August 24, 2013

It hadn’t been the first time Cam had seen Latasha nude – she’d been a guest in the family hot tub on several occasions – but up in his room that Saturday morning had been different, very different indeed. They may have both been virgins their first time together in bed and, yes, things were a little awkward, but they got in a lot of practice that day and a lot of fun besides.

Cam’s dad had called with plenty of time for them to finish up one last round, take showers together, get dressed, and get the sheets in the washer before the family showed up. It turned out there’d been a good time had by all in Chicago, and nothing was said about what Cam and Latasha had been doing – it would have been a little hard to explain to the girls, although Cam suspected that they must have had an inkling of what was going on.

He and Latasha managed a quiet moment before she had to head home that evening. “Cam, that was a ball,” she said. “It was real good, and I had a lot of fun. But I think maybe we probably shouldn’t do it again, or it could get habit forming.”

“It could indeed,” he’d told her. “I hate the thought of it being our only time, though.”

“I do too,” she admitted. “But Cam, you know what I want to do with my life, and it probably wouldn’t work. While I like you, Cam, maybe even love you, you just don’t fit into that plan.”

“You know I think you’re wrong on that, but we’ve argued about it before, so I won’t ruin the day we had by going over it again. If you ever change your mind, make sure you tell me first thing. But thank you, Latasha. It was something I’ll never forget, and I’ll always owe you.”

And that had been where they’d left it nine months before. They stayed friends after that, even close friends; Cam had taken Latasha to the prom, for example, and they still spent a lot of time together. They’d even spent more time nude in the Patterson hot tub – but they’d never crossed that special line again.

That wasn’t to say he wouldn’t have liked to have things different. Latasha was a very special friend in his life, even though she’d only been his lover for a day. He would have given a great deal to have her there with him as he faced Meriwether College – even if she was just a student, and still not sharing a bed, although he would have much preferred the latter. But it wasn’t to be, and he knew it – she was her own person and had her own goals in life.

And, as far as that went, she probably would have seemed pretty out of place at Meriwether, at least as out of place as Jodi. Her Mohawk, the piercings on her face and elsewhere, the huge earrings she almost always wore, her lippy attitude might not have gone over very well there, even though he was used to all of them and comfortable with them. Right now she seemed far away, and his life seemed poorer for it.

But still, he could dream of her there in his bed as sleep reluctantly overcame him.

August 25, 2013

Something seemed exceedingly strange to Cam as he woke up the next morning. Something wasn’t right … this wasn’t his familiar room at home, this was his dorm room at Meriwether College. No wonder it seemed strange!

He glanced at the clock and realized it was late enough that he really ought to be getting up, even though he really didn’t have much on his list to do today. It was tempting to think about rolling back over and sleeping a little more, but he realized that the host of eight o’clock classes to come, one starting the next day, would be enough of a shock and figured it wouldn’t be a good idea to get off on the wrong foot. He’d better start getting in practice for them. Reluctantly, he threw the covers back, sat upright, and yawned.

There was no sign of Howie in the room, not that he had expected any. The odds seemed good that Howie had enjoyed a better night than he had. But since he was alone, Cam didn’t feel like he had to be in any rush about getting around. He headed toward the bathroom but the phone rang – not his cell phone, but the landline phone in the room. Now who would be calling him on it?

Curious, he padded over to the phone and answered it with a sleepy “Yeah?”

“Are you Cam?” a man’s deep voice asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Howie’s not here.”

“Didn’t figure he was. He called me last night and said you might be interested in some company for breakfast. I hope I’m not calling too early.”

“That’s all right. I was just getting up anyway. I’m up for going to breakfast, so long as I can have a few minutes to pull myself together.”

“Fine, it’ll take us ten or fifteen to get over there. See you then.” The phone hung up abruptly.

That was really unexpected, Cam thought as he hung up the phone. He had no idea who the caller was, but obviously it was some friend of Howie’s, and it was a nice thing for him to do. He really had been feeling lonely.

