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.Even the coach noticed the difference in the way the team performed; though he didn’t ever say anything directly, he looked at me differently.For Stan the experience was practically life-changing.A lot of the players offered him tips during his workout, complimented him on his efforts, and made small talk of a kind normally reserved for team members.It was the most sustained positive attention Stan had ever gotten from jocks in his life, not counting me, and it was clear that the whole experience was doing wonders for his self-esteem, just as I knew it would.But the workouts were just the beginning.High school society is like a complicated ecosystem, and our interaction with the team changed our relationship to the rest of that system.Sometimes the players hung out with us outside of workouts.Sometimes we had lunch with them before practice.Rapidly our social status soared far above its earlier position.I was used to being something of a loner, except for Stan, and so I didn’t really care…oh, who am I kidding? I loved it, I loved it just as much as Stan did, if only because being part of the football clique gave me times during the week when I could forget about whatever diabolical forces were hiding just out of sight, waiting to pounce on me.Stan liked our changed circumstances for a completely different reason.He put so much effort into running with me and weight training with the football team that it wasn’t long before he started looking more muscular.Not that he was ripped, or anything—that would take months and months, if it happened at all.Not all guys can build muscle that way.But he was clearly getting some definition; his arms and legs looked less like match sticks, and his chest had begun to make his shirts look a little too tight.As if on cue, puberty started giving him some breaks.In just a few weeks, his voice got decidedly less squeaky, and he began a growth spurt that made him seem, if not like a junior, then at least like a sophomore.Imagine my surprise to overhear two cheerleaders talking about “the little cutie,” and then realize that they were talking about Stan!“That’s my boy,” I said to myself, and walked off whistling, not for some magic purpose, but just because I felt like it, something I hadn’t done since I was twelve.As for me, I knew I was much more combat-ready now.I also knew that my rise to social prominence made me a more desirable catch, and that I even had a potential choice of girlfriends.Sure, their attraction might be somewhat superficial.I was, after all, the same person I had been when those girls hadn’t really known I was alive—a little more muscle and a different rung on the social ladder hadn’t changed that—but, when all is said and done, sixteen-year-old guys, with or without memories of a thousand prior lifetimes, aren’t necessarily looking for spiritual fulfillment in a relationship.They are, almost invariably, looking for…oh, let’s just be honest, sex.Now I would like to think that wasn’t all I was looking for—I’m not a complete dog.Nonetheless, I’d be lying if I’d said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.The societies in which my earlier selves had lived had somehow generally avoided trapping people in the weird paradoxes of our society, in which girls are discouraged from having sex and guys are encouraged to have it, by their friends (and sometimes, more covertly, by their fathers) if not by society as a whole.I had always been very careful not to lay that kind of trip on Stan, who had been until just recently too tightly wound anyway.In fact, with his social status changing, I’d actually given him a “wait for the right girl” not-exactly-abstinence-but-pretty-much-the-same-in–the-short-run talk.Stan giggled a little bit over my mixed efforts to give him brotherly advice.I didn’t think he realized how close he was to getting picked up on the female radar, and perhaps it was just as well.I never told him about the cheerleaders.I didn’t want to get his hopes up, or, even worse, make him feel as if he had to do something right away.Like a rock hitting the surface of a pond and sending out ripples, the changes Stan and I were going through affected others as well.My mom gradually stopped looking at me as if she expected me to break into a million pieces.My dad’s transformation was even more gradual, but I couldn’t remember seeing him happier than the day I told him I was thinking about trying out for soccer [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]