by Tim Green
Jasmine’s lip curled right up off her teeth and she froze. “What are these people doing here? Take your hands off that.”
Jackson’s hand dropped from the face of the strange animal he’d been poking.
My father’s second wife held her chin high and directed her anger at Hamhock.
Even the all-bluff-and-bluster GM didn’t seem able to hold up under her hard stare. His sunburned neck went from red to purple and he blinked, but he didn’t look away.
“Uh, well . . . ma’am.” He scratched his purple neck. “We were just showing Ryan and his mom around a bit. He is gonna be running the show, ma’am. All due respect.”
Dillon recovered his wits and he too now stared at me with the kind of hatred you saved for someone who kicked a puppy.
His mom let out a harsh harrumph, like she knew something we didn’t, before looking back over her shoulder through the open door.
Mr. Dietrich entered the room and seemed surprised to see me.
“Ahh . . . hello.” He walked toward us but pulled up short of a possible handshake with anyone. He wore the kind of Popsicle-red pants you’d see old men golf in, with a lime-green and blue-plaid shirt that showed off his tan. He wore loafers with no socks and a white tennis sweater draped over his shoulders and tied around his neck.
“Actually,” Jasmine sneered, “I’m glad we’re all here. I’ve been busy with my lawyers and . . . Well, needless to say, my husband does not get to tweak my nose from beyond the grave.” She looked directly at me. “And you do not hold a majority interest in this team. Or you won’t when all the paperwork goes through.”
John Torres said what I was thinking. “Huh?”
Jasmine Peebles seemed to rise up taller than anyone in the room. “Ryan Zinna is not the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. I am. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, though.”
She smirked.
I looked at Mr. Dietrich, and by the way he bit his lip and inclined his head, I knew what she said had to be true.
I didn’t own the Dallas Cowboys.
32
“All right,” Mr. Dietrich said. “Jasmine, Dillon, I think it’s time for you to leave. Ryan and I have some things to discuss.”
After a few minutes—which included Jasmine’s protests—my mom, my friends, and I were finally alone with Mr. Dietrich. He explained that there was a lot of uncertainty.
“What Jasmine is doing is, quite frankly, pretty smart.” Mr. Dietrich had clasped his hands and laid them out on the table in front of him. “Texas is a community property state, so she owns half of everything they acquired during their marriage.”
“She signed a prenuptial agreement!” My mom’s eyes were burning and she rose up out of her seat.
I looked at her in surprise, realizing that she knew a lot more about my dad and his life than she had pretended to.
“Correct.” Mr. Dietrich thumped his hands on the table. “She’s challenging that, though, and I have to say that from what I’ve seen, I think she’s got a good chance to prevail. Those agreements are always shaky and under her claim, she’d actually get less money.”
“Then why is she doing it?” My mother burst out.
Mr. Dietrich raised his eyebrows. “Why? The team. She wants it.”
“You mean, she doesn’t want my son to have it.” My mother went from angry to bitter.
“Be that as it may, she’s in a very good position and we have to prepare for it. I’m your trustee. I’m committed to seeing your father’s will carried out, so it’s my job to defend your claim like it was my own.” Mr. Dietrich stared at me like he was waiting for something. “You see, I don’t have a family of my own. My business is my family, and your father was my brother in business.”
I shifted in my chair and looked at my friends. They stared at me, too, waiting. I looked back at Mr. Dietrich. “So what happens now?”
“If she does win, then I’ll have the swing vote.” He cleared his throat and looked at me hard. “She’ll only have half of your father’s shares. You’ll have the other half, forty percent each. Neither of you can control the team without the minority owner . . . me. I own twenty percent. Whoever I put my shares behind will run the team.”
“You’re supposed to be Ryan’s trustee,” my mom said, a disgusted look on her face, like she’d just stepped in dog doo. “Thomas trusted you to look out for him, and, as crazy as it sounds, he wanted Ryan to run the team. How could you even think about her?”