Cam went on into the bathroom, shaved, and finished his other morning business, and then pulled on a T-shirt and shorts since it pretty obviously was going to be hot again today. He was just barely finished dressing when there was a knock on the door. He opened it to see a huge guy standing there – several inches taller than Cam, and considerably wider. Behind him stood a girl who was not noticeably smaller than the guy – taller than Cam, and still pretty wide. She was wearing very short shorts and a crop top, and even at a glance he could see she was heavily muscled. “You gotta be Cam, right?” the big guy said.

“Yeah. I take it you know Howie?”

“Went to school with him, played football with him one year. It’ll be good to do it again. Oh, I’m Lyle Angarrack. This is my girlfriend, Ashley Keilhorn. We’re both juniors.”

“Good to meet you Lyle, Ashley. You have to be a lineman, right?”

“No, I’m the kicker.”

Cam shook his head. In his experience, kickers were scrawny little runts who had played a lot of soccer. “Jeez, it looks like you’d be on the front four. In fact, it looks like you could be the front four.”

“Would be nice if I could, but I’ve got exercise-induced asthma really bad, and I can barely run ten yards,” Lyle admitted. “Coach occasionally has me playing as a back when he wants to freak someone out. Let’s go get some chow.”

Cam followed the two down the stairs and out the front door. Once they were outside, Lyle asked, “So how do you like Meriwether so far?”

“It’s all right from what I’ve seen,” Cam replied as they started walking three abreast across the campus toward the dining hall. “I just haven’t seen very much of it yet. How do you like it?”

“It’s all right,” Lyle shrugged. “It’s not where I wanted to go to college, but they were the only ones to offer me an athletic scholarship, so I didn’t get much choice. It ought to work out all right, though. So, anyway, Howie tells us that you were the Bradford quarterback.”

“Yeah, that was a big game. I’m still not sure how we won it.”

“Ash and I were sitting there on the fifty yard line and I’m not sure how you won it, either. That last play could have gone either way. There were some real disappointed people back in Spearfish Lake.”

“Howie sort of said that,” Cam observed. He wasn’t very sure how much he wanted to get into the details of the game, considering how big Lyle was. “I thought Spearfish Lake played a hell of a game, but the breaks just went our way.”

“It happens,” Ashley said. “We had more than our fair share of breaks the one year we played for Spearfish Lake.”

As big as Ashley was, Cam still wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “You played football too?” he asked.

“Just holding for Lyle,” she grinned. “The team was real shorthanded that year, so they were glad to have me. But there were a couple of times I got into the thick of things.”

“A kid took it in his head one time that it was some kind of an insult that a girl was playing football, even as a holder,” Lyle laughed. “They had to carry him off the field on a stretcher.”

Given the size of the two of them, Cam wasn’t exactly shocked at the news. Someone would have to be a fool to tangle with both of them. “So, do you play here, too?”

“There’s been talk of it,” Ashley shrugged. “So far it hasn’t come to anything. Coach Forrister is a little square that way. I just pitch in as a volunteer trainer, mostly in the weight room.”

“Mostly as a motivator,” Lyle laughed. “Some guys on the team tend to get a little embarrassed when a girl can out-lift them.”

“I can see how that could happen,” Cam laughed.

“When I started going with Lyle, I was big and fat,” she grinned. “But he got me hanging around the weight room in Spearfish Lake, and it turned out I have a talent for lifting. I’m not much lighter than I ever was, but the weight has moved around to different places.”

Cam glanced over at her. She was certainly not the popular figure of feminine perfection, at least in this day and age, but she was clearly something special in her own way. In fact, the word that came to mind about her was “Brunehilde,” or maybe even “Valkyrie.” She was definitely a girl most people wouldn’t want to have pissed off at them, in any case – at least not unless maybe they were Lyle’s size.

But still, as they walked across campus, Cam thought he could hear faint strains of Richard Wagner’s music …

The lines in the cafeteria weren’t long – apparently a lot of kids were taking the opportunity to sleep in. Cam noticed that Lyle and Ashley didn’t take big amounts of anything and were noticeably careful about what they chose; for as big as they were, they were apparently selective about what and how much they ate. They found an otherwise unoccupied table to one side of the room and sat down.

