by Carl Deuker
Coach Quist, a big guy with a beer belly, had us stretch, run wind sprints, hit the blocking dummies, stretch more, run obstacle courses, and hit the dummies more before he finally let wide receivers run pass routes. The quarterbacks, two guys whose names sounded the same—Aiden and Kaiden—took turns flinging the ball downfield to us. After catching Hunter’s passes for weeks, working with Aiden and Kaiden was like trading in a Lamborghini for a junker.
Neither had the arm strength to get the ball down the field or to the sideline. I’d run an out pattern and break into the clear but then have to come back to try to make the catch. That gave the safety time to break up the pass.
There weren’t enough bodies on the freshman team for anyone to play just one position, so Coach Quist stuck me on defense as the nickel back on passing downs. “Play off the receiver and then—once the ball is in the air—break on it. Think interception. Use that speed. Be a game changer.”
He was upbeat, but the parent volunteers seemed bored. During water breaks, I’d look over at the field where varsity practiced. I couldn’t see much, but I saw enough to know that Hunter wasn’t clicking with his receivers—too many of his passes were bounding wildly downfield, and nobody was getting open on deep patterns.
That kept a spark of hope alive in me. Hunter needed to put up big numbers to keep college recruiters interested, which meant he’d need somebody to catch the deep ball. If nobody on the varsity could make the big catch, they’d have to look to the freshman team. Sure I’d screwed up the tryout, but Mr. Gates was still on the sidelines, and I was still the fastest receiver on either squad.
I didn’t see what happened to Richie at school the next Monday, but I heard about it. Everybody heard about it.
He was walking through Suicide Alley, being his normal self—talking loud, telling stupid jokes, laughing his high-pitched laugh. He must not have been looking where he was going, because he plowed into the one person in the school you don’t want to plow into—Hunter Gates.
Bad enough, but instead of apologizing, Richie pointed his finger at Hunter and went into a Hollywood tough cowboy imitation. “This school ain’t big enough for the two of us, pardner.”
I can picture Richie saying it, picture the scowl on his face and hear the craziness in his voice. He meant no harm; he never meant harm. He was always ready to laugh, and he figured everyone else was too.
He was wrong.
Hunter grabbed Richie by his shirt collar and—lifting him off the ground—walked him back to the double doors that led to the faculty parking lot. Hunter kicked the metal bar hard with his foot and the door flew open. Then he threw Richie out the door, like the muscle guys at a nightclub throw out gatecrashers. Richie fell backwards onto the lawn, his books and papers flying out of his backpack and onto the grass. Hunter pointed a finger at him. “You’re right, China Boy. This school isn’t big enough for both of us.”
During warm-ups at football practice after school, guys on the team repeated the story, laughing as they told it. None of them knew Richie’s name, so he was the Chinese kid with the big ears, or the Asian guy with the hair that stuck straight up. They talked about how white his face had gone, how his books and papers had flown everywhere, and how strong Hunter Gates was. “It was like the kid weighed one pound,” Aiden said. “Hunter tossed him out the door like he was a Styrofoam cup.”
The next day, I thought Richie might be hanging his head, or even hiding. If Hunter Gates had come after me, I’d have tried to disappear for a few weeks. But not Richie.
“Over here, quick,” he called out as I stepped into Ms. Ringleman’s room. “Three cheerleaders have been pestering me for your seat. They said, ‘Oh, oh, Handsome Richie. If you let us sit next to you, you can make out with us all through class.’ But I said, ‘No, this desk is for my friend Brock.’” Kids around him laughed, and even Ms. Ringleman smiled.
After class, we headed to the cafeteria. That’s when he finally did change. Hunter was sitting at a table in the middle of the cafeteria, surrounded by his pack of friends. Instead of sitting with the McDermotts and Trevor—who were a couple of tables from Hunter—Richie led me to a spot as far from Hunter as possible. I bought a cheeseburger and fries at the counter. When I returned, he motioned with his head toward Hunter. “Do you know him?”
