Wednesday, November 22, 2017

I

woke up on the floor beside my couch at around 5:30am when my phone started buzzing full blast. All the lights were still on and my homework and English textbook were lying in a crumpled heap underneath my neck. (Ow.) I snatched my roaring phone and found the beautiful name Jacob aka the Handsome One. I smiled and instantly brought the phone to my ear and whispered, "Hello, my love. What gives me the pleasure of hearing your voice so early?"

But the voice that answered was not Jacob's at all. It was a deeper, huskier kind of voice that I recognized instantly. The young man on the other line was none other than the quarterback of our school football team, Brett Stevens. "Get outside. Hurry." Brett immediately hung up the phone and I was left leaning on the couch feeling awkward and confused. So, I texted.

WHAT?

. . .

JUST GET YOUR GOODIE TWO-SHOES PATOOTIE OUTSIDE. HURRY.

Brett was really an awful communicator. He came from a family of machismo. Seven brothers and a dad who was for four years a pro football player, for nine years a pro baseball player, and for two months a fake wrestler upon invitation at WrestleMania to fake throw Dwayne The Rock Johnson off the ring. Chauvinism also ran in his family, and I don't know how his mom handled all the family's impossible men but she sure seemed to love her role as a mother. She was your stereotypical soccer mom except with the twist of going to up to sixteen sports events per week for her sons and of running school functions so she could schmooze with the right people who could put her athletics-oriented sons into the best colleges with full sports scholarships. I could never be like her, raising an animal house like that. I hope I have two girls. If that's what Jacob wants.

I heard a honk outside and then hurried to check my face in the mirror to inspect that my make-up from yesterday was on. I looked good as ever I must admit, just had to put my hair up in a bun. I grabbed two jackets (it was freezing outside this late in November) and I saw Brett Steven's white mustang sitting out by the circular fountain in our front driveway. I crossed the cobblestone in my Steve Maddens and then hopped in his car. It smelled heavily of Axe cologne. Axe was always a hit or miss for me. This time I wasn't sure.

"What's up?" huffed Brett, the alpha-male quarterback. His right arm was crossed over the head of the steering wheel like a cool, tough dude, and as I caught sight of his bulging bicep I considered whether my fingers would reach each other if I gripped his arm with both hands. Probably not, because I also had small hands.

"Why do you have Jacob's phone?" I said. It was odd that I answered to my boyfriend Jacob's phone and ended up in Brett Steven's car instead. This mustang was more-or-less running on a full tank of testosterone. Why did Brett have Jack's phone?

Brett never answered why he had my boyfriend's phone. He just threw on the jams and raced his car out of the driveway with a screeching exit that seemed like his attempt to scribble his signature onto the concrete by way of the burning rubber.

He zoomed through the suburbs with incredible disregard for police authority and eventually I took his silence as an insult. I tried making conversation where I could.

"So, Brett, how are you and Brenda?" Brenda was his current girlfriend. I think.

"Who's Brenda?" He said, turning his eyes over the peak of his bicep between us.

"What do you mean who's Brenda?"

"Oh, you mean my girlfriend?" He said.

"Yeah, I mean your girlfriend."

"My bad," he said, shrugging. "I didn't know which one you were talking about."

"Which Brenda?" I asked. Was there another Brenda I wasn't aware of?

"Which girlfriend," he said, calmly and simply.

I nearly swallowed my tongue. What a capital-A asshole. . . I nearly swallowed my tongue. "Right... I meant one of your girlfriends whose name happens to be Brenda..."

"She's good, probably good," he said.

"You don't know how she is? Do you ever talk to your girlfriends? Or do you just get down to doing It?"

I noticed Brett grip the handle fiercely when he went sixty mph and accelerated around a corner. I did in fact—as a first instinct—grab his raging bicep in order to stop my face from flying out the window.

Once safely around the bend I was shaking and could feel the sweat escape my feet.

