On the Dotted Line
Devin felt a kick at his foot and cracked one eye open. Hasan stood in his living room, holding his phone up so that Devin could see the screen. He tried to focus on whatever his friend was trying to show him, but the fog of sleep hadn’t quite left his vision yet.
“Wake yo sleepy ass up, bruh,” Hasan said, kicking at his foot again. He flipped his phone in his hand, tapping away as a few notifications pinged. “I come bearin’ good news. For both of us.”
Devin sat back on the sofa, so he was sitting up and rubbed at his eyes. “How’d you even get in here? And I thought you were in Baton Rouge?”
“Boy, Ralph must’ve been workin’ y’all hard last night. It’s Sunday afternoon, nigga. I told you I was only goin’ up there for the one day. This ain’t my first time visitin’ LSU. Everybody knew what the deal was when I got on the campus. And ya mama let me in as she was headin’ out.” Hasan held his phone out again. “Check this shit out, man.”
As Devin took the phone from him, he noticed that a second guy was in the room looking at one of the few shelves of family pictures that the Kings had in their home. Likely the only family pictures that any of the Kings, all three living generations, had.
The boy at the shelf turned around and nodded in Devin’s direction. “What’s up, man?”
“Where did you run into him?” Devin asked Hasan.
“Erik? LSU, nigga, clearly. I ain’t fuckin’ go to Dallas.”
Erik shrugged. “I was in Baton Rouge looking for the apartment that they promised me. They said they’d find it for me, but I don’t trust folks like that. Saw this dude up there and one thing led to another and here I am.”
“For?” Devin asked.
“Just look at the damn phone, bruh, damn.”
Devin sighed and looked down at the phone. A poorly edited graphic announcing Hasan’s verbal commitment to LSU to the social media world was on it. He zoomed in on the jersey and noticed bits of white skin poking out from under the jersey they’d pasted onto Hasan’s body.
Laughing, Devin tossed the phone back to Hasan. “I hope you didn’t fucking pay someone to do that. That shit is horrendous.”
“I tried to tell him that he shouldn’t have paid some random guy in a basement somewhere to do that and just sent it out if he was going to send it out,” Erik said.
“Y’all fuckin’ hatin’. The response you should’ve had was ‘Damn, bro. Big ups to you committin’ to LSU. That’s crazy, man. All love.’” Hasan glanced at the phone and then shoved it into his pocket.
“I mean, congrats on committing to LSU. I’m still going to laugh when you show me something that you paid someone to do and it looks like they did the worst jersey swap I’ve ever seen. They didn’t even bother to clip that off a black guy. AND THEY GAVE YOU NUMBER SEVENTY-FIVE!” Devin got up and walked toward the kitchen, still laughing, with Hasan and Erik following behind him.
Devin grabbed a cup and filled it with water from the tap, leaning against the counter as he drank from it.
“Now that you got your laughs. What you doin’?” Hasan asked.
“Doing about what?”
“Where you goin’ to school, motherfucker.”
Devin shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Boom, I got the decision. LSU. We goin’. You go.”
“I don’t even know him,” Devin said, nodding in Erik’s direction. “And I know I don’t say it a lot, but I don’t really want to sit on the bench for five years while waiting for the chance to play on special teams or something.”
“How you gon’ sit on the bench? You ain’t got no faith in yourself.”
“LSU’s got Tomori Perkins and Austin Williams coming in at corner. Both four stars. They have two sophomores, a junior and three freshmen already in the room. And that’s not counting Mike Stingley if he gets granted another year.”
“That’s just a little competition.”
“Fuck all of that,” Erik said. “Williams is going to decommit. Word is that Alabama got something for his baby mama. I’m guessing a spot somewhere in Tuscaloosa. Stingley’s going to transfer, graduate student. So is Lavallois. He’s already in the portal.”
“Still sounds like the makings of a packed cornerback room to me,” Devin said, shrugging.
“You ever heard of LeBron James?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“I’m just checking. I don’t know you like that. I’m trying to pull some LeBron James type shit and put together my own team. I ain’t getting 22 guys down to Baton Rouge, but I can get five or six for a secondary.”
“The disrespect for the ones who put points on the board,” Hasan said, shaking his head.
Erik waved off the comment. “This is LSU we’re talking about. The reason they’ve been mediocre these last few years is because they started worrying about the ones who put points on the board.”
“This isn’t the NBA we’re talking about. We’re talking about college football. I’m sure Coach Santini up in Baton Rouge has his own ideas about how he chooses who starts and who doesn’t.” Devin put down the glass and rubbed at his temple as he spoke.
“Yeah, we’re talking about college football. And we’re talking about a unit that gave up 379 passing yards a game last year and ain’t looking so hot this year. Why the fuck you think they are trying to get so many defensive backs in? So, this is how I see it. I’ve already committed and signed my paperwork to enroll in January, so I’m in.” Erik held up his hand to count through the names. “Tomori’s from Baton Rouge. He’s not going anywhere else. You got Jaren Thomas at safety from Atlanta, throw in Popeye Anderson from Houston and you. That’s—”
“That nigga real name Popeye?” Hasan asked.
Erik shook his head. “I don’t fucking know. Ask him when he gets to campus. Anyway, that’s five guys. A whole new secondary. Three years, no fly zone. All you have to do is call coach and tell him that you want to come to LSU.”
“I haven’t made a decision yet,” Devin said.
“It’s an easy choice, man. This is DBU. Been DBU for fifty years. We’re DBs. We should be at LSU.”
“I ain’t no pussy cornerback, but I agree with Erik,” Hasan said. “Where else are you gonna go? You ain’t even fucked with any of the schools you visited so far. Just go on and put that verbal in and call it a day.”
