Second Impact

by David Klass

  Danny was thirty yards deep now, running with that peculiar gait of his that doesn’t look like a full-on sprint but it gobbles up yards. Their cover guys were both still deeper than him, but I couldn’t wait much longer.

  I could feel my pocket starting to collapse behind me. I stepped up to buy myself one more precious heartbeat, and then a hand grabbed my shirt and I knew they had me. Danny and I had been doing this since Pee Wee, and I trusted him to get behind them and run under it. I threw it high and hard and got yanked to the turf. The crowd roared, and by the time I got to my knees Danny was five steps ahead of the guys chasing him, and then he was in the end zone.

  And that was when the momentum shift became a momentum tidal wave. You could feel the weight of it swelling on our sideline. You could hear the roar of the wave in the bass drum of our marching band and in the chants of our faithful fans. “Kendall, Kendall!” This day belonged to us now, and our town would not be denied.

  All credit to Albion High. Martinez kept running smart, disciplined plays, but we were knocking down his passes and stuffing his runs. Their defense hunkered down and slowed our running game, so I went airborne more often. In the middle of the fourth quarter—with the score tied at thirty-one—I hit Danny on a sideline route, and they tackled him hard. He held on to the ball and got up fast, but Coach took him out of the game and sent him off the field to get checked out, so I finished the drive with Scott and Magee for targets.

  I was passing well now, back in the rhythm that had destroyed Jamesville. I went short, short, and then long to Glenn Scott, who caught a slant-and-go and ran it all the way in for a touchdown. Finally—with five minutes left to play—we had our first lead of the game.

  That should have been that. Albion had blown a twenty-seven-point lead. We had dominated them the whole second half. Now we had pulled ahead, and they should have wilted. We kicked off and tackled their return guy in the coffin corner, between their end line and the five-yard line. They had to go ninety-five long yards against our suffocating defense. No way that was gonna happen.

  Then a strange thing happened. These kids who came from a football program nobody’d ever heard of and didn’t have a single star player on their team did something I didn’t expect. They got up off the turf and smacked us back. They had been down many times this season, but they had never been counted out, and they started playing mad.

  Martinez put this crazy drive together that started as slow as a tractor, and I kept waiting for us to stop him, but they made play after play and kept on rolling.

  Danny walked up to me and we stood side by side, watching. “How are you doing?” I asked. “Looked like you got your bell rung again.”

  “No, Coach was just being careful.” We watched as they made yet another first down. There were two minutes left and they had crossed midfield. “No way they’ll march it all the way in,” I said. “Our defense is too tough.”

  Danny glanced quickly at the scoreboard and shrugged. “Lucky we have an eight-point lead.”

  I looked at him. Danny’s like a walking calculator. Straight A’s in math all the way through school. “Danny, we have thirty-eight and they have thirty-one. It’s a seven-point lead.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, and blinked. “Seven. No problem. ’Cause they’ll never get a touchdown.” And just as he said it, there was a roar from the crowd because Martinez had threaded the ball through three of our defenders to his best receiver, who ran it in: 38–37. All Albion needed was to kick the extra point and hold us and they’d send the game into overtime.

  But they didn’t line up for the extra point. They went for the two points and the win. Martinez hiked the ball and pitched it to his running back, and they ran a sweep to the right side.

  It looked like we had the sweep covered, but somehow their back kept angling toward the sideline and our goal line, and then he hurdled clear over our last tackler and extended the ball as he fell, and the ref raised both hands. Touchdown. He had broken the plane of the end zone. We were down by one point with less than two minutes left.

  They kicked off, and Mike Magee ran it back to the thirty, and it was time for our last drive of the season, and of my high school career. Coach came over and put his hand on my back and said, “Get this one, Jer. You fought back from a real hard place, and you deserve it.”

  “We all do,” I told him. “The whole town. We’ll get it done.”

  We went out there and some of the guys looked a little nervous in the huddle. “Forget the crowd,” I told them, and I had to speak loud because the crowd was roaring. “Forget the score. Let’s just make one play at a time and we’ll win this thing.”

  I’ve never run a better drive under time pressure. I picked up two first downs to take us to midfield, and then on a fourth and five I hit Danny on a long slant to get twenty more, down to their thirty. He got up a little slowly and ran to our huddle. “You okay?” I asked him.

  “Fine,” he said, blinking. “Let’s take it in!”

  Thirty-five seconds left. Our field goal kicker had hurt his leg before halftime and was limping around on the sidelines. Our backup kicker was not at all dependable. We had two time-outs, and we had to take it all the way into their end zone. Runs wouldn’t do it. Short passes were risky, too. And our kicking game was done for the day. I had four shots at a game-winning touchdown pass.

  I took my first one at Glenn Scott in the right corner, and he almost pulled it down, but their defender got a hand on it at the last second and knocked it away.

  My second shot was a crossing pattern. Danny and Mike were supposed to cross up the middle and I would hit Danny as they came out of it. But Danny went the wrong way, so they never crossed, and Mike was double-covered. I waited and then I barely managed to throw the ball away before I got popped.

