Julie lay on her side in bed, facing away from the door, with Payton draped over her legs. Her mom had been right, she wasn't nearly cried out, but she had heard some of what her parents had said last night, even though she had pretended to be asleep when her dad came in to check on her. In the morning he came in to let Payton and Jordan out and sat on her bed and told her it was okay if she wanted to stay home today, or even a few days. He looked tired and she thought that he and mom got a little more sleep then she did, but not much. She turned onto her back and thought about how things had gotten to this point.

It had started during halftime of State when Eric had benched JD and put Matt in. Despite Matt and Tim's bringing them to the brink of victory, Joe McCoy was furious and had gone around town and on the radio telling everyone that if JD had stayed In the game, not only would Dillon have won it would have been a blowout. And somewhere along the line Joe had found out a few things which he used to weasel his way to the top of the heap of boosters and to get Eric and Tami fired.

He found out about Buddy's infidelity and that the boosters didn't give a damn about that, partly because a good number of them had been or were just as guilty of being unfaithful in their marriages, and partly because well, that was Buddy being Buddy. He lived life to the fullest and so some excesses were going to happen.

But when Joe found out about a former gang banger named Santiago who had not only been living with Buddy, but Buddy had used his influence to get Santiago on the team at Dillon, well that was going a bit far. And then it came to light that there had been a party at Buddy's apartment with Santiago and all his gang buddies and that Santiago had been arrested and charged with assault and armed robbery and had still been living at Buddy's.

The final blow for Buddy had been the fight he had started at the Landing Strip and the kind of attention that had brought. If it had been a fight at one of the other bars in Dillon everyone would have just shrugged their shoulders, but a strip club? Wasn't the whole point of a strip club to relax a man, to get all that aggression out of him? Did Dillon really want the head of the boosters to be a man who got in fights at strip clubs? That caused more than $50,000 in damage during those fights? Did Dillon want a head booster who harbored a vicious criminal?

Yes, yes, back when he had been a student, Buddy had led the Panthers to a win at State, but that had been, what 25 years ago? Joe had said or insinuated all of these things to various people, boosters and people who were friends of boosters, especially those boosters who were more than a little tired of Buddy having lorded it over them all these years, and having been in their eyes, selfish and very stingy in sharing the benefits and rewards of being a booster.

The fact that Joe had started throwing money around, in amounts that even Buddy had never done, led people to step over to his side of the line. And it hadn't helped Buddy that he had to deal with all of these problems and the major distraction of having Tim Riggins dating or seeing or having sex with his daughter Lyla. But with all of the eyes on him he couldn't do anything except let it happen, which of course led to more jabbering behind his back.

As far as Eric was concerned, in some ways it was easier getting him fired, thanks to Jason Street making an appearance at a booster's breakfast a few weeks after the loss at State. Joe had already been making noises about Eric's decision to bench JD and what Joe thought were horrible play calling decisions, but seeing Jason in his wheelchair, his eyes lit up, though he was very careful not to tip his hand. It was three days later that he had run into a booster and asked him about Jason and got the whole story. Or enough of the story so that Joe could take it and twist it and spin it to his own ends.

Which were that Coach Eric Taylor was a vicious uncaring and cruel man who regularly abused his players at practices and it was Eric's actions, or rather his deliberate and calculated inaction, in refusing to take even 20 minutes to teach Jason Street the proper tackling technique, which were solely and directly responsible for Jason Street's being paralyzed and in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The fact that Jason didn't bear Coach Taylor any ill will and called him at least once a week to talk was immaterial, Jason had sued Eric, a fact which Joe continually pounded home on the radio with Slammin' Sammy Meade and tossed into casual conversations with boosters and non-boosters.

Then there was the matter of the "Bull in the Ring" drill which had been videotaped by a news crew during one of the first practices during Eric's first year as head coach. In the drill, if you could call it that, really it was an out and out savage beating; one player would be singled out and made to stand in the middle of a circle made up of his teammates, who would then take turns running at him at full speed and trying to tackle him. The fact that many players had used this particular occasion to get a few punches and kicks in because Tim Riggins was the player in the middle was a little icing on the cake for Joe as it turned out it had been Riggins who had taken JD to the party where he had gotten drunk last season. So this was retroactive payback, as far as Joe was concerned. It also helped Joe's cause that "Bull in the Ring" had been specifically outlawed by more than 30 state high school athletic associations. The fact that Texas wasn't one of the 30 meant little to Joe; it even helped him as it let him be seen as a crusader for safety as he pledged $5,000 towards a bill to make the drill illegal in Texas.

There was also the matter of Coach Taylor rounding up all of his players at 11:00 PM one night and in the middle of a thunderstorm making the team sprint across a waist high stream and then up an 80 foot high hill over and over and over and over again. Joe hadn't been able to pin down the exact number of times the team had made the run but he had settled on saying "Way more than a dozen."

Tami Taylor, in some ways she had been the easiest to topple. The boosters had never really taken a shine to her, mainly because of the decisions she had made while she was principal at Dillon High School. The whole incident with the Jumbotron was a thorn in the boosters side and not only were they pissed at Tami for freezing the money for it; they were pissed at Buddy for not simply steamrolling over her. After all, she was just the principal and this was football dammit.