“Anyway,” Lyle said. “I was wondering that since you’re a quarterback if you were thinking about walking on for the team. You know, we’re kind of short on quarterbacks right now.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Cam replied honestly. “Despite how the game at the Joe came out, I don’t think I’m anywhere near Howie’s league as a quarterback. I think I was at best barely adequate at the high school level, and I can’t see playing it at the college level. Besides, I don’t know if Howie told you, but I’m still recovering from a bad bout with cancer, and I’m not all that strong. On top of that, I really want to concentrate on studying.”

“Howie told us about the cancer,” Ashley said. “I guess I can see why you’d want to be a little careful.”

“Well, if you don’t want to, I guess you don’t want to,” Lyle shrugged. “Hell, I wouldn’t be playing football if it weren’t for my scholarship, so I can’t blame you.”

“What are you studying?”

“My major is chemistry, and my minor is plant biology,” the big guy explained. “My goal is to get into wood products research. By that I’m talking about things that can be made using wood and wood fiber as a base material. Since wood is a renewable resource, I think that’s going to be important in the future.”

Cam was impressed. Clearly Lyle was pretty smart, and what was more, he had a career planned for after college and obviously a curriculum mapped out to get there. He was definitely not a dumb jock, although he could see how people could get that impression. “Ashley, how about you?” he asked.

“I’m just studying English,” she shrugged. “At one time I wanted to get into journalism, but I’m beginning to wonder just how viable a field that’s going to be in the long run. They don’t have that here as a major, anyway, but at least with English I can get close to it in case I do think I can get a job that will last in it.”

Clearly Ashley was no dummy, either. “I’m a little unsure,” Cam temporized, not wanting to let on about his lack of goals to these two. “I’ve got a choice of several possibilities, so I thought I’d wait a year before I settled on something.”

“Probably not the dumbest idea,” Lyle nodded. “In the two years we’ve been here, we’ve seen a lot of kids change their minds and then change them again.”

“You’ll probably watch me do it, too,” Cam sighed. “I’m tempted by American literature, but it doesn’t strike me as very practical. Look, I don’t like to blame my cancer for being indecisive, but there have been times I haven’t been thinking very far ahead, either.”

“I can understand that,” Lyle said. “That’s got to put a different outlook on life.”

“No doubt about it,” Cam replied. He didn’t want to get into that again, so decided to change the subject. “So, what’s the football team here like?”

“To be honest, pretty average,” Lyle told him. “We were five and four last season.”

“We would have been something like two and seven if it weren’t for Lyle’s kicking,” Ashley added.

“We’re hoping we can do a little better this year,” Lyle shrugged. “The quarterback we had last year couldn’t hit the floor with his hat when he wasn’t fumbling. I don’t want to wish ill on anyone, but it seems pretty likely he won’t be back, thank goodness.”

Cam could sense a story. “What happened?”

“The guy had a big, big head,” Lyle explained. “He thought he was God’s gift to women and God’s gift to football, and he wasn’t either one. Back over break last Christmas, he got loaded to the gills and wrapped his car around a tree. He’s going to be doing jail time when the hospital gets him put back together enough to let him out, and that cost him his scholarship. Well, when I heard that I went to Coach Meadows and managed to sell him on taking a look at Howie. The plan was for Howie to be the backup quarterback this fall, as Coach had some guy lined up to come in as a transfer student, but he never showed up. No one seems to know why, either. So now, unless something really weird happens, Howie is going to be the starting QB as a freshman. He seems to be working out pretty good, but we’ll know for sure next Saturday.”

“That’s a big load to dump on him.”

“It is, and Coach Meadows doesn’t want to do it, especially with no backup. Hell, the last time we talked about it he was making sounds about me as the backup quarterback. I’m no runner, and I’m not real fast, but I can hand off a ball and maybe even throw one once in a while. I don’t know that I want to do it, but I will if I have to.”

“On the bright side,” Cam grinned, “it might make the other team think twice about trying for a quarterback sack.”

