“Fine, but don’t come crying to me when all the ladies are asking about my pants,” Moods says.
You feel bad leaving him on this goose chase, but you also feel overwhelmingly tired and immediately fall asleep.
The next day, the alarm shrieks at 6:00AM. Moods isn’t there. The shovel isn’t either. He never came home. You were planning on sleeping in, but you can’t now. You walk to the forest, but you don’t remember the map and end up wandering for hours before you give up and come back to the room. Someone had been back. Moods’s stuff, or at least whatever could be hastily packed, is gone. Dannus Brumpp, your team’s left gobbler, sticks his head in the room.
“There you are,” he says. Team meeting in ten.”
There was no team meeting today. We were supposed to be done. You can hear your teammates grumbling as you all make their way to the Malter “Muge” Crusth Squabbling Facility but your stomach is dragging behind you like an anchor. You know it’s about Moods.
You find a seat. Coach Mansz paces around at the front of the room. Even at his most calm, Coach tends to rest at a light baseline pink but today his face and neck are flushed to medium rare.
“Siddown,” he growls. “Sit. Sit! Listen up. I wanted you to hear this from me first. Your starting mid bellower Randy Moods is out. Done.” He hits the whiteboard. “They caught him with pants. In the middle of a field. What did I say? What did I say about pants?”
“Listen up because I’m only going to say this once. We play as a team, we look out for each other as a team. We’’ll play this year without Moods and dagnambit we’re going to win without Moods. But this is on all of you. You let him down. You let yourselves down. You let me down.”
He glowered at each of them and then turned away. He couldn’t even tell them to geddouddahere, how he ended every meeting.
You start to slink away when you hear him call for you softly.
“He’s your roommate,” Coach says. “I asked you to look out for him. We all know Moods is a jackhead. I love that kid like a son, but he’d lose the floor if you told him not to look down. He needed you and you let him down. I don’t know if you knew about this or didn’t, but this is on you. This one’s on you.”
“I’m sorry, Coach,” you say. “I’m sorry.”
Later that day, you hear from Moods. He’s sobbing. “You were right, bro” he says. “You were right. This NCAA investigator guy was waiting for me. There wasn’t even a booster.”
“What are you going to do?” you say.
“I’m gonna go see the world,” he says. He already enrolled in balloon school.
Every once in awhile, you hear about Moods, but you never see him or talk to him again. He doesn’t talk to anyone from the school after the incident. You just look up in the sky hoping to see that balloon knowing he’s still out there.
The End
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