by Mike Lupica
“Well, I hope you’re all rested up now,” Troy Cullen said. “Because it’s startin’ to look like you boys could still win the whole God-darn thing.”
The Cowboys still had just that one loss, in their opener. It was why they were sitting right there in the standings, second place still, behind the Shelby Mustangs. There probably wasn’t a guy on the team who would have said it after they lost to Shelby the way they did—or maybe even thought it in their wildest dreams—but in a season when the Cowboys were supposed to be going nowhere, they were starting to get the idea, not so crazy anymore, that they could go all the way.
And it was Jake’s mom who’d always said that the problem with a good idea was that once it got inside your head, it was almost impossible to get it out.
Now it was the Thursday night before the Niles game, what should have been a school night but wasn’t because of teacher conferences the next day. So Jake was supposed to meet Nate at Sal’s for an early pizza, Bear being forced to stay home and study. He was doing that badly in English and history—his parents didn’t care if he had off the next day or not, they were threatening to take the keys to his truck away if he didn’t pick it up in school.
So Libby Cullen drove Jake into town, Jake knowing a lot of guys on the team would be around, telling her he’d call later if he needed a ride home, but he didn’t think he would since there’d be plenty of rides around.
Right before she dropped him at Sal’s, Nate texted him, saying that Bear had done all his work and been sprung, and that they’d be maybe forty-five minutes behind Jake. The next text said there’d been a change of plans: Bear wanted—no, needed—one of the five-napkin, double-cheese, extra-bacon specials at Ed’s Burgers, just up Main Street from Sal’s.
Jake said fine with him, was ready to go get a table at Ed’s and wait for them until he looked through the window at Sal’s and saw Sarah Rayburn sitting there by herself.
“This seat taken?” he said.
She looked up, surprised to see him, but smiled right away, the way she’d smiled at him at Stone’s that night and got him to thinking he might actually get somewhere with her someday.
“No, sir,” she said.
“I saw you through the window. Thought you looked lonely.”
“My friends are late,” she said. “Shocker.”
“Mine too.”
Sarah smiled again and said, “Now if I see one more pizza come out of the oven, I’m about to die, I’m so hungry.”
“Me too,” Jake said.
Sarah said, “How about we tell our friends they’re on their own and order something for the two of us?”
“Great,” Jake said.
They went and sat in a booth, Jake thinking that whether this was an accident or not, this might be as close as he ever got to having a date with this girl.
Somehow he managed to not sound like a complete idiot making small talk about the season, about the Niles game, and how things had worked out better for the team than anybody could have thought when they’d gotten their doors blown off in the opener the way they had.
“Back then,” Jake said, “I got the feeling people in town wanted to just call off the season now that Wyatt wasn’t the quarterback anymore.”
“But that was before they found you,” Sarah said.
“I don’t know about that,” Jake said. “Me and Casey, the two of us, still don’t make one of Wyatt.”
“I think you’ve done great,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Be serious,” Sarah said. “You ever think about pinching yourself to make sure this is all real?”
“You mean being here?” Jake said, the words out of him before he could stop them.
“I said you had to be serious,” Sarah said. “I guess what I’m asking is if you ever thought you’d be one of the stars of the team in your first year?”
Jake, a noted blusher, felt himself start to redden, nothing he could do to stop it.
“There’s only one star on this team,” Jake said. “Calvin.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sarah said. “My dad says that someday you’re going to end up being better than your brother.”
Her hair was pulled back tonight, showing off even more of her face than usual. Dark blue shirt, light green jeans, cool blue sneakers, Jake had noticed, the old-fashioned kind with no laces.
Jake said, “All due respect to your father, but has he already forgotten what Wyatt did last season?”
“Just telling you what he says,” Sarah said. Now she made her voice deep and Texas, imitating her dad, and said, “You mark my words, young lady, that Jake Cullen is gonna pass his brother someday the way Eli passed Peyton.”
“I think you’d find a lot of people with a fair argument against that one.” He grinned. “And about Eli being anywhere near as good as Peyton.”
“Daddy likes to count Super Bowl wins ahead of everything else.”
“Either way, I think Wyatt and I are a long way off from being the Manning brothers. Even with the way Wyatt brought the Longhorns back against Oklahoma last week.”
“That must have made everybody in the family happy,” Sarah said.
“Mostly my dad,” Jake said. “Listening to him when he got home, I thought he was the one who’d quarterbacked the ’Horns.”
Jake started thinking about what Wyatt had said in the pasture, how he wondered if their dad would ever see that he was trying to live out his own dream through Wyatt.
Suddenly, Sarah said, “Hey you, Mr. Quarterback. Am I getting boring already? Feel like I lost you there.”
Jake smiled and said, “Busted.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“Can I tell you the truth,” he said, “and get you to promise you won’t make fun of me?”
Sarah reached across the table and put out her hand. Jake took it, knowing she just wanted to shake on it, but Jake didn’t want to let go.
“Deal,” she said.
