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look away from his face—his awful, scab-covered face—but I can’t.
    RIVER
    I watch the sick dude until he limps away to another car with his rant. Do I laugh or cry? We all sit in silence, freaked out. Thanks, man , I want to say, but actually I’m more likely to die of boredom before the world ends.
    Two guys on the road watch the sick guy and laugh. Then they start tossing a football back and forth over his head, which makes as much sense as anything. Back and forth, back and forth. I watch them, hypnotized by the ball.
    Part of me doesn’t give a shit anymore. I’m dead to the game.
    Another part of me wants to run out of the car and grab it away from them, throwing it as far as I can until it smashes down hard and gets buried deep in the ground, an all-encompassing rage burning through me for the game and what it does to you and everyone who’s part of it.
    My first day Briggs summoned me to see him. I went into his office at three o’clock, but he was out. There was a blackboard with nothing on it except his name in chalk letters, a foot high: coach briggs .
    But what caught my eye was the birdcage on the stand in the corner. A canary? I walked over to him and whistled. He stared back at me without moving his coal-black eyes. I figured Briggs probably forgot about the appointment. I turned, ready to leave, when a booming voice came from the corridor: “River Daughtry.”
    I spun around, almost erupting in nervous laughter. He reminded me of a priest trying to impress a new choirboy with his godliness. He walked to the front of the room. Tall—six five maybe—with the bulk of a wrestler, jeans held up by a leather belt with a buckle as wide as a rearview mirror.
    I waited, my name hanging in the air between us. I felt uneasy, not sure why.
    â€œSit,” he said.
    He stared at me from the other side of the desk, as though by peering into my head my life would open up to him. I looked back at him directly, not caring if he took the stare down like a dog that thinks it’s being challenged.
    â€œSir.”
    â€œWelcome,” he said finally. “We’re glad to have you here. We’ll send you for a physical—I have no doubt you’ll pass it—then you can join the team. Coach Benson was very sorry to lose you.” He grabbed the football on his desk like a kid needing a security blanket, touching it as if he were comforted by the feel of the grain. He held it like he earned it. I looked at it and then back at his face, pock-marked like thirty years earlier acne had hit him hard.
    â€œCoach Benson was a great—”
    â€œâ€”His loss is our gain,” he said, drowning me out. I sat in silence after that while he spouted off about the team and how I could get them to first place because I had “the stuff.”
    The stuff?
    â€œYou know what the three D’s are?”
    â€œNo, sir,” I said. Sir. That’s how guys actually spoke here.
    â€œDiligence, devotion, and dedication,’” he said, dead serious. “Your team is your family. You live with us, you breathe with us, you practice with us, and you give us your all. I demand one hundred percent of you.” He stared at me with a paralyzing look, and I stared back. I figured he had to be totally out of his mind.
    So I made the team.
    And down the line came Lexie Blake. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with her.

Chapter 6
    JILLIAN
    River can’t sit still. He shifts in his seat every which way, eyes fixed on two guys tossing a football, a muscle in his jaw twitching.
    I keep replaying the past.
    Once you met River, you couldn’t not think about him. It was like he had you under his spell, which sounds cheesy and ridiculous, only it wasn’t. It was true. The mop of dirty blond curls against the sharp planes of his tanned face, the disarming stare, his lean strength. I remember talking to Sari and Kelly about how hard the team worked