Page 2 of The Heartbreak Blitz

It was too unbelievable to be true.

Next, Coaches moved us out of the way, the sound of worried whispers escalated, and then finally, someone shouted for an ambulance. Brady’s parents rushed onto the field. Briar, doe eyes looking on, stood back on the brown running track, Jules’s hand in hers.

Even then, I thought it wasn’t serious. Maybe a concussion. Maybe he’d been knocked out, but he’d come to.

The paramedics placed him on a stretcher and wheeled him away. The retreating ambulance wail echoed around the Spartan stadium, putting a sad punctuation on what was usually a joyous occasion. The game stopped. The people in the crowd dispersed, red-rimmed and blindsided.

It wasn’t until my parents took me to the hospital and his parents came out of a room sobbing that I realized how serious itwas. Reality had slapped me in the face with the force of a freight train at two hundred miles per hour.

I was never going to see my best friend again.

The complete and utter agony of his mom’s cries echoed through the halls. A woman I’d only ever known to be nice, sweet, and loving fell to her knees and had to be whisked off to a room herself.

The numb sort of pain that people who’ve only felt real loss will know the feeling of?—

“Yo, you in this with me?” Aidan asks.

Like being transported to a different dimension, my surroundings return in a nanosecond. It’s third and twenty-five. The crowd rallies with a warrior cry when our defense gets another stop.

“Windbreaker,” I state, confirming the play he told me he wanted to start with when we were getting ready in the locker room. Twenty yard, in route.

He grins, eyes sparking with competition.

His look makes me self-conscious. Sad, even.

I used to want to win so much more. When it was Reid, Brady, and me, we were unstoppable. We’d tell one another our big dreams. Speak them into existence.

Go to a good college. Get drafted. Play professionally.

But a bit of that drive died when Brady did. The remainder nearly disintegrated when Reid got drafted last year and Lex graduated. Reid’s now playing in the league with a breakout rookie season. Lex is off finding himself, all while I’m still here.

Nothing is the same.

It’s not that my current teammates aren’t all awesome, it’s me. I’m different. Scattered. Lost. Like life is happening to me instead of me taking the reins.

Our D gets the stop on a fourth down on our forty. Aidan starts to run onto the field, and like a robot, I follow after, pulling my helmet over my head as if I’m a soldier going into battle.

Standing at the line of scrimmage, the guy across from me smiles and begins to talk shit. I ignore him. I’m probably the best shit-talker on the team, but I can’t get into it. So, instead of telling him I enjoyed being balls-deep in his mom last night, I run my route, cleats eating up the yard lines until I’m slicing inside. I peer over my shoulder for the ball, and there it is, sailing toward me. With QB1’s precision throw, I barely have to put my hands out before it falls into them.

I take off, eyes on the field ahead of me. I cut outside, dodging a player, then cut farther out when another one lunges for me.Shit. I’m blocked outside. I race toward the sideline to eke out every last yard I can when someone shoves me out of bounds. My feet scramble to stay under me, but I end up corralling through the air, straight for a black-haired girl in an oversized sweatshirt who’s staring out at the field like a zombie.

A short, panicked noise leaves my throat, and the moment she sees me barreling toward her, her eyes round.

I try to throw myself out of the way but clip her shoulder instead. We both go down in a heap of limbs, her arms windmilling to the sides of her. The ground comes up too quickly, and I grunt on impact, sliding over the grass on my shoulder pad before coming to a stop a few feet from her.

Ah shit.I jump up and move toward her. I know from experience that getting hit when you’re not wearing pads and someone else is can hurt like a bitch. “Are you okay?” I ask, which comes out muffled before I pull out my mouth guard and wedge it in my face mask.

Like Brady, she lies there, but she blinks before I panic.

Transferring the football to my other hand, I reach out with my right to help her up. “I’m so sorry.”

“Farmer!” Coach barks. “We need you for the next play.”

Ignoring him, I wrap my fingers around the girl’s forearm while she lifts. Before I know it, she scrambles to her feet and shucks my hand away. “Watch where you’re going,” she spits.

“I’m r-really sorry,” I stutter out. “I couldn’t keep my feet underneath me…”

A few other players approach us, and she peers around like a cornered kitten.

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