That fall, the Franconia High
School football team was winning all its games. And the entire town was going
crazy. When the team played in another town, there were huge caravans of cars
that assembled at the high school, then drove in a miles-long single file, lights
flashing, horns blaring. Hours before the home games, the streets of all the
neighborhoods would be jammed with cars, too. High school kids hanging out the
windows, packed in the back of pick-up trucks, honking horns, playing loud
music, screaming through the streets, streamers of green and white (Franconia’s
colors) trailing behind them.
And every week, even at the junior
high, there were required pep rallies in the afternoon. We missed classes so we
could go down in the gym, pound our way up into the bleachers, and then scream
and yell like idiots about our high school football team. The band played,
coaches made speeches, the cheerleaders tried to see which grade could shriek
the loudest.
Not that I ever screamed or yelled.
I usually took a book along and sat in the top row in the corner and read. Yes,
it was hard to concentrate with all the shouting and chanting and pounding of
feet, but I never had any problems with concentration. Never. And other kids
had long ago quit wondering about me. In their eyes, I was just plain weird.
Insane. That’s all. And they pretty much just left me alone. To them, I was
some creature from some other dimension, or time, who had somehow materialized
among them.
The only minor annoyance about it
all was this: Harriet was a middle school cheerleader, and she lectured me continually
about school spirit. “Gosh, Vickie,” she would say, flipping her blond hair
back with a saucy toss of her head, “you’ve just got to support the team!”
I hoped Harriet would come to her
senses one day. In the meantime, I would treat this “cheerleader” thing as a
phase of her life. A very unpleasant
phase for me. For during the sports seasons, I no longer had a best friend.
The weekend of Homecoming in late
October brought complete hysteria to Franconia—to the town, to the schools. We
were playing our arch-rivals, Ingol City High School, also having a perfect
season. The winner of this game would surely move on to the state playoffs,
whatever they were.[i]
Not that I cared.
But everyone else in town
did—except, of course, for my father. All the display windows in the stores
were draped with green and white streamers. Every business with the capacity to
do so had a sign in the window: “GO, BEARS!”[ii]
Driving through the streets every evening were cars with loudspeakers attached
to the roofs, blasting out loud music and sounds that I guess were supposed to
be ferocious growling bears.
We had pep rallies every afternoon that week in school, a
huge bonfire and rally on Thursday night, followed by a parade through the
streets of Franconia. The marching band
marched; the players, cheerleaders, and coaches rode in convertibles and
limousines; and thousands of people
lined the streets, cheering, wearing green and white, waving green and white.
I saw none of this, but Father, who
had to write about it for the paper, told me. But I truly was not interested. Not
even curious.
On Friday—the day of the
game—school-as-usual stopped. In English we wrote compositions about football;
in math we did problems about football (“If Bill Lee”—he was one of the actual
players on our team, I later learned—“averages 7.6 yards per carry and carries
the ball 26 times, how many yards does he gain against Ingol?”). In art we had
to draw pictures of a football field. In science we calculated the air pressure
contained in a football. And so on.
It was a warm, Indian summer day,
and as soon as school was out, the streets were once again alive with honking
horns, blaring speakers, screaming and hysterical students. Two hours before
the game, an endless river of cars and pedestrians began flowing toward the
high school football field.
Now this part, I did see, because I was out on the
streets, heading in the opposite direction, toward the public library. I felt
like a tiny bug, crawling along the bank of a swollen river—upstream, against
the current. While a vast force of nature was carrying everything else the
other way.
Most of the time I looked down as I
walked, but sometimes people would yell things at me—or at least loud enough
for me to hear: “Hey! The game’s this
way, stupid!” Or: “Look at that idiot
going the wrong way!” Or: “Mommy, look at that dumb girl! What’s wrong with her?”
Why was I going to the
library? Well, I often went in the late
afternoon, but this was no ordinary trip. Earlier in the week, our social
studies teacher had assigned a local history project, so I was going to begin
my research. I knew it would be a quiet time. Probably there would be only a
single librarian there—some poor soul who lost when they flipped a coin or
whatever they did to decide who would have to miss the game.
But as I turned a corner, and as
the library came into view, I saw something surprising. Cutting across the huge library lawn and
heading straight for the front door was another figure. From a distance I
couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but whoever it was had a backpack
slung over one shoulder and was walking briskly, like me, away from the flow of
the rest of the world.
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