“Hunter Gates? Everybody knows him. He’s the quarterback of the football team. He was all-league as a freshman, but he was crappy last year. He was always mean, and having a bad season has made him meaner.”
Richie’s eyes dropped. “You heard about yesterday?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“He saw me in the hall today and called me Fang-Face. He told me if I said a word, he’d shove my violin up my butt. How does he know my name? And how does he know I play violin? I don’t get why he hates me. I was just joking.”
“Stay away from him, Richie. In a couple of weeks, he’ll forget about you.”
We both went silent. I ate my cheeseburger while Richie used chopsticks to eat a noodle dish he’d brought from home. “What do you say we go play chess in Mr. Gupta’s room,” he said when we’d finished. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”
We slipped out a side door and headed to Mr. Gupta’s room. Gupta had set out two long tables, one for beginners and the other for advanced players. Richie went to the advanced table and started a game with an Indian kid named Rohan who was in my P.E. class. As soon as the game got going, Richie went back to being Richie.
“What goes ‘Ha ha . . . plop?’” he said in voice that filled the room. He waited a beat, then answered: “A guy laughing his head off.”
Everybody groaned.
I looked over at the beginners’ table and spotted Anya Lin, the girl from Whitman Middle School who’d come in second in the science competition. Anya had dark hair and dark eyes and a smile that made you want to smile back. She wasn’t curvy like girls on hot Internet sites, but she wasn’t skinny, either. The chair across from her was empty.
Her eyes brightened when she saw me, and she motioned for me to move to her table. That’s how it was the first weeks of high school. Everybody was glad to see anyone they knew.
“I didn’t know you played chess,” she said as I sat down across from her.
“I’m basically a total beginner,” I admitted.
“Me too. I’m only doing this because my dad says I’ll need extracurricular activities to get into a top college, and I suck at sports.”
We started a game. My goal was to avoid an idiotic blunder and a humiliating loss. Anya was ahead by one knight as the lunch period neared an end. “How about we call it a draw?” she said, reaching her hand across the table.
“Draw it is,” I said, giving her hand a shake.
She stood. “What’s your next class?”
“General science. How about you?”
“AP Geometry.”
The bell rang, and we were off—me to my regular classes, and Richie and Anya to advanced math, advanced science, advanced everything.
When I got home that night, a big stationary bicycle was taking up half the den. My dad was sitting on it, his legs slowly—so slowly—moving up and down. He stopped pedaling as soon as he saw me, and he forced himself to smile. “What do you think of it?” he asked.
My mom came out from the kitchen. “Isn’t it great?” she said, her voice too cheery.
The blood was pounding in my ears. It was so wrong, all of it, but I couldn’t say it. “It looks like fun,” I managed. “I might use it too.”
My dad’s smile disappeared. “No, Brock, you stay outside in the sunshine.”
We ate dinner, and then I climbed upstairs to my room and logged on to the Internet. I searched “Steinert’s disease and exercise.” I found three articles, and all three said the same thing. Exercise wouldn’t hurt, and there was a slight chance it could help. “If nothing else,” one doctor wrote, “it gives the patient the feeling that he is fighting back.”
The exercise bike wasn’t the onl
y change. When I got home after practice a couple of days later, my dad’s car was gone and a new van was in front of the house in its place. The license plate had an icon of a wheelchair and the letters DP before the numbers. My dad was in the driver’s seat, and a skinny red-haired guy was sitting in the passenger seat, his hand pointing to some control on the dashboard.
I waved to my dad, but he was so focused on whatever the redheaded guy was saying that he didn’t see me. I went into the house.
“Is that Dad’s?” I asked my mom, who was looking out the window at the van.
“Yes. And, Brock, it’s a great thing. A tremendous thing. He can use his hands to brake, his thumb to accelerate.”
I felt sick inside. “Does he really need that? I mean—”
My mother interrupted. “Brock, he needs it. Maybe not today, but soon. Because of that van, he’ll be able to drive for years. But he’s embarrassed about it, so don’t ask him too many questions, okay?”