Brett looked unfazed by the fact he was drifting like a maniac, but now had a sudden ripple between his eyebrows as the thought of his problems with Brenda surfaced. "All of a sudden she's gotten into being a bit of a nagger."

Hm, I wonder why. "Have you talked with her about how you're annoyed by her nagginess?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, the veins in his arm growing more prominent under his skin as he thought about their problems more and more. "She won't stop bothering me with her phone calls."

"Well, she is your girlfriend, right? She's supposed to call you?"

"She calls me in the dead of night when I'm sleeping and have football practice in the morning. She is starting to really suck, Z." Brett started calling me Z instead of Zara ever since I started dating Jack who was on the same basketball team with Brett back when they were in junior high. Brett Stevens and Jack actually played only two games together that season, but when a fight broke out between Brett and an opponent and Jack stepped in to tell Brett he was wrong about the technicality they were fighting over, Brett respected him ever since for standing his ground. That moment turned into a rare acquaintanceship that ever since consisted mostly of Brett letting all the football players know that Jack was off limits as far as school bullying goes. "You can mess with the Glee club instead. They need a challenge to roughen them up," I heard him tell his group one day as I passed the lockers to leave school for a doctor's appointment. Jack seemed to have a way with people because he had such a way with words and a level of integrity that was universally admired thanks to his balancing social energy and intelligence.

When I started dating Jack, I noticed the couple of football players who would always say sexist jokes about me had suddenly stopped. It could be coincidence or Brett had called the order to cut the abuse. That thought made me feel I somehow had a new line of defense, not that I needed one. (I could stand my own ground, thank you very much.) But this sort of under-the-radar camaraderie was nowhere close to friendship in the usual sense. Brett lived in the jock world and Jack lived in the academic one. Jack had picked up the saxophone and bassoon, a double-reed instrument notorious in the school wind ensemble for its difficulties concerning but not exclusive to the fourteen keys assigned to the players thumbs alone. Brett knew nothing about saxophone or bassoon, let alone the school band, or even the basics of music theory (not to mention how to play a C on the recorder. He flunked recorder in first grade). Brett simply felt some sort of liking to Jack, and Jack never seemed to really notice. When I brought the idea up to Jack that Brett was looking out for him, Jack did offer his idea that the day Jack stopped Brett from pursuing a fight further when they were on the basketball court in junior high, Brett's father was in the stands without Brett knowing, and if Brett would have done something to hurt an opponent or risk his future in sports or borderline embarrass his famous-sports-athlete father in any way, Brett's father would have beaten him when they got home, would have never gone to any one of Brett's sports games again, and would never have brought Brett along to sports events as often as Brett's father Mr. Stevens does now. Thanks to Jack, quite possibly, Brett's relationship with Mr. Stevens was less toxic now than it had been any time prior to that junior high basketball game. Because once, at Jack's suggestion, Brett pulled away from the fight, their opponent socked Brett in the back of the head, and Brett got to make two free throws that won them the game. That moment launched Brett Stevens into a traveling team that triggered Brett's father to finally sign him up for expensive coaching lessons. His father thought he was really serious about sports after that game. And now Brett was looking toward a seven-figure salary in football and eventually, he hoped, an eight-figure salary in baseball. Baseball players in the MLB make the most money of any sport in the world, except the NBA. But Brett didn't play basketball anymore. He was all about muscle now. He had no skill in running back and forth on a basketball court for forty-eight minutes. Plus, he wasn't tall enough.

Driving in the car, wondering where Jack was, I eventually got tired of listening to Eminem's rap album Curtain Call on Brett's fresh Bose speakers and turned it off to say, "So where are we going and where's my boyfriend? You forgot to fill me in on what's happening."

"We're going to Travis Gibbs's house. Travis's mom Mrs. Gibbs just died of cancer."

I paused in utter shock. "Oh no." My hand fell over my face. And I thought about Travis Gibbs crying over the death of his mom, and believe me, if you ever saw someone as wise and sweet as Travis Gibbs cry, you would cry, too.

