Medford, Texas
At the Cooper house, the tie was celebrated as if UCLA represented the state of Texas rather than a university located more than a thousand miles away in Los Angeles.
Especially by Missy and Georgie.
The moment the receiver crossed into the end zone and the officials confirmed the touchdown, both of them jumped off the couch almost at the same time.
"That's it!" they both shouted.
"I can't see!" George complained from behind them.
By that point, his beer was practically finished, and he had gotten completely invested in the game too. During the first half, he had watched the beating with the resignation of someone who was simply waiting for it to end as soon as possible.
But ever since UCLA started making its comeback in the third quarter, his posture had gradually changed.
First, he stopped making resigned comments about how badly the team was playing.
Then he started following every play.
Now he was leaning forward on the couch, staring at the television as if the result could personally affect the following day.
Missy quickly returned to her spot. "I have to sit the same way. It's good luck," she muttered.
Then she glanced at the phone resting on the coffee table, only a few inches from her hand.
She still wasn't going to open Twitter.
She had seen perfectly well all the mockery during the first half. She had a pretty long mental list.
But first they had to win.
She would deal with the internet afterward.
Georgie sat back down too, although he remained practically on the edge of the couch.
George did the same without taking his eyes off the television.
Mandy stared at the scoreboard with an expression of genuine surprise. "They actually tied it..." she said in disbelief.
Half an hour earlier, such a result would have sounded like a joke.
"Well..." Mary commented, "I suppose this proves that you shouldn't lose faith just because things look bad."
Overtime began, and the house fell silent again.
UCLA had the first possession of overtime. They only managed a field goal.
It wasn't ideal.
"Fuck..." Missy muttered.
Mary heard her perfectly. She frowned and turned her head slightly toward her, but this time she decided to let it slide.
Oregon couldn't take much better advantage of its opportunity either.
Field goal.
The tie continued into the second overtime.
This time Oregon went first.
The Ducks' offense came up short again and had to settle for another three points.
Missy clenched a fist and nodded.
Now.
UCLA had the chance to end it. A touchdown and it was over.
And that was exactly what happened.
[TOUCHDOWN UCLA! STEVE RICE INTO THE END ZONE!] Brent shouted on the broadcast.
"FUCK YES!" Missy screamed, immediately jumping off the couch.
"That son of a bitch did it!" Georgie exclaimed with a huge grin, getting to his feet as well.
"Language!" Mary warned.
Although the reprimand lost quite a bit of its authority because of the smile on her face when she looked back at the television.
George had managed to maintain a little more composure.
A little, because he had also given a small hop on the couch when Rice crossed the line.
Now he watched the replay with a slight frown. "That pass..." George murmured. "Was it with his left hand?"
The replay answered for him.
Yes.
He had thrown it with his left.
George stared at the screen for a few seconds, processing it.
He could barely hear what Brent and Kirk were saying about the play.
Mostly because Missy was still celebrating.
She had gone from celebrating the victory to announcing, with far too much happiness, that it was finally time to go back on Twitter and personally collect on every single taunt she had read.
The phone that had been waiting on the coffee table for almost an hour was already back in her hands.
Missy was about to unlock it.
But she stopped.
The broadcast was still showing UCLA's celebration.
Backup players, coaches, and staff members had rushed onto the field. Some were jumping, others were hugging, and several were heading directly toward Andrew or Steve.
The camera stayed there for only a few moments before cutting to Oregon.
The emotional contrast was obvious.
On one side, UCLA looked like it had completely lost its mind.
On the other, several Oregon players stood motionless, still trying to process how a game they had completely controlled had somehow slipped through their fingers.
Then came the stands.
That managed to put a rather satisfied smile on Missy's face.
During the first half, Autzen had been a party.
They had shown fans laughing, celebrating every touchdown, and yelling things toward the field. Missy remembered the sarcastic chants: "Heisman," and also the "Overrated" ones.
Now there was nothing but motionless people.
Some with both hands on their heads.
Others simply staring at the scoreboard with blank expressions.
One man remained standing with his arms crossed while the people around him were already beginning to slowly leave their seats.
Missy enjoyed that shot considerably more than she probably should have.
Then the broadcast changed again.
This time to the visiting section.
