Friday Night Stage Lights Page 11

  The player slammed the ball down on the ground and held his hands in the air. Everyone around me went nuts. As in, they were pounding on the tables, hugging each other, and thrusting their fists up in the air. I may be mistaken, but I was pretty sure I even saw an older man with tears in his eyes. These people gave new meaning to the term “die-hard fans.”

  “So what just happened?” I asked Logan after everyone calmed down.

  “Seriously?” Logan asked.

  I shrugged. “Like I said, I really don’t know anything about the game.”

  “This is awful. I’ve been doing it all wrong, haven’t I?”

  “Doing what wrong?”

  “This football thing. Right now you probably think it’s nothing but a bunch of crazy fans who get together, stuff their faces, and yell like maniacs at the TV.”

  “Well, I mean, it’s kind of true. . . .”

  “That’s where you’re mistaken, Brooklyn. Football is so much more than that. It’s about hard work, discipline, and being a superior athlete. And I’m here to show you that.”

  I raised my eyebrow at “superior athlete,” but I didn’t say anything to Logan.

  “The first thing I need to do is start at square one and teach you how the game is played. How are you ever going to respect the sport if you can’t understand it?”

  “You might be right. After all, it’s your Texan duty,” I said, using the words that he’d said when we first made this deal.

  “Exactly,” he agreed. And with that, Logan began to tell me every single thing that was going on during the game. He went over every play and actually made the game easy to understand. And the best part was that he didn’t make me feel dumb for living in Leighton and not knowing a single thing about the game.

  “So you have to memorize certain moves?” I asked.

  “Plays,” Logan corrected me and then nodded. “It’s a huge part of football. It’s our plan of action on how to move the ball down the field. But the thing is, we can’t use the same play every time, or the other team will know how to stop us. So we memorize tons and tons of different ones and then wait to see which one we’re going to use.”

  “That’s a lot of work,” I said. “I always thought football was doing the same thing every time and hoping to get to the end of the field without being tackled.”

  Logan shook his head. “Not at all. It’s tons of practice and memorization. We need to know what we’re going to do on the field, since we work together as a team. We learn and prepare for all the different possibilities that might happen. Coach has us running all different kinds of plays that we learn. We also spend a lot of time watching videos and going over them.”

  What he was saying reminded me of ballet and all the choreography that I had to learn. I’d never thought I’d ever put ballet and football together, but learning the plays seemed a lot like learning a new dance.

  “Okay, watch carefully. This is a big play,” Logan said and pointed to the screen. “Texas Tech is winning right now, but if we get the ball, we’ll be in the lead. All he has to do is run to the end zone and make a touchdown.”

  I watched as UT got the ball and the player raced down the field.

  “Run!” I cheered as he got closer and closer to the end zone. And you know something? Logan was right. Football was a lot more interesting to watch when you knew what was going on.

  Chapter 27

  After halftime, Logan turned to me and gestured to the inside of the house.

  “Okay, it’s time for dessert,” he announced and rubbed his stomach.

  “Dessert? After all that other stuff?”

  “Oh yeah, you haven’t finished eating until you’ve had dessert. Stay here, I’ll go get it.” He sprinted off before I could protest and returned about five minutes later with two giant bowls, each with a brownie, ice cream, caramel, and a mound of whipped cream.

  “Um, you’re going to have to roll me out of here if I eat this. I’m pretty sure I might bust,” I told him.

  “Take a bit. After you try it, you won’t have any problems finding room for it in your stomach.”

  And like everything else today, he was right. It was amazing.

  The two of us were making a good dent in our brownies when an older woman came over. She had a little girl in her arms with pigtails that had burnt orange and white ribbons in them.

  “Hi, I’m Natalia, Logan’s sister, and this is Izzy,” she told me and pointed at her daughter. “We’ve heard all about how good a dancer you are.”

  “You have?” I asked and turned to Logan. He gave me a sheepish smile and shrugged.

  “Izzy here loves ballet,” Natalia said and placed Izzy down and pointed at me. “This is Brooklyn, and she’s a dancer. She performs on the stage, and your uncle Logan is going to dance with her.”

  Izzy’s eyes grew huge, and I remembered how exciting it was when I was little and met older dancers. But she wasn’t the only one who was impressed. I couldn’t believe Logan had told his family about us. Truthfully, I’d fully expected him not to say a word about it. It wasn’t like ballet was a cool pastime for football players.

  I kneeled down so I was on Izzy’s level. “Hi, Izzy. Do you dance too?”

  She nodded shyly.

  “I bet you’re great at twirling. Do you want to show me?”

  She grinned and held out her arms and began to spin. She went around and around, and when she finally stopped, she lost her balance and fell in a heap of giggles.

  “You’re great!” I told her. “You looked like a real ballerina.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for her to grin bigger than she did. Her face shined with happiness, and it was pretty crazy to think it was because of what I said.

  “It’s nice to be able to meet you,” Natalia said. “We’re all rooting for you to get into that school.”