  Third down. Eighteen seconds left. Coach called our second-to-last time-out. I hurried over to him, and he told me we were running a post to Danny. I looked back at him. “I’m not sure about Danny. When we ran the crossing play, he cut to the wrong side.”

  “He can run a post route,” Coach said. “Straight to the goalpost, and you’ll drop it in his hands. He’s our go-to guy, Jerry. This is for all the marbles.”

  I ran back onto the field, and we huddled up and I called the post. “You good with that, Danny?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He blinked. “Let’s do it.”

  I heard something in his voice. “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just the crowd noise.”

  I studied his face.

  “Jerry, we gotta break the huddle,” Magee warned.

  “A delay of game here would kill us,” Glenn pointed out.

  But I was looking at my oldest and best friend, and he was blinking and looking back at me. “Let’s go,” Danny urged softly. “We can do this.”

  I was remembering how he kept turning the volume down when we were watching mixed martial arts on TV, and how his hip-hop music was turned so low, and the fact that he got the score wrong on the sideline. And now I was watching him blink and look back at me and say, “Let’s go.”

  Every bone in my body wanted to hike the ball, throw it to him, get the touchdown, and win it for Kendall.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.” We walked toward the line of scrimmage, and I started the snap count, and then I broke it off and signaled for a time-out.

  “Jerry,” Brian Hart who was in the backfield said, “what are you doing?”

  Coach Shea was shouting from the sideline: “Hike the ball! Run the play!”

  But the ref had seen my signal and he gave us our last time-out.

  I walked over to Danny. “Come,” I said.

  He looked back at me, and I saw how much he wanted to stay on. It was his dream and it had been since he was a little kid in Pee Wee. And it had been my dream, too, and the dream of all those people in the stands, shouting at me to run the play. Our marching band was halfway through our fight song. Principal Bam
burger was up there, and Superintendent Sparks, and the mayor of our town.

  “Come on,” I said, and I took Danny’s arm. I led him off the field, and he seemed like he might protest, but he never did. He stumbled once as we walked, but I caught him.

  Coach Shea was hurrying toward us, but someone beat him to it. Danny’s father had been watching the whole thing from a front bleacher, and I guess he had jumped to the field, and he met me first on the sideline. I looked at him and I didn’t have to say a single word. He read my eyes through the two bars of my face mask, and he nodded to me very slightly. He put his arms around Danny and said softly, “Come on, son,” and led him away.

  I sprinted back on the field, and we huddled up, and I called the same post play, but for Glenn Scott. He streaked out toward the goalpost, and I led him perfectly, but he was a half step too slow, and the ball grazed off his fingertips. There’s a good chance Danny would have caught it.

  We had no time-outs, so I called our last play myself—a crossing route where Glenn and Mike would end up in opposite sides of the end zone. The ball was hiked, and I faded back and watched them cross. Glenn was my first choice, but he stumbled. I felt the pressure and looked to Mike Magee, but he was covered step for step. Hands were grabbing at me, so I lofted it up into a corner of the right end zone where only Mike could possibly catch it, and I said a little prayer as I was clobbered.

  The ball came down a few inches beyond Mike’s desperate dive. Danny is four inches taller than Mike. Maybe he would have stretched for it and caught it.

  We lost the game and the state championship, and that’s something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life. My flu is gone now, and I’m clearheaded, and I still can’t quite believe our big chance is gone. I wake up every morning and watch the first light on my trophies, and I think how close we came to winning it all.

  I walk through the halls of school and there are some really awkward looks. Even though nobody’s said it, I know what they’re thinking: “You cost us the championship.”

  People in Kendall do say it. They say it in a million ways. Straight out in anger: “What the hell were you thinking?” And from the side: “Why couldn’t he have played one more play?” And sometimes they pretend to understand: “I know he was your friend, but…”

  That but comes back to me at night, when I lie in bed torturing myself about the championship I’ll never bring to our school. We were so very close, and now it’s gone forever.

  I never talked to Coach Shea directly about what happened in the last minute of the game and why I walked Danny to the sideline. But I think he understands. Since he’s retiring as football coach, he was cleaning stuff out of the coaches’ office the other day, and he saw me passing by in the hall and waved me over. There were piles of old football equipment and signed team balls and diagrammed plays from seasons gone by. “Look at all this junk,” he said. “Twenty-five years of it. Some of it’s going home. Most of it’s going in the Dumpster.”

  He bent and picked up a hat. “Hey,” he said, “here’s the hat I got when we won the state championship way back in the Dark Ages.” It was an orange cap, old and faded, with a K above the bill for Kendall and two gold stars on either side of it. He handed it to me. “You take it.”

  “I can’t take that,” I told him. “It’s yours.”

  “It doesn’t fit my fat old head anyway,” he said, and then he put it on me. “Life isn’t always easy,” he noted in a low, gruff voice. “You take your best shot.” He was looking me in the eye, and I nodded back at him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Listen, I’m sorry…” I began to explain and apologize.

  He thumped me lightly on the shoulder, cutting me off. “Hat fits you pretty good,” he told me. “Wear it with pride.” Then he shrugged and stepped away and picked up a garbage bag filled with what looked like a half century of shoulder pads and jockstraps. “Look at this mess. I better call in a dump truck.”

