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Andrew Black runs at night.
It's a new habit, a response to recent restlessness. In the late hours on his computer an unproductive guilt crept over him. He first ignored it, attributing the feeling to his body adjusting to a sudden change in lifestyle. When the feeling stayed, he started reading again, when that wasn’t enough, exercise was the sudden, obvious addition. He started running.
He was interrupted in less than a week. He ran until he felt like stopping, riding the satisfaction until sunrise. Then he was stopped by a cop. There was no hostility in the interaction, simply tacit officerial skepticism. The encounter left him embarrassed; he should have known better.
With badged circum-specters looming he shut himself in again. For one night. The difference in mood had been so great he immediately looked for a fix and in deliberate naivety of any-choice-is-better-than-none he wondered how he would be treated were he conspicuously benign. He took his brightest clothes, sleeves rolled up, shirt tucked into his waistband. He thought it worked, in fact it had become irrelevant. The first patrol to pass gave him a nod, the second stopped and called out, “Hey Andrew! What college are you thinking?”
The clothing may have helped someone else. For Andrew it was his name spreading across dispatch. Now cops are friendly, greeting him by name and often stopping to chat. It could be worse.
Andrew tries thinking about different subject when he runs but he always returns to his one constant thought. The domination of his surroundings that become his limbs. He knows the houses, feels them like a hum, their yards like an outline on the path of his run. A two-story house with two cars in its garage, both cold. A car on the corner parked in front of a cold and empty one-story. The sharp heat of boilers, radiant heat beneath floors, or hot water circulating through iron registers. The human warmth of beds, of voids falling into each other. He sees the animals in their living brightness, in dens or burrows or at prowl.
His sense of place has become more important than his sight. It makes him feel set right, on perfect bearing, like the animal must feel of its tail. His tail is cosmic, balancing spatial ignorance.
The thought doesn’t motivate his running, even as he runs for its cause. The clock has set him on these roads, a loop around the city-suburb. Many miles nightly, he supposes his endurance beneficiary. A cruiser passes, miles pass, a cruiser passes, miles pass. A cruiser slows. “Hey, Andrew!”
They talk (indeed) football.
His parents know, of course.
Andrew lies in bed, staring at his ceiling. It is the first Tuesday of February, his alarm will ring soon, he thinks about the day ahead. He’s a senior at a public high school in Atlanta and the first practice for spring baseball begins in nine hours. His bedroom occupies one corner of the second story of a house in the quiet forests west of the city. His walls are pale blue, his window frames are white and rise to the ceiling, three-fourths curtained, the clerestory upper quarter un-shuttered and fogged over in the morning cold. He sits up and the door on his closet opens, his clothes for the day hanging at the front.
He walks across the rug covering hardwood to his now-opening door. In the hall he knocks on his brother’s door and sets it slightly ajar then opens the door to the bathroom. The faucet turns and blinds draw over also-fogged bathroom windows and he strips. He brushes his teeth and steps around the blue outer curtain and the clear inner curtain and he turns his back to the water and closes his eyes and sees the world.
His brother is in bed, staring at his phone. His mother is at the stove. His father is at the kitchen table, tablet open and on its stand. Neighbors to one side are in bed, asleep. Neighbors to the other have already left, their dog asleep in its crate in their bedroom. Andrew again wonders if to possess ubiquity is to deserve it.
His father does not know this secret.
A cloth runs over his back.
A person jogging by could guess someone is showering. They could guess someone is in bed; that someone is at a stove; that someone is at a table, reading the news. Is it invasive to have certainty from strict options? He can’t see their faces or hear their thoughts or words. He can’t see their screens. He doesn’t even truly apprehend those around him, only the voids he cannot touch, the absences denoting presence. The faucet turns back and he dries himself and cleans the mirror.
Modest, he knocks again on his brother’s door and pushes it open and walks across the run. His towel finds its hook, he reaches for his clothes. Brandless white t-shirt and black gym shorts, red socks and red Solars and a white hoodie with Adidas large and in black across the best. His bag comes to his hand and his door closes as he’s in the stairwell. Andrew greets his mother, Anna, and his father.
“Hey.”
James Black says “Good morning.”