  “Thank you,” I told her and waved at Izzy as the two walked away. I turned to Logan. “You told them about us?”

  “Sure, I mean, I might have mentioned ballet and helping you with the Showcase.”

  “Thanks,” I told Logan.

  “For what?”

  “For not hiding ballet and looking at it as if it isn’t important like half this town does.”

  “Believe me, I understand what it’s like to really care about something. And you all train and practice just as hard as we do. That’s what it’s like with football for me. I get it.”

  “People don’t usually get it about ballet.”

  “It’s what you love. That makes sense. And remember, there’s also a bonus in there for me, too. If I can get you to respect football, it also means that I’ll convert the only person in Leighton who doesn’t care about the game, so it’s not like I’m losing out on this deal.”

  “Something like that,” I said and made a face at him. I pointed to the screen. “Speaking of football, isn’t that player about to score a touchdown?”

  Logan instantly focused his attention on the TV. “You’re right! See, I did teach you well!”

  “You’re a great teacher,” I said and cheered along with him and the rest of his family, because for once, this crazy game actually made sense.

  Chapter 28

  I wish I could say that Logan caught on to ballet the way I was able to understand a lot more about football after he had explained it that weekend. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

  At all.

  The next practice was more of the same. Logan tripping over his feet, messing up the steps, and generally making me scared to death that we weren’t going to pull this off.

  I tried not to get upset, but that’s hard to do when your entire future is at stake.

  “I don’t understand,” I finally said after Logan stepped forward instead of to the back and collided into me. “You do all of this so well during conditioning.”

  “I’m trying, I swear,” Logan said, and I felt a flash of guilt at getting on his case when he was helping me. “I have the steps down, but when I put
them together, they kind of jumble into a big, confusing mess.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I would probably be the same way if I tried to play football.”

  “And remember,” Mary Rose said to me. “It took you years and years and years to get this good. We can’t expect Logan to be perfect.”

  But you were the one who suggested he dance with me. That he could take Jayden’s place, I wanted to say. I held back my words, though, and we walked through the dance again, marking the steps to help Logan get it down.

  “Think of it like your coach going over the plays,” Mary Rose told him. “You’re good at memorizing plays, and this is similar.”

  Logan nodded and tried. He tried so hard, we could all see that, but something wasn’t clicking. And the more it didn’t click, the more frustrated I got, even though I tried not to.

  “You’re supposed to go left!” I snapped when he ran into me for a third time and stepped on my toe. I threw my hands up in frustration and walked across the room to get away from him.

  Logan sank to the ground and looked about as defeated as I did.

  Mary Rose stood between the two of us, and her eyes went from Logan to me. I could tell her mind was spinning; she tapped her pointer finger against her other hand like she does when she’s trying to work out a piece of choreography.

  “How about you take a break for today, Brooklyn? Logan and I can stay here a little longer, and then we’ll get back together again at our next practice. Does that work?”

  “Isn’t the idea that we dance together?” I asked.

  “You will, but I’m thinking that right now Logan might benefit from working one-on-one with me. What do you think?” she asked him, and he nodded right away. “We’re not kicking you out because we don’t want you here. The two of us will work together on a few things to make sure that Logan has it down so that we’re not wasting our time.”

  “Okay,” I said, because what we were doing now obviously wasn’t working. And maybe it would help. At least, I hoped it would, because if things stayed the way they were right now, I was in deep trouble and could kiss any hope of getting into TSOTA good-bye.

  Chapter 29

  I left the studio wishing and hoping that Mary Rose could work some magic. I thought about texting Jayden to tell him my fears. I had been keeping him updated about our progress every time he came over to hang out. Jayden assured me that Logan would catch on, but I wasn’t too sure.

  I fished around in my bag for my phone to call Jayden and settled onto the bench outside the studio.

  It was the perfect type of day outside, and the sun warmed my face. I thought about Oregon weather. Fall would be starting and it would be cold and, truthfully, miserable. It rained a lot there, and while there were a million things I missed, the weather wasn’t one of them.

  I found my phone, but when I unlocked it, I saw I had 118 messages.

  “What the heck?” I said.

  That had to be some kind of mistake. I don’t think I’d ever gotten that many messages at once in my entire life. Mia texted me a lot, so much that sometimes when I opened my phone, it took a while to read through all of them, but never this many. I’d only been away from my phone for about an hour.

  I checked the messages and discovered that they weren’t from Mia. In fact, her name wasn’t on any on them. Instead, I had messages from a ton of my classmates and numbers I didn’t even recognize. People I never even talk to at school, so I had no idea how they’d even gotten my phone number.

  “What’s going on?” I asked out loud. Should I open them? Do I want to open them?

  I scrolled through the texts and it only took a few seconds to figure out what that something else was.

  They were about a video Mia posted.

  A video that everyone was talking about.

  Leave it to Mia to post something that gets everyone to her channel again. It’s only a matter of time before she gets a job on ESPN. But what did that have to do with me? Why are people talking to me about the video?

