by Mike Lupica
“How come you wanted to be friends with me?” he said, not looking at Chris, just staring straight up at the sky. Hoping Chris wouldn’t laugh at him. Or say something like “Who said anything about being friends?”
Or get weirded out and just get up and leave.
He didn’t do any of those things.
“Dogs,” he said.
“Dogs?”
Chris rolled over, propping himself up on an elbow. “No lie,” he said. “It started when I saw you had that picture of Casey that day.”
“Aw, man, that is so not cool.”
“It was to me,” Chris said. “’Cause it’s the way I feel about Brett, even though I’d never tell any of the guys that.”
“So we’re hanging out because we both like dogs?”
“I’m not good at talking about myself,” Chris said.
Scott grinned. “My mom says guys never are.”
Chris rolled back over, like maybe he could find the right words in the sky. “When you talk about how hard you try, I could see that even before I knew you,” Chris said. “Does that make any sense? My mom says that the best thing anybody can have going for them is heart. And, I don’t know, somehow I could see you had heart even before we got out here.”
He blew out some breath like even talking this much had made him tired.
For a long time, nobody said anything.
Then Chris said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah.”
“How come you didn’t tell Mr. D you could kick when he was looking for guys to kick off?”
“Are you joking? Did you see how fast Big Nick went for that tee?”
“You can kick, dude,” Chris said. “But Coach’ll never know that if you don’t tell him.”
“I can kick here,” Scott said. “I can kick with only you and Casey watching. And you have to promise me you’re not going to tell anybody.”
“Why?” Chris said.
“Because I’m asking you to.”
“I’m not promising until you tell me why,” Chris said.
“Because I’m afraid, that’s why,” Scott said. He took a deep breath, wanting Chris to understand. “Because kicking is all I’ve got, and if I screw up, then I won’t even have that anymore. I won’t even be any good in my dreams.”
“For a guy I said had heart, you can sound like such a baby sometimes!” Chris said.
It came at Scott loud—and out of nowhere, like a clap of thunder you didn’t know was coming. Like something had been building up inside him since they’d gotten out here and now he had just popped.
“What . . . ?” was all Scott could get out.
Chris Conlan wasn’t through.
He was on his feet, on fire.
“You want to be afraid about something?” Chris was really yelling now. “How about somebody taking your whole stinking season away?”
Then he picked up the ball and threw it as far as Scott had ever seen him throw it, toward the woods. Casey went running after it at top speed from all the way at the other end of the field, barking his head off, Brett trailing way behind, making the squeaky noise that passed for his own bark.
“Dude,” Scott said, when he thought it was safe to say anything, “what does that mean, somebody’s going to take your season away?”
Chris turned toward the water now. Scott couldn’t get a good look at his face and wasn’t sure he wanted to, because the coolest kid in school was blinking his eyes, fast, biting down on his lower lip, like he might start crying any second.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you for a couple of days,” Chris said finally. “I might have to quit the team before the season even starts.”
“Quit the team?” Scott said. “You can’t quit the team. You’re the best player. There is no team without you.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t read,” Chris said.
Then he turned and ran.
EIGHT
Scott was afraid to call Chris the rest of Saturday.
He wanted to call him, wanted in the worst way to understand what was going on with the only friend he had at school.
But he didn’t pick up the phone. He thought about going online and trying to instant-message him, which sometimes was an easier way to talk to somebody.
He didn’t do that, either.
He mostly just sat up in his room, Casey lying there on the floor next to his bed, thinking the same thing over and over again: How crazy this was.
This was Chris Conlan. How could he be this crazy about some book he was having trouble reading?
Except that’s not the way it came out. It came out like he couldn’t read at all. But how could that be? Everybody could read by the time they got to the sixth grade.
Couldn’t they?
When he finally left his room for dinner that night, his mom said, “Did you and Chris have some sort of fight?”
“No.”
He stared at his plate like he was trying to read something.
“Because he left in a pretty big hurry.”
“There was no fight, Mom.”
No way he was going to tell his parents what had happened. Chris hadn’t said it was a secret, hadn’t said another word before he’d bolted. But Scott wasn’t taking any chances until he talked to him again.
Still his mom, being a mom, wouldn’t let it go.
She said, “He just came in, asked if he could use the phone to call his mom, then said he was going to wait outside for her. Then when you didn’t come back right away—”
“Mom!” It came out too loud and Scott knew it. “Nothing happened!”