The few thousand UCLA fans gathered there looked like a blue island in the middle of a green stadium that had gone almost completely silent.
The camera swept across the section until it stopped for a few seconds on three young women celebrating together.
All three were wearing blue UCLA jerseys with the number 19.
The reason the cameraman had decided to stay on that shot a little longer was fairly obvious.
The first was blonde, lightly tanned, with a huge smile as she raised both arms. She had rolled her jersey up slightly, revealing just a small part of her stomach.
Beside her was a girl with black hair and strikingly light eyes, delicate features, and a beauty that stood out even among the entire crowd.
The third had golden-blonde hair falling in waves over her shoulders, fair skin, and a much more restrained expression than the other two, although the smile she was trying to hide made it quite clear that she was just as excited as they were.
Georgie stared at the screen. "Wow..."
Mandy slowly turned her head toward him and drove an elbow into his ribs.
"Ouch," Georgie muttered, looking away from the television.
He looked at his wife, and upon seeing her expression, decided with a degree of wisdom rarely seen from him that any explanation he could offer would probably only make things worse.
However, neither Missy nor Mary was paying much attention to him.
Both of them were still staring at the television.
The shot of the three girls had lasted only a few seconds before ABC returned to the field, but it had been enough.
Mary slowly turned toward her daughter.
Missy was already looking at her.
"Was that...?" Mary asked, her tone clearly surprised.
"Paige?" Missy finished, somewhere between confused and incredulous.
"What?" George asked. He hadn't been paying attention, but that name did bring back memories he hadn't expected to revisit tonight.
"Paige. The other genius girl who used to live here. The one who knew Sheldon, remember?" Mary said.
"The girl who convinced Missy to steal my truck and drive to Florida when they were thirteen? No, almost slipped my mind," George said with a touch of sarcasm.
Missy made a small grimace. Put that way, it sounded considerably worse.
"I think that was her..." Missy murmured, looking back at the television even though the image had already changed.
It had only been three or four seconds.
But the camera had focused directly on those three girls, and Paige Swanson didn't exactly have one of those faces that was easy to forget.
Especially not for the Cooper family.
Paige had been another one of Medford's oddities.
A girl the same age as Sheldon and Missy who had somehow managed to be intellectually comparable to Sheldon ever since they were little.
For Sheldon, that had immediately made her a rival.
With Missy, it had been different.
She and Paige had gotten along especially well.
Between the ages of ten and thirteen, they had been fairly close. Maybe precisely because Missy had never treated her like an academic curiosity or some kind of freak.
After all, she had grown up alongside Sheldon Cooper.
To Missy, Paige was simply Paige.
A fun girl, strange sometimes, very smart, but next to Sheldon, pretty normal.
They probably would have remained friends for much longer.
If Florida hadn't happened.
When they were thirteen, Paige had managed to convince her to take George's truck and run away to Florida.
The idea had been terrible.
Of course, at thirteen, it hadn't seemed quite so terrible.
They didn't get very far.
The police found them before that brilliant teenage adventure had the chance to turn into something considerably worse.
After that, Mary and George decided Paige was a bad influence and forbade Missy from seeing her anymore.
The ban only worked to a certain extent.
Medford wasn't exactly New York.
It was hard to live in the same town and not run into each other every now and then.
Missy still saw her occasionally at a store, walking down some street, or with her mother. But they barely spoke anymore.
Besides, they had never gone to the same school.
Paige had graduated from high school at only eleven, so even though they were exactly the same age, they had never been classmates or had that daily obligation to see each other that normally kept teenage friendships alive.
Missy frowned slightly.
Now that she thought about it...
It had been quite a while since she'd seen Paige around Medford.
Of course, Missy didn't spend as much time there as she used to either.
Since starting college, she came home maybe two weekends a month.
Even so, she couldn't remember running into Paige even once since September.
She tried to remember the last time.
'July...?' she thought, then mentally nodded.
After that, nothing.
Missy looked back toward the television, although the broadcast had already returned to the field.
Did she move to California?
Is she studying at UCLA?
Did she finally go back to college?
That would explain why she had disappeared from Medford. But even then, that wasn't what stood out the most.
