Second Down - Chapter 20

I fantasized about getting my hands around Elijah’s throat and choking him out the entire way home. Admittedly, that was taking things a little too far. Sure, he was an asshole, and he’d ruined my clothes, but I’m not sure going to prison for attempted murder would be the best way to deal with it.

Still, it did make me feel a little better to fantasize about it.

I was just so furious because he kept doing this shit and kept getting away with it. There were absolutely no consequences for him. I knew that because there had been no consequences for me when I’d been just like him, but now that I was trying to turn a new leaf and be a better person, it was like I was constantly considering the consequences.

I was certain that if Elijah was pissed off enough at someone, he could put his hands on that person and choke them and get a slap on the wrist.

It sucked that bad people got to do whatever they wanted without caring about it, but if you were even a little good, you had to constantly moderate yourself.

I walked through the door, ready to go upstairs and be pissed off for a while longer, when I saw Mom sprawled on the couch, one arm draped over her eyes, the other hanging limply toward the floor.

“Mom?” I said, my voice a little higher than I meant it to be. She shouldn’t even be home. She had a shift at the hair salon that she was supposed to be at.

When she didn’t respond, I dropped my bag and rushed over to her. Her face, what I could see of it, was covered in sweat, and her skin was waxy and pale. So limp, her arm just kind of laying on her face. I couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.

I dropped to a knee next to her and started trying to figure out what I should do. I reached for her arm to check her pulse, but right before I grabbed her wrist, she moved her arm slightly, uncovering one eye and asked, “What do you need?”

The question was clear, not slurred or anything, but her voice still sounded really weak.

“Mom, you look terrible,” I said sympathetically. “Are you sick? Did you… Did something happen at work?”

“I’m fine,” she said, obviously not fine. She tried to push herself up, but she slumped back against the cushions, clearly struggling. “Just had a headache, so I switched shifts with someone. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“You don’t look fine. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck. You’ve been having a lot of these headaches lately.” 

“It’s nothing. Just… stress. The regular Tylenol isn’t really cutting it anymore, so it just seems like it’s worse than it is.” 

The fact that over-the-counter drugs weren’t helping told me that it was much worse than she was letting on.

This went well beyond headaches. I moved away when I was nineteen, partly from work and partly to get away from Mom, who had spiraled into some really out-there stuff while still doting on Josh. I knew that she’d ended up getting sick in my dreams, and I had a vague memory of it being connected to the headaches.

I wanted to kick myself for not paying enough attention back then. And going forward, what should I do? Whatever.

Yes, I sometimes hated Mom for the way she always sided with her little psychopath, but she was still my Mother, and I hated seeing her like this.

Besides, she wasn’t always mean. She could be nice sometimes, too.

What was clear though, was that the headaches were more than just headaches. There was more to it than that, but I wasn’t sure what. 

“Have you seen a doctor about these headaches?” I asked getting off my knees and sitting on the edge of the table. “If regular drugs stopped working, then it has to be getting worse, right?”

Mom’s hand fluttered dismissively. “Dr. Taylor wasn’t any help at all. Just said they were tension headaches and to take some aspirin. Doctors always think a woman’s pain is all in her head.”

“I thought I heard dad say the last time you saw Dr. Taylor was like two months ago. Maybe you should get a second opinion? These don’t seem normal. What if it’s something serious?”

“Blake, honey, please.” Mom’s voice had that edge to it, the one that said I was pushing too hard. “I know my own body. I just need better pain medication.”

I didn’t want to push any harder. She was already hurting. The last thing I wanted was to annoy her on top of that.

“I could run to the pharmacy,” I offered. “Get whatever’s strongest over the counter? I mean, they have to have something better than just Tylenol, right? Or I could get otehr stuff, like Ibuprofen or whatever, maybe it will work different.”

Her face softened. “Would you? That would be wonderful. And stop worrying. I’ll probably be fine by the time you get back.”

I didn’t believe that for a second, but I nodded anyway. “Want me to handle dinner when I get back? So you can keep resting?”

“That would be nice.” She reached out and patted my hand as she closed her eyes again. Her skin still felt clammy. “Such a good boy. I love you, sweetie.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, hurrying otu the door. We lived close enough to mains treet that the pharmacy was only a few blocks away. The headaches did have a tendency to come and go, so I didn’t doubt it might go away, but I also knew they’d still come back.

Fixing this would be harder than fixing Dad’s thing, since it would require her to do something.

Maybe I’d talk to dad about the headaches again.

Later that night, I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, my eyes tracing over its textured pattern, kind of like a form of meditation. Mom had been mostly right. By the time I’d gotten home, she was sitting up and looked much better.

She still opened the bottle and downed a few pills as soon as I handed her the bottle, suggesting the headache wasn’t gone, just better, but at least she didn’t look like death warmed over anymore.

