Losers Take All (20 page)

“They're going to keep him here overnight,” Dylan's mom told us, looking and sounding a little better, “because he might have a low-grade concussion. He's resting now, but he wanted me to thank you all for coming and hanging out. It means a lot to him knowing you're here. He'll be out of the hospital tomorrow and back on the soccer field soon.”

We all applauded the good news.

Dylan's mom paused and gave us a smile. “In the meantime, he's coming to watch the game on Tuesday, and he said he wants you to lose this one in his honor.”

As if in response, a chant started that I doubt has ever rung out in a hospital waiting room before: “Losers, losers, losers forever!”

The young doctor looked around, a bit mystified.

“Let's lose this one big for Dylan,” Meg called out.

“Not just big but ugly!” Pierre seconded.

Frank's deep voice boomed: “It's time to show the world just how bad we can be!”

 

26

The news about Dylan was apparently exactly the kind of new fuel that was needed to keep our story roaring along as a trendy social media event. Internet loudmouths reacted with fury. Angry tweets and posts about the beating soon included Dylan's name and picture, and the rumor that the attacker had been a member of the football team.

It rained hard all weekend and there were no soccer practices, so I kept to myself and stayed far away from the media—and Becca. But I followed the chatter on the Web, and it felt strange that most of the people posting comments about us had never even been near our town. They still seemed to take our situation very personally, as if what was going on in Fremont touched something in their own lives, and what had happened to Dylan outraged them. Becca was right—there are a lot of people out there who hated the sports cultures of their schools and towns, and we had struck a nerve.

The
Star Dispatch
on Saturday had a news article about the assault on a Fremont student, with comments from our town's police chief that there was an investigation under way. On Sunday morning the paper's sports section ran a piece about our upcoming game against Maysville, and how hundreds of people were expected to attend. There was no sign of Dianne Foster's article about the Logan family, and I began to hope that either she hadn't written it or her story had been overshadowed by the attack on Dylan and would never be published.

I visited Dylan on Sunday afternoon. He was home from the hospital and enjoying his newfound fame. He was getting e-mails and texts from people he didn't know, and some of them were sending him flowers and chocolates. A fan in Greenwich Village with the username Jockhater had sent him two dozen cookies from a fancy city bakery. He had a black eye and his wrist was now in a plaster cast, but he was in high spirits. “I gotta get my wrist broken more often,” he told me. “Do you want a white chocolate chip or a brown sugar butterscotch?”

I asked him about the police investigation, and he told me that he wasn't supposed to talk about it. But since we were old friends, he confided that the cops had searched the Stevens and found a few footprints.

*   *   *

On Monday the heavy rains continued. Two police cars were in the parking lot when I arrived at school, and rumors flew around about students being called in for questioning. I also heard that the school system had hired a private investigator to figure out who had posted the original video, and that Muhldinger was furious that his football team had been linked in unsubstantiated rumors to a vicious assault.

Becca didn't show up at school, and Meg told me she was a little sick and had stayed home to try to recover for our Tuesday game. Our soccer practice was rained out so I went home right after school. I was feeling a little sick myself, so I headed up to my room and lay in bed watching the rain lash the windows.

I have a small room that looks down on our neighbor's garage. My bed faces the one window, and then there's just space for a dresser, a desk, and a chair. I've had this room my whole life, and a lot of the stuff in it is from when I was a kid. The Tonka fire engine my grandfather gave me when I was five is parked on top of my dresser. Above its ladder is a photo of my brothers tossing me back and forth across a leaf pile when I was seven. In the picture I manage to look both thrilled and scared to death, which pretty well sums up my relationship with my two older brothers.

Then there's some newer stuff. In computer club, Frank, Dylan, and I had built a robot with big hands that could navigate shoulder blades and spread suntan lotion on a person's back. We'd named him Sandy, and he'd won first prize in a robotics competition. Sandy waited on his treads on my night table, next to a framed photo of Becca. I had taken the picture of her on a windy day not long after school started and I liked how she was laughing and trying to push her hair out of her eyes.

Thunder shook the house, and lightning flashed so close to my window that it glinted off the metal frame of Becca's photo. I wondered where my father was—his crew couldn't work in such a storm. He hadn't said more than a few words to me all week. He'd spent a lot of time away from home and when he came back he either stayed in the family room watching the tube or went down to the basement and hit the heavy bag. On Saturday night he'd quarreled with my mom, which was very rare. I'd heard them shouting back and forth—him telling her that he just needed a little space, and her answering that he could take all the space he wanted, but he was also a husband and a father. There was real anger in their voices, and it made me think of Becca and what she was going through with her own parents.

I hadn't talked to her all weekend, and I was tempted to call or at least shoot her a text, but every time I glanced at my cell phone I remembered what she had admitted to during our walk, and how she had lashed out at me later in the hospital. She was the one who owed me an apology, and she wasn't exactly burning up the phone lines delivering it.

Thunder crashed, rain pelted the windows, and I lay there feeling dizzy and disoriented and wondering why this strange soccer season was splitting me apart from the people I loved the most.

*   *   *

Tuesday dawned bright and sunny. I came downstairs earlier than usual, but my father had already left for work. His crew likes to start early and he's always one of the first ones on-site. I saw that he'd had cereal and coffee—his bowl and mug were in the dish rack. And he'd read the newspaper and left it behind on the table.

Then I looked closer. Side-by-side photos of my dad and me filled up half of the front page of the sports section. The headline on the feature article read: “A Tale of Two Logans.” The photo of my dad was from his playing days, and he was suited up and wearing number 32. The picture of me was from our first soccer game, and next to my dad in pads I looked ten years old and as thin as a pencil.