His father is in his navy work coveralls. It has two chest pockets, gold embroidery is above each, BLACK’S MACHINING and JIM. A United States flag is on one shoulder and on the other is a yellow flag with a black snake and four illegible words. Andrew is eating when Michael comes downstairs in a whirl, saying “Baseball day!”
Andrew smiles slightly, “In eight hours, chill.”
Michael says “I’ve been chill all winter, I’m sick of the cold!”
James chuckles.
They leave, their mother seeing them off from the back stoop.
Andrew takes them through the quiet and gently curving forest roads, the city still waking up, with few cars and regularly spaced orange lights and steady green lights beneath a solid wall of gray sky. A car stays behind him, then two, some fellows of the thousands at his school. He sees the heat of their engines, in their tires over pavement. They pass a tree with an orange stake hammered into its trunk, and beyond the tree he finds deer, just out of sight from the road.
The school is on the crest of a hill, the parking at its base. As a senior, Andrew has a designated spot, and as he shuts the door people call his name. The path to the school is a scenic sweep, pebble-pavement, students marching up the incline. Andrew looks to the base of a different part of the hill, to a park with a full creekbed and dead brush on its banks.
The path leads through a divided commons, some students at the outside tables call to him. The entrance is brick, metal and glass, two great windows on either side of steel double-doors, painted blue. The chatter of the commons reaches them in the vestibule, and through another set of double-doors where Michael heads off with a “Later, bro.” Andrew continues his small nodded acknowledgments.
The school is four wings in a square, with an open courtyard at the center, where more tables and benches have few students occupying them as other students walk beneath covered paths. He stays inside, turning down a hall that has classrooms and lockers on one side and lockers and windows on the other, past more stairs and down another hall of more of the same. Blue lockers, pale yellow walls, beige and blue glossy vinyl tile, all subdued under the gray morning light. He opens his locker and he sees a familiar void, Isaiah, obvious height and easy gait, lanyard hanging from his waistband, duffel bag at his side. He hears him before he says “Sup, Drew.”
“Yo,” Andrew shuts his bag in his locker.
Isaiah signed to Mizzou in December, benefiting second-most from Andrew’s success.
“You know how much I want to walk in tomorrow in the Florida hat? Fuck a suit.”
“Fuck a suit?” Isaiah repeats with a laugh. “Gotta look good on camera.”
“Gotta look good for five minutes on camera.”
They pass through the showers and into the gym and sit on the bleachers, looking at their phones until the bell rings and they fall into line for warm-ups. The class has an odd number of students, Andrew as usual plays the coach, badminton today.
They don’t keep score, Andrew wins.
One night after far too long in front of a screen, Andrew went to his father’s office and pulled a novel from the shelves. He enjoyed it, and that enjoyment became a desire to take classes with more work and more reading. It challenged him at first, but after months of uninteresting assignments on books he already read, the class became routine. They’re on Shakespeare and taking notes on a scene from a text-literal adaptation of Coriolanus. Andrew liked Hamlet more.
Isaiah’s second class is next to his and they walk together to weights. Down the stairs, again to his locker, again through the showers but now into the weights room. Shrugs, skullcrushers, squats. Deadlifts, pull-ups, dead hangs. Curls, bench, Isaiah spots, grousing over Andrew’s head.
“Where you get this lift from? I’m twice your damn size.”
“Two years,” Andrew raises the bar, “carrying your ass.”
Weights ends and they go to lunch, the table full of football players. His final class is College Physics. It’s the only class he doesn’t breeze through, so he takes exact notes, recording every lecture and listening at night.
He often wonders if it’s the only class he actually needs.
At the last bell he finds Michael and they walk out from the school to the baseball field and the team changing rooms. Andrew has played almost every sport the school offers but Michael’s heart has only ever been for baseball.
Michael establishes himself as a sophomore, as a junior there is full expectation that he will be the ace. The day is brisk but little wind keeps it tolerable, and as they arrive at the field, Andrew looks at the new faces. He can see their nervousness and their quiet energy, and from the few who shout his name, freshman braggadocio.
