The only thing waiting for me that morning was my cramped office in the empty high school, the unceasing demands of a job I’d outgrown. It was an important position, don’t get me wrong—I had a lot on my shoulders—but it was hard to stomach being the number two again, after savoring an all-too-fleeting taste of real authority.
Three years earlier, I’d taken over as Acting Principal after my boss, Jack Weede, had suffered a near-fatal heart attack. He was sixty-five at the time, and everyone assumed he would pack it in, and that my promotion would become permanent. But Jack surprised us all by coming back; he couldn’t let go of the reins. It was his call and I didn’t hold it against him—retirement had never struck me as much of a prize, either—but the ordeal had taken a toll on him, and a lot of his workload ended up landing on good old Tracy’s desk.
Even on a slow day in early August, there was more than enough to keep me busy. I started by combing through the analytics from our most recent round of assessment tests, trying to spot gaps in our curriculum, and offer some low-impact, last-minute suggestions for addressing them. We’d been slipping a bit in the statewide rankings—not badly, but just enough to cause some alarm—and we needed to take some concrete measures to turn that around before it became a serious problem.
After that, I scoured a stack of old résumés in search of a long-term substitute for Jeannie Kim, our popular （if slightly overrated） AP Physics teacher, who was taking maternity leave in January. An incompetent sub isn’t a huge problem if they’re only in contact with the students for a day or two, but Jeannie was going to be out for an entire semester.
If I’d left it up to Jack, he would’ve waited until the last minute, hired the first warm body he could get his hands on, and then shrugged it off if something went wrong. It’s hard to find a good sub, Tracy. There’s a reason those people don’t have real jobs. But I wasn’t about to let that happen, not if I could help it. Our students deserved better. It was easy to forget, when you were a grown-up and high school was safely in the past, how it felt to be a captive audience, the way time could stand still in a classroom, and one bad teacher could poison your entire life.
- 2 -
Vito Falcone was ready to make amends. With the help of his sponsor—a sullen Uber driver/piano teacher named Wesley—he’d drawn up a list of the people he’d wronged in a significant way. There were nineteen names on it, and that was just his adult life. He’d been a dick in middle school, and an even bigger dick in high school, but Wesley advised him to set that aside for the time being.
“You got your hands full as it is,” he said.
It was a humbling experience for anyone—dredging up the past like that—but it was even worse for Vito, because… well, because he was Vito, an important person, well-known and widely respected, at least in some quarters. He’d played in the NFL for three seasons—not a superstar, but he’d shown a lot of promise until a knee injury ended his career—and he’d stuck with the game after his retirement, becoming one of the most successful high school coaches in central Florida. He was an alpha dog, the guy who gave the orders and let you know when you fucked up. The world was like this: you apologized to Vito; Vito didn’t apologize to you. Nobody else in the church basement had any idea what that felt like, or how hard it was to surrender that kind of authority.
Of course, that was how you got into trouble in the first place—he understood that now—thinking you were more important than other people, or better than they were, and didn’t have to follow the usual rules. But that was how Vito had lived his life, ever since the age of twelve, when he’d had his big growth spurt, and everyone suddenly realized what a freakishly gifted athlete he was. He’d been good-looking too—still was, for a guy in his midforties—and that didn’t help. Girls and women had always fallen into his lap; he didn’t have to be nice to them, didn’t even have to pretend. It wasn’t healthy growing up like that, everybody acting like your shit didn’t stink, because after a while you started to believe it too, and a person like that could do a lot of damage.
* * *
The other problem with believing you’re special is the shock that comes when you finally realize you’re not, that you’re just as fucked up as everyone else, if not worse. For Vito, this reckoning had sunk in slowly over the past couple of years, when he’d begun to suspect that there was something wrong with his brain. He’d been having headaches for a while—bad ones—but then he started having these weird mental lapses. He’d be driving somewhere and he’d just zone out—he had no idea if it was a few seconds or a few minutes—and when he emerged from the fog, sometimes he wouldn’t know where he was, or where he’d been going. He’d have to pull over and think about it, and the answer didn’t always come to him right away. That was a terrible feeling, like his mind was an empty closet.
He knew about traumatic brain injuries, CTE, whatever you wanted to call it. Nobody involved with high school football could ignore that stuff, not anymore. And yeah, he’d had a concussion or three over the years. There was no way for a quarterback to avoid it. You’d set up in the pocket, start scanning downfield for receivers, and—Bam!—the lights would go out. Next thing you knew, you’d be standing on the grass with this woozy drone in your head while your teammates slapped you on the helmet, asking if you were okay, and you’d say yes, because that was the only possible answer. And if nobody stopped you, you went right back in the huddle and kept on playing, letting the autopilot take over until the cobwebs cleared—sometimes it took ten minutes, sometimes a couple of days—and then you’d forget all about it, because it did you no good to remember.
Vito didn’t tell anyone about his lapses—not his doctor, not even his wife—because putting his fears into words would have made them real, and he didn’t want them to be real. He wanted it to be like that time in college when he looked down and saw that he was pissing blood, a dark crimson river streaming out of him, like a Stephen King nightmare. He hadn’t told anyone about that, and the next day he was back to normal.
I’m fine, he’d tell himself. There’s nothing wrong with me.
But then it would happen again—Vito sweating on the side of the road, trying to remember where he was—and he knew he was fucked. And not in the normal way, like when he blew out his knee for the second time. That had sucked beyond belief—to be twenty-five years old and to know with absolute certainty that your dream was dead—but it wasn’t the end of the world. Vito had gotten depressed for a while, and then he picked himself up and stepped into the next chapter of his story.
But this—this shit with his brain—was different. There was no next chapter with this. You were just a middle-aged guy in the old folks’ home, a fifty-year-old drooling into a paper cup, waiting all day for visitors who aren’t coming. It would be like you’d gone extinct, or maybe like you’d never existed at all.
* * *
Somehow he made it through football season, but things had gotten worse over the winter. He didn’t feel like himself, and being stuck at home with his family didn’t help. It was too quiet in the house, and the quiet would get him thinking, and then he’d start to spiral.