“I was thinking that lately, first time in my life, I haven’t wanted to be my brother.”
Saying something to her he hadn’t said to anybody else, not his mom, not Nate or Bear, not Coach J. Nobody. Talking like this to a girl he’d been afraid to talk to since the school year started.
“Well, that certainly sounds sensible enough to me,” Sarah said.
He went to the men’s room, texted Nate, told him what was going on, told him to go ahead to Ed’s, he’d catch him whenever. Sarah had already called her friends, told them she’d eaten with Jake, would meet them at Amy’s later for ice cream if it didn’t get too late. Or they could go to Stone’s for pie.
“You sure you don’t want to go meet them now?” Jake said after he’d paid up, refusing to take up Sarah’s offer to split the bill.
“I’m good,” she said.
“You want to walk around a little bit or something?”
Without hesitating at all, Sarah said yes, she’d like that.
There were a lot of nights like this, always during the football season, when Jake just knew, mostly with his heart, that he wouldn’t want to be anywhere except Granger, Texas, a place where you knew just about everybody and everybody knew you on Main Street at seven thirty the night before another big game.
A couple of Jake’s teammates, Chad Mauro and Raheem Johnson, walked into Sal’s as Jake and Sarah were leaving. Raheem raised his eyebrows soon as he could see Sarah wasn’t looking. Jake shook his head and mouthed, Shut up. And kept walking. Nate and Bear had texted him from Ed’s, telling him they’d just ordered and would be a while.
Through the front window of Amy’s, Jake could see the front room was already filled with Granger Cowboys. It would be different in an hour or so in these places, up and down Main Street; the players would all be gone, Coach McCoy having told them at the end of practice that
even though there was a school holiday tomorrow, he’d better not see any of his boys still out and about late if he got a hankering for a burger or one of Amy’s milkshakes himself.
For now, Jake and Sarah walked.
It was Sarah who finally said, “This is nice.”
“A nice surprise,” Jake said. “Seeing you there at the counter, I mean.”
Sarah said, “Can I say something to you, you promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”
She didn’t know she could say anything she wanted, anything at all, and Jake would happily take it. He still couldn’t believe she was with him right now.
“This something bad?” Jake said.
“No, silly, it’s not like that. It’s just that . . .”
“Keep going.”
“You seem older than you really are,” she said.
A laugh came out of Jake, he couldn’t stop it.
“You said you wouldn’t take it the wrong way!” Sarah said.
“No,” Jake said. “I laughed because my mom has always said the exact same thing.”
“Well, we’re both right. I don’t mean that you’re all serious or whatever. You just don’t act like . . .”
“A freshman?” Jake said.
“Sometimes you don’t act like you’re in high school at all! The other kids in your grade, even my grade, they act plain goofy at times. You never do.”
They were coming up on the park now.
Jake said, “Maybe it’s just a thing happens to you, you grow up in a small town like this, knowing people are watching you, because of who you are, and your daddy, and your brother. Makes you think twice about putting on a clown suit, especially when you’re out in public. Or looking at third-and-eight.”
“You said you don’t want to be your brother,” Sarah said in a soft voice, “but the conversation keeps finding its way back to him, doesn’t it?”
“That it does,” Jake said. “You know what they always said about ol’ Wyatt Cullen: You can’t stop him, you can only try to contain him.”
“You don’t have to tell me what it’s like,” she said. “I had an older sister who was Little Miss Perfect, too.”
“Wyatt was Little Miss Perfect?”
“Wow, aren’t you the comedian?”
Jake said, “All I know about your older sister is that she is old enough to already be through college.”
“The college being Yale,” she said. “Drama major.” Sarah’s eyes got big and she said, “But then she’s been a drama major her whole life. In addition to being a soccer star. She was always the one. I was never much good at sports, unless you think of cheerleading as a sport. Do you, by the way?”
“Absolutely!” Jake said.
She punched his arm and called him a big liar.
“No way,” he said. “I can’t believe some of the stuff you guys do.”
“Anyway,” she said, “she was Miss Perfect, and I’m leading cheers. But I have fun doing it, and it makes me feel like a part of the team. And, who knows, maybe I’ll end up being a dancer someday.”
“Really?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said. “But at least now you know that I know a little bit about having the spotlight be on somebody else growing up.”
“Thank you,” Jake said.
“For what?”
“For telling me that.”
They heard some laughter now from across the street as they got to the entrance to the park, saw some of the guys from the team leaving Amy’s. And then some of the offensive linemen, Buddy Herzlich and Dicky Grider, coming out of Ed’s.
Big-game Thursday night on Main Street, not just kids out there, but adults, too, waving and calling out to Jake and telling him to have a good one.
If he wasn’t officially the number one quarterback now, he felt like one on this night. And realized that people in this town weren’t just looking at him, they were looking to him. Wanting him to make them proud, make it all right that they cared about a high school football team as much as they did, at Ed’s and Amy’s and Sal’s and Stone’s, and on J. D. Frederick’s radio show and of course at coffee shops and filling stations in the morning.
