“Why do I have the feeling you’ve been trying to humiliate me ever since you left the locker room?” Andy sighed.

Cordelia smiled innocently. “What are you talking about?”

“Rolling around on the ground, prancing around on an imaginary pony, impersonating an Indian, talking like a drunken barbarian—it’s like you turned into an idiot!”

“Must be the jersey.”

“That’s a low blow, Cori.”

“If you’re wondering how low I can go, it’s probably not as low as you, short stuff.”

Andy sighed again, looking ahead into the dark cavern of Cordelia’s ear. There wasn’t a lot of wax—at least, not more than the average person—in there, but at his size every clump of wax looked like the goop clinging to the side of a murky cave. His body still secured by the duct tape, he turned his head to the side and could just make out the soft flesh of Cordelia’s cheek and crevices of light through the visor of the helmet.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I get the feeling you’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Humiliating me!”

“Oh, you’re so paranoid,” Cordelia said. But it was true. The running laps part wasn’t too bad; Cordelia was used to jogging for cheerleading practice, but when the football coach called for push-ups, she did the only thing she knew how to do. She dropped down on hands and knees, rather than hands and toes, and push-upped away.

“This year is our year, men,” the coach was saying, pacing back and forth in front of the players, who were too busy counting their push-ups and grunting to pay any attention to his Braveheart speeches. “We may have been the worst team in the division for twenty-three years straight, we may have had more injuries than the Battle of Little Bighorn, we may have been mocked and ridiculed by every sportswriter within a three hundred mile radius, but this… Men, this is our year!”

“Wolves!” they all chanted in unison, except Cordelia, who bellowed it soon afterwards.

“Men,” the coach continued, pounding a fist into his open hand, “we have the other teams right where they want them. They expect us to lose. They expect to strut out onto the field this year, every one of them, and score touchdowns as if they were taking cookies from an old lady. We won’t be the old lady this year! We won’t be baking them any more cookies!”

“Wolves!” they all chanted again. Cordelia was still a bit behind in her delivery.

“This year, we will take out that ‘u’ in chumps and put the ‘a’ back where it belongs!” the coach roared, his voice booming with excitement.  “For you see, men, we have something no other team has!”

“Disability checks?” a stocky senior nicknamed Dan ‘the Ram’ guessed.

“Our own hate-mail column?” his friend Butthead chimed in.

“Freeeeedom!” Brad cried out and then saw the coach glare at him. “Sorry, I was feeling the mood.” He quickly fell back into doing push-ups.

“No, this year we have something new!”

“Talent?” the Ram spoke up again.

“Unavailable school funds can’t buy that, but it can buy you the next best thing!” The coach waved his hand to something out of sight of the rest of the team. “Everybody, I’d like you to meet our new team mascot!”

The water boy, standing behind the coach, made a ghetto drum roll with his tray of drinks as a costumed skunk cartwheeled its way onto the field. It was a small costume, so obviously the person inside was small as well, but it also wasn’t very well-tailored. The skunk’s fur was bare in some spots, as if it had been run over by a semi twenty or thirty times, the eyes were goggley like something a preschooler would glue onto a piece of paper and call it a creature, and the tail was so long and fluffy that when the mascot spun around to face the team, it knocked the water boy over.

“Well, at least it’s an animal this year,” the Ram muttered.

Butthead laughed. “Better than the hot dog from last year!”

“That was a hot dog?”

So that was mustard…” Brad stopped doing push-ups for a moment. “Andy, you owe me ten bucks.”

“What’s going on out there?” Andy whispered into Cordelia’s ear. “I hear my name. Are you humiliating me again?”

“They’re just showing off the new mascot,” Cordelia murmured, struggling through her fifth push-up.

“Please say it’s not a hot dog again.”

“It’s not a hot dog. Now be quiet before the coach realizes we shouldn’t be doing push-ups with our helmets on.”

“He hasn’t noticed that in the past four years…”

“Are you men quite through?” the coach said impatiently.

“Quite,” they all said, except the Ram, who always felt the need to get out the last word.

“I wonder what dork they got to be the mascot this year,” he joked.

The skunk reached off and pulled its head—or rather, her head—off and the face of the raven-haired Ruby appeared underneath.

Brad jumped up and kicked the Ram’s arms out from under him so he did a face-plant into the grass. “Don’t be calling my girl a dork, spud!” He then wrapped his arms around the skunk. “Hey, dollface. I didn’t know you were the skunk.”

“Ugh, neither did I…” the Ram sputtered, spitting out grass.

Ruby beamed. “I wanted to find a way we could be together all the time. I thought this would be perfect.”

“It is perfect,” Brad laughed, picking her up in his arms. “You’re my little pussycat!”

“Rawr,” she giggled, pawing his helmet.

The rest of the football team made puckering sounds with their lips and then laughed when the Ram and Butthead began reenacting a little boy and a little girl who had just fallen in love. Perhaps they did it a little too well.

“What’s going on?” Andy whispered to Cordelia again, leaning further into her ear. It was beginning to get hot in the helmet and Cordelia’s sweat wasn’t helping to cool him down.

“Brad and Ruby are making out,” she said in a hushed voice. “So are Dan and Butthead.”

“Suddenly, I’m glad I’m in here.”

“Want to clean out my ear while you’re there?” Cordelia teased.

“Uh, I think I’ll pass, Cori.”

“Okay, but if you start screaming for help and I can’t hear you because my ear is blocked up, then I guess you’re going to have to just keep on screaming.”

“I have to go,” Ruby said shyly in Brad’s arms. “There’s still a lot more adjustments to be made to the costume. Do you like it?”

“Did you make it yourself?”

“Yes!”

“Then I love it,” he grinned, taking off his helmet and kissing her before setting her back on the ground. She smiled and waved as she walked away.

“I’ve seen toilet-paper Halloween costumes better than that,” the Ram said. Butthead laughed.

The coach spun Brad around and pointed a finger in his glazed eye. “You! You stay away from that pet skunk dame. Women weaken legs!”

“Yeah, but I really like this girl,” he said distantly with a small shrug of his shoulders.

“Then let her train you!”

“Okay, okay,” Brad muttered. “No more fooling around.” He dropped back down in between the Ram and ‘Andy’ and went back to push-ups. “Women weaken legs, huh?”

Cordelia blinked. “That was oddly familiar.”

“ANDY!” the coach suddenly hollered, suddenly appearing in front of Cordelia. “What the hell? I know girly push-ups when I see them! You think you can pull one over me!?”

“You’re the idiot thinking I’m a guy,” Cordelia uttered under her breath, but coughed in order to get the guttural feeling back into her throat. “No, sir!”

 “Then why are your knees touching the ground!?”

“You taught us to find the path of least resistance and go with it,” Cordelia said in that same deep voice, and then added, for effect, “sir!”

The coach stopped and rubbed his gray beard. “I…did teach you guys that, didn’t I? …Alright, good jorb, Andy. I’m glad somebody around here pays attention to what I say.”

Ram snickered. “He said ‘jorb’.”

“Coach Z,” Butthead scoffed. “Hehehe.”