Effortless

Twenty

The crowd erupted with cheers, and some of the people in the stands stood up and pumped their fits in excitement. Others yelled at the tops of their lungs, saying things like 'That's right, boys!' and 'Hell yeah!'.

The adults in the town loved high school football; it was the highlight of the year. It was such a big deal that they would tailgate the games regardless of whether or not they had children playing for the team. Originally I was under the impression that people only tailgated college football games, but I was wrong. The citizens of this town had nothing better to do with their lives than to get overly excited over high school football.

My friends and I decided to go to the game that Friday. We didn't go to every football game because we found that we had a better time hanging at each other's houses over watching boys run into each other with full force. However, we needed to change the routine every now and again.

Justin came along too. I should've known he would and I should have been used to him being around but I wasn't. I wasn't happy about it and I apparently wasn't doing a great job at hiding it.

"Why did he have to come?" I complained in a whisper to Ricky as we were walking toward the bleachers. Kailey, Bella, and Justin were walking ahead of us having their own conversation.

"Who, Justin?" Ricky asked me as if he didn't already know the answer to his ridiculous question.

I nodded. "Yeah, I think I've made it clear how much I don't like him. I figured he would have found some other people to harass by now."

Ricky glanced at me before looking down at the grass as we walked. He hesitated before giving his opinion. "No offense, but if we isolated ourselves from every person that you don't like, we'd have no other friends."

"That's not true!" I raised my voice a little higher than I intended to. Just because someone says 'no offense' doesn't mean that it isn't offensive.

It wasn't true. The only people I didn't like were Justin, Diane, my aunt, some of my teachers, a lot of my classmates, and the randoms who didn't like me. Oh, plus Javier. Though, I was starting to dislike him less than the others.

Okay, so maybe that was a lot of people.

"I think that you should try to be friendlier." Ricky suggested. "Sometimes you can be a little...what's the word?"

He was waiting on me to fill in the blank but I stayed silent. I wanted to hear what he had to say.

"Nevermind." He said as he shook his head. "You're a cool person to be around, Eli. At least I think so. You should show other people that."

I was about to tell him that that wouldn't happen anytime soon when a football hit me in my head. It didn't hurt because it was one of those soft footballs that children play with, but it caught me off guard. There was a group of kids playing in a patch of grass next to the bleachers and one of them threw the ball too far.

I rubbed my forehead with one hand as I picked up the ball with the other. The group of kids looked to be between ten and twelve years old. One of them raised his hand up for me to throw the ball back while the others stared.

Apparently none of the kids thought that it would be best to apologize to the stranger they hit in the head. The ball wasn't hard and it wasn't thrown very fast, but it still hit me square in the head. If I had wanted to, I could have been petty and took the ball for myself. Luckily for the kids I was in a decent mood.

I had a couple of beers before coming to the game. It took a lot more than what I drank for me to feel anywhere near drunk, so no one could tell that I had drunk anything in the first place. I was walking normal for the most part and I could think straight. It wasn't like I was doing anything wrong. Plenty of people pregamed for football games, right?