Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (3)

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.

Drinking helped a little. A lot, actually, because if you were drunk and your brain malfunctioned, you could blame it on the alcohol. And if you were hung over, you couldn’t worry too much about the future. It took all your energy and concentration just to make it through the day.

He spent a lot of time at the Instant Replay, a sports bar where he knew the owners. It felt good to be out of the house with a game on and people to talk to, all kinds of welcome distractions. But he was a public figure and needed to be careful about gossip, so some nights he hid out in the Last Call, a gloomy dive where he was often the youngest customer by twenty years. No one bothered him there, which was a relief when it wasn’t depressing. Other times he just parked by the lake and listened to the radio, sipping Maker’s from a flask.

It got bad in the spring. He made some careless mistakes at work—he was Athletic Director as well as Head Football Coach at St. Francis Prep—and got locked into an unpleasant dynamic with his wife, who alternated between accusing him of having an affair—not a terrible guess, considering his history—and begging him to see a therapist. And then, one night in May, it all came to a head at the dinner table.

“Vito,” Susie snapped. “Did you hear a word your daughter just said?”

“Most of it,” he lied. “I just missed the last bit.”

Actually, Vito was a little buzzed and had been frantically trying to remember the name of a Will Ferrell movie, a really popular one he’d seen three or four times. He was pretty sure it started with an S, but it wasn’t Semi-Pro, it was the other one, the one with the frat. He could’ve just looked it up on his phone, but he hated relying on Google to tell him something he already knew.