Undercover Tailback

by Matt Christopher

“No, Coach, I swear —,” Parker insisted.

  “You don’t have to swear, Parker,” the coach replied. “I believe you … this time. You may, well, stretch the truth once in a while, but you’re no thief. Say, shouldn’t you be in class now?”

  Parker was late. He left the coach’s office and ran off to his math class.

  When he got there, they had already finished going over the previous day’s homework.

  “Nice of you to join us, Parker,” said Ms. Cobertson as he quietly took his seat. “May I have your homework, please?”

  Parker reached for his notebook to find the assignment. But his notebook wasn’t there. Had he lost it?

  Or had it been stolen?

  As he fumbled to come up with an explanation, he saw everyone staring at him.

  Staring — and laughing.

  Did he have his shirt on backward or something?

  Parker felt something nudge him at the elbow.

  Cris Muldoon was standing there, waving a brown leather three-ring binder with P.N. in big gold letters on it.

  “Uh, where was it?” he whispered to Cris.

  “You left it on your seat back in homeroom, dummy,” said Cris. “I figured I’d give it to you before class, but you weren’t around.”

  “Thanks,” said Parker. He handed in his paper.

  “Now perhaps we can get on with today’s lesson,” said Ms. Cobertson. “Let’s all take a look at page forty-three. …”

  Parker had been a whiz in math class that year. For the first time, everything about it had made sense. He didn’t even need a pencil and paper or a calculator. He could do most of it in his head.

  But lately, even the simplest problem was beyond him. His hand used to shoot up into the air whenever Ms. Cobertson asked the class a question. Now he almost never lifted it off his desk.

  In fact, he just couldn’t seem to concentrate on any of his schoolwork these days. Instead, he’d take out a sheet of paper and draw elaborate doodles — zigzags and scribbles and all sorts of things that popped into his wandering mind.

  As Ms. Cobertson put down a series of math problems on the blackboard, he took out a piece of paper and started to doodle on top.

  He did it automatically, without thinking. In fact, that’s what he’d been doing earlier in homeroom. No wonder he forgot his binder. Too busy scribbling and drawing doodads. And stopping off at his locker to dump his history book.

  As Parker’s attention wandered, one of the doodles started to look like a locker. He drew numbers blasting off from it, like in a comic book.

  Suddenly, Parker sat up. He remembered drawing a similar picture in homeroom. Maybe that’s how someone got my combination! he thought. Anyone could have been looking over my shoulder. So that’s how someone got into my locker. Someone who knows I’m a big Gators fan, too! Gosh, everyone knew about that.

  But who would do that — set me up with a stolen gator?

  Cris?

  Too obvious. Why would Cris have made such a big show of giving him the lost notebook? No, it had to be someone else. Someone who also snagged the gator from the coach’s office.

  Joni? She certainly knew how much he liked gators. Wait a minute. That was ridiculous. She hadn’t even known about the guy with the camera until he told her about it.

  The more he thought about it, the more an ugly picture took shape in his mind.

  It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

  9

  That afternoon, Parker was more distracted than ever during practice. He kept looking around as if he might see something. Maybe someone wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt would simply walk up to him, point a camera at him, and shout, “Surprise!” What if it was all some kind of joke, like one of those weird hidden video TV shows?

  If only it were that simple, he thought as he missed a lateral.

  “Parker, are you playing football or searching for UFOs?” called the coach from the bench. “Let’s see some heads-up ball!”

  “Better get with it, Parker, or you’ll be warming the bench,” said Cris.

  “Okay, okay! Spike, let me try Thirty-two Grind for a change. Haven’t done much with it since the Leopards game.”

  “Aw, Parker, you don’t want to get hurt, do you?” asked Spike. “This is just a scrimmage. Save it for the real game.”

  “C’mon, Spike,” Parker pressed. “I want to keep in shape. Give me the ball.”

  “All right,” Spike agreed.

  This time the play worked like clockwork. Parker broke through the small hole in the line. He wove his way through the secondary defense into the clear. Since it was just a practice session, he didn’t run all the way down to the goal line, but awfully close.

  It felt good to get something right that day.

  After practice, he stopped by Joni’s house on his way home. He told her about the gator in his locker and his visit to the coach’s office. He showed her the doodle in his three-ring binder.

  He was about to tell her his latest theory when she suddenly blurted out, “It has to be someone on the team!”

  “The perpetrator?”

  “Exactly! The perp!”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,” he admitted reluctantly. “But I just can’t believe it.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Well, for one thing,” he said, “we all know the plays. We don’t have to steal them from the coach’s playbook.”

  “All of them?”

  “Sure, and we go over and over and over each one,” he explained. “Any one of us could draw those plays from memory.”

  “You really think so?”

  She paused, as if an idea were forming in her mind.

  “Okay,” she said. “Prove it.”

  “Prove what?” he asked.

  “Prove you can draw the plays from memory. Draw one.”

  “Joni, this is silly,” he protested.

  “I’m serious,” she insisted. “Go ahead and draw one, any one.”

