Game Changer Read online

  Dedication

  Dedicated

  to the many victims

  of the cockroaches

  of ignorance and intolerance.

  Ronnie Antonio Paris, 3. Jeremy Mardis, 6. Kameron Prescott, 6. Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, 7. Gabriel Fernandez, 8. Anthony Avalos, 10. Noah Cuarto, 4. Juwan Bymon, 6. Desiree Bymon, 7. Ponda Davis, 28. Lisa Bymon, 26. Stanley Almodovar III, 23. Amanda Alvear, 25. Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26. Oscar A. Aracena-Montero, 26. Simon A. Carrillo Fernandez, 31. Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33. Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21. Martin Benitez Torres, 33. Antonio D. Brown, 29. Darryl R. Burt II, 29. Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28. Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25. Tevin E. Crosby, 25. Franky J. Dejesus Velazquez, 50. Deonka D. Drayton, 32. Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22. Paul T. Henry, 41. Frank Hernandez, 27. Miguel A. Honorato, 30. Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40. Jason B. Josaphat, 19. Eddie J. Justice, 30. Anthony L.Laureano Disla, 25. Christopher A. Leinonen, 32. Juan R. Guerrero, 22. Brenda L. Marquez McCool, 49. Jean C. Mendez Perez, 35. Akyra Monet Murray, 18. Kimberly Morris, 37. Jean C. Nieves Rodriguez, 27. Luis O. Ocasio-Capo, 20. Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, 25. Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36. Joel Rayon Paniagua, 31. Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25. Juan P. Rivera Velazquez,37. Luis D. Conde, 39. Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, 24. Jonathan A. Camuy Vega,24. Christopher J. Sanfeliz, 24. Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35. Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25. Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34. Shane E. Tomlinson, 33. Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25. Luis S. Vielma, 22. Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37. Jerald A. Wright, 31. Cory J. Connell, 21. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41. George Floyd, 46. Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, 54. Ethel Lee Lance, 70. Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49. Tywanza Sanders, 26. Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, 74. Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45. Myra Thompson, 59. Lonette Keehner, 56. Timothy Caughman, 66. Jimmy Smith-Kramer, 20. Balbir Singh Sodhi, 51. Anita “Nicki” Gordon, 63. Anil Thakur, 31. Sandeep Patel, 25. Ji-ye Sun, 34. Thao “Tony” Pham, 27. Garry Lee, 22. Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32. Waqar Hasan, 46. Vasudev Patel, 49. Paramjit Kaur, 41. Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65. Prakash Singh, 39. Sita Singh, 41. Ranjit Singh, 49. Suveg Singh, 84. Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39. James Craig Anderson, 47. Larnell Bruce Jr., 19. Maurice E. Stallard, 69. Vickie Lee Jones, 67. DeLois Bailey, 53. Sam Cockrell, 46. Micky Fitzgerald, 45. Lynette McCall, 47. Charlie J. Miller, 58. Thomas Willis, 57. John Crawford III, 22. Breonna Taylor, 26. Aura Rosser, 40. Jamarion Robinson, 26. Eleanor Bumpurs, 66. Jaquavion Slaton, 20. Kwame “K.K.” Jones, 17. Jimmy Atchison, 21. Kendra James, 21. Kayla Moore, 41. Jordan Edwards, 15. Ukea Davis, 18. Stephanie Thomas, 19. Felicia Moreno, 25. Serena Angelique Velazquez Ramos, 32. Layla Pelaez Sanchez, 21. Alexa Negron Luciano, 26. Yampi Mendez Arocho, 19. Jordan Anchondo, 24. Andre Anchondo, 23. Arturo Benavides, 60. Leonard Cipeda Campos, 41. Maribel Hernandez, 56. Raul Flores, 77. Maria Flores, 77. Jorge Calvillo Garcia, 61. Adolfo Cerros Hernandez, 68. Sara Esther Regalado, 66. Alexander Gerhard Hoffman, 66. David Alvah Johnson, 63. Luis Alfonzo Juarez, 90. Maria Eugina Legarreta Rothe, 58. Elsa Mendoza Marquez, 57. Ivan Hilierto Manzano, 46. Gloria Irma Marquez, 61. Margie Reckard, 63. Javier Amir Rodriguez, 15. Teresa Sanchez de Freitas, 82. Angelina Englisbee, 86. Juan Velazquez, 77. Guillermo “Memo” Garcia, 36. Greg McKendry, 60. Linda Kraeger, 61. Ricky John Best, 53. Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23. Blaze Bernstein, 19. John Freddy, 43. Sukhjit “Sammy” Khajala, 50. Mohammad Zafer,60. Mohammed Alamgir, 38. Albert Kotlyar, 32. Mohammed Abdul Nasser Ali, 54. Imam Maulama Akonjee, 55. Thara Uddin, 64. Khalid Jabara, 37. Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein, 15. Deah Barakat, 23. Yusor Abu-Salha, 21. Razan Abu-Salha, 19. Hassan Alawsi, 46. Atatiana Jefferson, 28. Stephon Clark, 22. Botham Jean, 26. Philando Castile, 32. Alton Sterling, 37. Michelle Cusseaux, 50. Freddie Gray, 25. Janisha Fonville, 20. Eric Garner, 43. Akai Gurley, 28. Tamir Rice, 12. Tyre King, 13. Jesus M. Huesca, 25. Michael Brown Jr., 18. Tanisha Anderson, 37. Trayvon Martin, 17. Sean Monterrosa, 22. Jamel Floyd, 35. Danny Overstreet, 43. Fred Martinez, 16. Gwen Amber Rose Araujo, 17. Terrianne Summers, 51. Guin “Richie” Phillips, 36. Sakia Gunn, 15. Ruth “Ruthie” George, 19. Tiarah Poyau, 22. Mollie Tibbetts, 20. Nazma Khanam, 60. Janese Talton-Jackson, 29. Cherica Adams, 24. Jessica Hampton, 25. Mary Spears, 27. Nova Henry, 24. Ava Henry, 10 months. LaVena Johnson, 19. April Jace, 40. Julia Martin, 27. George Chen, 19. Cheng Yuan Hong, 20. Weihan Wang, 20. Katherine Cooper, 22. Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20. Veronika Weiss, 19. Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60. Joyce Fienberg, 75. Richard Gottfried, 65. Rose Mallinger, 97. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66. Cecil Rosenthal, 59. David Rosenthal, 54. Bernice Simon, 84. Sylvan Simon, 86. Daniel Stein, 71. Melvin Wax, 88. Irving Younger, 69. Riah Milton, 25. Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells, 27. Vanessa Guillen, 20. Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, 18. Hanna Harris, 21. Roderica Ribbonleg, 15. Elijah McClain, 23. Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, 22. Ahmaud Arbery, 25. Andre Alexander Green, 15. Antwon Rose Jr., 17. Cameron Tillman, 14. Ciara Meyer, 12. John Albers, 17. Laquan McDonald, 17. Logan Simpson, 16. Giovanni Melton, 14. Zachary Bearheels, 29. Loreal Tsingine, 27. Benjamin Whiteshield, 34. Paul Castaway, 35. Jason Pero, 14. Malena Loonskin, 26. Nireah Johnson, 17. Brandie Coleman, 18. Emonie Spaulding, 25. Andrew Anthos, 72. Cornel Young Jr., 29. Patrick M. Dorismond, 26. John Adams, 61. Anthony Dwain Lee, 39. Alfred “Abuka” Sanders, 29. Christopher Arnold, 29. Djibril Diol, 29. Adja Diol, 23. Khadija Diol, 2. Hassan Diol, 25. Hawa Baye, 7 months. Zaria Joshalyn Burgess, 15. Everardo Torres, 24. Dawn Rae Nelson, 35. James Taylor, 50. Bruce James Weigel, 42. Stanley Bates, 35. Michael Pleasance, 23. Ousmane Zongo, 43. Alberta Spruill, 57. Kenneth Walker, 39. James Jahar Akbar Perez, 28. Michael Bell Jr., 21. Bounmy Ousa, 59. Joseph Rosenbaum, 36. Anthony Huber, 26. Kelly Thomas, 37. Daniel Prude, 41. Oluwatoyin Salau, 19. Nina Pop, 28. Malinda Raya, 39. Amanda Dabrowski, 31. Mackenzie Lueck, 23. Miles Hall, 23. Ricardo Munoz, 27. Brandon Roberts, 27. Darius J. Tarver, 23. William Howard Green, 43. Jaquyn O’Neill Light, 20. Manuel Ellis, 33. Donnie Sanders, 47. Etonne T. Tanzymore, 38. Tommie Dale McGlothen Jr., 44. Kanisha Necole Fuller, 43. Steven Demarco Taylor, 33. Joel Acevedo, 25. Dijon Kizzee, 29. Simmie Williams Jr., 17. Latisha King, 15. Daniel “Dano” Fetty, 39.