Because Paige hadn't simply appeared in California. She was in Eugene. At a UCLA away game. And she was wearing a blue jersey with Andrew's number 19 on it.
Missy narrowed her eyes slightly. Now she had a lot more questions than she had a few seconds ago.
She unlocked her phone, but she didn't go to Twitter. That could wait. She opened Facebook and searched through her friends for Paige.
They still had each other added. Not because they talked.
In fact, Missy couldn't remember exchanging a single message with her through Facebook.
She opened the profile and noticed it was practically dead.
48 friends.
A profile picture that didn't even show Paige, just some landscape.
The cover photo was a night sky full of stars. There were no recent posts. No new pictures.
No status updates.
Nothing that gave any indication of what she had been doing over the past few months.
For a moment, she thought this wasn't going to help her at all. Then she opened Paige's friends list, and she didn't even have to search very far.
Among the first names Facebook showed her was one she would recognize anywhere.
Andrew Pritchett-Tucker.
Missy's finger hovered over the screen.
'No way,' Missy thought, and tapped the profile.
Facebook worked a little differently when it came to celebrities.
Andrew still technically had a personal profile, but it had been a long time since the overwhelming majority of people could simply add him and expect him to accept.
There was a friend limit, and with millions of people interested in following him, his profile allowed anyone to subscribe to his public posts without actually becoming his friend.
That was exactly what Missy did.
She followed him.
Just like hundreds of thousands of other people. That was why she recognized the profile immediately.
The same picture and the same name.
The public posts she had seen before and the link to his YouTube channel.
It was him. Not a fan account. Not some other guy with the same name.
The original Andrew.
Missy went back to Paige's profile for a moment. Then she saw the small line that confirmed it completely.
Paige Swanson and Andrew Pritchett-Tucker are friends.
Missy went completely still.
One thing was Paige studying at UCLA. She could understand that.
Another was her traveling all the way to Oregon to watch a game.
Maybe she had friends who were fans of the team, or maybe she was dating someone who followed UCLA.
But this was different. Paige didn't simply follow Andrew.
Andrew had personally added her.
Among millions of followers and a limited number of people who could be on his actual friends list, Paige was there.
Missy looked at the name again, 'How the hell does Paige know Andrew?'
The player she had been following since Mater Dei.
Apparently, Paige knew him personally.
Missy felt a rather uncomfortable mixture of surprise, curiosity, and a small amount of irrational indignation.
Since when?
She went back to Paige's profile and opened the messages. She stared at the empty space for a few seconds.
It had been years. She couldn't just show up out of nowhere asking: How do you know Andrew Pritchett-Tucker?
So she wrote something much more normal: Hi, how are you?
And sent it.
"Everything okay?" Mary asked.
Missy's head snapped up. Her mother was looking at her, "Yeah."
"Did you find anything about Paige?" Mary asked curiously.
George and Georgie were listening too.
Missy lowered her phone slightly. "No. Nothing," she said, shaking her head.
Mary raised an eyebrow.
Missy quickly downplayed it. "I'm not even completely sure that was her. The camera showed her for like three seconds."
Mary seemed to accept the explanation and turned back toward the television.
Missy discreetly let out a breath. She had no intention of telling her yet.
Her mother had never exactly regained a good opinion of Paige after what had happened with the truck.
She probably wouldn't like the idea that Missy had just gotten back in touch with her for the first time in years.
After the interviews and final replays, the broadcast finally came to an end at around 10:05 at night in Texas.
George got up from the couch shortly afterward.
It was poker night.
Mary let out a faint huff.
It wasn't exactly her favorite activity. She had never liked the idea of gambling money very much, although over time she had come to accept George's home poker games as long as they stayed within certain limits.
No staying up too late, and no turning the basement into a casino.
Just a few friends, beer, cards, and a few dollars changing hands.
She could tolerate that.
Georgie and Mandy also started getting ready to leave.
Meemaw had been watching the little girl while they spent the evening there, and it was time to head back.
A while later, the basement was occupied by six men sitting around a table.
Cole was among them.
George couldn't help giving him a peculiar look when he sat down across from him. One loaded with a meaning that only he fully understood.
He said nothing. Not with everyone else around. But it was difficult to look at Cole that night without thinking about the kid they had just spent four hours watching on television.