“Jasmine knows the organization. She’s an adult—not one I’m overly fond of, but it would keep the organization more stable, and that’s good for the value of the team and me.” The room seemed to get suddenly colder and Mr. Dietrich’s eyes glinted from behind his glasses. “Before you get too upset, I’m not saying Ryan won’t prevail here, I’m just saying that nothing is certain, and if it does go Jasmine’s way, I will have another duty to carry out.”
“Duty?” My mother’s eyes narrowed.
Mr. Dietrich smiled. “Well, you know Thomas. Very smart. An amazing chess player. I could rarely win a game. In a separate document, he gave me instructions for what to do in the event that this happened.”
“Instructions? What instructions?” My mom’s face hardened even more.
Mr. Dietrich brightened. “I’m not at liberty to explain it in detail, but let’s just say it’ll be an interesting contest.”
“A contest?” I asked. “Between me and Jasmine?”
Mr. Dietrich laughed. “Oh, no. Not her. A contest between you and Dillon.”
33
“Easy come, easy go.” That’s what my mother said as we drove home half an hour later.
I just stared silently out the window as Izzy and Jackson sat in the backseat.
It wasn’t as cut-and-dried as all that. It might have been easy come, but it wasn’t going to be easy go. Not if I had my way.
We were halfway back to my house before anyone said anything.
“What do you think he meant by a contest?” Izzy asked.
It annoyed me because I didn’t know the answer even though I’d been thinking about it.
“Good grades?” Jackson suggested, hopefully. “You got that covered.”
Izzy bit her lip. “He said he and your father played chess. Would you have to play Dillon in chess to win the team?”
“That’s pretty crazy,” Jackson said.
“The whole thing is crazy,” I replied.
“I think we should just forget all about this.” My mom gripped the wheel and glared at the road as we cruised against the flow of the rush-hour traffic back toward the heart of Dallas. “You don’t need to own a team. You’re too young. I’ve said that all along.”
I couldn’t have disagreed more and couldn’t help saying so. “You didn’t seem so hot for her to take it away from me back there.”
“That woman is a sack of snakes. I’m instinctively against whatever she wants.” My mom seemed to forget the three of us kids were even there, and she glanced in the mirror at my friends in the backseat before putting the radio on and turning up the volume when she recognized “Colder Weather” by the Zac Brown Band. We listened to my mom sing along, one song after another, with the volume holding back any chance for conversation.
When we pulled into the circular driveway, my mom shut off the truck and chirped like a happy bird. “How about a cookout?”
“I’m definitely in.” Jackson swung the door open but stayed seated.
“I can ask,” Izzy said.
“You do that and let me know. Chicken and ribs. Why don’t you all take a swim while I help Teresa put things together?” My mom was already on her way up the front steps, happy to be back in her own base camp and fully in charge.
I looked at my friends. Jackson licked his lips, but Izzy returned my questioning eyes with a sympathetic tilt of her head.
“Come on,” I said, hopping down. “Let’s go out back.”
They followed me. Izzy called her mom right in front of us, so whe
n she got denied on the barbecue because of a family dinner, I knew it wasn’t her just wanting to bail on the brewing storm between me and my mom. We hung out in the back, waiting for Izzy’s mom to come get her. Jackson did some stunts off the diving board, winning his own cannonball contest with twelve-foot plumes of splash. To his dismay, Izzy and I would only watch from our thickly padded lounge chairs in the shade.
“He’s not very good, you know.” I could tell Izzy was speaking to me, even though her eyes were on the human cannonball.
“Who? Coach Cowan?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. The general manager. Hamhock. I made a big deal about him picking Mark Fusco because it’s maybe the best move he’s made since he got here. The other picks? Not so great.”
“Hey . . .” I liked Bert Hamhock, even if he talked like a farmer sometimes and wanted to fire Coach Cowan. My mind raced, searching for just the right argument to quiet Izzy down. “He picked John Torres.”
