The sun beats down relentlessly on the field. It’s the last day of practice at camp. You’re exhausted and each one of your limbs feels like it has been replaced with one of the giant sports drink coolers you’re waiting to get to in order to fill up your bottle. Coach Mansz has been remorseless. You made the semis last year, and this is it: it’s your senior year and your last shot at a title, and for Coach, it is his chance to get the boosters and the press off his back after failing to win a championship in any of his first five seasons, something that his predecessor, the legendary A. Morton Lodez, had managed to do fourteen times in his glittering 36-year reign at the top of the sport of Full Contact College Squabbling.
You fill the bottle and start chugging, but as you start to try to catch up to the guys and limp back to the locker room for a plunge in the ice bath, Coach stops you.
“Hey, I know that Chairston was our guy,” he says. “But he’s gone now.” Chairston, who captained the team all three years you had been in the program, had graduated and signed a big contract with the pro leagues. But the wildlife preserve he had chosen to celebrate his hefty contract was the crooked one that had skimped on security measures and he was somehow simultaneously eaten by both a tiger and crocodile. “This is your year now, and I need you to lead this team. Not just on the field, you can do that just fine. I need you to keep these jackheads in line.” As he says that he glances up at your roommate and best friend, Randy Moods.
“OK, skip,” you say. “I won’t let you down.” You know exactly what he means about Moods.
—-----
You get back to your dorm room. Moods is sitting on his bed, idly tossing a ‘quab in the air and catching it. You don’t understand how he manages to have the energy for that since it hurts to move, breathe, and think after Coach made the entire team do 1,500 arm flap drills after Kiggley missed a simple drunkard’s riposte in front of the first mole, but Moods seems geared up.
“Dude,” Moods says. “I’ve got a line on something absolutely nuts.”
You furrow your brow. Moods is a good teammate and a great friend, but he is also the biggest idiot you know who is responsible for almost all the good stories you ever tell and most of the trouble you’ve ever gotten in.
“How can you have a line on anything other than a bed right now?” you ask.
“Dude,” he says. You look at him. “Bro,” he says sheepishly. For the past year, you’ve been making fun of him for saying “dude” all of the time, so he tries to switch it up with “bro” for your benefit. Early experiments in saying “bud” or “amigo” got him jeered by the entire team; an attempt briefly at using “guv’nah” after accidentally showing up to a Victorian novels class was a complete debacle.
“Bro, you’ve got to come with me tonight. It’s senior year, we need to look good. I’ve got this crazy hookup.”
“What are you talking about? I’m beat. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
I met this dude,” Moods says. “Real fancy guy. Actually wearing a top hat, bro. This guy is Reginald “Wump” Marnassasson IV. Loves what we do. Gives a lot of money to the program, in fact he pays a lot of Coach’s salary himself. We got to talking and he owns this whole pants factory. Not just regular pants. Crazy pants. The fanciest stuff, I mean I’m talking about rare pants, bro. And he wants to just give them to us tonight. Because we’re cool.”
You sigh. “First of all, I’m too tired to go chasing after some pants after Coach made us do the puker’s gambit fifteen times. Second, this whole thing sounds sketchy as heck. You know what can happen to us if we get caught with pants? Didn’t Coach talk to us about pants for like three hours?”
“That’s the beauty of it! We won’t get caught! We have a whole system. You see no one is giving us anything. The pants are buried in the woods. We just take this map,” Moods says as he grabs a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, “and we just dig. Who gave us the pants?” Moods makes a puzzled face. “Bro, I don’t know. You don’t know. We just have them.”
“And,” you say, “when we go wear these glittering trousers at all of the finest squabbler parties and someone asks us where we got them, you say…”
He thinks for a second. “We got them at the pants store, dude.”
You think about it. It’s actually not that bad of a plan. There’s no way that Moods came up with this himself, which makes you very suspicious.
“C’mon dude. You in?” He grabs two shovels from under his bed. They’re new. They still have stickers on them from the store.
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