The biological son Cole had given up for adoption years ago.
The same kid George had been following since high school without knowing for much of that time that, technically, he occasionally sat down to play poker with his real father.
The conversation inevitably ended up turning to the game.
There was no way it wouldn't.
Several of them had watched it.
Others had already heard about the comeback.
George, being a high school coach and probably the person in the room who understood football the best, ended up talking considerably more than he had expected.
There were things that were difficult to ignore.
Eighteen years old, seven touchdowns, more than 500 yards, the biggest comeback in NCAA history, and that final left-handed pass while he was being taken down.
The praise was almost unanimous.
Almost.
"Johnny Football is still better," one of the men commented as he arranged his cards.
Cole snorted.
George did too. His came out considerably louder.
Several pairs of eyes immediately turned toward him.
"Johnny Manziel is damn good, but he's not better than Pritchett-Tucker," George said.
"Agreed," Cole nodded.
The man who had defended Manziel looked up from his cards. "Why?"
George adjusted his chips with one hand. "Look, Ralph. I could talk to you about statistics. Andrew has more passing yards, a better touchdown-to-interception ratio, and overall better numbers as a passer. That's the easy argument. The one everybody uses."
Ralph gestured for him to continue.
"But forget the numbers for a second. Look at the arm. He can throw deep without having to set his feet perfectly. He can do it on the move. He can throw from different angles. And he's what, six-three, six-four? He's already got the size scouts want in a professional quarterback."
George picked up his beer and vaguely pointed it toward Ralph with it. "Then you watch him run, make people miss, change direction, and he doesn't seem to have any obvious weakness there either."
Ralph immediately shook his head. "You can't say he runs better than Manziel."
That, he was willing to argue.
He could concede that Andrew was taller, more disciplined from the pocket, and much closer to the prototype NFL teams drooled over.
But as a runner...
"Fine," George admitted. "I'll give you that one. Manziel has shown more as a pure runner. More rushing touchdowns, maybe better instincts when everything breaks down. Point for Johnny."
Ralph smiled, satisfied.
"But that's one point. What about everything else? Arm. Size. Reads. Pocket. Accuracy. Deep ball," George listed on his fingers.
Ralph's smile faded a little.
No one could argue with him.
"And you know what impressed me the most today?" George added.
Ralph remained silent.
Another man, still studying his cards, asked, "What?"
George tapped his temple with one finger. "This."
There was a brief silence.
"He didn't fall apart," George continued. "That first half would've broken a lot of players. Especially a freshman. You're down thirty-seven, you start thinking you have to get it all back in one play. You force throws. You try to do too much. You make one stupid mistake, then another. He didn't."
"You're getting old," Ralph said. "Now you prefer the boring quarterback."
George burst out laughing. "Boring? Did you see the last play? He's getting taken down, switches the ball from his right hand to his left, and throws left-handed. Name me another college quarterback right now you think could do that with the game on the line. Manziel. Klein. Whoever you want."
This time, no one answered.
George spread his hands slightly. "Exactly."
A bald man sitting next to Ralph smiled. "Since when do you defend a California kid this much?"
"It's because of Missy," Ralph said immediately. "The girl's in love with the quarterback from Los Angeles."
Several of them laughed.
George rolled his eyes. "Georgie likes him too, which is starting to worry me a whole lot more."
That drew an even louder laugh.
"Well, then we know what's going on in your house," one of them said. "The whole Cooper family turned into Bruins fans."
George made a face. He couldn't entirely deny it.
Although technically, they weren't UCLA fans. They were more like Andrew fans.
If he transferred to another team tomorrow, Missy and Georgie would probably start watching that team instead.
Before he could say it, another man set his cards down on the table. "My son's obsessed with him too."
George raised an eyebrow. "Tommy?" he asked, remembering the eleven-year-old boy.
"Yeah. He's got every Pritchett jersey. Palisades, Mater Dei, and now UCLA," the man nodded. "Last week I told him Manziel was better and he looked at me like I'd insulted his mother."
The table erupted in laughter.
"Kid's got good judgment," George said with a crooked smile.
Another man joined in. "My nephew follows him too. Watches his videos even during Sunday dinner. My sister's already sick of hearing that kid's voice around the house."