  I clicked on the link that someone had sent, and I didn’t have to watch long to find out my answer.

  “Hi, everyone! Good morning! This is Mia Tarvis bringing you the news you want and the news you didn’t even know you needed, especially when that news involves Leighton High’s football star, Tanner Kratus. Yep, you heard that right. I have breaking news that I couldn’t keep to myself.”

  The image went from Mia to Tanner on the football field. It was last week’s game, the one that happened shortly after Tanner heard about his scholarship. The footage showed him on the field as his coaches spoke to the crowd and congratulated him on the University of Texas. The crowd was going nuts for him, even more so with the announcement of the scholarship, if that was possible.

  “Last week we celebrated Tanner’s offer to play ball at the University of Texas, but this week the party is over. Rumor has it that he still plans to go to UT, but not to play football. I repeat, your favorite Leighton High quarterback is not going to play football.”

  The video cut to a cartoon crowd looking shocked, which would have been pretty funny if she weren’t playing our conversation from Locos Tacos over it.

  Our secret conversation that she’d promised not to tell anyone about.

  The one the whole world now knew.

  The number of views at the bottom of the video was a little over six hundred. Six hundred people had already watched this video, and it was only posted two hours before. I didn’t want to look at the comments. You’d have to be an idiot not to know what people in Leighton were going to say about Tanner’s news.

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought about what Mia had done. I’d told her this in secret. I’d trusted her to keep quiet. That’s what friends do. Why would she have shared this information?

  I thought back to dinner with her. She’d recorded me eating the burrito, and she must have left her camera on afterward. Had she done it on purpose? On accident? Did it even matter?

  The only thing that mattered was the fact that she’d taken the information and shared it with everyone. And for what? To get more views? To bring people to her video page? Was that more important than our friendship?

  As if things couldn’t get any worse, Mom pulled up right at that moment.

  “What are you doing here early?” I asked. Technically, I still had another half hour of practice.

  “Get in,” Mom said, her voice hard and angry.

  I stayed rooted to the spot and pretended I didn’t hear her. Maybe if I didn’t respond, she wouldn’t see me.

  “Brooklyn Gartner, get in the car now, or I’ll come escort you into the car myself, and it won’t be pretty.”

  Nope. Guess not.

  I trudged toward the car. It was only about ten steps, but you better believe that I walked those ten steps as slowly as I could. I climbed into the front seat and wished I could hide my earbuds up my sleeve and tune out the conversation we were no doubt about to have. I guessed telling her about Logan was out right now.

  “So, I watched a video today. And it appears that a large part of the community has too,” Mom said before she even drove away from the studio. “I thought I should come here early to talk to you about it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean for that to happen,” I told her and wished I could show her that was the truth.

  “That was private information that only we knew about, Brooklyn. I find it pretty hard to believe that Mia didn’t get the information from you.”

  “I told Mia about Tanner, but that was it. I didn’t know she was going to share it with every single person on the Internet. It was supposed to be something between us.”

  “Then what made her do that?” Mom asked, a little softer this time.

  “I have no idea,” I said, and it was the truth. Of all the text messages on my phone, none of them were from Mia, and she was the one I most wanted to hear from. As mad as I was at her, I wanted to think that maybe there was a reason. Maybe she had
some great story for why she’d taken our family’s secrets and made them her news.

  “What she did wasn’t right,” Mom said. “But that doesn’t let you off the hook. It wasn’t your news to tell. Tanner told us all of that in confidence, and now a lot of people he wasn’t ready to talk to know what he’s been thinking about. This isn’t about you; it affects Tanner’s future.”

  I hadn’t even thought about Tanner. What would he think now that I’d told his secret to everyone? He was going to hate me. I groaned and slid down in my seat, wishing I could disappear. In a town like Leighton, you don’t walk away from football. And based off of how many views the video had already gotten, the town definitely wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. If I had to apologize a million times, I would. But I had no idea how to make this right. And then Mom said the worst thing in the world. The words I never wanted to hear.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Brooklyn. I expected better.”

  And I expected better from Mia, I thought, but I didn’t dare say those words out loud. Something told me that now was the time to stay quiet. I only wished that I would have felt that same way when I’d been talking to Mia.

  Chapter 30

  I told Mom I wasn’t feeling well when I got home and was going up to my room.

  “That’s fine, honey, but you’re going to have to face Tanner. You owe him an apology.”

  As I headed up the steps. I wanted her to follow me. I wanted to talk more about what had happened with Mia and about Tanner’s choice in general, but she stayed downstairs.

  I crawled into bed and wished I could hide under my sheets for the rest of my life. It would be easier than facing everyone after what I’d done. My phone sat in my dance bag. I hadn’t pulled it out since Mom had picked me up, and while I wanted to see what Mia had to say, there was now a side of me that didn’t want to check. What if she hadn’t even texted me yet? What if she had, and hadn’t apologized? My brain spun a million awful scenarios and just made me feel worse.