A Step Toward Falling Read Free Page B

except for the obvious part. Football players have too much power at our school, especially this year with their winning record. I’ve seen lunch ladies wave them through the line without paying a dime for a full tray of food. I’ve seen kids they don’t know buy them sodas and carry their backpacks; anything to win three seconds of a football player’s approval.
    Richard thinks our group of friends is different but we aren’t really. We might not prostrate ourselves to win the football team’s attention, but we still spend some amount of time every lunch period staring over at their table. Just because we can see the problem doesn’t mean we aren’t part of it.
    Lucas and I have never talked about what happened with Belinda, so I have no idea if he feels guilty the way I do or if he feels like he’s being unfairly punished. I assume it’s the latter—that he thinks what happened was terrible, of course, but not his fault. At the very least, he probably thinks it’s more my fault than his, which—though I don’tadmit this to anyone—might be true.
    It’s still hard for me to understand what happened.
    On the surface, it’s a simple story. Three weeks ago, I was at a home game with my four best friends: Richard, Barry, Weilin, and Candace. Ordinarily we aren’t big football fans, but this year everyone goes to home games. Every week, with every victory, the crowds get bigger.
    That night, I was in a terrible mood, though I feel stupid admitting it now. Toby Schulz, a boy I thought I’d been flirting with for the last two weeks with funny texts and Facebook messages, was sitting two rows down from us, on a clear and obvious date with Jenny Birdwell, a cute sophomore with a blond ponytail. Three days earlier he’d sent me a message saying, “We should do something some time,” which I had stupidly thought meant with each other . Apparently it didn’t. Apparently it meant we should sit near each other at a football game and wave hi while I’m on a date with someone else .
    It wasn’t that I was so in love with Toby. He’d seemed smart and a little more engaged than our typical new recruits to Youth Action Coalition, who usually show up angry about one issue and bored by all the others. At the first meeting Toby came to, he stayed after to say he was impressed by the range of our “actions” and all “the cool things we were up to.” He had curly brown hair and slightly crooked teeth that for some reason made him even cuter. LGBT support wasn’t his main issue, he told us, not looking at Richard, but he was certainly on board with that. His main issue was the environment. He lovedbackpacking and wanted the mountains to still be around for his children to enjoy. How could I not get a crush on him? And when he messaged me three times over the next week, how could I not think maybe he liked me back?
    If I’m being honest, though, I’d have to admit: it wasn’t Toby being there with a cute sophomore that bothered me as much as a long series of Toby-like misjudgments on my part. It felt like I kept making the same mistakes over and over—thinking classroom joking was flirtation, thinking guys who asked for my phone number to get a homework assignment wanted my phone number more than they wanted the assignment.
    I partly blame Richard for this. He loves to pretend that everyone is at least a little bit gay and might have a crush on him. He’ll sit beside Wayne Cartwright, our gorgeous quarterback, in the main office waiting for a late pass and claim their arm hairs were reaching out for each other. He knows nothing will happen but he still dwells on these moments. “Arm hairs don’t lie. They can’t, actually. They don’t have individual brains. Just instincts.”
    For him it’s funny. Nobody expects Wayne Cartwright to miraculously come out of the closet and mix arm hairs