“I may be big, but I’m not that big,” Lyle said seriously. “Look, I’m just as glad we got a chance to talk without Howie around. If you don’t want to walk on, that’s fine. You have your reasons, and they seem like good ones, so I won’t bug you about it and I’ll ask Howie to not bug you about it, either. But look. Howie is a friend, and he’s going to be put in a tough position. Worse, he’s going to have distractions enough as it is with Autumn living so close by. Howie is one of the good guys, and he’s pretty much a straight arrow, so I guess what I’m saying is to try to not make it any tougher on him than he’s already got it, and try to help him out when you can.”

“Sure, I’d do that whether he was a football player or not. I don’t know Autumn very well, but it doesn’t seem like she’s going to try to make things worse, either.”

“I don’t know Autumn very well, but I think I know her better than Lyle does,” Ashley said. “She seems like a good kid too, but life would be simpler for both of them if they were living on campus. I’m really a little more concerned that she’s going to have problems of her own, and Howie will have his mind on her rather than the game the next couple of months. It would be better if they were living together for real, but they’re not in a position to do that like Lyle and I are.”

“Hold it,” Cam frowned. “You two are living together on campus? How do you manage that? Are you married or something?”

“At one point it looked like we would have to get married to manage it, but it would have loused up our financing,” Lyle explained. “So, well, we worked it out.”

“What Lyle is saying is that officially we have our own dorm rooms and our own roommates,” Ashley grinned. “But my so-called official roomie also has a boyfriend who’s on the football team, so we sort of worked out an arrangement. It’s one of those things that everyone sort of knows, but they look the other way.”

“It gets a little awkward at times,” the big guy explained. “But it works. One day last year I talked to an alumnus. He must have been here fifty years ago, maybe even sixty, I don’t know for sure. A long time ago, anyway. He said back then that they didn’t even allow guys in the girl’s dorms, even for a visit, or the other way around. When I told him about the setup Ashley and I have, well, he went away shaking his head.”

“It seems a little surprising to me, too,” Cam agreed. “It’s too bad Howie and Autumn can’t work out something like that.”

“They have, sort of,” Lyle told him. “But it’s really not going to take effect until after football season and they’ll still have to get along on one set of wheels. We have Ashley’s car here, and we’ve already told him he can use it if he really needs to. We don’t really use it all that much. Are you going to be able to get along here without wheels?”

“I have to. I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“How did you manage that?”

Cam shook his head. “Well, the cancer is involved again. I had driver’s ed course before I came down with it, and afterwards, I just never got around to the tests. I suppose I’ll do it sometime, but since I was coming here and I knew I wasn’t allowed to have a car, I didn’t worry about it.”

“Well, if you have to go out to get something sometime, let us know,” Ashley said. “Do you have any other kids from your school going here?”

“None that I know of,” Cam admitted. “And that includes the last couple of years. How about you?”

“Just the two of us and Howie. There were a couple of other kids from our class. One dropped out, and the other one transferred somewhere. I’m not sure where and I don’t care, since we weren’t exactly friends.”

“I had a few of those, too. I’m not sorry to leave them behind.”

By now they had long since finished their breakfasts. Cam offered to get up and refill their coffee cups all around, and they settled in for an even longer discussion. After having been there for two years, the big couple had a lot of experience around the campus and could give him a lot of useful tips on how to get around, things to do, things to avoid, instructors to be wary of, and similar gems of wisdom. It was certainly a much better orientation to Meriwether College than had been presented the night before, and Cam wished he’d brought a notebook with him.

Somehow the campus seemed a little less lonely now; even though the couple were Howie’s friends and he’d sort of lucked in to them, it seemed like they were on the verge of becoming friends, too.

His impression of the pair was that they were both smart and friendly, even though their size could be intimidating, at least to some people. That was a lesson in itself, one that he had seen before: don’t let what you see on the surface fool you. If nothing else, Latasha had taught him that; she was, well, not intimidating to look at, but her strange appearance was off-putting to a lot of people. Cam had gotten past her surface appearance to understand the loving, caring person who lived underneath, and there was no doubt that he missed her. Maybe he could find someone to care about like that again someday.

Maybe Meriwether College wasn’t going to be quite as lonely as he had worried about.

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