By now the Meat Grinder has probably been banned, tossed on the dogpile of high school football history as a cruel and unproductive anachronism, a relic of the better-forgotten days when “walk it off” was a cautious, conservative concussion protocol…

Heath secretly hated weekends. They were when he felt most alone, even abandoned, when Vanessa’s implacable choices loomed the starkest, and his own mewling acceptance echoed in the emptiness of her shadow…

For most, it takes a few hard collisions of sunny idealism and cold bewilderment to first see the truth, and usually an accumulation of injustices and embarrassments before we understand how things really are…