Izzy made me wait while she cracked open a can of iced tea and leaned forward to take a sip. “Exactly.”
“You love John Torres.” I realized the outrage I felt had crept into my words, giving them a nasty flavor.
“John Torres may be the cutest quarterback in the league right now,” she said, “but that won’t win games. I can think of three backups in the NFL who’d be better.”
I barked out a laugh. “Like who? Kellen Smith?”
“I forgot about him. He makes four.”
“Are you serious? You don’t even know who Kellen Smith is,” I said.
“Just because you don’t know, doesn’t mean I don’t know.” She set her tea can down hard on the little table between us, sat back, and crossed her arms.
“Okay,” I said, “what was his completion percentage?”
She narrowed her eyes at me and smiled. “When? Junior year or senior year?”
I wasn’t about to be outgunned on my Cowboys knowledge by a girl, no matter how much I liked her. I mean, I was the owner. Maybe. “Sophomore year.”
Her smile widened into a grin and she let her head fall back like she was ready to take a nap. “He didn’t play his sophomore year because of injury, medical redshirt. Dislocated his kneecap and tore the medial collateral ligament. Junior year he completed 73.8 percent and senior year it was a school record—80.1 percent, with thirty-one touchdowns and just eight interceptions. He also ran for seven hundred and twenty-three yards and eleven touchdowns.”
I could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t making it up. “Yeah, I know all that. Not the exact numbers, but . . .”
I was thankful that Jackson finally got out of the pool and stood dripping wet and staring at us under the trellis of cool green vines. “What you guys talking about?”
“Just the Cowboys,” Izzy sang.
“Yeah, so cool that you might own them,” Jackson said. “I mean, that you do. Kind of. Maybe. Aww, who cares? You’re gonna be playing in our game this Saturday anyway, which is way better by far.”
I wasn’t so sure about that and I wasn’t going to leave the field of battle with Izzy so quickly. “She thinks Bert Hamhock’s not a good GM. She doesn’t like John Torres.”
Jackson looked back and forth between us, then froze. “Oh, no. I’m not getting in the middle of this one.”
“There’s no middle,” I complained. “Just tell us what you think.”
“I think . . . I gotta use the bathroom.” He hurried off, struggling to wrap a towel around his waist.
“So . . . ,” I said.
“I’m not gonna argue.” She sipped her tea and squinted at the sun sparkling in the pool water. “It’s your team.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Well,” she said, taking out her phone and sitting back in her chair, “I’m here for you if you need me. That’s all.”
“Thanks.” I lay back, too, and took out my own phone, googling Kellen Smith and finding out Izzy knew his numbers exactly. I was impressed, but determined not to show it.
Jackson returned and sat down, too, and ten minutes later, Izzy’s mom texted from the front circle that she’d arrived.
Izzy stood. “Well, let me know how it turns out with the team.” She said it like we’d never let up on the conversation. “Either way, hey, you owned the Dallas Cowboys, right?”
I looked up and scowled. “Worst case, I still own part of them.”
It was a bluff. They knew and I knew that a minority interest got me nothing, except a lot of money if the majority owner ever decided to sell them, which might not even happen in my lifetime.
“For sure,” she said. “See you guys tomorrow.”
She hurried off.
Jackson puffed up his cheeks and I knew he had something to say.
34
“Man, she really is pretty.” Jackson’s eyes followed her as she disappeared around the corner, his bearlike shoulders hunched and wrapped in a fluffy towel.
“You should go out with her,” I mumbled. I couldn’t help being annoyed. I was annoyed with everyone and everything, but the look Jackson gave me after I suggested he ask her out took me down a couple pegs. I felt bad.
“Man, I wish.” Even the thought of it seemed to hurt him. “She’s crazy about you.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, we’ll see how it goes now.”
The look of admiration on the face of a giant kid creates a discomfort hard to explain. “Maybe you could ask her to that victory bonfire they’re talking about having after the game?”
