Thomas Kent watches the movie in which the lawyer shows the home film-recording of the assassination of the president, including a shot of a massive explosion of red out the side of the president’s head, an image that had been edited out of that same footage shown on the television, and Thomas thinks back to Waldron, remembering that there was no blood, no blood at all

As a boy of four Thomas Kent watched when the car pulled up to the house that was for sale next door, and in the middle of the bright, yellow day—it was hot, Thomas remembered—two figures emerged, one of whom was tall and the other of whom was Roger Dinkens, the one his father had mentioned earlier that week and who Thomas had been excited to see, but he was now nervous about it, so that when Thomas’s father came out and said, “That’s the boy. Why don’t you go meet him?” Thomas looked at his father with wide eyes and shook his head desperately, to which his father responded “Suit yourself,” and went off, leaving Thomas to look back at the two black figures getting out of the car and going up to the house, before disappearing inside, and over the next few months Thomas would watch that sight, of one or the other or both of the Dinkenses entering or leaving the house, always from that anxious distance, unable to find the nerve to go up to the boy and say anything, until his first day of nursery school, when the young black boy came up to him first, and said, “I’m Roja,” and Thomas started crying and crying and ran to the other side of the room, where the nursery school teacher cradled him until he stopped, and when he looked up, he saw another boy, a taller blond boy, in front of the smaller black boy, and the smaller black boy saying, “I’m Roja,” and the taller blond boy saying, “I’m Fiwl”

but he would get his second chance later on that year when the nursery school teacher paired them up to make a picture and while all of the pictures that the other children made were of things in some sort of childish harmony, Roger Dinkens and Thomas Kent drew two armies, on either side of the page, and the only words they said to each other were what the different parts of their armies were, and while Roger thought this was amusing Thomas thought it wasn’t, but he wanted to do it anyway, and for some reason when the picture was finished he wanted the nursery school teacher to cut it in half so he could keep what he had drawn, and only what he had drawn, but the teacher wouldn’t let him and for the rest of the day Thomas in silent revenge wouldn’t do anything he was told to do, preferring to sulk in his chair until the teacher told him that she would talk to his mother if this continued and Thomas finally starting doing as he was told

but this didn’t last long because in kindergarten his father switched him over to Samson College, a private school, whereas Thomas knew that Roger was going to Garvey Elementary because that was a public school and the Dinkenses were poor

so the only sights Thomas had of Roger for a long time after were from a distance, sometimes inside his own house, and sometimes from across the park, until one day there was a game of dodgeball that one of the older kids had started up in that park when both Roger and Thomas were there, and Roger ran out to play with them, and he was not quite but almost as good at throwing the ball as the older kids, and Thomas watched for a long time before he went over and played with them too, because even though he didn’t ask they acted as though he was part of the game anyway, and after a few minutes Thomas got hit by one of the older boys and had to sit down until a ball would come his way and he could stand up again and even run around again if he hit somebody, but instead of getting a ball to come his way he had to wait for nearly three minutes which to him, as a five-year-old, was an eternity, until Roger got the ball and rolled it his way, and Thomas took it, and he looked around at a kid to hit, but he couldn’t see any, and remembering a trick that he had seen one of the other kids try—double-crossing the kid, who in misplaced generosity had given him the ball, by hitting that exact same kid back—Thomas threw the ball at Roger and hit him squarely on the nose, and Roger put his hand to his face, and smiled, and sat down in a pretend huff, and Thomas watched as Roger waited and waited but nobody ever threw him the ball, not even Thomas because he didn’t want to give up the ball and then have Roger hit him back at this point, or, even worse, not hit him back

and the next time Thomas saw Roger the taller blond boy named Phil was with him and the two played together in the sand with small metal cars which Phil had brought with him in a plastic bag with holes in it which the rough metal edges of the cars had cut open, and Thomas watched them play together from a distance

where he would watch for a long time, even when the metal cars in the sand became a soccer ball with goals made out of dirt patches in the park, and Phil and Roger would take shots at each other, which led to regular arguments about the validity of a goal that had gone directly over one of the dirt patches, and in the end Roger came up with a new point system to account for the ambiguous goals

and then soccer was replaced with climbing trees

and then climbing trees was replaced with a football, and as Thomas watched from the side of the park—he was nine at this point and didn’t have any friends at school—he saw two boys who couldn’t throw a spiral to save their lives, but who threw the ball anyway up until they could sort of get one, and soon enough after enough practice they threw better spirals than boys who were going to high school soon, where there were official football teams from schools all over Hellespont and British Columbia even, and while that was still several years off for Phil and Roger they practiced anyway, and not just passes but long snaps and passing routes and punts and even trick catches

and Thomas continued to attend Samson year after year, with a tie a starched shit and stiff blazer that smothered him all day while he was surrounded by kids all day whose ignorance of his existence smothered him even more, so that one day he went to his mother and father and said, “I don’t want to go to Samson anymore, Dad,” to which both his father and father looked up with some surprise, and after a long talk they agreed that Thomas would stick it out until high school at which point he could go anywhere he chose, and when after two more long years the time did come he chose East Hellespont High, knowing that Phil and Roger would be there

