Bad Haircut by Tom Perrotta

our ‘76 state championship game, Rocky DeLucca quit the football team. Harding High never forgave him. Rocky was not only starting halfback and varsity co-captain, he was also president of the Student Council, which voted to impeach him the following week. A lot of people stopped talking to him. Nasty messages were scrawled on his locker. But Rocky barely noticed. All he wanted to talk about was love.
    “You know what it's like?” he told me. “It's like the whole world's in black and white, but Wendy and I are in color. I don't know how else to explain it.”
    In the weeks before Rocky's downfall, I had gotten to know him pretty well. We were the only two football players on the Student Council, and he had gone out of his way to be my friend even though I was nobody special, just a sophomorebenchwarmer. He gave me a ride home a couple of nights in September when practice ran late; gradually it turned into a regular thing.
    Rocky was a short muscular guy with a big Italian Afro, olive skin, and a dazzling smile. On Fridays during the season, when football players were required to wear their game jerseys to school, he wore his under a corduroy blazer with patches on the sleeves. He was so cool that it took me a while to admit to myself that he was also a little strange. As popular as he was, he didn't have a girlfriend or a group of guys he hung out with; as far as I could tell he spent his nights at home. He had a cassette player in his car, but only one tape— “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce—which he played over and over, despite my protests. I gathered from remarks he made that he had experienced Croce's death as a personal tragedy.
    One rainy night in October he turned to me and said, “You ever get the feeling that everything's a dream?”
    “Only when I'm sleeping,” I said.
    He ignored me. “Sometimes, right in the middle of the most ordinary situations, I get this weird humming noise in my head and everything starts glowing a little around the edges. It happens a lot during football games. I feel like I'm the only person alive, and everyone else is just a figment of my imagination.”
    “Jeez,” I said. “Maybe it's time for a new helmet.”
    Another night, after a grueling practice, he asked me if I liked football. Actually, I was having a miserable season. I hated sitting on the bench. But Rocky was team captain so I said, “Are you kidding? I love it.”
    He shook his head. “I don't know what's wrong with me. I just can't get excited about it this year.”
    I was stunned. Our team was undefeated, ranked fifth in the county, ahead of many larger schools. Rocky was playing well.
    “What don't you like about it?”
    “The mind control. I listen to the coaches for five minutes, and the word ‘bullshit’ starts running through my head like a mantra.”
    “A what?”
    “A mantra,” he said. “A word you meditate on.”
    Before the impeachment, Rocky's main presidential duty was to say the Pledge of Allegiance over the school PA every morning. You could tell from his voice that he wasn't too thrilled about it. At Harding, it was considered uncool to get too worked up about saluting the flag. The unwritten rule was that you had to stand up, but were not required to put your hand over your heart or actually say the words.
    While the rest of my homeroom slouched and mumbled along with Rocky, Wendy Edwards remained seated and went on with her reading. Wendy was a fanatical reader; it was hard to tell if she was making a statement or was simply oblivious to the ritual. But she wasn't a troublemaker, so Mrs. Glowacki left her alone.
    On the Wednesday before the state championship game, Coach Whalen was walking in the hall when Rocky asked everyone to please rise. Whalen didn't want to miss the Pledge of Allegiance, so he stepped into the nearest room, which happened to be ours, and slapped his hand smartly against his chest.
    Coach Whalen was a school legend. In only three years, he had taken a losing