“No one likes someone who’s going down the drain,” I said. “That sucking sound is pretty embarrassing.”
Jackson rolled his lower lip beneath his teeth and nodded. “Yeah, but she’s not like that. She sat with us that second day of school when she could have sat anywhere. She sat with us because there’s something about you she likes. Then you dissed her and she still came back. And you weren’t even second QB on our team either. Izzy was there because she likes you. It’s like that book she had you read. She’s all about what’s on the inside.”
This embarrassed, shocked, and scared me all at the same time. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t process it in my brain, so I tucked it into a dark corner and gave Jackson a final shake of my head, signaling an end of the discussion about Izzy.
Jackson let out a heavy sigh, but I ignored it. I returned to my phone to study more remote facts about Cowboys players, no matter how deep they were on the depth chart, not that it mattered. If Jasmine got her way, or I lost whatever crazy contest Mr. Dietrich had in mind, I wouldn’t have to worry about making any decisions for anything.
I checked myself. I hated feeling this way. Negative thinking had no place if I was going to be the son of Thomas Peebles, which I now had every intention of being. And that meant fighting—for the Cowboys and for making bigger plays on the Ben Sauer team. And now that I was a QB—even the second QB—I was going to make things happen. One thing I knew was that regular people do all kinds of things for people who are famous; they just can’t help it.
I was no fool. I knew I wasn’t, like, one of the president’s kids, or a pop star, but I knew there were degrees of being famous in that upper stratosphere. And as owner—part or whole—of the Dallas Cowboy, I was in it. What’s the stratosphere? The part of the Earth’s atmosphere that is seven to thirty-one miles above the surface. That’s what our science teacher told us. You’re way up there. Everyone can see you, and most of them want to be where you are, even if it’s for a moment.
That’s what I was counting on. Coach Hubbard wouldn’t be able to resist my ideas.
I sat back, took a deep breath. I wanted to do something. I got up and headed for the house.
“Hey, Little Man, don’t be mad,” Jackson said. “I was just saying . . .”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Be right back.”
I returned with a book written by Bill Walsh, the famous 49ers Super Bowl coach.
Jackson looked at it. “Finding the Winning Edge?
What’s that?”
“Bill Walsh coached two of the greatest quarterbacks ever, three if you count Jeff Garcia.” I sat down on the lounge chair and opened a notebook I’d also brought with me. “Neither of them had a strong arm, at least by NFL standards. They ran an offense that capitalized on their quickness—not just their physical quickness but their mental quickness.”
“Nobody’s more mentally quick than you.” Jackson leaned toward the book. “Except maybe me.”
I looked at him and laughed, because he was right about that. Already, Jackson had proven his smarts in school. He knew everything and I’d seen him helping the other players on the team with their assignments, even if we’d only run the play one time and even if it was for another position other than his. “Yeah, so let’s do this together.”
“What exactly are we doing?” Jackson flipped open the pages to chapter eleven. “‘Preparing to Win’?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing,” I said. “Preparing to win, on the field and off. Not only do I plan to win whatever Dietrich throws at me, but I’m gonna hit Coach Hubbard so hard and so fast with this stuff that he’s never gonna see me coming.”
35
Jasmine Peebles had some PR firm of her own do a press release about her legal challenge to my father’s will. When I asked my mom about my press conference, she frowned and asked if I wanted to be like Jasmine Peebles. That hit home and I trusted my mom when she said a press conference would have to wait until things were final.
“Then, if you get the team,” my mother said, “the time will be right. If you don’t, there’s no reason for a press conference, is there?”
Word quickly spread that my stepmother had suddenly put the fate of the Cowboys into question again. It was in the newspapers, on the sports channels. People, I learned, love controversy. The only thing better than a kid who suddenly inherits the Dallas Cowboys is the same kid who might lose it all. I kept my head up and played it off like it was no big deal—just a typical day in the life of Ryan Zinna.