I left her sitting there, leaning back with eyes closed, and made one of the only things I knew how to make: spaghetti. It was something I’d taught myself as an adult in the dream life, and mom was actually surprised when she came into the kitchen later and saw what I was making.

Josh was thankfully quiet through dinner, and so mom had no reason to stop being nice to me, making this one of the best evenings in a while, in spite of my ruined clothes.

I’d talked to dad after dinner, trying to bring up her headaches and how worried I was about it. He’d kind of blown it off. Well, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t blown it off exactly, and it was clear he took it seriously, but it was also clear he wasn’t going to talk to me about it.

I got where he was coming from, sort of. Back in my other life, the dream life, if some teenager had tried telling me how to handle something this serious, I probably would’ve dismissed them too. What did a kid know about these things?

Hell, even with that dream life still a solid memory in my head, I didn’t know about these things or what to suggest even if he had listened to me. Construction work and welding hadn’t exactly made me a medical expert.

But watching Mom suffer, knowing what might be coming, it was torture. I hadn’t been around in that other timeline, but I knew it got a lot worse, and I wanted to avoid that for her. Again, not that I could explain that.

What was the point of getting this second chance if I couldn’t actually change anything? Everyone just saw me as some kid who couldn’t possibly understand adult stuff. The coaches were the same way every time I made a suggestion.

It was frustrating.

The only thing I could really have an effect on was myself. Which left me with my other problem, how to achieve my goal. I still wanted, more than anything else, to make football my career, which ultimately meant getting to the NFL.

Coach was right about needing high-level training to make that happen. He was also right that I couldn’t afford it.

I’d left that problem to mull over in the back of my mind all night as I dealt with more pressing matters, but it seemed that this was one area where my dream memories might actually be able to help.

I knew the dream was real. I was done second-guessing that. Enough stuff had played out either in the way I remembered it or at least affected by changes from the way I remembered it to tell me it wasn’t just my subconscious making patterns.

Mechanics of how that actually happened be damned, I knew what was going to happen, which seemed like the kind of thing I could turn into money.

My problem was, I hadn’t exactly been a Wall Street guy in that other life. I’d been a blue-collar guy, which didn’t really lend to investments.

Sure, I could piece together some stuff. I knew the technology that would go mainstream, I knew some companies that would be huge. What I didn’t know were any details. How those companies got huge, the sequence of when things were a hit.

If I had time, I could just go for it, throw my money into Apple or Google, whenever it showed up, and let it roll into real money. But I didn’t have time and I didn’t exactly have much money to throw anything into. Stock could go up a thousand percent, but if you only put a dollar in, that would give me … what, a thousand dollars after years of waiting.

Not exactly the solution to my problem. I needed something quick that I could take what little money I had and build on it, then again and again, so it had a chance to snowball into enough money to be useful.

And I had to do all that in time to hire private coaches early enough to do some good.

I knew of some major events too, of course. 9/11 and the start of like, twenty years of war in the Middle East. That big recession in 2008 that had crushed the construction industry for a long time. Who’d win the presidency and a few other major offices.

But that presented the same problem. Those events were years from now, and I didn’t know how to make money off those things.

Thinking of 9/11 made me also think, was I supposed to do something about that? I mean, I knew when it was going to happen. That one, at least, I knew exactly when it was happening.

But how could I? How could I possibly explain that to anyone? What would I even say? ‘Hey, in about seven years, some terrorists are going to hijack planes and crash them into buildings.’ Right. That would go over well.

They’d probably think I was crazy. Or worse, once it actually happened, they might remember that kid who knew everything about it before it happened. And then they’d think I was somehow involved.

Once again, I was trapped knowing things I couldn’t do anything about.

Then it occurred to me. There was something I knew a fair amount about.

Sports.

And not just sports, I knew specifics. I knew games that would be played. Big wins and losses. I knew who would win the championships.

Mostly I knew it for football, but I knew a few other sports more generically, and still knew the big events. Baseball. Basketball. Hell, even a few other things.

The baseball strike was still going on - had been since August. I couldn’t remember exactly when it would end, but I knew it was sometime this fall. Not much help there, though. How would I even make money off knowing when a strike ends?

There was the Oklahoma-Colorado game. I didn’t remember the details exactly, but I knew it was an unexpected blowout because of how badly Colorado beat Oklahoma. Colorado was ranked high - fourth or fifth maybe? They were expected to beat the lower ranked Colorado team, but not to the extreme level that they did. 

And dad loved boxing. He would talk about it a lot before he passed. There was that George Foreman fight around Christmas I think of this year. Maybe even sooner. I’d have to look it up, but I remembered Dad going on about how nobody thought Foreman had a chance.

I grabbed a notebook and started jotting notes, trying to capture everything I could remember about sports from that time. The Super Bowl upsets were months away, but worth noting down. The more I wrote, the more details surfaced.

