“Byron?!” said Mustang, the mere act of saying his name sounding as though it left a bad taste in his mouth. “Are you serious?!”
“I’m afraid so,” replied Ray, still not relishing the fact it had fallen to him to deliver the news as he plonked his weary body down into the armchair alongside the sofa.
With his bones now feeling as though they were itching inside his skin, Mustang pushed himself up off the sofa and began pacing around the living room, his frustrated footsteps muffled by the thin carpet underfoot.
“But hey, look, I know this isn’t exactly the best news you could’ve heard today,” Ray said, trying to put a positive spin on things as he watched Mustang prowl back and forth like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. “You know, given the somewhat … ‘rocky’ history between you and Byron.”
“That’s putting it lightly,” quipped Mustang, deciding it best to satisfy his urge to busy himself by grabbing his putter from where he’d left it leaning up against the wall after taking a break earlier from reading up on ‘The Six’ by rolling a few putts.
“But …” said Ray, moving quickly to continue with his point before Mustang became too distracted by thinking back on his past encounters with Byron. “Don’t let that take the shine off what happened today. Ok, after only playing your first 18-holes a few months ago, your name was read out on live television today by Dallas Rugger as part of a squad announcement for the Walker Cup. I mean, kid, no matter what way you look at it, that’s an incredible achievement – so don’t let Byron Ballas taint it for ya.”
Having been idly rolling a golf ball underneath the sole of his putter as he was talking, Mustang let out a quiet sigh before knocking it away, one-handed, across the carpet. He knew Ray was right, as he always tended to be with things like this. To go from living in a car to being an alternate for the United States team at the Walker Cup in a little under four months was something he should be proud of. And, deep down, Mustang was. Yet that didn’t change the fact that this was Byron Ballas they were talking about, the guy who’d been actively gunning to take Mustang down ever since he drained that insane putt on 18 the morning he and Ray caddied for him and Truman up at the Creek – nevermind how he probably felt since then going on to be bested by him at the Memorial Matchplay.
And, sure, whilst their exchange on 18 after his birdie putt dropped to hand him the win had been passably civil and not tinged with the same bile as those of their other interactions over the course of that weekend, Mustang still vividly remembered what Byron’s last words to him had been as they stood on that green shaking hands: “I’ll get ya next time”. Of course, amidst the pandemonium that had engulfed the green at the time and, as a result, sent his mind racing so fast it would have broken the sound barrier had it been fitted with wheels, Mustang had just taken what Byron had said to mean he’d “get him” in a golfing context – and perhaps that’s even how he, himself, had meant it too. Now that they’d both made the Walker Cup team, however, a paranoid voice in the back of his mind, one lurking in some dark, hidden recess far from the reach of logic or reason, was making a very compelling argument that maybe – just maybe – Byron had been handed the kind of gilt-edged opportunity he’d been waiting for to finally get his revenge on Mustang. How exactly he’d do that? Well, that’s where the same voice began to get a little sketchy with the details. Either way, though, it had succeeded in planting the seed of doubt in Mustang’s head.
Not that he was going to tell Ray that, of course. He’d only worry.
“Yeah, no, you’re right,” Mustang said, convincingly, as he took to leaning on his putter like he was standing at the side of a green, waiting on his turn to putt. “This is a good thing – regardless of Byron being on the team.”
“Yeah, exactly!” agreed Ray enthusiastically, so relieved at the idea he’d actually gotten through to him that the fact Mustang was only telling him what he wanted to hear went completely over his tired head. “Plus, Byron, more than anybody, knows himself how much of a big deal it is to make the Walker Cup team. Cause when I was talkin’ to Beau after the announcement – after he swore he’d no idea Dallas was thinkin’ of pickin’ Byron for the team, by the way – he told me that Byron’s grandfather, Colton Ballas, actually played in the Walker Cup.”
“Wow, really?” said Mustang, delighted he’d managed to convince Ray he wasn’t racking his brain to try and figure out how Byron might try to get at him. “When?”
“1964 at Baltimore Country Club,” Ray answered, watching as Mustang pulled one of his three remaining golf balls out from where they were bunched up together against the baseboard. “He was even the guy who clinched the Cup for the U.S. on the final day by knockin’ down a 20-foot birdie on 18 in the last match out.”
“He must have been a pretty important part of the team if they sent him out in the bottom match,” pondered Mustang aloud, punctuating his remark by sending the ball he’d pulled out from the baseboard skidding across the carpet with a gentle stroke of his putter.