except that he wasn’t Roger anymore, he was Blue

because Phil wasn’t Phil anymore either but Sneakers Phil, and whenever Thomas saw either one of them catch a touchdown in the park it was for the other to yell “Touchdown, Blue!” or “Touchdown, Sneakers Phil!” just as the commentators on the television did for the college games, and while Phil changed from Sneakers Phil to Sneakers to Crazylegs to Blondy to Blondboy, for Roger it was always Blue

and when he went to East Hellespont High which the kids called just East High Thomas found out what it was like to be in a classroom not only with no tie and blazer but all of a sudden with girls

and it took some time getting used to the girls

but in the meantime there was also sports, and while most of them were too young or too clumsy as they got used to their pubertous bodies to play on the midget football team Blue was allowed to practice with them in the first year, and when it came to the following year all the kids in their grade, including Susan McNally, one of the many girls Thomas spent a lot of his time looking at, were talking about the boy who called himself Blue who was going to be starting with the midget football team that year, and while Phil, who had now gone back to just Phil, was also going to be on it they didn’t talk about him, because while Phil was going to be a second-string offensive lineman for most of the year, Blue had a lock on starting at wide receiver

and he played all right, and Thomas watched the games from a distance, including the first touchdown pass he caught and the second and the third and the fourth

and even though the team didn’t win much with Blue, Thomas as he watched began to feel a yearning to compete himself, and after a long winter, in the spring came rugby, for which there was a bantam team, but only for the city sevens tournament, and Thomas took a chance and tried out for that team and made it, but only as one of the players who sits on the sidelines and watches, while Phil and Blue were named captains because they had played the previous year, and while the East High bantam rugby team that got sent to the sevens tournament that year included all three of them, only Phil and Blue played in the games, which was just as well because Thomas watched, thankful to be at a safe distance, as they got destroyed by Samson in the semifinal

and it continued that way the next year, football in the fall, rugby in the spring, except that with each passing game Blue became more and more of a celebrity so that Thomas, who up until tenth grade had never been in any of Blue’s classes because this was the sort of high school with enough students for that sort of thing to happen, still heard about Blue all day by the people who talked about him in seemingly reverent tones, saying things like, “Did you see the two touchdowns he caught?” or “Did you see the four tries he scored on Newton High?” until it got to the point that the kids would actually follow his football or his rugby teams to the away games to watch him play

and Thomas didn’t quite know what to do when, on the first day of classes after the winter break, in advanced geometry, he turned around and saw Blue sitting behind him, because even though they had grown up around each other and Thomas had known Blue back when he was just Roger, they had never talked since Thomas got switched after nursery school, except for the one time Roger said, “Heah” and threw him the dodgeball which Thomas subsequently took and hit him with, which Thomas didn’t want to remember, and even though they had practiced together on the rugby field it always seemed like Blue was off playing his own game in the pitch, and everyone else was just the ornamentation required to keep it a rugby game instead of a one-man show

and when Blue tapped him on the back, smiled, and passed him the pile of photocopied assignments, saying, “Here,” his voice was much deeper than Thomas thought it would have been

and of course Blue by this point had also discovered girls, because there was Susan McNally who had talked about Blue to the others as though he crap gold, and when the two finally started going out their relationship was something akin to broadcast news, with Thomas hearing all the stories, of their first date together, of their first slow dance together at the East High Spring Formal, which wasn’t really a formal but more of a semiformal, their first private kiss, their first public kiss, the first try he scored with her in the stands, watching and cheering, their first make-out session in which clothes had come off, and the first time they had sex, which was discussed in scandalous whispers, and was when they were still in grade ten—an age which, in Hellespont, was young as hell—and the details were known to everybody too, that they did when his father was out of town, it in the rain on the back porch

the back porch that Blue had built with his father, which in order to build it he apparently had to take off immediately following an all-star football game in Vancouver, notable because it was after that game when—Thomas had overheard a couple of players on the team saying after gym class—players were being approached by the college scouts from the States, and even though Blue was too young to be thinking about college, still being only in grade ten at this point, apparently one of the scouts had asked about the skinny black kid who had caught one touchdown pass and intercepted another on defence, because Blue was playing both sides of the ball at this point, and the only thing he had done faster than run his patterns that day was take off to go build that porch, that back porch that Thomas had seen Mr. Dinkens look at after it was done with a certain disbelief, because even though he was a carpenter and his father and grandfather had been carpenters, Thomas’s mother said at the dinner table one night, this was the first time, Mr. Dinkens had told her, that a Dinkens had a porch for his own house

and Thomas thought about going up to Mr. Dinkens and telling him what Blue had done on that porch

