Losers Take All Read Online Free Page B

was mowing the hospital’s large lawn, while Frank had focused his eyes on a lunch tray on my bedside table that hadn’t been cleared yet. Given my condition, there wasn’t any solid food that he could snag, but there was an uneaten watermelon Jell-O that he was eyeing hungrily. “I didn’t even know hospitals had dentists,” Frank said. “But he did a pretty slick job. Wrapped you up like a Christmas present.”
    â€œOral surgeon,” I tried to say, but it sounded like a frog croaking over a windy swamp. My dislocated jaw had been popped back into place by an oral surgeon, which I think is like a dentist on steroids. I had seen enough dentists, nurses, and oral surgeons in the past two days to last a lifetime. I’d lost track of the number of people who had come into my room, studied my X-rays, and poked around inside my mouth like it was an interesting renovation project.
    A bandage now wound around my head and under my chin to prevent me from opening my mouth too wide. Two of my front teeth had been knocked out, but one of them had been saved and brought to the hospital with me and replanted. Several more had been chipped and cracked and jarred loose, but they had been splinted to healthy teeth and were all somehow still rooted in my gums. I had also been diagnosed with a grade one concussion—the mildest kind, they told me, as if I should be grateful—and I was floating on pain pills.
    â€œDon’t try to talk,” Dylan advised me. “Stick with thumbs-up, thumbs-down. Are there any cute nurses here?” Dylan thought about girls a lot and talked about them as if he were highly experienced, but the truth was that he was almost painfully shy and didn’t have any success with dating in the real world.
    I gave him a thumbs-down.
    â€œHow’s the food?” Frank asked, following up his own main interest.
    Another thumbs-down.
    â€œHe can’t chew food anyway,” Dylan reminded Frank. And then as if on cue they both glanced right at me at the same moment—at my swollen face, bandaged jaw, and splinted teeth.
    Dylan shook his head and said, “Jesus, Jack, didn’t your mom teach you not to play in traffic? What the hell were you doing out there banging bodies with the football meatheads?”
    â€œHe was doing something he should be very proud of,” a deep voice answered from the doorway. I recognized the distinctive rumble of our new principal. Heavy footsteps approached and then he was standing at the foot of my bed, his bald head shiny as a cue ball under the fluorescent lights. “Giving his all for his school.”
    â€œLooks like he gave most of his teeth for his school,” Frank observed. “Anyway, I thought it was just a pickup game.”
    Muhldinger folded his massive arms across his barn door of a chest. “Sometimes when you play hard you get your bell rung. A few months later, you don’t even remember it.”
    â€œThat could be because concussions cause memory loss,” Dylan suggested.
    Muhldinger glared at them, and then he said, “I’m not surprised you two don’t understand. I’ve never seen either one of you put on the school colors. But that will change soon enough. Now, I’d like a word alone with Jack.”
    Dylan rolled his eyes and headed out. Frank hesitated, as if reluctant to leave me with this maniac, but then he, too, left, and Muhldinger pulled the door shut. “I was going to stop by yesterday, but your dad said you were pretty much out of it,” he told me. “You seem much better this morning.”
    I didn’t say anything back. For one thing my mouth was all wired together, and while I was curious why Muhldinger had come, he was just about the last person I wanted to see in my hospital room. So I just lay there on my back looking up at his flat nose that had been broken and reset badly, and his hard black eyes that seemed to flash down and