“That he was,” Ray confirmed, tracking the roll of Mustang’s ball as it slowly came to a stop right up against the first one he’d struck across the living room. “And it’s for that very reason why I don’t think you need to be worryin’ ‘bout Byron.”
“How come?” Mustang asked, drawing another ball out from the baseboard.
“Well, you know as well as I do how badly Byron feels he needs to match what Colton and Truman have done – I mean, you saw it yourself first-hand that mornin’ we caddied for him and Truman, and he had a shot at tyin’ their course record. So, if that’s how intense he gets over just tryna’ shoot 62 at the Creek, can you imagine what he’ll be like at Seminole with the Walker Cup on the line? And against a Great Britain & Ireland team as good as this one is? Trust me, Byron will only be thinkin’ ‘bout one thing and one thing only, and that’s winnin’ – so, I really don’t think you need to be worryin’ ‘bout him … at least, not in this case anyway.”
With another silky smooth stroke, Mustang sent the third ball rolling across the carpet to join the other two, watching as it took the ever-so-subtle break from right-to-left every putt seemed to take en route past the television. After seeing the ball nestle, as planned, right up alongside the other two, though, Mustang stood back up straight and let out the smallest of sighs. Though his first attempt at genuinely getting through to him may have come up a little short of the green, Ray’s second attempt wound up being a dart right at the pin, because Mustang couldn’t help but see the sense in what he’d said – much to the chagrin of that paranoid little voice inside his head who’d been trying to convince him Byron was already deep in the process of plotting some dastardly scheme against him.
“Yeah, I guess …” Mustang said quietly, this time not needing to try and sound convincingly honest. “I mean, this isn’t like the Memorial. We’re gonna be teammates this time. Both going for the same thing. Both wanna win. It wouldn’t make any sense for there to be any bad blood between us – for that week, at any rate.”
Despite his tired body begging him to reconsider, Ray pushed himself out of his armchair and back up onto his feet. “Of course it wouldn’t,” he said, groaning slightly as his back made its discontent with his decision to stop sitting known. “Now, though, I dunno ‘bout you, but I think I’ve just about reached my limit of ‘Ballas Chatter’ for the day. So, given Jeanie is comin’ over in a little while to cook you a special dinner ahead of your first day at school tomorrow – which, now that I come to think about it, was meant to be a surprise, so act accordingly …” Mustang smiled; of all the things Ray was excellent at, ‘keeping secrets’, as he’d discovered, was most certainly not one of them. “I’m gonna go grab a shower real quick, ok?” Ray continued, he, too, smiling at the fact he’d let the cat out of the bag so easily. “But this whole ‘Byron business’ … you are good, right?”
Having had his fill of rolling putts, Mustang began to walk back over towards the wall. “Yeah, I’m good,” he said, leaning the grip of his putter back up against the cream-coloured wall he, himself, had helped paint when they were renovating the house. “I mean, am I still prepared for the fact that, all week, he’s probably going to be calling me ‘My Little Pony’, ‘Seabiscuit’, and whatever other horse references he’s thought of since the Memorial in front of everybody? Sure. But, at the end of the day, we’re gonna be on the same team, so I’m gonna be out there rooting for him – no matter what.”
“Well, that’s very mature of you, kid,” said Ray, sounding genuinely impressed.
With his putter securely in place, Mustang turned back around from the wall and looked across the living room at Ray, the mid-afternoon light being diffused through the opaque net curtain covering the window, suddenly, making the room appear almost hazy. “But if he gets on my nerves too much, though?” he said, a wry smile now breaking across his face. “Well, I’ll just have to remind him what happened the last time he called me all those names!”
*
Early the next morning, the moment Mustang had been increasingly dreading with each passing hour the previous evening finally arrived. And it all started with Ray bursting in through the door of his room at the ungodly hour of 6:15 a.m.
“Alright, kid! Up and at ‘em!” Ray announced, the words all clanging loudly off one another and dragging Mustang awake with as much subtlety as throwing a bucket of water on him would. “First day at school! Let’s go!”
Having taken longer to get to sleep than he would have liked on account of thinking about his first day, Mustang felt as though he’d only been asleep for around ten minutes as he pried open his eyes and took in the, somewhat blurry, sight of Ray bustling across his room towards the window next to his bed. “W-what?!” he groaned, his sleep-deprived brain functioning on just enough emergency power to allow him to speak. “Already?!”
