Inexcusable Read Free Page B

hear a word with the constant roar in my ears coming from inside my own head and from all points around it. The phone rang all the time, and my dad answered it. He never put me on the phone, never shied away from a question, never lost his patience with school officials or local radio or whoever. He took off work and stayed there with me and played Risk, the game burning on all week as we took great chunks of continents from each other and then lost them again in between phone calls and lots of silence and lots of talks where he said not much more than that everything was going to work out all right and that it didn’t much matter anyway what any investigation said because he already knew, knew me, and knew that his internal, in-his-own-heart investigation had cleared me.
    â€œYou’re a good boy,” he reminded me every time I needed reminding.
    I didn’t look at the mail. He did that, too. I could tell, though, if he had opened any letters from college football programs. He hadn’t. No acceptances, no rejections the entire week.
    No acceptances, no rejections. It was as if I did not exist. No acceptances, no rejections. That’s being exactly nobody, that’s what that is.
    By Friday of the week I stayed home, everybody had looked into the accident. It was an accident. And also, it was no accident, anything but an accident. Everybody concluded—though not happily—that I had not done anything wrong. I had not done anything out of line. I had not done anything blameworthy.
    â€œAn unfortunately magnificent hit, in the universe of football” was what the writer called it, in the article about my being cleared.
    The game, Risk, was unchanged at the end of that sorry week. It was right back where we’d started it. In stock car racing, when there is a wreck on the track, they wave the yellow flag, which means everybody keeps driving, but nobody passes anybody else, nobody changes position, they just continue, motor on, high-speed float, until things are stabilized and you can race again. We ran that week under a yellow flag, me and Dad.
    Quietly, I returned to classes the following Monday. Everybody made a great effort to put the incident away, back, in the background, one tackle, late in a game, late inthe season, very late in a high school football life. Very possibly the end of my football life.
    When I got home, at the end of that first quiet day, I got the mail and opened it.
    I had quietly received an offer of a football scholarship.
    The next day I quietly received two more.
    Fate is a bitch, but there you go.

SHUT UP
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    G igi Boudakian has her head in her hands, and that is all wrong. If you knew Gigi Boudakian you would agree with me that she should never have her head in her hands. She should be happy, like, every minute, because she deserves it. And for Christ’s sake, she should not be here with her head in her hands now, here with me, like this.
    â€œThis is all wrong, Gigi.”
    â€œYou got that right, Keir,” she says, still with her head in her hands, still with her eyes to the floor.
    â€œYou are my friend, Gigi, forever. I love you, Gigi.”
    â€œShut . . . up.”
    â€œWhy does Carl have to come, Gigi? I don’t understand at all. And your father, and my father, and everybody. There is no reason for this. No reason. Miscommunicationis all that really happened here, that’s all. I thought one thing, you thought another thing. Why do you have to make it worse? Carl has been my friend forever, just like you have been my friend forever, so why do we have to make an accident into something else? I love you, Gigi.”
    â€œShut . . . up.”
    â€œYou know I could never do anything to hurt you. You know I am the very last person in the world to ever do anything like that. I am a good guy and you are a smart girl, and we are us, so this could never be wrong the way you say it is. You know that! So why don’t