Andrew stopped pitching before his junior season, self-preservation described in misdirection as “My future’s probably in football, coach.” Catcher was never a question, he was too fast to waste behind the plate but he could play everything else so he’s starting centerfield, scouts scoring games often writing 8 with a star. An atypical leadoff hitter but existential threat on the bases. First at the dish, the hardest out to get and the table-setter. His coach played briefly in the minors, but establishing an adult life of good decision-making quit when he knew the Show was out of reach. Andrew is on good terms with him, having only one disagreement: his coach thinks he would be better going pro in baseball. Andrew likes baseball more but worries he’ll get caught. In football he just has to be fast.
The older players have the relaxed camaraderie of hundred of days of battle, their warm-ups are easy and they quickly progress to jocular rookie hazing. The freshmen are given a lengthy head-start but still can’t beat Andrew around the track. Fungoes are hit and he catches every one. He hits sharp grounders to third or deep short and no throw beats him to first. The older players watch and laugh.
As they drive home, streetlights begin to come on.
Their mother reads at the kitchen table, their father still at the shop. “How was practice?” asks Anna as Michael brushes past her, bags and cleats in hand as he runs upstairs, his answer coming from the stairwell, “Good!”
Andrew nods, “Yeah, it was good. Typical, nobody standing out yet.”
Anna titers, “It’s the first day. Did you show them up?”
“You know I did.”
“That’s my boy.”
Andrew lays out his work from physics, his recorder set to x1.5 and playing. The recording finishes, then he finishes the work. He thinks about the class and the heat of the stove and of his brother’s laptop and his father’s truck as it turns onto their street. He stands and stretches and walks into the hall, calling through Michael’s open door, “Dad’s about home.”
Andrew sees the garage open from the kitchen, “Dad’s home,” and his mother hums and he sets the table. James comes in from the mudroom, leaving his own heavy bag beside his boots. He kisses Anna and passes Michael on the stairs as he goes to his bedroom to shower and change.
He’s back down quickly, in jeans and a polo. Pasta is on the table, Anna blesses their dinner and they eat. “How was practice?” James asks, prompting Michael to give the full recollection. They finish and clear the table, then return to it.
Anna says “There’s ice cream, for after we’ve finished talking about tomorrow.”
Andrew considers the schools again. Ohio, Georgia, USC, Florida. He considers his visits to each, about their coaching staffs and their players and what they offered. He wonders, as he has wondered every day and night for more than a year, if he shouldn’t play at all.
Andrew says “Florida. I want to go to Florida.”
His mother asks “Why not Ohio?”
“Weaker program.”
“USC?” she asks.
“Across the country, about as good as Ohio.”
“Georgia?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know, I guess I just don’t want to go there.”
“So,” says his mother, “why Florida?”
“Gainesville is close, not as close as Athens, but close, and I liked it more than the others, when we went. And Devaris is the best quarterback in college football.”
“But this is his last year,” says Anna.
“Yeah, I know. I guess it just feels right.”
His mother nods.
James finally says “Florida also guaranteed your housing request, California and Ohio didn’t, and it’ll be cheaper for you to rent there, after. This is the largest commitment of your life, so far. Are you ready for that?”
“Yeah, I am.”
His father is quiet again, then he says “We’ve had this conversation a hundred times. We trust your decision, whatever it is, and regardless, your school is just a step. It won’t matter for your future career where you played, in four years there will be things you loved and hated about any school you attend, but you’ll be going pro, and that’s what your focus needs to be. School is good, but it’s only what helps you reach your real goal.”
Anna agrees, adding, “And it is better than having to fly to California.”
Andrew is thankful for their reinforcement. No one else on his football team was even approached by Florida, but he isn’t looking for a place with people he knows, certainly not for friends, he’s looking for somewhere to play. Weather and his parents having an easy enough time coming to games are just a bonus.
Florida, he repeats to himself as he and Michael clean the kitchen.
Florida, again and again.
When he’s done with his homework he opens his laptop. YouTube, Reddit, Instagram. Local news, an article on a recently found dire bear carcass. Basketball highlights, baseball forecasts. When he feels sufficiently unproductive he opens a digital copy of a book from the AP list. When he can no longer sit still he pulls on a red Braves long-T and black Ultraboosts. He walks downstairs and outside through the mudroom.
The door locks behind him.