Page 266 of The Locker Room

eyes. “Do you think I wanted you to know?”

The Locker Room 231

“I wanted to know,” Chris said now, and Xander fidgeted, the

object of everyone"s scrutiny and pity, and finally Xander just glared at

them.

“Look, Leo said be honest, okay?”

Leo patted his shoulder, and Xander wanted to die. “Yeah, kid.

Honesty. You has it. What else were you honest about? Should we see?”

“So, Xander, that sounds horrific. How do you recover from that?”

The man"s glare on television was not nearly as frightening as

Xander would have hoped, watching it. It looked miserable, and

mortified, and irritated—not furious.

“I had Chris and I had basketball. It was all good.”

And so on. She covered Chapel Hill, their deal with the Kings

when Xander could have gone anywhere in the league, and then, the

questions they"d dreaded the most.

“But guys—you"re pro ball players. How could you never be seen

with any women, and have nobody suspect?”

Their expressions on television were like two kids caught sneaking

cookies—except a thousand times worse.

“We were seen with women,” Chris mumbled. “We even slept with

a few of them. It was… it was—”

“We were trying to keep our coach off our back.” Xander stepped

in, to get him off the hook. “He… man, every other word out of the guy"s

mouth is „fag". We were just sort of desperate for him to leave us alone.”

“Well, did it work?” Barbara asked, as though this didn"t shock

her.

“It did,” Xander confessed. “It worked for the whole team. But…

we couldn"t do it anymore. It—” He looked miserably at Chris, who

nodded. “I was getting an ulcer, Chris couldn"t stop drinking. I… one