  Anyway, that’s the story of Kendall’s football season. Carla got me started writing this blog, and I wish she were still in our writing class to critique my final effort.

  I’m gonna stop writing and go to sleep now, because tomorrow Danny and I agreed to meet for an early-morning run. He hasn’t said much to me since the Albion game. But he’s still my best friend in the world and a hell of a runner, and maybe, just maybe, if I get a good night’s sleep I can stay with him.

  From: Carla.Jenson@Farragutacademy.edu

  To: JerryQB@kendallhs.edu

  Subject: New school, old friend

  * * *

  Hi Jerry,

  I should have written you sooner. Sorry. I was kind of emotional that weekend after the game. Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one. And then there was the new school, and some trouble transferring my old e-mail into their system—note my swanky new e-mail address.

  I’m not writing to talk about the game. I hope you could hear me cheering, although I guess it’s not very likely in a place that big. But I want you to know that I was screaming “Go Jerry!” from the moment they put you back in the game up till the very last second, and I do mean that. You are an amazing player and, God help me, I do love watching football, I really do. And I’m really glad to know about what happened in the locker room at halftime that sent you guys back out there to accomplish that miracle. Because it was a miracle, no question. I know I said I wouldn’t talk about the game, and I know you didn’t quite get it done, and I know why. But just remember, you gave us a miracle, we cheered and shouted, and we watched. You made it a great game. But the other team made their miracle, too, just like you said on your blog, and even great games end, one way or the other.

  I just have to say one more thing about the game, Jerry. You can’t beat yourself up about the what-ifs, especially not in sports. Danny might have stayed in and caught a pass. Danny might have stayed in and dropped a pass, or gone the wrong way again, and then everyone could be dumping on him, instead of on you, and you could be beating yourself up about how you knew he wasn’t okay and why hadn’t you thrown to Mike Magee and maybe Mike Magee would have caught it. I know you like battle metaphors, Jerry, but you can’t unstir something once it’s stirred, and you can only take a drive forward. You gave us some great moments, and I cheered and cheered and cheered.

  And I don’t know whether it’s any comfort or not to know that a few dozen miles away on the carefully manicured lawns of Farragut Academy (I know, if you were writing this, it would probably be a palace, a small university, peopled by students in designer clothes that cost more than the average Kendall citizen earns in a year, but actually it’s just a pretty good New Jersey prep school with some aspirations and some affectations. They think I’m going to help their Ivy admission numbers, and mostly everyone just talks about college admissions, just like back in Kendall), nobody even knows there was a game. We all live in our own little worlds is I guess what I’m saying, and all you can do is play by the rules of your own particular little world and try to do the right thing. And I think you tried.

  There are some things I would like to say to you, and some things I probably don’t really want to say, but maybe in a month or so, we should take that bus into Manhattan again and do something. And I don’t mean visit a traumatic brain injury unit, though I know you think that’s a pretty fun afternoon in the big city. Go to a museum, or a weird old movie, or just walk around a little. We don’t have to talk about the game (we can see if I do as good a job at not talking about it as I did at not writing about it), or about the season, or about my crimes and misdemeanors, or about what you said at the town meeting. We could talk about writing and the experience of putting your life up on a blog, or about college. I’d like that.

  One thing I’m afraid we might have to talk about. I feel bad about this, but I know there’s been some stuff in the papers. I don’t think that it’s for sure yet that the hospital will close, but I do think it’s true that my dad is seriously considering another job this time, and I don’
t know whether he would be doing that if he believed that they were going to keep the hospital open. And sometimes I have this bad feeling that maybe he got angry at the town, or he stopped believing in the town after what happened to me, and he just stopped fighting. But that isn’t true. He hasn’t stopped fighting. He still wants to keep it open. And he’s been worried about this for a long time. And it would be total arrogance for me to think that my stupid little issues could end up affecting a whole town. But we’ll see what happens, and I hope people won’t blame my dad if it’s not good news.

  You’re a good writer, Jerry. I really like your description of the game. It’s much, much better than anything I could have written. I won’t tell you now what I think are the good phrases and the bad phrases, because, overall, I think it’s a strong piece of writing. It sounds like you, and it sounds like football. I printed it out, along with all your blogs from this season, and I’m going to save them with my own writing. I know I’ll read them over, and I know I’ll read more because I know you’ll write more. And I’ll always be proud that in my admittedly somewhat checkered career on our school paper, I was the one who signed up Jerry Downing and got him writing. And he told the story of a pretty interesting football season, as only he could tell it. Good going, Jerry. I don’t know if anyone has said congratulations to you lately, but I’d like to say it now.

  Congratulations on your season,

  Carla

  Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010

  Copyright © 2013 by David Klass and Perri Klass

  All rights reserved

  First hardcover edition, 2013

  eBook edition, July 2013

  macteenbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Klass, David.

  Second impact / David Klass and Perri Klass. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When Jerry Downing, star quarterback in a small football town, gets a second chance after his drunk driving had serious consequences, Carla Jenson, ace reporter for the school newspaper, invites him to join her in writing a blog, mainly about sports.