  Epigraph

  Come as you were,

  Not as you’ll be,

  Remember to bring back

  the best part of me.

  Take what you find,

  Leave what you lost,

  Light the way burning

  the bridges you crossed . . .

  — Konniption, “Come As You Were”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Full Stop

  2. Sideways

  3. Coke and Crayolas

  4. Horror/Comedy, but Mostly Horror

  5. Exit Strategy

  6. Hostile Territory

  7. My Sunscreen Ignorance

  8. The Memory of Memories

  9. All the Things That Never Happened

  10. Cheeseburger in Parallel

  11. Nevermore

  12. Who We Are

  13. Ignorance is a Cockroach

  14. Here’s the Thing . . .

  15. Counting Cows

  16. Expunged, Expelled, and Otherwise Obliterated

  17. Dots, Connected

  18. A While Till Yesterday

  19. Skater on the Roof

  20. All the Easy Answers

  21. Larger Than Initially Reported

  22. Point Seven Three

  23. “I’m So Glad You’re Mine”

  24. Cars Heading South

  25. Two White Girls Visiting a Black Kid in Jail

  26. Blunt Object

  27. World Without Miracles

  28. Hail Mary

  29. Red

  30. A New Kind of Balance

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author


  Books by Neal Shusterman

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Full Stop

  You’re not going to believe me.

  You’ll say I’ve lost my mind, or that I’ve suffered one too many concussions. Or maybe you’ll convince yourself that I’m conning you, and that you’re the butt of some elaborate practical joke. That’s okay. Believe whatever you want if it helps you sleep. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Build ourselves a comfy web of reality like busy little spiders, and cling to it so we can get through the worst of days.

  We’ve had plenty of troubled days, haven’t we? All of us. The ground shifts, and the world changes, and we go tumbling. It can happen in the time it takes for a traveler to step off an international flight and sneeze. Or the time it takes for a man with a crushed windpipe to stop breathing.

  I’ve seen all that, just like you . . . but I’ve known other things. The kind of world-bending events that can’t be tracked by the news or by scientists. Changes that no one else on Earth will ever know.

  But like I said, you don’t have to buy into anything I say. In fact, it’s better for you if you don’t. Tell yourself it’s only a story. Stay in the middle of your web. Catch a few flies. Live the dream.

  My name is Ash. With all the things that have changed, my name hasn’t. It’s a constant around which the rest of my universe revolves, and I’m grateful for that.

  Less-than-interesting fact: Ash is short for Ashley—which, as my grandmother repeatedly says, was once “a very masculine name.” It was her brother’s name. Apparently he was named after some guy in Gone With the Wind, because he had the bad luck to be born in 1939, when the movie came out—and long before people were willing to admit how racist it was. He had a twin brother named Rhett, who eventually died of polio. And here’s the funny thing—the guy who played Ashley Wilkes in the movie? His real name was Leslie Howard. Dude couldn’t get a break, even fictionally.

  My name only became an issue once a year on the first day of school, when clueless teachers called it out, looking for a girl. Anyone who was stupid enough to make an obnoxious comment basically got their liver handed to them by yours truly, so classmates learned to just let it go. Anyway, Ash always worked for me. And only my aforementioned grandmother calls me Ashley.

  Although this story begins and ends with football, it’s the stuff in between that matters. The mystery meat in the sandwich you’ve already been warned you won’t be able to swallow, much less digest. Drink milk, it’ll calm your stomach.

  It would be a stretch to say that football was my life—but a lot of my life revolved around it. I played since I was little, and was a starter on my high school team—the Tibbetsville Tsunamis. Don’t start. It’s not my fault. The school used to be “the Blue Demons” but years ago a holier-than-thou type on the school board raised a big stink, claiming it was “unwholesome,” and made the school change it. So our mascot went from a grinning blue demon that never hurt anybody to a snarling blue wave that killed 800,000 people in Southeast Asia, and made sushi radioactive in Japan. Somehow that’s less offensive. At least we have cool helmets.

  The sport might have been my life if I was a running back, or a wide receiver, or, that dream of dreams, a quarterback. But I’m not fast. I’m not graceful. I’m not “poetry in motion.” I’m more like a poetry slam. You could say I’m sturdy. Not fat, but solid. Like an oak. It’s part of what makes me a fantastic defensive tackle.

  Tackles and linebackers—we do the dirty work and get no glory—but we’re always, always the reason for victories and losses. See, the quarterback is like the lead singer of a band whose head swells so big, he goes solo, and demands only blue M&M’s in his dressing room. The running backs and wide receivers, they’re guitar and bass. But the linemen? We’re the rhythm. The drummers who hold the beat, but are always in the background.

  That’s okay, though. I was never in it for the attention. I loved the raw energy of it. I loved the way it felt to smash through an offensive line. And I loved the feel and the sound of crashing helmets. Remember that, because it’s going to come back.

  I was known for my tackles. My hits. Rarely were there flags on my tackles, and I prided myself on that. I did it right, and I did it well. To the best of my knowledge, I never caused a concussion—but I bruised and got bruised. Sometimes pretty badly, but I never complained. “Walk it off” was our family motto.

  “Enjoy it now,” my father once told me. “Because it’s over sooner than you think.”

