Sarah would no doubt spend the evening draping herself on Nick while Sienna and I pretended to dance in a corner, but it would be fun nevertheless. Seeing her with Nick was making me miss Reed more than I cared to admit. I had pinned a few pictures of he and I to the cork board above my bed and I often drifted off to sleep staring at them, pressing the depths of my memory to hold on to his voice.
I was packing up my map and getting things sorted in my backpack when Sienna burst through the door and came running in, throwing her body onto my bed next to me. Her eyes were wide with surprise, and I couldn’t tell if it was in a good way or a bad way.
“Whhhhhaaaat…does that face mean?” I tilted my head questioning her even more.
“Oh my god, Nolan. Please promise me you’re not going to freak out, ok? It’s not that bad, I promise,” she said. Of course, I was freaking out now.
“Yeah…I’m pretty sure I can’t promise you that now,” my heart was racing and a million scenarios were flying through my mind all the way from my tuition payment had been rejected, my scholarship falling through, to she hadn’t really left for coffee but instead eloped to Vegas and came back married.
Sienna ground my imagination to a grinding halt the second she flopped the newspaper on my lap, folded to the sports section with a full-page color photo of Reed standing in front of the red and blue A on the mountain near his university campus. I looked up at her, my eyes wide now, too, knowing full well what I would find when I started reading the story. “Shit!” I grabbed the paper and started reading.
The first part was all about Reed, his projections for the year, how the UofA coaches had tracked him for years and expected great things from him. There was a great quote from Buck about how proud he was to see his son follow in his family’s footsteps and a few quotes from Coach Baker about Reed’s work at Coolidge and how he thought of him as a second son. I was starting to relax a little from the positive nature of the story when I finally came to the section labeled ‘Accident.’
I gulped and looked up at Sienna, who was just staring at me, her mouth closed tightly, willing me to read on. As I read, I relived the entire night. The way they described his injury made the bile climb up my throat a little and the quote from his mother about how scared she was for her son, describing the call she got from the hospital, almost made me feel sorry for her despite how terrible she’d been to me.
And then there it was, as if it had been covered in yellow highlighter, it jumped out to me in a flash.
Reed’s then girlfriend had been in the Jeep with him at the time of the accident, and while she didn’t walk away with the same injuries as the star athlete who had been driving, she was left with a terrible sense of guilt.
“I guess a part of me feels like the entire thing was my fault, like I caused him to miss out on his entire senior year,” said Nolan Lennox, also a senior at Coolidge at the time. “He was driving me home, and if he didn’t have to deal with me, then this never would have happened.”
I know the story didn’t end there. In fact there was an entire column left. But that’s where it ended in my eyes. I just dropped the paper and flopped back on the bed, smacking my hands to my forehead, my mind racing with possibilities of how I could fix this. I could ask for a retraction, I thought. Except she was accurate, and I hadn’t asked for any of this to be off the record. I just hoped it wouldn’t make sense with her story. But reading it now, I see the emotion my words brought to everything, and the reason she included them. I was screwed.
I heard Travis and Nick come barreling into our room while I laid on my bed with my pillow over my face wondering if it was possible to buy up every paper in southern Arizona before Reed, Buck or my parents could read my gaffe in all its glory. I sat up when I felt a second pillow hit me in the gut.
“Hey, what was that for,” I smiled, rubbing my face a little to snap myself out of my funk.
“Pillow fight with a girl, couldn’t help it,” Travis smirked, flirtatiously, but friendly all the same.
“I’m not much of a fighter right now, I’m afraid,” I slumped a bit, sliding the copy of the paper over to him and pointing to my quote. I waited a few minutes while he read the entire story and then I felt his stare when he turned to look at me.
“No f**king way! You dated Reed Johnson?” he was more interested in my love connection to a quarterback then the fact that I’d embarrassed myself in the biggest newspaper in the state. I just shoved him a little to get him back on task and he leaned into me whispering over my shoulder that it wasn’t that bad, immediately turning back to ask me questions about how well I knew Reed.