Ralph looked around the table, growing less pleased by the second. "What the hell is going on with the kids in this state?"
In theory, they should have been rooting for Johnny Manziel.
It was Texas A&M.
He was one of their own.
If the season continued the way it had so far, he could become the first freshman in the history of college football to win the Heisman.
The fact that he was Texan on top of that should have been more than enough to turn him into a source of statewide pride.
And yet, an uncomfortably large number of kids seemed more interested in a quarterback from California.
George smiled.
That was precisely what was strange about it.
Missy and Georgie weren't isolated cases.
Andrew had managed something fairly unusual for a player based in California: he had young fans right in the middle of Texas who not only followed him, but defended him with almost personal loyalty. And it wasn't just Texas. It was every other state too.
Part of it was football, his numbers, and his talent.
But another part of it went further back.
Back to YouTube.
A lot of those kids hadn't discovered Andrew when he got to college.
They had been following him for years.
Although, privately, the comment about Andrew being a California kid still carried a certain irony.
'Not entirely,' George thought.
His eyes drifted briefly toward Cole.
At least by blood, that California phenomenon had a lot more Texas in him than anyone around the table realized.
Past midnight, the game finally came to an end.
One by one, the men gathered their things, said their goodbyes, and headed home.
All except Cole.
George ended up walking him out to the front yard.
The night was cool and quiet, especially after several hours of voices, laughter, and football arguments inside the basement.
Cole lit a cigarette.
George stood beside him with his hands in his pockets.
For a few seconds, neither of them said anything.
Until George finally said it, "Your son is an anomaly."
Cole turned his head slightly. "Caleb?"
"You know perfectly well which one I mean. Though Caleb's good too," George replied.
It wasn't an empty compliment.
Caleb was fifteen and in his second year of high school. As a freshman, he had managed to make George's team as the backup quarterback, which was already fairly unusual for someone his age.
That season, he had taken another step forward.
There was still a senior ahead of him, but George had started dividing the snaps between them much more evenly. Caleb was no longer simply the young kid waiting for his turn; he was actually playing, and if he kept developing, the job would probably be entirely his the following year.
He had talent.
It was just...
George wasn't going to say it out loud in front of his father.
He wasn't Andrew.
Not remotely.
That wasn't an insult to Caleb.
Of all the current high school quarterbacks, none of them were at the level Andrew had shown during his final two years at Mater Dei.
Not even the ones considered five-star prospects.
George looked up at the dark street. Sometimes he couldn't help imagining it. What would have happened if Andrew had grown up there?
If Cole hadn't given him up for adoption.
If that kid had gone to Medford High.
Then George would have been the one coaching him. The idea still seemed crazy.
They probably would have won everything. Not just the district. Everything that was available.
If he stayed all four seasons, every title they could possibly win. Stadiums filling up just to watch him.
Scouts showing up every week.
ESPN sending cameras to Medford.
Maybe even some documentary about the little Texas town that, through some impossible statistical accident, had produced the best quarterback prospect anyone could remember seeing.
Although George also knew the story would have been different.
Los Angeles was Los Angeles.
The market was much bigger, the opponents more recognizable, and there was media everywhere.
Medford might have been in Texas, but it was still a small town.
It probably couldn't have given him the same exposure.
Cole exhaled smoke, "You're not exactly the best person to tell me my son is an anomaly," he commented.
George raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I'm not?"
"I still remember Sheldon Cooper pretty damn well."
George immediately grimaced.
Yeah.
Sheldon tended to leave that kind of impression on people.
"He's already working on his second doctorate, right?" Cole asked.
George nodded. "Yeah."
Saying it still felt strange.
Sheldon had earned his first Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at sixteen.
George still wasn't entirely sure he understood how any of that worked.
He could look at a football player, recognize his talent, and understand why every university was fighting over him.
But the kind of things Sheldon did were much harder for him to comprehend.
Now he was writing the dissertation for a second doctorate, and although George would never truly understand that world, he was proud.
Sometimes he even found it funny to think that, if they were talking about anomalies, Sheldon could probably compete in the same category as Andrew, or maybe he was even stranger.
They were completely different kinds of talent.
Cole let out a small laugh as he took another drag from his cigarette, "Medford has a statistically suspicious tendency to produce weird people."