* * *

Travis Gibbs lived right across the street from Brett Stevens. And although Travis and Brett slept right across the street from each other, they lived worlds apart. Travis Gibbs's life revolved around scientific and mathematical intrigues while Brett was a diehard jock-a-holic. Travis Gibbs made 50 to 100 dollars an hour teaching physics, chemistry, math and anything along that realm depending on how desperate you were to get tutored (and Travis Gibbs had a way of knowing if you had a test tomorrow and how badly you would fail without his overnight help, so don't even try to lie to him that you were inclined to pay him less), Travis Gibbs was notorious for making multiple grands a night for hosting online review sessions (regularly unapproved by the teachers—who were vocal about their fears that Travis Gibbs's online teaching would kill their traditional in-person classroom careers).

There was no doubt Travis's help saved Brett Stevens's ass ten times over; but still, that didn't mean they liked each other. They were just neighbors, and Travis Gibbs was a borderline know-it-all that made his money off the academic failings of people like Brett who argued they simply didn't have the time or right incentives for such things. But although they came from different worlds, Travis Gibbs from the robotics club, math league, physics lab internships at Caltech (and, as Travis always added, soon MIT), and Brett from the world of everything sports- and testosterone-related like popular kid parties, kick-backs, cheer-leader/dance-team make-out-and-sex-fests-- you name the poisons—all that mattered tonight on the funeral of Travis Gibbs's mom, was that Travis and Brett's mothers were best friends.

Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Stevens attended the same yoga classes together. And as much as they both loved their bare-chested yoga instructor Eduardo Francesco with a burning passion that led to extended one-on-ones that led to mysterious all-nighters no one seemed able to explain or be willing to talk about, they both loved each other more. The two mothers were notorious for getting their nails done, getting massages, going to church, hitting the mall for the holiday season, grocery shopping and even taking the younger kids to movies together, and the death of Travis's mother, would soon end up being a fatal blow that was permanently rupturing Mrs. Stevens's happiness.

The crinkle between Brett's eyebrows grew even more and the veins in his temples engorged in a red pigment that stamped his rage as he considered his mother's despair over Mrs. Gibbs's death. And why he felt angry in such a sad situation, maybe because he thought life was unfair, or that God didn't seem to be on his mom's side, would stay a mystery as my time with Brett extended, because I would continue to wonder why such a young man who seemed to have everything in the world, all the ability, all the money, all the popularity, all the girls and all the future... could possibly be so angry all the time, and so unhappy.

But I had little time to speculate over Brett's emotions before the car pulled up to a mansion of pristine modern architecture that made it obvious a wealthy science engineer lived there. Brett and I entered the house of the Gibbs' and discovered a full house of people honoring the passing of Mrs. Gibbs in an weeklong open-house event we would learn was called a Jewish Mourner's Kaddish. The morning funeral allowed business friends and firm partners to stop by before work to pay their respects to the deceased's family. There was plenty of food, but Travis Gibbs and Jack Daniels were hard to find. Brett and I had to creep through the crowds and exit to the backyard to enter the pool house and find them. Jacob opened the door to Brett and I without a smile. Jacob and Brett swapped phones—apparently Jacob gave Brett his phone while Brett's phone stayed here in the pool house charging.

Jacob kissed me softly and led Brett and I inside the quiet, dark pool house, thanking Brett for driving me here. Brett nodded, gave a quick, melancholy apology to Travis, who was somewhere in the dark shadows, on his loss. His mother will be missed. And then Brett left, having no capacity for any such emotional moments of the sort. His reflex was to remove himself from tough situations, and that was okay for now. But when the door closed and Jacob and I turned to Travis, all we could see was the dark of the room where Travis was sitting somewhere, hunched over on the bed, sickly and quietly weeping, because his mom was dead.

But her death wouldn't keepthem apart very long. Travis will be with his mother soon.