All Played Out

I jump at the chance to spend another night with her.

“If you’ll be my nurse again.”

Her eyes lift in a smile even though her mouth doesn’t, and I know I’ve won. In my truck, I flip my heater on to full blast. Some hint of winter is beginning to creep in, and the night air is crisp and there’s a cold breeze. She’s wearing a light jacket, but I can tell as I drive that she’s cold. So I flip the middle console up, and tell her to scoot over, and I drive onto campus with her huddled close to me. We park near the tunnel entrance by the north parking garage, and I find a Rusk sweatshirt in the backseat to pull over her head for extra warmth. It swallows her, falling all the way to her knees, but the dark red looks good against her skin, and I like seeing her in it.

Even with her jacket and my sweatshirt, she loops her arm around mine and snuggles closer. I lead her down to the mouth of the tunnel, which at first glance looks like an oversize drainage pipe. A concrete-covered ditch runs for about fifty yards before the entrance to the tunnels, and a thin line of water runs down the middle. As we stand at the entrance, the tunnel looks dark and dank. Hardly the most romantic place, but it pricks my sense of adventure, and some of my fatigue gives way to anticipation.

“You’re sure this is safe?”

“Now that you mention it, I keep thinking of that disaster movie where one of those underwater tunnels in New York collapses and there’s a huge wave of water coming down the tunnel.”

“Fantastic. Exactly what I wanted to think about.”

I laugh and pull out the flashlight I brought with me. I direct the beam down the tunnel, and it shines far enough to show that it splits into three tunnels a little ways in. As far as I can tell from here, they’re parallel, but that doesn’t mean they don’t branch off somewhere farther down.

“Let’s go, sweetheart.”

Fifty feet in, we find our first piece of graffiti on the concrete wall. In faded black spray paint, it reads “College Is Okay If You,” then the writing gets too faded to read, leaving the secret to making college “okay” forever mysterious.

When we get to the split, I have Nell choose, and she picks the middle.

We stumble upon a zombie horde painted on the wall, and I squeeze her arm. “Good choice.”

She wrinkles her nose, and I laugh. The sound echoes eerily off the walls around us and causes a twinge of pain in my head.

Nell sees it.

“We shouldn’t have done this.”

“I’m fine,” I assure her. “Let’s keep going. Maybe the Batcave is somewhere down here. Or the Chamber of Secrets.”

She doesn’t react to my Harry Potter reference even though I know she’s read the series because I saw them on a shelf in her room. Stubbornly, she says, “You’re not fine. I did some research after you left this morning. You said you’ve had concussions before. And with each one, no matter how mild, your risk for brain trauma increases. The next time you hit your head a little too hard, the symptoms might not go away for months or at all. They could be permanent. I read an article about one football player who not only can’t play anymore, but he has to have a tutor in all of his classes even though he used to be a straight-A student. He can’t concentrate. Can’t retain facts. And it’s been three years since his last concussion. He can’t play football, and football has made it so that he’ll have a hard time doing anything else.”

“I know, Nell.”

She stops abruptly, pulling her arm away from mine. “You . . . know?” She sounds like my knowing this is some kind of betrayal.

“Yeah, I know it’s risky. But I’m a wide receiver. Not a rough-and-tumble tackler. I don’t take frequent hits to the head.”

“Frequent enough,” she says.

“In a good game, I make maybe six catches. A great game could be eight to ten. Some of those don’t even end in a tackle. And yes, I’m tired now. And I’m still showing symptoms, but I’ve got several days before the next game.”

“And what about practice?”

“I’m taking care of that.” Though I’m not sure how long I can get away with underperforming like I did today. One bad practice is fine, but any more and I might jeopardize my chance to play this weekend even if I don’t mention the concussion.

“It only takes one hit, Mateo. Just one. I get that you’re this big, strong athlete and you think you should just tough it out, but you’re wrong. This game can’t possibly be that important.”

“It is.” We’ve both stopped walking and she’s dropped my arm to square off with me in this dark and dreary corridor.

“Football’s your dream, and I get that. And I know your coach mentioning going pro the other week has you excited, but you also have to be realistic. It’s just not smart.”

Her words stir up long-buried memories, and in an instant all the things in her that remind me of Lina come to the surface, similarities that I haven’t thought about in a long time. But I’ve had this fight before. Maybe not about a concussion, but that dig about being realistic is always the same. People think it’s the nice way to help you manage your hopes . . . that they’re doing you a favor by being honest. But that’s fucking ridiculous. It assumes that you’re stupid or naive, that you don’t have reality beating down the door to your thoughts day in and day out. It takes fucking work to dream, and I don’t need anyone else shoving the unlikelihood of success in my face, because I do that to myself enough already.