  He took out a fresh piece of loose-leaf paper from the back of his binder and started to draw.

  First he marked all the positions at the line of scrimmage with the starting team’s numbers. Then he drew a dotted line to indicate where he would move when the signal was given.

  “See?” he asked.

  “Mmmmmm,” she said. “That’s one where you get the ball and carry it. Draw one where you don’t have anything to do.”

  “I always have something to do,” he said. “But I know what you mean. I’ll draw a pass play where I don’t get the ball.”

  He started out fine, but when it came to marking what Spike did and where the receiver moved, he couldn’t quite remember.

  He tried another, and it was worse. He couldn’t recall much of what anyone else did, where they hit a mark — anything that didn’t directly involve him.

  “See?” she said. “You can’t be sure what everyone else has to do. No one on the team can. So making copies of what you know would be only part of the picture.”

  “Those Leopards knew every move to all our plays,” he said. “They had to have copies of them.”

  “What could be more natural than one of the players dropping by the coach’s office before practice? It would be easy enough for him to snap the pictures and then get lost in the after-school crowd.”

  “All right, all right,” he admitted. “It could have been one of the guys on the team. But why? And which one?”

  10

  That evening, Parker decided to take a scientific approach to his investigation. On a piece of paper, he jotted down a team roster. Every member was a suspect.

  Then, along the top of another page, he made some column headings — possible motives:

  “Was bribed”

  “Hates the coach”

  “Hates school”

  “Hates the rest of the team”

  “Is just plain stupid”

  Then he made a column titled “Has acted suspicious.”

  There
was plenty of space under each column for the names of suspects to be penciled in. He left room for additional bits of information, too. He’d keep his eyes and ears open and ask Joni and Melissa to do the same.

  To start off, there weren’t any names in any of the columns. Then, day by day, the spaces started to fill up.

  “Darren Shultz was late for practice,” Parker wrote in the “Has acted suspicious” column. He added, “Could have been in the coach’s office while we were all out on the field.”

  Then Joni found out that Darren had been taking a makeup history test.

  The next item went under the “Hates the rest of team” column: “Fabian deRosa complained he never gets any help.”

  But that was soon followed by: “Fabian scored three times in practice, then announced, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you guys.’ ”

  Most of the offense and a large part of the defense came in for comments, one after the other. But then explanations followed, and the comments were crossed out.

  At the same time, a lot of comments were being made about Parker — by his teachers.

  “Haven’t finished the assignment, Parker?”

  “Lost your homework?”

  “Don’t know the answer?”

  “Can’t find the place? Will someone please show Parker where we’re reading!”

  The grades on his papers went from A’s to B’s to C’s, one after another.

  But Parker hardly noticed. His mind was definitely elsewhere.

  Then Parker decided to take another approach to his investigation.

  “Mom,” he asked one morning, “remember how you said I could use the computer in your office for homework? Can I come by after practice?”

  “That won’t give you much time before I have to come home,” said Mrs. Nolan. “Can’t you use one of the computers in school?”

  “This is kind of private stuff,” he explained. “It won’t take much time.”

  “Well, it is the best time,” she said. “The office is pretty quiet late in the day. All right — I’ll see you later.”

  That afternoon, Parker entered all his information into a program on his mom’s computer. He added a new list next to each player’s name — his best guess for what the chances were that that person was the perpetrator.

  Cris Muldoon: 50–50

  Spike Newton: 50–50

  Fabian deRosa: 50–50

  Morris Comer: 50–50

  Parker hoped that this program would sort all the information and spit out the name of the most likely suspect. But when he tried to make the program work, nothing much happened. The computer just alphabetized the list of player’s names.

  He figured he’d just have to keep at it. He decided to add new information every day. Whenever he picked up the slightest clue, he changed the odds. This meant stopping by Mrs. Nolan’s office every day after practice.

  One afternoon, he came in almost breathless with excitement. Joni had just told him that she’d seen Fabian deRosa coming out of the FotoQuick shop. A solid clue!

  He rushed to change the odds next to Fabian’s name. Then he punched in every combination of keys he knew. But the computer just gave him the same alphabetized list every time.

  Later that day, Joni called to say that her friend Gloria told her that Fabian had bought the nicest photo album for his mother’s birthday. With a sigh, Parker changed back the odds after Fabian’s name.

  “Isn’t this secret math project taking a lot of time?” asked Mrs. Nolan during dinner a few days later. “I don’t seem to hear anything about History or Science or any of your other subjects.”

  Parker stared at the vanilla ice cream melting away on the pecan pie in front of him.

  “I’ll eat that if you don’t want it, Parker,” offered Melissa.

  “Parker? You didn’t answer me,” said Mrs. Nolan. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” he said, grabbing the pie plate back from Melissa. He started gobbling the ice cream. “Just have a lot on my mind. Big project for the science fair.”

  “The science fair was last month,” said Melissa.

  “Next year’s fair!” snapped Parker. “Can’t start too soon.”

  “Paaaarkerrrr.” His mother frowned. “What’s going on?”

  “Okay, you might as well know, too,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I saw someone stealing something.”