but he didn’t, and instead continued to watch as Blue tore up the rugby field that spring, and then the football field that fall, going once more to the all-star game at the end of the season and having to miss a chance at talking to the scouts again, Thomas heard again in the locker rooms, because this time he had to go help his father do some work inside someone else’s house, and then not only did he tear up the rugby field again the following spring he also entered the grade eleven mathematics competition and placed in the top five, just ahead of Thomas

and he tore up the football field again that fall, even though people were wondering if he would play as well without Susan McNally around who, as one rumour had it, had changed schools over to some small town just outside of Edmonton, and who, as another rumour had it, had already found a boyfriend over there

but of course, because this was Blue, he played well anyway, and this time at the all-star game the scouts didn’t let him get away, and as one of the boys—Phil himself this time—said in the locker room that spring when Blue wasn’t around for a rugby practice, he was being offered by a couple of American prep schools a couple of partial scholarships to be an every-down cornerback, which as it happened was the reason why he wasn’t in the locker room that day, because he was gone for a week for some ambiguous reason that, as rumour had it, also had to do with those scouts

and that week Thomas Kent, who had been starting at winger for the last two years, but who had never had the opportunity to score because on a mediocre high school rugby team the ball routinely gets lost somewhere in the centres, was moved in a series of adjustments to inside-centre in order to accommodate the absence of Blue, and he played well, scoring a try for the first time

and it was after the game, when Phil came up to congratulate him, that Thomas learned that Blue and Phil had been playing rugby for some time now for a club for grownups as well as for East Side High, and he was invited by Phil to go along, where he could play with adults instead of just the kids, where one of those adults was Evans Ferguson, their coach

and Thomas didn’t know what to say, so he said yes, but when he went to the tryouts to give it a shot, he found that while he was at least competent with the high school team he was completely outclassed with the Lions, where it seemed that every practice he was taking a licking and making an idiotic spectacle of himself, even though the others told him he was playing all right

and during the games he sat on the sideline, watching Blue playing wing, his position

and they graduated and Thomas decided to take the year off but was persuaded to keep playing rugby by Evans, who said that substitutes are very important to the team, so he stayed, and even though he had missed a few events in his time off like initiation and the sevens tournament, it was all right because he heard all about it whenever they came back and said what Blue had done that was so wonderful this time, and he went and drank at the clubhouse even though he often drank alone, walking around, looking at things like the Rookie of the Year plaque with Blue’s name on it or the Waldron tournament team with Blue in the middle, and for the rest of that season Thomas watched from the sidelines as Blue played the wing position better than Thomas ever did, saying nothing about it because there was nothing that he could say, and while things got better somewhat and he scored that try in the championship game the following year, they didn’t get all that better because everyone gave the credit of that try to Griffith Elford, who got his name put onto the plaque right next to Blue’s, and then there was the decent playing he was doing that summer both at the sevens tournament and at the Waldron tournament,

except when Blue decided all of a sudden he was more important than the team and cost them that game against Waldron so it all was really his fault, his fault, Blue’s fault and not Thomas’s

because if Blue had scored that try then they wouldn’t have had to play Waldron again the following day in the semifinal, because there were three teams tied at two wins and the Barbarians had the most points, so the Barbarians got first place and the top seed in the playoffs the following day, and if Blue had scored that try then the Lions would have won, and with the three wins would have been in first place, and then Waldron could have lost in the semifinals to the Barbarians because they hadn’t beaten West Hellespont once in the past two years, and then the Lions could have beaten the University of Hellespont and then it would have been the East Side against West Side and maybe he could have done something to help the Lions win that nobody could take away from him this time

but no it was Blue’s fault (not his) that they had to play Waldron, Blue’s fault that Thomas had been out there and trying to do his best against the bigger Waldron players who, even though they were unskilled, could still lay a licking on you, Blue’s fault that the ball came out to the wing in that one play early in the game the following morning and it was Blue’s own goddamned fault for looping around to support Thomas on the play and it was Blue’s fault when Thomas in a panic threw a hospital pass way up in the air so that he wouldn’t get hit by the two Waldron players who were coming down on him, and it was Blue’s fault when he went for the ball, and it was Blue’s fault for not seeing the third Waldron player who was waiting for that precise moment, and it was Blue’s fault and not his that the player went and high-tackled Blue and the shoulder met Blue’s face hard and Blue fell to the ground and didn’t move except that Thomas kept waiting for him to move because his eyes were open but he didn’t move and Thomas knew that the neck was snapped even before the paramedics came and told him about it and it was Blue’s fault except it wasn’t

it was his fault, his fault, Thomas’s fault

and when Thomas Kent sees the picture of the princess’s car after the accident, and on each of the following days after that when he sees her face when she was alive, and pretty, and loved, he knows that all of those pictures are being shown of her when she was alive because it wouldn’t be good to see her dead, and Thomas can’t help but wish he could see all of Blue’s pictures from before, dodging tackles in the newspapers, standing in the middle of the team in the photos inside the rugby club, or smiling in the yearbooks, so he won’t have think about the one sight of Blue he can’t forget, his mouth closed and his eyes open, lying dead on the pitch.