“I won’t say anything,” I mumbled.
She shook her head. “No, that’s no good. You have to say something. Just be positive.”
The freshman team opened the season with an away game against Woodinville, a city at the northern end of Lake Washington. Both teams had first-game jitters. Guys jumped offside, made false starts, fumbled handoffs, and dropped passes. All the perfect-form tackles disappeared now that the sleds and the dummies were gone. A good tackle meant getting the guy down any way possible.
At halftime the game was scoreless, and it stayed scoreless through the third quarter. Whenever we made a big play, we were sure to follow it with a fumble or a penalty. Woodinville did no better. I ran good routes and got open, but Aiden didn’t throw a single ball my way.
With about four minutes left, though, our running game suddenly clicked. Our running back, Blake Tuckett, sliced through the Woodinville line for gain after gain. We roared down the field, moving from our twenty-seven to their six-yard line. It looked like we’d score easily, but on third-and-goal from the two, one of our linemen jumped offside, changing it to third-and-seven.
Thirty seconds were left in the game. Coach Quist called time out and had us huddle around him. “Eighty-eight slant,” he barked. Then he looked right at me. “Catch the ball, Brock.”
The ref blew his whistle. I trotted onto the field, taking deep breaths. All I had to do was look the ball in, catch it, and get across the goal line, and we’d win.
“Hut! Hut!” Aiden screamed.
I drove forward three steps and made my break over the middle. I was wide open, but where was the ball? I could feel Woodinville’s linebacker bearing down on me. Finally, Aiden released his pass, a wobbly spiral with no zip.
Still, I could have reached out, grabbed it, and fallen into the end zone. Instead, I pulled my arms in and dropped my shoulders, curling up like a scared bug. The Woodinville linebacker got a piece of me, and I went down, but not hard. Aiden’s pass skipped off the turf.
I stood and trotted to the sideline, trying to act as if it had been just a normal incomplete pass. Once we reached our sideline, Aiden yanked off his helmet and glared at me. I moved away from him and looked onto the field. If our kicker, Eli Watts, made the field goal, we’d win the game, and my play would be forgotten.
A twenty-three-yard field goal shouldn’t be a big deal, even on the freshman team. But what happened next was insane. The snap was low. The ball skipped past the holder and bounced crazily downfield. Eli raced after the ball and tried to pick it up but ended up kicking it farther downfield. A Woodinville player scooped it up, and then he was off. He wasn’t the fastest guy in the world, but no one tracked him down. From the Woodinville side, I heard a mixture of laughter and cheering.
“You alligator-armed that pass,” Aiden said, coming over to me, pointing his finger. “You didn’t have the guts to reach out and catch it. This loss is on you.”
“Your pass was late,” I shot back. But on the bus ride back to school, nobody said a word to me.
“How did it go?” my dad asked as soon as I stepped in the door, his eyes bright with expectation.
“We lost seven to zero,” I muttered.
“Did you make any catches?”
“A couple,” I lied. “A curl and a slant.”
Saturday night, the varsity lost to Woodinville 23–0. I didn’t go to the game, but I read about it in the Sunday Seattle Times. There was a small article in the print newspaper, but all the statistics were posted online. Hunter had thrown three interceptions and had fumbled twice. Colton Sparks made three catches but for only twenty yards, and no other receiver had caught more than one. I’d had a horrible game, but knowing that the varsity was terrible made me feel better.
After my drop against Woodinville, Coach Quist demoted me to the second team. That meant my role on offense was to be the deep threat on a team that didn’t have a quarterback who could throw deep.
Because of my speed, I did get some playing time on defense. Whenever our opponent absolutely had to throw, I was in the backfield as a nickel defender. My assignment was to play in the center of the field and knock down any deep throws. Twice in three games I actually did that, chasing down looping passes and slapping them away. Both times, I got pats on the back from the coaches and the other guys on the team. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
As bad as things were going, I still had a tiny bit of hope. At practice, Hunter was throwing the ball great—I could see that from the freshman field—but the timing with his receivers wasn’t there. Colton was the best of the bunch, but he was strictly a short- or medium-pass guy. And since no other receiver had the speed to go deep, defenses were pinching in. Hunter needed a receiver who could stretch the field.