David Stevens and Spence Tolar, his two running backs, came up to him and said, “You ready?”
“Let’s go play ’em right now,” Jake said.
David said, “Can I digest my five-napkin Ed’s burger first?”
He and Spence moved on. Aaron Saunders and Justice yelled at Jake from across the street. Jake waved at them and Aaron yelled over, “Sarah, what are you doing with that loser?”
Now Sarah yelled back at him and said, “Did you forget how to keep score?”
Jake and Sarah sat down on a bench, and Sarah slipped her arm through his like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“You guys really seem to like one another,” she said.
“Good teams don’t need to have every single guy like one another,” Jake said. “But it sure doesn’t hurt when it happens that way.”
He was so focused on Sarah that he didn’t even notice Casey Lindell until he was standing right in front of them.
25
HE WAS STANDING WITH HIS HANDS ON HIS HIPS AND IGNORING Sarah, not even saying hello to her, focused on Jake.
“Well, look at you,” Casey said. “Having a nice night?”
Jake, keeping his own voice down, said, “Everybody’s been having one.”
Casey was wearing a Spurs T-shirt with the sleeves cut up to his shoulders. Faded old jeans. Boots.
“Just not as nice as you’re having,” he said. “Like you’re the mayor of Granger.”
“Now, Casey Lindell,” Sarah said, smiling up at him, leaving her arm where it was. “You be nice.”
“I kept thinking I was wrong, that we’d both get the same chance,” Casey said to Jake. “But I can see where this is going, no matter what I do.” Casey shook his head, like he was sad. “Coach and them said all along it would be a fair fight. But we both know it’s not.”
“We’re both playing quarterback for the Cowboys, last time I checked,” Jake said.
“We both throw a pick, but you’re the one left in. Now you’re starting against Niles.”
“And you started against Morgan Creek. Seems to me it’s who finishes that counts. I’m the starter tomorrow night. Nothing more.”
“In the biggest game of the year so far,” Casey said. “So I’m all the way back to where I was when I got to this town. A backup. To a freshman.”
Making it sound like that was some kind of dirty word.
“I kept trying to tell you it wasn’t ever a fight,” Jake said. “The only one ever saw it that way was you.”
“Doesn’t matter that I’m a better thrower of the ball than you’ll ever be,” Casey said. Voice rising up, like he wanted everybody on Main Street to hear. “Why wouldn’t I think the quarterback job in this town is just something gets passed from Cullen to Cullen?”
“Casey, we played this out already. You’re wrong about all this, mostly about me.”
“I got two years of high school football left,” Casey said. “I was willing to wait my turn even though everybody could see I was a better quarterback than Tim from the time we got to camp. Even if you backed me up for two years, you’d still have two more after I’m gone. But nobody in this whole town, including our old coach, seems to think you should ever have to wait your turn.”
“You don’t know me,” Jake said.
“You’re Jake Cullen,” he said. “Everybody knows you.”
“You think I didn’t wait my turn behind my brother?” Jake said in a quiet voice. “You think I didn’t wonder if my turn would ever come?”
“I don’t want to hear about your problems,” Casey said.
“Didn’t expect that yo
u would,” Jake said.
Casey nodded at Sarah and said, “Far as I can see, you’re overcoming your problems just fine. Guess any Cullen’ll do.”
Jake could feel Sarah’s hand gripping his arm.
Jake stood up anyway. Like at Stone’s. Just feeling different this time.
“You say what you want to me,” he said. “But you’re being rude to Sarah, and I’m gonna have to ask you to stop now.”
“You know what everybody says, right?” Casey said. “She couldn’t get near your brother so now she’s with you.”
Jake took a step.
“Enough.”
“Or what?” Casey said. “You finally gonna man up about all this?”
Jake could see guys from the team watching from the other side of the street. Some started to cross Main Street now. Sensing that something was about to happen with their quarterbacks.
Jake heard a laugh then.
“Lindell, what in the world do you know about how to man up?”
Calvin Morton.
Standing there with his cousin Melvin. The two of them having come out of the park from Jake’s left, Calvin for once not announcing his own arrival.
Until now.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt, but I couldn’t listen to none of this for even one more minute,” he said to Casey. “You talkin’ about being a man and acting like a little boy.”
“This doesn’t involve you, Calvin,” Casey said.
“See now, that’s where you’re wrong,” Calvin said. “Ever’thing involving this team and its general well-being involves me. Specially if I see somebody doesn’t seem to care about its general well-being.”
“You’re going to give me some kind of lecture now about being a good teammate?”
“Matter of fact, I am,” Calvin said. He’d been smiling, but now he stopped. “Because I am a good teammate. No, that’s not quite right, now that I think about it. I’m a great teammate, and so is he.” Nodding at Jake. “He’s a better teammate than you and a better all-around quarterback, and he beat you out this job fair and square. Starting with him knowing that there’s more to being a quarterback than being a thrower.”