"What?" George murmured, pulled out of his thoughts.
"Think about it," Cole said.
George didn't need long: Sheldon, Paige, and Andrew.
Even if the last one had never actually lived there. If things had gone differently, Andrew could have grown up on those exact same streets.
For a small town in the middle of Texas, Medford had somehow ended up connected to an almost unbelievable number of exceptional people.
George remained silent for a few seconds before looking at Cole. "Are you going to contact him?"
Cole's expression shifted slightly.
The light tone from a moment ago disappeared.
George more or less knew what his plan had been from the beginning.
It wasn't simply about showing up in Andrew's life and saying, I'm your father.
Cole mainly wanted to tell him about his biological mother.
He wanted Andrew to know who she had been and that she hadn't abandoned him because she didn't want him.
She had died giving birth.
However complicated Cole's decision to give him up for adoption had been afterward, that part of the story shouldn't stay buried forever.
"I don't know," Cole said. "My idea was to let him finish the season in peace. I don't want to show up now, out of nowhere, in the middle of all this and tell him, 'Hi, I'm your biological father. By the way, there are a whole lot of things about your mother you never knew, and I need to tell you about them.'"
George nodded slowly.
It made sense.
Andrew was already living under enough pressure without adding that on top of it.
"UCLA already has six wins. They're definitely going to a bowl. So the season could last until early January," George commented.
Cole nodded. "I know."
He stared at the cigarette for a few seconds. Then he let out a humorless laugh. "Although every week that passes makes it look worse."
George raised an eyebrow. "Worse?"
Cole looked at him.
"Think about it from the outside. A guy gives his son up for adoption. Eighteen years later, that son turns out to be a celebrity, has millions of people following him, and looks like he's on his way to becoming one of the best players in the country. Then the biological father suddenly shows up saying he wants to meet him," Cole replied.
George understood immediately.
"It sounds exactly like the kind of asshole who abandons a kid and comes back when he finds out the kid became famous," Cole added.
George didn't answer right away. Without context, it was true.
"And if he wins the Heisman..." George said after a few seconds.
"It'll look even worse," Cole finished.
Waiting until the season ended was probably the right thing to do.
But if Andrew ended up winning the Heisman as a freshman, Cole would be trying to approach him right after his son had become an even bigger figure.
There was no perfect time.
"Stop overthinking it and just do it. Explain why you waited. Just tell him the truth and leave it at that," George said, shaking his head.
Cole slowly nodded. "That's what I'll do after January. I'll find a way to contact his parents first. I'm not going to just show up in front of him."
There were a few seconds of silence.
Then George thought of another fairly obvious part of the problem, "And are you going to tell your family?"
"I have to," Cole replied. "Caleb is going to be a headache."
Caleb was already an Andrew fan.
He had gone with Missy and her friends when Andrew made his official visit to Texas A&M.
And then his father was going to sit down in front of him and explain that Andrew Pritchett-Tucker was his half-brother.
George couldn't help a small smile. "That's going to be interesting."
"Don't use that word," Cole said, closing his eyes for a moment.
They said goodbye right there.
George watched him walk away down the street before heading back toward the house.
The night had ended with a historic comeback, an argument about quarterbacks, and the confirmation that, sometime over the next few months, an entire family could change forever.
…
In Oregon, Andrew's night was still far from over.
After the game-winning touchdown, he'd barely had time to catch his breath.
First came the celebration on the field.
Then they grabbed him for a quick interview in front of the cameras, still sweaty, still in uniform, with teammates passing behind him and yelling whatever came to mind whenever they spotted a microphone nearby.
Then came the locker room.
The coaches' speech.
More celebrating.
A shower, and finally, once he managed to put on clean clothes and leave the stadium, he got on the bus with the rest of the team.
They stopped by the hotel first to pick up their bags, which they had already left mostly packed before heading to the stadium, and from there they went straight to Eugene Airport.
At around 9:45 at night, UCLA's charter took off for Los Angeles.
The little over two-hour flight didn't feel much like the usual trip home after a game.
Normally there was always some degree of order. Players going over plays. A coach talking with a group.
Tablets turned on.
Comments about mistakes they would have to fix the next day.