I hadn’t actually seen any of the varsity games. Rory and Tim had been asking me to go with them, but I’d been turning them down. They’d started hanging out with guys who got drunk whenever they got hold of beer or wine, so I never knew whether they were truly going to the game. The last thing I needed was to get caught doing something stupid. I couldn’t ask Richie—he wouldn’t want to sit in the cold and cheer for Hunter Gates. As for asking Anya—I didn’t have the nerve. So I followed Hunter’s season on the Internet, pulling up the stats for every game and poring over them.
His numbers sucked. He was near the bottom of the league in completion percentage, yardage, and touchdown passes. The only thing he led the league in was interceptions.
After the varsity had lost their fourth straight game, I went to Recruits.com to see where he stood. I scanned the list once, then a second time, then a third. One hundred quarterbacks were listed, but Hunter wasn’t one of them.
At the beginning of September, nobody at Crown Hill High knew Richie Fang. Six weeks later, everyone knew him. Every other day, Mr. Spady, the principal, said his name at the top of the morning announcements. Richie took second place in a statewide math contest, first in an architectural design contest, first in a UW violin competition. The guy was a trophy factory.
Some kids congratulated him, bumping knuckles and high-fiving him in the hall. Most kids ignored him. But not Hunter, and not anybody in Hunter’s crowd. The more times Richie’s name came over the intercom, the more they ridiculed him, calling him Fang-Face and Fungus and Fing-a-ling and worse.
Most of the stuff that happened to Richie was invisible to me. But sometimes after Ms. Ringleman’s class, I’d be with him as Hunter and his posse came at us from the opposite direction. Usually Hunter would walk straight at Richie, forcing him to step to the left or right. Whichever way Richie chose, Hunter would go that way too, not letting Richie get by. Finally, Richie would turn sideways, his back pressed against the wall, a lock digging into his spine. Hunter would grin and say, “See you later, Fang.”
And then there was the Twitter post. Somebody took a picture of Richie naked in the locker room one afternoon and then posted it that night on an account called @FangsLittleWang. I never saw it, but I heard about it. Everybody heard abo
ut it.
When kids spotted Richie in the halls the next morning, they snickered. For a while, Richie didn’t know what was going on, but he soon found out. By noon, somebody had told Mr. Spady, and by the end of the school day, Twitter had taken down the post.
The next morning, every homeroom teacher talked about cyberbullying and how it was a crime, and that if anybody knew anything, they should come forward. The teachers were trying to do the right thing, I guess, but all those lectures did was to make it certain that everybody in the school knew about @FangsLittleWang.
I wanted to say Don’t let it bother you to Richie, but that would be so weak. The entire school is saying that you’ve got a little wang, and you’re not supposed to let it bother you?
“In one week, nobody will remember any of this,” I said.
He snorted. “Right. And in two weeks, Hunter Gates will knit me some nice warm mittens for the winter.”
The football season dragged on. Hunter’s stats picked up when he threw a couple of touchdown passes and the varsity team actually won a game, but the next week he threw two interceptions in a loss.
The freshman team wasn’t doing any better, and I was doing nothing at all. In two games, I’d been on the field for only four offensive plays, and I hadn’t had a single pass thrown in my direction. Coach Quist used me as a nickel back a little more often, but not much.
After each game, my dad asked me a couple of questions, and I told some version of the same old lies. “I caught a couple of balls, and I made a tackle on special teams. We’re mainly a running team, though.” He’d smile and say something like “The main thing is to get out there and compete.” And that would be that for a week.
My mom had stopped pestering me about concussions or injuries. For a time, that surprised me, but then I figured it out. She washed my uniform after every game—and most of the time it really didn’t need washing. She knew how little playing time I was seeing.