Away Running by David Wright Page B

dour. “Right.”
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    Freeman thanked Juliette for an amicable soirée. She was working on her laptop on her bed. She said goodbye but kind of automatic-like, and he looked deflated.
    I walked him downstairs.
    “So, you gonna phone your mom?” he said as we stood under the porte cochere.
    “Tomorrow.”
    “You better, man, ’cause family’s the most important thing.” He crossed the street, calling back, “I’ma be on you about it.”
    I watched him disappear into the dark alongside the Parc Montsouris.
    My mom had agreed to send a letter authorizing me to play, but she didn’t say much else. She wouldn’t accept my apology. She told me I was enrolling for summer classes at Orford the day I got back. She said she would contact the coach at Laval to let him know my decision. My decision? We hadn’t talked since.
    My girlfriend, Céline, sent a long email. She dumped me. She said she couldn’t trust me.
    I pulled my cell from my pocket, flipped it open and scrolled down the text messages to the one my dad had sent the day after the last call with my mom. Make things right , was all it said.

DIABLES ROUGES (1–1) V. OURS (0–2)
FEBRUARY 28
    FREE
    Me and Matt, Moose, pushing his ten-speed, and Aïda, our flag-team captain, were walking from the stadium to the RER after practice. They were chatting and laughing and whatnot, Matt and Moose horsing around, exchanging clownish looks and faux-sexy glances. Aïda, in her headscarf, smiled at their silliness. Me, I kept to myself.
    It had been a month or so since I’d decided to stay. I was having fun and all—living in France, who wouldn’t be?—but I wasn’t feeling right either. Not easy, like Matt seemed to be. Homesick maybe. I’d Skype Mama every week, and she’d tell me how she was doing (“Fine”) and how Tookie and Tina were doing (“Fine”), and she’d ask how it was with me (“Fine,” I’d say). So we were all fine, you know. Still and all, as often as not I just felt off, uneasy.
    Me and Matt and them passed by the city cemetery and the humming electrical substation that powered Villeneuve—ten-foot concrete walls topped with barbed wire, skull-and-crossbones and Danger–High Voltage signs all over. There was what they called an “industrial park” nearby. It wasn’t much of a park: fenced-in construction sites and giant cinder-block warehouses, most of them vacant. A ways off was a congested highway.
    “The A1,” Matt once explained to me. “The Autoroute du Nord. It leads to Brussels.”
    “How do you know these things?” I asked.
    “How don’t you know them?” he said back.
    We had the Ours (French for “bears”) coming up on Saturday, a game we should win. The Saturday before, we had stomped the Mousquetaires, 42–0. Mobylette killed. Matt kept calling sweeps and Mobylette would turn the corner and blow by the DB s like they were standing still, his legs just a-churning. The boy could scoot! But it was Matt who won the day, calling the right play at the right time, getting everybody involved and keeping everybody focused even as the game got out of hand. Other teams had foreign players too, but Matt was on .
    Me, not so much. Coach Le Barbu had me at safety, and I played it as a sort of monster-back—part linebacker, squeezing the line of scrimmage when I saw a run coming, and part defensive back, dropping into coverage. I’d been effective, you know. I’d made lots of tackles. But I hadn’t shined, really. Not like Matt. I hadn’t gotten a single interception, very few big hits. It rattled my confidence for real, yo. And I hadn’t played a down on offense. No need for me to.
    We wove our way through the Cinq Mille projects. In the concrete courtyard between high-rises, some older guys—gray-haired, a mix of Arab and black—were playing the metal ball game you see old French guys play in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Pétanque , it’s called. That was what I was staring at when I noticed this group of