That night, nobody seemed interested in turning the plane into an extension of the film room.
The coaches didn't make much of an effort to try, either.
They had earned it.
The charter felt more like a private party thirty thousand feet in the air than the return flight of a college football team.
There was laughter coming from practically every row.
Andrew, for his part, was exhausted. But it was one of those pleasant kinds of exhaustion.
Even so, sleeping was practically impossible with the atmosphere inside the plane, and he didn't really feel like trying anyway.
For one night, he could simply enjoy it.
The plane landed in Los Angeles shortly before midnight.
Then came getting off, collecting the bags, transportation, and the final ride home.
By the time Andrew finally walked through the front door of his parents' house, it was around 12:40 in the morning.
The entire family was still awake and gathered there.
Cam was the first to reach him.
"My baby!"
Andrew barely had time to open his arms before Cam wrapped him in a hug and, to his surprise, even lifted him off the floor for a couple of seconds.
'Baby...?' Andrew thought, amused.
"Dad..."
"Thirty-seven points," Cam said, setting him back down.
Mitch appeared behind him. "Let him breathe."
Although immediately afterward, he did exactly the same thing and hugged him for several seconds.
From there, it was practically a line.
Phil.
Claire.
Gloria.
Haley.
Even Alex hugged him without anyone having to ask her to, something Andrew immediately registered given her usual almost military defense of her personal space.
Manny too.
Luke first tried that teenage version of a masculine handshake, as if a hug would be too emotional.
It lasted approximately half a second before he ended up hugging Andrew anyway, excitedly asking him how the hell he had made that final pass.
Andrew smiled.
One by one.
Until finally, only Jay was left.
Andrew stopped in front of his grandfather.
Jay remained standing there, watching him with that hard-to-read expression he had worn for as long as Andrew could remember.
A slight smile appeared on Andrew's face, "So..."
Jay held his gaze for a few more seconds. Finally, he spoke, "Come here."
The entire facade disappeared.
He pulled Andrew toward him and gave him a tight hug, accompanied by several equally hard pats on the back.
Andrew let out a small laugh and returned it the same way.
"Good job," Jay murmured.
"Thanks," Andrew said with a small smile.
After that, everyone went back to the living room.
For almost half an hour, the game once again became the only topic of conversation.
But this time Andrew got to hear how they had experienced it.
They went on like that for almost thirty minutes before Andrew glanced at his phone.
Haley noticed the movement. She seemed to have been waiting for exactly that. She stood up, "Ready?"
Claire immediately lifted her head. Mom mode activated without any transition, "Where are you going?"
Andrew had no intention of lying either. "A fraternity party. I'm guessing it's probably insane after the comeback. Steve, Leonard, and the others are already there."
Jay made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Go. You earned it. Enjoy yourself while you've got hundreds of college students willing to tell you how wonderful you are."
Haley smiled immediately. "Thanks, Grandpa!"
Jay turned his head toward her. "I wasn't talking to you."
Andrew let out a small laugh and stood up. Then he looked toward Claire, "I'll keep an eye on the kid."
Haley turned toward him. "Excuse me?"
Claire, on the other hand, looked considerably more relaxed. She trusted Andrew in that regard.
She knew perfectly well that he wasn't the kind of person who went to a party intending to drink until he forgot his own name. In fact, if there was anyone his age she could trust to keep a clear head in the middle of a college party, it was probably him and Leonard.
"Thanks," Claire said with a nod.
"I don't need him watching me!" Haley protested. "I live on my own. I'm in college."
Andrew was already walking toward the door. "Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Come on."
Haley made a face and followed him.
They said goodbye to the rest of the family, and the two of them finally stepped out into the Los Angeles night.
Andrew had been awake since early that morning, had just played one of the most brutal games of his life, and his body was starting to make sure he knew it.
But that night UCLA had just completed the biggest comeback in college football history.
Sleep could wait a little longer.
As he walked toward the car, Andrew glanced at his phone one more time.
[Paige: Sam forced me to come to a party. I think half of UCLA is here. Steve, Leonard, and Howard are already here]
[Paige: Are you coming?]
Andrew replied that he was and put his phone away.
The idea of going to that party suddenly seemed considerably less exhausting.
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