  “Did you report it?” asked Mrs. Nolan.

  “I tried to, but no one believed me,” Parker explained. “I didn’t see who it was and … well, there’s no real absolutely positive proof, but I’m sure of it. And if I can just find out who it is, then, well, then everyone will see that I’ve been telling the truth.”

  “I’m sure that’s important, Parker,” said his mother. “But you have to be very careful about accusing someone unless there’s no doubt whatsoever.”

  “I know that, Mom,” he said.

  “And your first responsibility is to your school-work. Playing Dick Tracy is one thing, but you mustn’t neglect your studies.”

  But he was. In class, when he was called on, he sometimes didn’t even know what the question was.

  Even worse, his weekly tests were being affected. Math was usually his best subject. But at the end of that week, he got such a low test score, it brought his average way down.

  “I’m sorry, Parker,” said Ms. Cobertson as she handed him the test after class, “but your average is below the passing level. You cannot participate in athletics. At least not until you bring up your average. I’ll have to leave a note for Coach Isaac in his mailbox.”

  Parker was stunned. The Kudzus were scheduled to play their biggest rival, the Pittstown Piranhas, that Saturday. He had to play. He couldn’t miss the most important game of the year.

  Besides, it was a chance to get a close look at the team in action. He was sure to pick up more clues.

  He stared down at the math test with the failing grade. It was the worst mark he’d ever gotten. How was he going to explain it to his mother? To the coach? To everyone?

  “So, is Parker Nolan the math genius everyone thinks he is?”

  The deep voice asking the question belonged to Huey Walker. He and Mitch Crum crowded around Parker’s desk, trying to see the grade.

  “Yeah, what did you get on that test?” asked Mitch.

  “Leave me alone,” said Parker angrily. “Don’t be so nosy.”

  “Hey, you guys, you expect him to tell you the truth?” Spike Newton called from the doorway. “How can you trust a guy who lies — and steals?”

  “Bug off!” Parker shouted. “All of you, just get off my case.”

  They just won’t let up on anything, he thought. And wait until they hear I can’t play.

  Then another thought occurred to him.

  Who says anyone has to hear?

  Ms. Cobertson said she was going to leave a note for the coach in his mailbox. But it was the last class of the day — and it was Friday. The way the school delivered mail, Coach Isaac wouldn’t get anything until Monday.

  No one said I have to tell him I can’t play, Parker thought. I don’t have to say anything to anyone.

  And what’s the big deal about a stupid math test, anyway?

  Especially since I think I know now who was in the coach’s office with the camera that day.

  11

  Knowing who had done it was one thing. Proving it was another.

  Short of catching the perp in the act again, Parker thought, there has to be a way to trip up the guilty individual.

  That evening after supper, he tried to come up with a plan.

  “Melissa, will you please stop shuffling those cards?” he asked. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

  “Okay, Parker, I’ll put them away if you’re not interested in playing,” she said.

  She reached over and slipped the deck into a small brown envelope with a clasp.

  “Where’s their box?” he asked.

  “Got lost,” she said. �
��This is just as good.”

  Almost as good as the real thing, he thought.

  Suddenly, his whole face lit up.

  Oh, boy, he thought. What a great idea! But would it work?

  He headed for the telephone.

  “Hi, Joni? Got a minute? I want to talk something over with you. What do you think of this?”

  It was bitter cold that Saturday. Gray clouds hovered over the field.

  Parker hunkered down on the sideline to watch the coin toss.

  “We might even get some snow today,” he heard Rook Stubbs say.

  “Brrrrr,” said Coach Isaac, clapping his gloved hands. “Better make sure that drinking water doesn’t freeze.”

  The Kudzus won the toss and elected to receive. The Piranhas’ placekicker booted the ball high into the darkening sky. But it didn’t travel very far downfield. Perry McDougal, the Kudzus’ backup offensive running back, was on the special team that received. He was in the clear for a moment as the ball came toward him. He looked like he was thinking about running it. Then a wall of Piranhas was suddenly bearing down on him. Wisely, he signaled for a fair catch.

  “Good going, Perry,” said Cris as the Kudzus’ regular offense came onto the field.

  The eleven players gathered into a tight huddle, stomping to keep warm in the frosty air. As Spike started to speak, Parker leaned way in, his elbows almost touching the ground. A yellow FotoQuick envelope dropped onto the frozen turf in front of him.

  “Whoops!” he said loudly.

  He picked it up and made a big show of stashing it inside his uniform, under his protective padding.

  “What’s that?” asked Huey.

  “Oh, just some interesting pictures,” said Parker. He glanced around the huddle very mysteriously.

  “Pictures?” asked Cris. “What kind of pictures? And what are you doing with pictures here?”

  He sounded real bothered.

  “I just found them in the locker room before the game,” Parker explained.

  “Well, what did you bring them out here for?” sneered Moose.

  “Remember what I told you during the game with the Leopards? How I saw someone with a camera coming out of Coach’s office? Well, I finally figured out who that someone was.” He patted the pictures and smiled knowingly.