There was also the matter of her appearance. No one could deny that Tami Taylor had a fine figure, it was just that….well, Joe would never say that she sometimes dressed like a slut, but as principal of a high school, was it really too much to ask for her to wear a blouse or dress occasionally that didn't show off her cleavage or at least not as much cleavage?

But then, late in the school year it turned out that a student named Becky Sproles had gotten pregnant thanks to Luke Cafferty who happened to be one of Eric's players. It was bad enough that teenagers were promiscuous in places like Los Angeles and New York, but in a small town like Dillon? It was just….outrageous. And it turned out that Becky didn't want to keep the child and put it up for adoption, she wanted to get an abortion, but didn't know how to go about getting one. And instead of going to her counselor at school, Becky had, thanks to Tim Riggins, gone straight to Tami Taylor, who had practically marched arm in arm with her to the women's clinic two towns over and held her hand the entire time that precious innocent child inside of her was murdered and removed from her body and thrown in the trash. Luke's mother being fanatically anti-abortion helped Joe a great deal.

That Tami had simply done what she was allowed to do which was to counsel Becky and not recommend any specific option and when Becky had said, "But….but what if I don't want to keep it," Tami had nodded and said, "Well, I can give you some literature about that," was immaterial and simply muddied up what was a very clear black and white, right and wrong issue.

Of course Joe used this to his advantage, but was afraid that he had overplayed his hand when he heard just how rabid Cafferty's mother was. She wasn't going to be satisfied with Tami being fired. No, that wasn't going to be enough by half. She wanted a public shaming, followed by a public flogging, with actual tarring and feathering capped off with Tami in chains being marched off to prison for the next 20 years.

Eric and Tami were lucky that Buddy was there. Even after being forced out as head of the Dillon boosters, that didn't mean everyone had abandoned him or that no one would listen. He managed though some machinations that he never told the Taylors about to get Eric an interview, not a job but an interview for the head coaching position of the East Dillon high school football team, and also get Tami an interview for a counselors job, also at East Dillon. And thanks to good interviews and Buddy being a former teammate of the principal of East Dillon, both Eric and Tami got the respective positions.

Julie hadn't joined them at East Dillon. She had been told by letter that she had been grouped with those students who would be attending Dillon. Which wasn't the best thing in the world, but at least she would have Landry and Devin as classmates. In fact they had arranged their schedules to have all of their classes together except for band.

Then she found out that Landry and Devin had been assigned to East Dillon. This was not good. But there was some shuffling around and students were allowed to fill out a form asking to be sent to one or the other school if they felt where they were it wasn't a good fit, which had given Eric a rare chance to smile and laugh and say, "Well, isn't high school pretty much about not fitting in and being miserable and picked on?" Her mom had smacked him really hard on the back of the head for that and he's started to say something, but the look she gave him made him grumble under his breath and go back to watching game tape.

So Julie had filled out the form and waited for the letter saying she had been transferred East Dillon. And waited. And then Tami had called, and gotten talk a lot of nonsense, except that maybe Julie should fill out the form once more, you know how things can get lost, paperwork and all that. So another form was filled out and sent off and….nothing until the first week of school when Julie got a letter saying that after careful review she was to attend Dillon high school. By that time she had had 5 tires on her car slashed and been picked up and nearly tossed in a pool by JD McCoy and had started to hear whispers and chatter in the halls and the dread had started to settle over her.

But she still had Matt and it wasn't like Landry and Devin abandoned her entirely. The four of them would hang out at the Alamo Freeze or at practice for Crucifictorius. But Matt started spending more and more time with his mentor Richard Parker and Devin and Landry, well, it wasn't like they faded away, but Landry was actually getting some playing time on the East Dillon team, so he needed to spend more time in the wright room and watching film and….well Julie knew that drill.

She and Devin had had kind of a fun time at the gay bar, at least until Devin had spied her' type' and disappeared with her for two hours. But Devin had always been more Landry's friend than Julie's and well, Julie had pretty much dropped Lois towards the end of the last school year.

Her constant literally drooling over Tim Riggins had just been….urgh it was the only thing she'd talk about. If Julie started talking about a movie, Lois would somehow steer it around to Tim. And Lois had never gotten over the fact that Julie had actually been hugged by Tim and that he had saved her life during that tornado scare two years ago. Julie always rolled her eyes when Lois brought it up, as she made it seem like Tim and Julie had been caught out in the open and he had made her lay down and then covered her with his body. The truth was much less dramatic, and Tim's choice of where to huddle hadn't been the wisest, beneath a shelf of various scissors and Exacto-blades. Julie was very glad that she had never told Lois that Tim had lived in the Taylor's house for a couple of weeks or what had happened to make Tim leave.

The tire slashing's had continued and then the pushing and shoving and tripping at school. She hadn't told her parents about any of that or the slashed tires. Only Matt and Tim had known and only about the slashing's.

And then Matt's dad had died.

And then Matt left.

Now she was all alone over at Dillon, a single gazelle surrounded by more than 2,000 lions.

Bereft.