I sat in the silent kitchen and read the article from beginning to end. It was well researched and sharply written, but I thought it belonged on the Opinion page rather than the sports section because it had such a strong point of view. It painted a picture of an out-of-control school run by a bunch of sports lunatics who were trying to impose their will on a helpless student body. It noted Fremont's many sports championships but mediocre test scores, compared the school's whopping athletic budget to the relatively small amount it spent on the library and computer center, and contrasted the high number of athletes who won league and county sports honors with the few National Merit Scholars.

Muhldinger was described as a “nonteaching audiovisual specialist” who had been catapulted into the job of principal because he was a kick-ass football coach. According to the article, there was plenty of resentment among the Fremont faculty that a man who had no claim to being a serious educator had been promoted over their heads. The article described how he'd tried to pump up the sports culture even more by requiring seniors to join a team, and how some students really hated this. According to Dianne Foster, the school's sports-crazed policies had created a unique and dangerous situation at Fremont—what she called a school divided against itself.

That was where the article stopped talking about my school and started talking about my family. My father was described as the ultimate jock to ever come out of the ultimate jock school. She listed his records, including the most yards gained by a Fremont football player in one year, the most yards gained in a career, and his best-ever time in the mile run. If he hadn't been injured in college, Dianne wrote, my dad would have gone pro. Reading his achievements in the newspaper made me a bit proud, but it also filled me with dread at what was coming.

Sure enough, the article jumped to my brothers and their own impressive sports achievements. And then it started to talk about me, and how I had never played for any Fremont team. It described in surprising detail how I had been pressured into informally trying out for football and gotten my teeth knocked out. And it told how Muhldinger had met with me in his office, offered me a place on his varsity and even tried to give me my dad's old number—and when I turned it down, he'd socked a hole in his door.

I sat there wondering which of my friends had told the
Star
Dispatch
reporter these private things. Did they think they were doing me a favor by giving her inside details? Muhldinger would think I was the one who'd provided this information to the reporter, and my dad would, too. I forced myself to finish the article.

So the son of the best athlete to ever play for Fremont decided to fight back and start a very different kind of team than the one his father starred on. Ironically it took a phone call from Tom Logan to allow that team to be birthed. Apparently, the legendary star of the Fremont football dynasty had no idea that he was stirring up an insurrection.

In just a few turbulent weeks his son's team has called into question the values of a public school system that chooses to glorify a sport known to cause brain damage rather than try to improve the minds of its students. This afternoon, when the Losers take the field, they will find themselves in the spotlight for a very important reason. Fremont provides a cautionary lesson in what happens when a school loses its way—it's now a community with wildly clashing values, an institution divided against itself, and most intriguingly, a tale of two Logans.

 

27

Cars and SUVs with out-of-state plates started arriving two hours before game time. They streamed into our school's parking lot, and friendly-looking strangers wearing a colorful assortment of hats, caps, and bandannas asked where the soccer game was going to be held. There were soon several hundred people milling around the south field, not to mention five TV trucks and a small army of reporters. Apparently our school could turn away strangers from practice, but it couldn't control who came to our games, which were open to the public.

Dylan joined us in the locker room in his uniform. He wasn't going to play but he had come to lead us out onto the field. Teammates signed the plaster cast on his right arm, and the bandage on his broken nose had a big red-and-gold letter on it—not an
F
for Fremont but an
L
for Losers.

I hadn't said a word to Becca in days, but as we prepared to run out she caught my eye. “Sorry about that article this morning. I know it hurt.”

“Yeah, it wasn't good.”

“None of that stuff about your family came from me.”

I looked back at her and shrugged. “It came from somebody.”

“How'd your father take it?” she asked.

“Haven't seen him. But I'm sure he wasn't too pleased.”

“Time to go,” Coach Percy told us, holding his pith helmet under his arm. “There are a lot of people out there today, so it's normal to be a little nervous. As Julius Caesar said: ‘No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.'” He paused and smiled at us, and then lowered his voice as if preparing to share a secret. “But Caesar also said: ‘If you must break the law, do it to seize power. In all other cases, observe it.'”

I wasn't sure what he was telling us to do, but I now knew who had posted the video of our team, and I was beginning to suspect that in his own polite way Coach Percy was much more of a dangerous revolutionary than Shimsky.

With his strange words of encouragement ringing in our ears, we hurried down the narrow basement corridor, out the side door, onto soggy grass. As our team approached the large crowd on the south field, I spotted the cheerleaders finishing a kick routine. Beyond them, in a corner near a goal, Muhldinger and Mr. Bryce were conferring with the referee and the Maysville coach, perhaps discussing how to handle this giant crowd.

We ran past a woman news reporter taping a stand-up. I heard her say, “Here come the self-styled Fremont Losers, whose claim to be the worst soccer team in America has captured—” but the rest of her words were drowned out by a roar.

The throng of students, townspeople, and strangers had recognized us, and a cheer went up. At that moment Dylan, who was leading the way, broke into a jog but seemed to get his legs tangled up with Frank, who was following close behind. They went down onto the wet grass, and Chloe and Zirco, who were trailing, skidded into them and joined the pileup. I was in the middle of the pack and was tripped up and knocked down myself. One after another the Losers fell onto the mosh pit of flailing bodies, and I heard the woman reporter shouting to her camera operator, “Stay on it, Gus. Make sure you get that! What an entrance!”

Mud-stained but smiling, the Losers untangled themselves and we ran to our bench as the big crowd laughed and cheered. I was a little worried about Dylan's wrist, but it was in a plaster cast and apparently suffered no further damage.

The Maysville squad was already on the field, all warmed up. Coach Percy sent me right out for the coin flip. We were playing a freshman team, and their captain looked about a foot shorter than me and kept peering around nervously. “How many people are here?” he asked.