Short Stories (bxb)

Skin and Bones Pt. 2: Trust Me

The following Wednesday night was our first game. It was a home game against a pretty tough team, and no one was surprised that the starting lineup hadn't changed much since the year before, with the exception of the spots vacated by graduated seniors. I was the power forward. Totally normal. Calum was the small forward. Also normal. Isaac was the center—not normal, but not unexpected.

But Calum wasn't at his best today. He kept making stupid mistakes that were costing us big time, and Coach wasn't having it. She got so frustrated, she switched his position with Isaac's before the game was halfway through.

     Isaac, on the other hand, killed it. He was awesome out there. Coach left him as SF for the rest of the game and made sure to congratulate him profusely, while Calum stood nearby with a grudging frown on his face. I could tell right away that there was going to be an issue.

     After the game was won—largely thanks to Isaac—the team decided to celebrate by walking to McDonald's for a greasy hunger-raid, as was tradition after a difficult home match.

    Isaac sat next to me as we ate, but he talked to everyone—or at least, everyone talked to him. He had this quiet charisma to him—He wasn't too loud or too soft spoken—that made it hard not to like him. He was, for lack of a better term, cool, and his teammates gravitated towards that.

    I found myself watching Calum throughout the night, and it became obvious to me that he noticed as much as I did. He was pissy the whole evening through—first he'd been replaced on the court as the star, and now he was replaced in the team as the favorite.

It felt good to see him stumble a little.

It felt less good to see the way he treated Isaac the following day at school.

I was nearly positive that the main reason he'd ever started picking on Isaac in the first place was some inferiority-complex compensation type shit—he'd realized early on that Isaac was a threat on the court and tried as hard as he could to reduce that threat. It was never about the leg. It was about the guy who used it.

So that much hadn't really changed in theory. In practice, though, Calum's reaction grew worse, and so did the abuse that came with it.

    Suddenly, the nasty remarks weren't just a practice thing. Calum and his fuckboy entourage, half of which had probably never even spoken to Isaac, took to the hallways with their jeering. By Thursday, jeering had evolved to shoving.

    Isaac continued as he had before. He would push his headphones into his ears and roll his eyes, and that was it. He didn't spur them on or slow them down.

     It didn't help matters that he, despite not really wanting to, was quickly climbing up the school's social ladder. People recognized his name even if they didn't know his face. I kept hearing him brought up in conversations he had no part in. Isaac? Yeah, that guy's really nice. Isaac, the hot one? Who am I kidding, which other Isaac would you be talking about? I'm totally crushing on that new Isaac kid. Um, no you're not, he's mine.

    Right now, he was about where I was. Known. Liked. But it seemed like he was on track to jump even higher, right up to where Calum sat—in a big golden throne labeled Potential Prom King.

     Calum clearly didn't care to be replaced in a third aspect of his life—his spot at the Westview High seat of worship. And he took it out in Isaac, hard.

     Though the hallway antics were frustrating, they were trivial at most. It was during practice that I really got worried. Calum and Luke never stopped playing rough. Tripping and pushing happened time after time right under Coach's radar, just high enough for her to be aware of it all. Even when Isaac's nose bled for thirty minutes straight at practice the next Monday, she acted as though nothing was wrong. We were just playing the game.