Ashley ✓

Forty-One | The Question

SOTC: Just the Way You Are by Bruno Mars

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After a long ass time switching weight on our legs when we weren't inching our way up the Dutch Bros line in baby steps, Sienna, Fedor, Francesca, and I parted from it with various flavors and whips of iced drinks. It equipped us for yet another long ass line to get our tickets scanned. Finally, though, we entered the stadium with our sugared concoctions reduced to ice cubes diluting the areas that our straws couldn't touch.

And woah.

When I say NFL stadium, I'm talking that there were so many bodies crowding the ascending rows of seats. On each side I found not only every student, but their parents, siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins, second cousins, and their three-times-removed step-cousins. It was everyone everyone.

Somehow through some form of magic, I instantly found Haneen waving to me through the crowd. I waved to her and the one on her lap. That one would be an elated baby with glimmering brown eyes, his ears covered by noise-cancellation headphones. Over text, I learned today that if anyone asked, Xavier was the baby brother of Mustafa Fadahunsi.

"Ashley, do you wanna sit right here?"

I removed my gaze from Haneen to Sienna, who gestured a seat toward the middle of the stadium.

"Yeah, we were thinking about sitting toward the back, but then we decided not to," Francesca left off. "So ya know, in this particular spot, any of of us could get out and down the stairs when the time came!"

"I'm fine with that, yeah," I stated honestly, though rolling in the back of my mind was the memory of Sienna's contradicting statement, 'Don't leave.'

Very interesting.

Anyway, we all sat down and that was that up until a large, bravado-looking man in a black suit and tie literally hop to the center of the court. The large TV screens on each side of the stadium lit up to display the man up close, which was when I saw the microphone pressed against his mouth.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, LET THE GAME BEGIN!" he bellowed.

Screams, shrieks, and any blaring sound known to mankind echoed throughout the stadium by the work of the crowd, and some created a symphony of seat-banging through their clenched fists.

The noise didn't cease as the man proceeded to say the names of the opposing team as they ran onto the court. Every player originating from the high school West was playing today was greeted with good noise from the crowd. The team captain, who I had heard was famous for his recent scholarship at the time, was greeted with increased seat banging.

When the man finished the introduction of the opposing team, he moved onto the basketball players of West High School. Every player on there was greeted with in increase in volume until one came out.

Him.

It's when he ran out in a jersey hugging the bulk of both his arms that I realized the full extent of his fame. Full generations could've gone deaf for years from how the euphoric praise rattled the stadium, and even the man had to take a few tries to settle the crowd.

The game began a few seconds afterward.

Not a second passed in the first half without noise from the crowd as the ball flew west and east, slamming against the grounds of the court when one team managed to keep the ball in their vicinity.

The first score, one made by West High, was met with a surge of cries. Especially from one kid two rows away from us, who launched his full, opened Aqua Purificada into the atmosphere to drench the people behind us. I don't remember if the cops took the kid away from the scene because that's when West scored yet another goal, and the cries from that one drowned out the altercation.