Devin nodded slowly before turning around and refilling his glass with water. Taking a sip from the glass, he exhaled dramatically as he squeezed between Hasan and Erik to walk back to the living room.
“We ain’t done talkin’. Where you goin’, bruh?”
“It’s Sunday. What the fuck you think I’m going do?” Devin asked as he plopped down on the couch and turned the Saints game on.
-*****-
“Can I ask you a question?” Kaley reached up to flip the rearview mirror down to check her appearance before heading into Casa Jenkins. Despite her regular appearances there, she was still intimidated just existing inside the opulent home.
Caesar looked up from his phone. “Depends on the question.”
“What do you mean it depends on the question?”
“That it depends on the question,” he said as he grabbed his stuff from the car’s cup holder and swung the door open.
She got out as well and followed him around to the trunk. He held out a pair of grocery bags for her to take.
“Okay, actually I have two questions.” She looked in the bags to make sure what he was handing her wasn’t heavy before taking the bags.
“I hope you aren’t going to keep adding questions to ask without asking them. By the time we get into the house, you’re going to be up to having fifty of the motherfuckers and I’m going to spend the rest of my life answering questions.” He picked up the rest of the bags and shut the trunk before starting up the driveway. He looked over his shoulder. “Are you going to ask your two questions?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but if your family has a personal chef, why do you bother to go buy groceries for yourself? Couldn’t you just wait ‘till, I don’t know, the chef cooks something?”
“I enjoy cooking for myself every so often. Pierre isn’t here twenty-four-seven.”
Kaley nodded and pointed to his friends’ cars that were parked along the driveway. “Okay, don’t you think it’s a little weird that your friends show up at your house and just hang out when you’re not here?”
She waited a moment for him to answer, but he kept walking in silence.
“Caesar?”
He still didn’t answer.
“Caesar!”
“You said you had two questions. You asked two questions,” he said, laughing at his own joke.
Kaley rolled her eyes. “You’re so fucking lame. I don’t know why I’m with you.”
“Because I have a huge dick.”
“Huge compared to what exactly? If you’re comparing it to, say, an ant leg then yeah, I would say it’s huge. If you’re comparing it to a regular man’s dick then I don’t know about all that. In that case, we’d just be insulting other regular sized dicks.”
“It’s not the size of the boat but the motion of the ocean and this dick is the Atlantic, baby,” he said with a wink.
She ignored that comment. “So, about your friends?”
Caesar shrugged as he balanced the bags in one hand to unlock the door and shove it open. “It’s something that we’ve always done. My parents are barely here. No one really cares. I don’t know. It’s just a thing. Who knows? They might come here even after I go off to college. Drive from Mississippi and shit just to hang out by my parents’ pool.”
“It’s weird.”
“Only because you grew up in Slidell and everyone is too hoity toity or hopped up on painkillers to talk to each other so your friends aren’t close enough to you to just show up at your house. And now all your friends are mad at you for breaking up with ol’ boy.”
“Ol’ boy?” She dropped the bags on the counter in the kitchen.
“You take offense to me calling him white trash so I figured that would be a better way to bring up your ex.”
“Caesar! Come here!” Deion Jenkins’ voice boomed across the house, deciding to shout instead of using any number of ways to get his son’s attention that likely would’ve been more effective.
Caesar set his bags down and pointed at Kaley. “Keep your hands out of my Skittles. I have no issues with fighting you over them.”
“No one wants your shit ass Skittles. Go on before he comes looking for you and I have to hide.”
He shook his head. Taking a moment to glance at his phone, he swiped away all the notifications of girls trying to hang out with him and reminding himself that he was a changed man and Kaley was all that he needed.
He found his father in a room that most families of their income bracket would refer to as a study. In the Jenkins’ household, it was just a mostly empty room that Deion used as a makeshift office whenever he wanted to get away from his family – despite the fact they had more than enough fully furnished rooms for him to do that in.
Deion looked up from a laptop and pointed to a tablet next to him. “Sign those documents where they’re highlighted.”
“What are they?”
“Documents that I told you to sign where they are highlighted,” his father said, nodding to the tablet.
Caesar held his hands up and walked over to pick up the tablet. A dozen or so tabs where marked for signatures. He signed his name in the first blank and noticed that it was a contract to engage his father as his agent.
That gave him pause. Enough of a physical pause that Deion noticed.
The man sighed and shoved the laptop aside. “Give me the tablet.”
“Nah, I’m signing it.”
“Give me the damn tablet, boy.”
Caesar handed it over.
Deion swiped through the pages and placed the device back on the table. He pointed to the text on the screen. “You have to make me your agent and give me power of attorney so that I can set up a shell company to manage your image rights. The NCAA’s little loophole on their image rights rules is that no 18-year-old kid more interested in getting his dick sucked by sorority girls than making money is going to know how to manage that and they aren’t going to get rich from selling signatures to Jim Bob at the gas station.”
“Isn’t that against the rules though?”
“It’s not against the rules for the father of an athlete to manage said athlete’s affairs for them so they can focus on their education and playing whatever sport is making that school money.”
Caesar shrugged. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“That’s why you need to trust me that I know what I’m doing and sign it.” The older man picked up the tablet and held it out to his son.
Caesar took it from him and quickly signed all of the spots that were highlighted before placing the tablet back on the table.
“Caesar, make sure you keep family business in the family. Try to think with the head on your shoulders for a change.”
“Alright, dad.”
Deion dismissed him with a wave of his hand. Caesar had been alive long enough to know when he was no longer needed so he left the room, closing the door behind.
When he got back to the kitchen, he noticed the bag that once held his Skittles was now empty. He looked out of the window into the backyard where Kaley, Skittles in hand, was talking to Bentley, Andrew and Jurgen.
Shaking his head, Caesar headed outside.