“Yep!” Ray confirmed, grabbing the curtains and pulling them briskly apart, the harsh sound of the metal hooks sliding across the rod grating on Mustang’s nerves. “So, let’s get movin’, huh?!”
After throwing open the window to the still dimly-lit morning outside – the air pouring in, admittedly, feeling refreshingly cool – Ray then grabbed the covers of his bed and yanked them straight off an unsuspecting Mustang.
“Shower, breakfast, and out the door by 0700!” he barked, sounding eerily like the old drill sergeant he had when he first entered the academy.
“I don’t suppose it’s too late to go back to Florida, is it?” Mustang asked dryly, his voice slightly garbled on account of the fact he was still lying face down on his pillow.
“You know what? Let me make some calls and I’ll get back to you,” replied Ray, just as dryly, before walking straight out through the door of the room and carrying on his way to the kitchen to go check on the bacon he’d left frying on the stove.
After Mustang, eventually, pulled himself out of bed and ticked off everything on Ray’s list, the pair of them, right on schedule, were out the door at 7:00 a.m on the dot and climbed into Maisie – St. Nicholas’ Junior High in New Malo, their ultimate destination. Though Mustang had said he wouldn’t mind getting the school bus that passed through Marais des Voleurs as part of its route through the smaller towns and villages orbiting New Malo to pick up those other students going to the same junior high – and even those few remaining students going to the adjoining high-school who’d yet to learn how to drive – Ray had insisted on driving him. Of course, at the time, when Mustang brought the topic up a few days previously, Ray had claimed that it was no trouble to drop him off because he had some errands he needed to run in New Malo anyway, so it would be all the same for him to drive him. Secretly, though, that had been a lie. Ray didn’t have any errands to run in New Malo; in fact, he very rarely needed to make the 30-minute drive there at all.
No, the only reason he’d wanted to drive Mustang himself was because Ray was nervous – more so than even what Mustang actually was. He’d never understood why people he knew with kids would always make such a big deal about their first day at school; thinking to himself it was crazy how they’d make just a few hours apart seem like they were sending their kids off to the frontline in some far-flung, war-torn country, such would be their level of concern. Now that he was experiencing it for himself, however, Ray could finally see where those same people he’d made fun of were coming from.
Would Mustang know how to get around? Would he be able to find his locker? Would he find people to hang out with? Would he be sitting on his own during lunch? Would he get on ok with the teachers? These questions had been all Ray could think about for days. Even after Jeanie’s attempts to reassure him that Mustang would be absolutely fine and he had nothing to worry about, Ray had still found himself going through every worst-case scenario and trying to gameplan for how he’d fix them should they rear their ugly heads. And as he finally pulled Maisie up to the curb in front of the school, letting her engine tick gently over as he drank in the mildly chaotic scene of kids descending on the school from every direction – the fact they were all wearing the exact same uniforms making them look uncannily like an army of clones – those very same questions that had been plaguing Ray, not only returned to being front and centre in his mind but were joined by, at least, a dozen new ones.
“Ok, well … I’ll be in and around here later to pick you up, alright?” Ray said, doing a good job of pushing down his concerns and not having any tension come across in his voice as he split his hands between resting one up on top of the steering wheel and the other on Maisie’s gear stick. “And uh … you have everythin’, right? Lunch money?”
Mustang reached his hand into the chest pocket of his navy blazer – his second least-favourite part of his new uniform behind the tie – and pulled out the neatly folded ten-dollar bill Ray had handed him that morning in-between forkfuls of bacon and eggs. “Right here,” he said calmly, before tucking the money back inside his pocket.
“Ok, good …” said Ray, quietly annoyed with himself at the palpable sense of relief he felt at seeing that Mustang did, indeed, have the money he’d given him. “Well, uh … I guess … have a good day then, alright?”
Seeing Ray lift his right hand from off the gear stick and hold it up for a fist bump, Mustang, just as if they were out on the course, balled up his hand and knocked it against Ray’s. “Will do,” he smiled, sensing the tiniest part of Ray might need some reassurance he was going to be fine even if he, himself, was feeling as nervous as he was when he first walked on the tee the morning he played Wilford Kretschko in the Memorial.
With their version of ‘goodbye’ said, Mustang popped open his door and pushed it out, allowing a flood of noise from outside to pour into Maisie’s cabin. Just after he stepped out onto the street with his brand new backpack in tow, however, before Mustang could close the door, he was stopped in his tracks by Ray leaning across the front of the car. “Actually, kid? Just one more thing.”