There was something here. If I could verify the dates and details, I could start small. Build it up gradually, rolling winnings into the next bet. A risky way to gamble if you didn’t know what would happen, but I did.

The only things that were changing right now were stuff I was affecting, and it’s not like what I did out here in west Texas was affecting who won the Super Bowl.

I’d placed a few bets in my dream life. Nothing serious, just office pools and the occasional weekend wager. Enough to know how it worked, at least in theory.

The reality hit.

Theory was great, but I was fourteen. It’s not like I could walk into a bookie’s office and place a bet. I stopped writing and thought. There had to be a way. Maybe I could convince someone older to place bets for me? But who would trust a kid with gambling advice?

There was only one obvious answer. I had to convince Dad to do it for me, ‘cause I sure as hell wasn’t waiting to start this until I turned eighteen.

Man, this was going to be a hell of a conversation. 

***

Even though I’d put off most of my anger about Elijah to deal with mom and work through everything else, I hadn’t forgotten it. I got up extra early to make the walk to school the next morning, thinking about all the shit he’d done this year.

The clothes might have been the last straw, but it wasn’t the only one, and the closer I got to school, the more angry I got. I’d been trying to play this smart, to keep from getting in trouble, since the start of school, but I was just about at my limit.

Elijah lived on the other side of town, a little too far to walk, and his mom had to be at work early, so he usually was at school way before everyone else. I made my way into the building and down to the lockers near the door that lead to the fieldhouse, since that was where most football kids got their lockers assigned, I guess to make it easier to get out to practice.

My plan worked. I turned the corner to find Elijah at his locker, putting books into his backpack. Also as expected, he was alone. Elijah always hid behind Mason or Jake, meaning dealing with him would have required facing off against multiple guys. I’d do it if it came to it, but my odds were not that great.

No, this needed to be handled one on one.

I was up on him just as he closed his locker nad turned around. The moment he saw me, his eyes went wide and he looked terrified. He took a small step back, putting himself right against the locker, looking either way down the hall, I guess hoping a teacher or maybe one of his buddies would show up and bail him out again.

It’ why I wanted to do this before school, instead of at the end of the day. There weren’t a lot of classes at this end of the school, since it was by the athletics department just down from the cafeteria. Most teachers would be in the main part of the school on the other side. His tough guy act was nowhere to be seen.

No help was coming for him.

Even though he was already against the locker, I pushed my forearm into his chest hard, slamming him into them as much as I could.

“What the fu…”

“What do I want?” I said, interrupting him. “I want to beat the shit out of you for ruining my clothes yesterday, dumping them in that bucket of bleach water. That’s what I want.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

We both knew I was lying. Hell, I’d only been about seventy-five percent sure it was him until this moment, since there were a few others like Jorden who could be the culprit. But the expression on his face gave it away.

For someone who was constantly pulling shit and then pretending it wasn’t him, you’d think he would be a better lying.

“Bullshit. I know it was you. You’ve been screwing with me all season, and I’m getting real tired of it.”

“If you don’t…”

“If I don’t … what? Stop? Let you go? You’re friends aren’t ehre with you right now, Elijah, and you and I both know you aren’t man enough to fight your own fights. Are you so stupid that you don’t realize you can’t hide behind them twenty-four hours a day? You ready to start fighting your own fights?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” he said, but his voice quivered as the words came out.

“Bullshit. You’re terrified of me. You scared of fucking everything. It’s why you are the way you are, Elijah. Too scared to be a real man so you gotta tear everyone else down to your level. Well I’m sick of it. I’ve been patient with you, Elijah. All year. Patient enough to let all the crap you and your buddies have pulled slide. But guess what?” I leaned in close, getting a inch from his nose. “That patience is officially gone.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Look, man, whatever you think I did, I didn’t…”

“Next time something like this happens,” I said, continuing as if he hadn’t said anything. “If you so much as look at me the wrong way, I’ll find you when your friends aren’t around. And I’ll beat you within an inch of your life.”

Elijah froze, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. For all his tough talk on the field, all the swagger he showed when Mason and Jake were backing him up, there was nothing left now.

I wasn’t naive enough to think he was going to just take it though. He’d be terrified for a little bit, but then he’d be embarrassed, and that would make him feel like he needed to do something.

“You aren’t with someone all of the time, Elijah. Even if you come at me with Mason, I’ll still find you later, when it’s just me and you. This is your one chance to get smart. Stay out of my way. Don’t fuck with me again. Don’t fuck with my friends again. Or I’ll make sure you never catch a ball again.”

I released him and he dropped to the floor. he was shaking, not looking up and not meeting my gaze as I glared down at him. He was a beaten dog.

I turned on my heel and walked away, leaving him huddled there, the scared little boy he was.

I gave it fifty-fifty whether he’d actually listen or try and come after me to save face.