“Coach! Jeez!” I complained. But better to let him get a look now ...

Coach Wilson thought the reason I gave him for wanting to avoid undressing in the locker room was hilarious. “She what?” His grin could not have been wider. “She marked you, huh?” He laughed outright, causing his class of golfers to give us a closer look as we chatted on the sidelines of the fake fairway.

“Uh, yeah,” I agreed. It was true. Megan had left a line of love bites across my middle. She said I was lucky she didn’t try to spell out her name. I rolled my eyes then, and I rolled them again at Coach’s outright laughter.

“This is the black cheerleader?” he asked, sputtering.

I hadn’t told him who I’d been dating, but I frowned at his description of Megan. There weren’t more than a dozen black families in the whole valley, so Megan did kind of stand out. Still, she was black only by convention; she had almost as much European ancestry as I did and was lighter-skinned than many of the Hispanic and Native American students at school.

So I didn’t answer the question. In fact, I made that part of my pitch. “I don’t want to have to answer questions about it, Coach. Just…is there somewhere I can change and take a shower without causing a lot of laughter and pointing?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved at me while turning back to watch his class learning to use their clubs — something called a nine iron. “Just go through my office to the coach’s corridor. There are two bathrooms with showers at each end. Pick one.”

“Thanks, Coach,” I said.

He made a face, looking at me sideways. “I won’t say a word about why you’re doing this. That’s up to you.”

“Yeah, thanks again.” I got out of there, heading toward my fifth-period class.

* * *

I skated without incident through the rest of the afternoon, making an excuse to Mrs. Barbera to leave sixth-period Civics before the bell.

“Coach needs me there a little early,” I said, and that was good enough. Being a football star comes with a few perks in high school. If Coach needs you, he needs you, and no one is going to dispute that.

I did get to the gym before the bell, but I had somehow forgotten that the place would be full of kids taking a sixth-period class. I walked in through the big doors to a locker room full of boys in various states of damp and underdressed. I don’t know why I didn’t expect that.

It was surreal. And steamy. A whole room full of half-naked boys horsing around, making rude noises, yelling insults, and generally being cheerfully obnoxious. Just as it had always been, I suppose, but I suddenly felt like an outsider.

Because I was. What I had in my pants was not what they were showing me way too many of. I didn’t stare, but it did strike me that penises and testicles are pretty funny-looking if you really think about it. I felt the urge to laugh, and I struggled with it, fearing that I would giggle or something.

I didn’t know many of the guys in this class. Because of being a jock, I didn’t really have time to hang with people who weren’t athletic. Most of the kids in sixth-period gym had a free period in seventh, or something like a study hall, or another way of going home early if they wanted.

I did see Lee Benally, one of the Navajo students who I had been friends with for some time. He played baseball in the summer, but his folks wanted him to concentrate on academics. Too bad, in a way. He was a good second baseman--but that was usually my position, too.

Lee didn’t seem to see me, and I didn’t wave at him or anything. That would be too weird. Why did I even think of it?

Coach Wilson’s office was the farthest along the wall, right before the big doors that opened into the gym floor or the fields outside. Sure enough, it was unlocked, but Coach was nowhere to be found. The door to the inner hall opened, too, and I went to the left and found a small locker room with eight big lockers and fourteen small ones. It was all just for the coaches, and had a bathroom and two showers with shower doors attached.

But I needed stuff from my locker, and to get it, I would need to go out into the damp mob getting dressed in their street clothes. I sighed. This was a lot scarier than I expected. I wasn’t quite sure what I was afraid of, though.

I stashed my books in one of the tall empty lockers in the coach’s room and headed out to retrieve my practice uniform from my usual locker. There were fewer naked guys around, and now was as good a time as any, just as the bell rang and the exodus began in earnest.

But my neck muscles seemed to have turned to wood by the time I got back to the inner sanctum with all my uniforms. I wasn’t going to do that again on game day. The strain of not looking was too much.

We haven’t even got on the field to do wind sprints, and I’m already tired, I thought. Would I be able to juggle this amount of strain and still win football games for ten more weeks?

Getting dressed in my practice uniform was a revelation. The football pants that went with it were so tight that the fact that something was missing would have been obvious if I weren’t wearing my jockstrap and protective cup. They were empty, of course, but no one had to know that.

It felt weird, and I wondered if, without something to keep it full, if the protective cup would move around. The jock should hold it in place, and hey, things were still sensitive down there, so the cup was a good idea. If it didn’t felt so weird.

Fully dressed in my yellow practice uniform, I headed back out through the inner hallway to Coach Wilson’s office and found the man himself sitting there making marks on a clipboard. He looked up at me and grinned. “So she put her mark on you, huh?” He chuckled and made a motion that I should pull up my jersey. “Lemme see!”

“Coach! Jeez!” I complained. But better to let him get a look now rather than be tempted to come in on me in the private lockers. I turned so no one could see my bared middle through the big window into the locker room and pulled up my shirt to show the line of purplish bruises.

“Boy, oh, boy,” Coach chortled. “Lucky she didn’t decide to spell out her name, huh!”

I rolled my eyes and headed to the helmet racks to pick up mine.

Jake and Dave Garcia were there, loitering before going out on the field. Jake even had his uniform and pads on with his arm still in a sling. “Someone help you with that?” I asked.

He made a short upward jerk of his head in Dave’s direction.

“Yeah,” Dave drawled. “I had to take care of the old man.”

Jake and I both snorted at the joke. Dave was a year younger than either of us, a junior, and he’d probably be quarterbacking for us on Friday unless Jake convinced Coach he had made a miraculous recovery.

I twitched. Well, no one knew better than me that miracles can happen. Still, Dave seemed kind of happy at the situation. But Jake looked at him sideways, like you might at a cockroach you’d just noticed on the wall.