“Yeah?” Mustang said, bending at the hip so that he could see back inside Maisie.
“Just remember … if anyone asks?” Ray said, his serious tone, suddenly, turning drier than a mouthful of sand. “You’re Catholic.”
Mustang couldn’t help but laugh. When Ray had first started going about looking for a school to enroll him in once he came to live with him properly, Mustang remembered how, after looking as though the only viable option he’d have would be to send him to the junior high in Copperhead Springs – which, though a perfectly fine school, was a good 90-minutes away and would have seen Mustang needing to get a public bus just in order to get there – Ray went to Beau to see if he could help him out. Sure enough, two days later, Beau came back to Ray saying he’d called the principal of St. Nicholas’, one Father Michael Breen – who, unsurprisingly, was an old friend of his – and, after working some of his ‘LaFleur Magic’, he’d successfully snagged Mustang a place in the notoriously-difficult-to-get-into St. Nick’s. The only condition, however, was that on the off-chance the topic should arise, the party line, as per the instructions Fr. Breen had given Beau, was that Mustang always has been and always will be “as Catholic as back-to-back masses on a Sunday morning.” And while he thought the irony of being asked to lie about being a Catholic was funny, if it meant not having to spend 3-hours a day travelling back and forth to Copperhead Springs on some packed bus, Mustang was all in.
“I’ll make the Pope himself look as though he needs to up his game,” Mustang said, with a wry smile. “See ya later!”
Swinging the door shut, Mustang slung his backpack up over his shoulder and darted around the front of Maisie, giving Ray another quick wave in through the windshield as he moved.
“Yeah …” Ray said quietly, nervously watching as Mustang joined the other students walking towards the intimidatingly large front doors of St. Nicholas’. “See ya later, kid.”
*
Having managed to successfully decode the schedule he’d been handed by one of the five elderly nuns waiting just inside the front doors and then navigate his way through the maze-like hallways that made up the inside of the school – itself, a building that looked as though it had definitely served as a convent or seminary at some point in it’s past, what with the amount of religious iconography crammed into every corner – Mustang walked in through the door of his first class of the day, Homeroom.
Naturally, being the new kid, Mustang was treated to the customary stares from some of the students already sitting inside the classroom; each of them quickly turning to their friends who hadn’t yet seen him on account of having their heads buried in their phones and beginning the all-important hushed investigation to see if anyone knew who he was. Fortunately for Mustang, however, he’d prepared himself for just such an event. Locking his eyes on the vinyl floor beneath his feet, the splashes of primary colours that once adorned it long-since faded after years of industrial-strength bleaching, Mustang hurriedly made his way towards the very back of the room, found the first empty desk he came across, and sat down.
With all the thinking he’d been doing about starting at St. Nick’s, Mustang had decided that his best course of action would be to, as much as possible, keep a low profile for his first week or two until he got a proper ‘lay of the land’. From his own experience back in Florida, any ‘new kids’ who came into his old school were always treated as a novelty – like a zoo getting a brand new panda bear. Like all novelties, though, if you see it enough times, it quickly loses its appeal and becomes just another thing you don’t really pay attention to. And for Mustang? That was a prospect he very much liked the sound of.
DING! DANG! DONG!
Crackling through the intercom attached to the wall above the door, the simple three-note melody, played out on a miniature xylophone, cut through the general din of conversations about summer vacation and TikTok videos blaring through phone speakers just enough to capture everyone’s attention – including Mustang’s.
“Excuse the interruption,” said Ms Kralik, Mustang instantly recognizing the voice of the stern school receptionist he’d met when he came in with Ray a few weeks previously to sign some paperwork; her pinched, wrinkled face sneering across her desk at them making for an unforgettable first impression. “Could Mustang Peyton please come to the Principal’s office? That’s Mustang Peyton to the Principal’s office. Thank you.”
Seeing his plan to keep a low profile go up in smoke before the first bell had even rung, Mustang just let out an amused sigh before pushing back his chair, grabbing his backpack, and making for the door of the classroom.
For those few remaining students who still hadn’t noticed his presence, upon seeing his prompt response to Ms Kralik’s announcement, they now hurriedly joined the others in tracking each and every step it took Mustang to walk out of the classroom and disappear down the hallway in search of the principal’s office.
Because what’s more exciting than a brand new panda bear?
A brand new panda bear with a name like ‘Mustang Peyton’.
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