Free Away Running by David Wright Page B

we are.”
    “Here we are,” I said.
    “Well, how about this: what if you and me go both ways?”
    I didn’t follow him.
    “I played running back till my junior year,” he said. “I got mad skills. And you’ll train with the defense, so you can go in on D. That is, if you ain’t afraid to come up and hit a body.”
    “Ha! I played safety two years in high school.”
    “That way,” he went on, “the half when you can’t play QB anymore, you go in on defense...”
    I finally got it. “And since we can’t be on the field together, you boost the offense.” It was smart—a great idea. And he didn’t even know our heads were on the chopping block. “I bet it’ll fly with the team too.”
    “Get two full games out of us instead of just one and a half,” he said. “If we do that and avoid the M&M s, we be clean as gasoline. Whoop Jets butt, Mousquetaires, all of them.”
    “The M&M s?”
    “Mental mistakes,” he said.
    I couldn’t help myself; I cracked up. “Right, of course, Mister Cheap Shot to the Chin, Fucking Al-Qaida Motherfucker!”
    Even he had to smile at that. Then he got quiet.
    “This is okay, you know,” he said.
    “This losing?”
    “Not the losing—of course not that,” he said. “But this .” He pointed toward the floor of the train. “Being here. Back home, Coach tells you when to pee and how to hold your willy. That’s all you ever know—what you’re told. Here, it’s like we got some say in it.”
    He’d hit the nail on the head. It was what had made me leave home: so I’d have some say in what I did with my life.
    We got off at Cité Universitaire. Across from the Parc Montsouris was a bakery. Freeman stopped. “I’ve got to bring something,” he said, dropping his bulky bag in the middle of the sidewalk for me to watch over. “Can’t show up to your cousin’s empty-handed. I’m suave like that.”
    He pronounced it swah-VAY.
    Through the window I watched him survey all the selections in the glass case. He came back out carrying a box.
    “Fruit tart.” He frowned. “That mess is expensive!”
    “The cost of being suave.” I pronounced it like him, but he didn’t laugh.

MATT
    Juliette had insisted I invite Freeman to dinner because, as my “surrogate mom” (her words, not mine), she said she was responsible for me and needed to know who I was spending time with. But also Juliette could be kind of starchy. She was twenty-five, and since coming over two years ago to do a dissertation on literary feminism of the 1950s, it was like she was more French than the real French. Anyone who didn’t have the appropriate credentials was suspect.
    I knocked to make sure we didn’t barge in on her getting dressed or anything. “Jules, this is Freeman,” I said when she opened the door. “Freeman, Juliette.”
    “Come in,” she said in English. “Welcome.”
    Freeman handed her the tart.
    “Thank you very amicably for the invitation,” he croaked. Her English is spot-on, as good as mine, and I had told him so, but he kept going back to his overly formal, very guttural French. And he was struggling. “Mathieu speaks very amicably of you,” he said.
    Amicably again. Swah-VAY.
    Jules chuckled. “It’s only because he can’t afford not to.”
    He and I sat on the couch (my bed) while she went into the kitchen to check on dinner. We were silent, kind of awkward. Since Jules’s pad had only one bedroom, my room was the living room—it was also the dining and TV room. Freeman had told me his host father was a captain of industry or something, so Juliette’s place must have seemed like a closet to him. These tiny Paris apartments were quaint when it was just you and your cousin, out in the world, making it on your own, but having another North American there made it seem like what it really was: former maid’s quarters, with drafty windows and three people on top of one another.
    “I’ll be right back,” I told him, and I slipped into the shower closet,