  My dad also played high school football. He was counting on a college scholarship but never got one. Instead he went to work for my uncle, managing auto parts distribution. He walked it off. Between that and what Mom earned as a nutritionist, we scraped by okay. Thank God for fast food; it drove people to my mom like a cattle chute.

  That’s how things were. It’s what doctors call “baseline.” The reading by which everything else is measured. It was the normal before everything went to some place way past hell.

  There are choices we make, choices that are made for us, and things we ignore long enough until all choices have fallen away. I’ve been plenty guilty of ignoring stuff I don’t want to deal with until it doesn’t matter anymore, or it’s too screwed up to bother fixing. Like the time I put off registering for the PSAT until it was too late. My mom was furious, but I didn’t care. She was enrolling me in an SAT prep class, so what was the point of wasting a perfectly good Saturday on a practice test I’d be taking half a dozen times anyway? Besides, I was hoping for the scholarship Dad never got.

  “That’s what Jay next door thought,” my mom had pointed out. “He hung everything on a scholarship he never got, and didn’t get in anywhere.”

  “There’s always community college,” my father chimed in, always taking whatever side my mother didn’t. “It’s less expensive, and he can transfer to a university in two years that won’t bankrupt us.”

  It made me think of my friend Leo Johnson, who was already being courted by major schools. I was happy for him, and it would bring recruiters to our games, but I knew none of them would be looking at me. I can’t deny that I envied the options Leo would have—but I had to trust that I’d have choices, too.

  So where was my choice, then, that took me down the path to the tweaked places I ended up? It couldn’t have been the choice to play ball that day. I mean, who in their right mind chooses not to play their sport without a good reason—such as death or dismemberment. Few things would keep me away from the field. I had an obligation to my team. There wasn’t even a premonition that first day. There was nothing to indicate that something was beginning that couldn’t be undone.

  Maybe it was the choice to play football in the first place all those years ago that set things in motion. But was that really a choice? Football was my father’s love. It was the way he and I connected, so I loved it, too. Sometimes it’s like that when you’re a kid. You eat up whatever your parents put on your life’s plate.

  So let me set the table for you, before I heap on the crazy-ass casserole. It’s Friday, September 8. It’s the first game of the season. I’d come back from summer vacation with a growth spurt, and had hit hell week hard. I was ready. As it was still almost two months before daylight savings kicked in, the game would begin in late-afternoon sun, but would end under the stark halogen lights that could turn the ordinary into a spectacle.

  The locker room was all wild energy that the coach had to harness into a “wall and a wedge.” That’s how he wanted us to see it. The Tsunami defense was a wall of water that nothing could get through. The offense was a whitewater wedge, surging through everything in its path.

  As soon as I suited up, I went over to Leo. He and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember. We’d been playing football together since we were little kids in the Pop Warner league, where the padding made us so top-heavy we could be tackled by a stiff breeze. Leo was an amazing wide rece
iver. It was like he had tractor beams in his fingertips that could suck a football out of the sky. He was Black, like about a third of our team. Actually, our team was a good representation of the school demographic. A fair balance between white, Black, and Latinx, with one Asian kid everyone called Kamikaze, even though he was Korean, not Japanese.

  I was friends with just about all of them, and we would always give each other good-natured shit.

  “If you were any whiter, I could wave you to stop a war,” my friend Mateo Zuñiga once told me, after trying and failing to teach me Spanish pronunciation. Mateo was the best field-goal kicker in the county. He might not have helped my pronunciation, but he did a pretty good job of educating my taste buds, since his mother’s cooking was a religious experience—including the miracle of late-night pozole.

  At the time, I thought having a diverse group of friends checked my box of social responsibility. Like there was nothing more for me to do than have some brown at the table. “Color shouldn’t matter” I was always taught—and always believed. But there’s a big difference between “shouldn’t” and “doesn’t.” Privilege is all about not seeing that gap.

  While Mateo and Kamikaze and everyone else in the locker room were whooping themselves into a frenzy, Leo always got quiet before a game. Focusing. “If I’m gonna make it to the end zone, I gotta already be there in my head,” he once told me. But today, I knew there was more to it.

  “Ready to make the Wildebeests an endangered species?” I asked him, hoping to get him into the spirit of things. (Yes, we were playing the Wharton Wildebeests—they made the Tsunamis sound good.)

  Leo grinned. “They’re already endangered,” he said. “I hear they only breed in captivity.”

  It was good to get a smile out of him. I knew this was the first game he was playing since his girlfriend moved to Michigan—which might as well have been Mars. In the weeks before the move, Leo was all about applying to Michigan State, convinced that what the two of them had would stand the test of time. Then she sent him a break-up text. From the plane. That had to be a first, getting dumped from 37,000 feet. A long way to fall.