Inexcusable by Chris Lynch

aggressive, scary, fun, cool, tense, mean, privileged, confident, unpredictable, unsurprising, lazy with bursts of superhuman antisocial energy. And blond. White blond. They looked like a couple of big Swedish farm boys. They filled a room.
    Usually.
    â€œHey guys,” I said, letting go of Ken to go shake hands.
    â€œYo, Keir,” Bam said warmly, “good to see you. I was hoping you’d make it.”
    â€œGood to see you, Keir,” Cory said, offering me a handshake like a fistful of warm rigatoni.
    The whole room was like this. Cool. I went around the semicircle of football players as if it were a reception line for the president’s birthday party.
    â€œJames,” I said, nodding at James, our lanky and beautiful wide receiver with the great legs but the hands of stone. James spent the year blazing around the field, looking like a threat, catching very few passes but looking fab doing it.
    â€œArthur, Phil, Jon-Jon,” I said to our pudgy pack of defensive linemen. I realized our players were even good enough to have arranged themselves by position, as if there were some chart someplace that instructed offensive players to hang with offensive players, defensive with defensive, with our fearless leader Quarterback Ken there to stir the ingredients as necessary.
    I was special teams. It is just a saying. It is just a term, and a kind of stupid term to boot, in that glorious way only sports can be that stupid. But momentarily, it had meaning for me. I was a kicker, the kicker, neither offense nor defense, untethered, unaligned, unmarked. I could go where I wished, mingle as I wished, do exactly whatever I wished.
    Kicker not cornerback. I was never a cornerback, really.
    As I stood mutely with my associates and homes of the last few years, the music thudded along the floorboards, up through my shoes and into my bones from all the other places in the house where people were acting like there was a party going on.
    â€œHey,” Ken said as he came up behind me and slipped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed me once more.But it was a warm squeeze this time, a soft and gentle squeeze.
    â€œHey,” I said back, turning to catch his face right in mine. “No parents, huh?”
    He giggled, sort of distractedly, as if somebody in a far corner of the room had said something.
    â€œNo,” he said, “no parents.”
    â€œNo parents,” James said with a similar giggle, and they all appeared to take this as a cue to disperse. A few guys spread out over the generous expanse of the Quarterback Ken family bed. A couple more went to hang precariously by a wide-open window, while one or two more seemed to merely hug the walls looking for plaster cracks.
    Ken started guiding me toward the dresser.
    â€œYa,” he said, his head brushing alongside mine as he nodded, “that’s their graduation present to me. They cleared out. I have until Monday, free-range, full amnesty, no questions asked as long as nobody gets injured, nothing gets broken, and no authorities arrive on the premises. Or if any of that does happen, it’s covered up by the time they’re back.”
    He was giggling again by the time he had finished speaking and we had reached the highly polished cherry-wood top of the dresser and its great big mirror staring us in the faces.
    Quarterback Ken’s face had a strange, lopsided, unrecognizable smile, like he had had a stroke but that itwasn’t an unpleasant thing. My face, I was shocked to find, looked shocked.
    â€œWhat is this?” I asked, looking down at the silver tray.
    â€œWhat do you think it is?” he asked.
    â€œI wouldn’t know,” I said.
    â€œOh, I think maybe you would know.”
    â€œI think I don’t.”
    â€œWould you like to know?”
    â€œWell, Ken, that’s why I asked in the first place. To know.”
    â€œNo, no,” he said, dramatically undraping his arm from me so he could bend