Chapter 68: Chapter 68: The Day After II
The bus home was quieter.
Everyone was tired now, phones dimmer, the loud one from earlier half asleep against the window. Finn had stopped talking, which felt like a miracle.
Jamie looked out at the streetlights going past and let the day settle on him.
Yesterday, Tranmere had been a badge on a wall and a shirt that felt too heavy. Today it had turned into something else. A group chat. A bus. Lads who teased him. A girl who knew his name now.
It had started to feel less like a club he had signed for and more like a life he was walking into.
He got home, said night to Alan, and checked his bag for the morning without really knowing what to pack for a classroom.
He fell asleep with two different kinds of nerves sitting side by side. The tired kind from football, and the new kind about walking into a room full of strangers and having to say his own name out loud.
Monday morning did not feel like football at all.
The room had plastic chairs and a whiteboard, a smart screen along one wall, and students already sitting in the clumps they always sat in, with the people they already knew.
A few of the academy lads were there. But not all of them, because they got split across different groups, and the ones he knew best were somewhere else.
So he was the new boy again. Second time in a week.
The teacher, a tired-looking woman with a lanyard, checked her list and found his name.
"We’ve got a new starter," she said. "Jamie. He’s on the scholarship programme, with Tranmere. Jamie, tell everyone a bit about yourself and then grab a seat."
The eyes all turned to him at once.
"Erm." His mouth went dry. "I’m Jamie. I play right-back. I, er, just started at Tranmere."
He could not think of an interesting fact to save his life, so he just stopped.
A couple of people nodded. The teacher pointed him to a seat.
And that was when he saw her. Maya, three seats over, chin on her hand, watching him fail at the introduction she had warned him about.
She did not laugh. She just tilted her head slightly, a small told you so, and Jamie felt his shoulders come down half an inch.
At least there was one person in the room who was not a stranger.
The class itself was harder than he’d thought, in a way that had nothing to do with being clever.
It was the switch. His body still thought it was on a pitch, and now he was supposed to sit still, take notes, and listen to dates for assignments that were weeks away.
He wrote things down because everyone else did. He tried not to look lost.
The teacher was practical, not cruel. She talked about deadlines and coursework and said the football staff would be told if anyone fell behind, and Jamie understood, properly, that the shirt came with a whole other job stapled to it.
Tackles and crosses were half of it. This was the other half.
At lunch, Maya showed him around like it was nothing.
"Don’t sit there, that’s where the loud lot go," she said, steering him past a table. "Food’s better if you go for the hot stuff before half twelve, after that it’s dead. And don’t get the science teacher started, he’ll keep you back talking for hours."
He sat with her and a few of the others, and the academy lads from the other groups drifted over too, so it turned into a busy, noisy table rather than anything quiet.
Finn clocked it straight away.
"One day," he said, dropping down opposite. "One day and he already knows someone. Fast worker."
"He knows me because you told everyone his life story at the game house," Maya said, not missing a beat. "Sit down and stop being weird about it."
Finn put his hands up, beaten, and Jamie hid his smile in his drink.
Maya asked him again where he’d come from, and this time Jamie answered a bit more. Not everything. Just a bit more than he had the day before.
The door was opening slowly. He was okay with slowly.
The rest of the week ran together.
Class in the morning, then across to the training ground. Gym work. Video. Recovery. Then home with a bag full of coursework he had never had to think about before.
It was heavy in a way he had not expected. Early alarms. Tired legs sitting still in a classroom, then tired legs asked to sprint through drills an hour later. Coaches watching everything, checking whether the right-back from Saturday showed up again on a wet Wednesday.
By Friday, though, the classroom had stopped feeling like enemy ground. People said his name in the corridor. Someone asked him about the weekend’s game. He was becoming a face, not just a new one.
His phone buzzed once midweek with a text from Garcia.
Garcia: How’s the week going? Keep the routine clean. Talk soon.
Jamie sent back a thumbs up. Alan mentioned the same thing at dinner, that Garcia had said to keep his head down and stay boring, and Jamie almost laughed, because he’d heard that word before.
The football did not let him drift, either.
On the Tuesday, Mercer put the match video up for the group and did not linger on anything nice.
"That worked," he said, freezing the frame on Jamie’s cross for the goal. "Good ball. That’s the standard, not the highlight."
Then he clicked forward to a different moment, one Jamie had half forgotten. A run he’d made in the second half, further up than he should have gone, and behind him a gap where a right-back should have been.
"And that," Mercer said, tapping the screen. "That’s the cost. You go, someone covers. If nobody covers, that’s a goal against you."
He moved on. He did not tell Jamie off. He just left it up there long enough for everyone, and Jamie most of all, to see it.
It was not framed as a mistake. It was framed as the deal. You get to go forward. You pay for it with the space behind.
On Friday, the squad went up for the weekend.
Jamie stood near the back and watched the names go up, and Mercer read his out again.
Right-back. Starting.
The room did not react much, and neither did Jamie, on the outside.
But it hit deeper than the first time. The first start had been a shock and a gift, a chance to surprise people.
This one was different. Now they had seen him. Now the question was not can he do it, it was can he do it again, and that was a heavier thing to carry.
He was not scared of it. But he felt the size of it settle on him, quiet and real.
That evening, Jamie sat on the end of his bed.
The team sheet was a photo on his phone. His bag was open on the floor, the classroom folder inside it with an assignment due Wednesday. And his boots sat by the door, cleaned now, waiting for Saturday.
He looked from one to the other. The shirt, the schoolwork, the boots. All of it pulling at him at once.
By Friday, Jamie had learned one thing Tranmere never said out loud.
Getting the shirt was easy compared to living in it.
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