. She walked in from the kitchen and leaned against the doorway. She had another glass of wine in her hand.

"Should I leave the outside lights on?" she asked.

"No."

"Not going out?"

I shook my head.

"Where's Kyle?"

"Don't know."

I could've told her Kyle was partying at the circle, but she wouldn't have known what or where the circle was, and then I'd have to explain it all. Then she wouldn't have understood why I wasn't there, too, and I'd have to explain that as well. It's just easier to let her think her son is this really happy kid who's friends with all the popular people at school.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know..." she said. It seemed she was trying to get at something. "The two of you have been friends a long time."

"Ma, I'm fine. Kyle's fine. We're all fine." I sank down in the couch and stared at the television.

Kyle and I had been close since the day the Saint-Claires moved in across the street. As kids, we played capture-the-flag until midnight in the summer. Often I stayed at the Saint-Claires' shore house in Brielle. We built snow forts in the winter and played ice hockey on North Pond when the flag was up. Kyle would sleep over at my house and I'd sleep over at his. We grew up catching lightning bugs, colds, Yankee-Red Sox games, and a fist fight or two. Or three. We were best friends, and best friendships endured anything. At least I thought.

Then things changed. I don't think my mom had a clue about that. Kyle and I trained together for the upcoming varsity season and, when school started, I'd get a ride from him on most mornings. But that was it. The truth was, ever since seventh grade, we lived different lives at Millburn. I sometimes wondered what would've happened to me if I'd never quit baseball to concentrate on soccer. I was going to be a soccer star, I'd convinced myself. But it never happened, and that decision was now long in the past.

"My son," my mom said, with a thoughtful smile, "a senior in high school."

I frowned. "It's no big deal."

"You'll be the talk of the school."

"Not likely."

People at Millburn saw only what they wanted to see. If they wanted to think you were cool, then you were cool. Or smart. Or an athlete. Or hot. If they wanted to think you were a nobody, then you were that, regardless of how you saw yourself. Some thought my friendship with Kyle was a fraud, that he had taken pity on me. Others believed I had dirt on Kyle and that he only maintained the façade of a friendship in return for my silence. But no one knew the real me. No one could get inside my head. Of course, that didn't matter. What the people in my class thought of me was my reality. And, in the end, my reality was that I couldn't go with Kyle to the circle to hang out with the crowd—people I've lived in the same town with all my life—because of the ladder. Sure, I was about to be a senior. Sure, I should've felt something special. But I didn't.

"It'll be the time of your life," my mom said, as if she were imparting wisdom for the ages.

"And you know this how?" I said.

She shook her head. "You don't think I was a high school senior once?"

"Way back when," I said with a grin.

"It wasn't
that
long ago, mister," she said. "High school is high school. Senior years are special. You'll see what I mean."

I rolled my eyes. "Whatever."

The Tuesday after Labor Day, the sun would come up, I'd dress, get a ride, then walk in the Millburn High main entrance as I had hundreds of times as a sophomore and junior, as I had as a seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grader at the junior high. Senior year would be just another in a long chain of endless years of academic endurance. There'd be different teachers, different classrooms, different books, but it'd all be the same. Barring a miracle on the soccer field, nothing would make it especially memorable.

My mom frowned and shook her head. "With an attitude like that..."

I had nothing else to say. I waited for her last words that in any of our discussions were the closing credits, the pithy epilogue. She walked back into the kitchen. I heard her shoes click on the tiled floor, then stop.

"You never know how things'll turn out," she said. "They just might surprise you. But you have to at least
try
to enjoy yourself."

That was it? I didn't expect her to have the definitive answer on how I was going to make it through the year without crashing and burning, but I certainly expected something more, something a bit more tangible.

I looked back toward the kitchen and heard the spray bottle.

Then heard it again.

It had been an especially humid morning. I was wiped out; Kyle was, too. In the middle of the Christ Church field, he took ten paces in one direction, then another ten perpendicular to that. We used our shirts, water bottles, and whatever else we could find to mark the boundaries. Kyle brushed the sweat from his forehead and stood on one edge of the square, the soccer ball at his feet. I stood on the opposite edge, facing him.

"Ready?" Kyle said. "You first."

He flicked the ball to me.

I caught it with my instep and brought it down to the ground. Kyle charged at me. I shielded him with my body. My cleats danced on and around the ball, pushing it forward, drawing it back, nudging it left, then right. I imagined myself a player much greater, and I saw the two of us battling on a field infinitely grander—like Wembley or Estadio Azteca. Kyle was with me every step, trying to knock me off balance with his shoulders and hips. Still, the ball remained in my control.

"Not bad, Jonny," Kyle said.

Sometimes he could be so damn patronizing.

"I'll let ya touch the ball when I'm done," I said. Kyle pushed into me, but I held my ground. "Shoulda eaten your Wheaties, Saint-Claire."

That was all Kyle was going to take. He stepped on my cleat, then elbowed past me to steal the ball.

"So that's how we're playin'?" I said.

He gave me a wry smile. "Get used to it."

I bent down, tied my laces, then stood again. It was his turn. I charged at Kyle, leaning my body against his, darting my cleats at the ball. To his surprise (and mine), I quickly made the steal.

"Gee, that wasn't
too
easy," I said.

"A stroke of luck, wiseass," Kyle said.

We took turns, playing keep-away for another half hour. It had been a good training session for me. Great, really. My passes had been crisp, my shots on target, and earlier, when the two of us ran laps, the end lines and sidelines seemed shorter than usual.

"Last one," Kyle said.

I moved toward him. He stepped over the ball, faked one way, then pulled it backwards. I closed the distance between the two of us, then bumped him. He held me off. I bumped him again, feeling the intensity in his body—he was
not
going to give up the ball. But I pushed forward, trapping him in a corner.