“Don’t raise your voice to your mother, bud,” his dad said. “She didn’t do anything.”
“Sorry,” he said.
He wanted to ask his parents if there was any way somebody as smart as Chris couldn’t read. Or if it was possible that any sixth-grader couldn’t read.
But he had made up his mind that he wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until he saw Chris at school on Monday.
He didn’t have to wait that long.
Every Sunday Scott and his parents had brunch at their favorite restaurant in town, the New Paradise Café.
They would leave their car at church and walk down Main Street and usually sit in the first room at the New Paradise. Scott ordered the same thing every time: blueberry pancakes, tall stack.
Today Scott had polished off his stack in record time, finished eating so fast that his parents weren’t even close to finishing their omelets. He asked them if he could walk down to the video store, which opened at noon on Sundays, then meet them back here in a little while.
His dad gave him some money, saying, “In honor of making the team, you can rent a game if you want.”
“Dad,” Scott said, “I didn’t make anything, and you know it. I just stuck it out.”
“So get a game in honor of that,” his dad said.
“I’m not any better at football this week than I was last week.”
“You know what we say in this family,” his dad said, smiling that smile at him. “You don’t always get to pick the things you’re best at.”
Scott was walking toward Gramophone Video, still thinking about Chris because he hadn’t been thinking about anything else since yesterday, when he saw Chris walking toward him, along with Jimmy Dolan and Jeremy Sharp.
No place to hide.
He wanted to see Chris, but not like this. Certainly not with Jimmy Dolan in the picture.
“Hey, look, it’s the brain,” Jimmy said. “All duded up.”
They were all stopped now, in front of Thayer’s Hardware.
“Hey, guys,” Scott said, trying to ignore Jimmy as usual.
“Hey,” Jeremy said.
Chris didn’t say anything, just kicked some invisible pebble on the sidewalk. Scott couldn’t believe Chris would be hanging out with Jimmy. Maybe he’d just run into the other guys at the video store.
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Scott said to Chris, “I was going to give you a shout-out later.”
Jimmy said, “You been hanging out with the brain, Conlan? What for—you need help with your homework?”
Scott thought, Of all the things in the whole world this dope could have said, he had to say that.
Chris looked over Scott’s head, down Main Street, and said, “I don’t need any help from the brain to do my homework.”
Scott felt as if all the air had gone out of him, like a ball with a hole in it.
Before anybody else could say anything, Chris said, “I gotta go. My mom’s picking me up in front of Lou’s.”
A diner at the other end of Main.
“We’ll go with you,” Jimmy Dolan said. “See you around, brain.”
He laughed then, as if he’d cracked himself up.
Scott stayed right where he was, didn’t turn to watch them go, didn’t care about the sound of Jimmy’s laughter, which to Scott was always the same as a fingernail being scratched across a blackboard.
The only thing he could really hear—still—was Chris calling him “the brain.”
He didn’t turn around until he was sure they were gone. Then he walked slowly back to the New Paradise Café, hoping his parents were ready to go home.
Because he was.
Casey was waiting for him, the way he always was.
He was waiting right behind the front door, spinning around in excitement, acting as if Scott had been away forever.
At least Casey never let him down.
Scott ran upstairs, changed into his play clothes as fast as he could, grabbed his football. When Casey saw the ball, he immediately ran through the kitchen and to the back door, barking all over again, kept barking all the way through the woods until they were back out on Parry Field.
It seemed like more than just a day since Scott and Chris had been out here.
More than that, it seemed to Scott that he was right back where he started.
Him and Case.
Alone.
He should have known it wasn’t going to last with Chris Conlan, no matter what Chris had said about them having dogs in common. No matter what he’d said about Scott having heart.
When Scott got close enough to the goalposts, he fired a pass as hard as he could at the tire.
Missed by a mile.
Casey didn’t care. He chased after the ball like this was their regular game on a regular day, as if nothing had changed, even though Scott felt as if everything had changed.
Even if he couldn’t figure out why.
Chris had acted in town as if Scott was the one who had done something, when all Scott had done the day before was listen. How was listening somebody’s fault?
In town it was like he and Chris hardly knew each other, as if it had been somebody else who stuck up for him with Jimmy Dolan at the bus that day, somebody else pushing Scott to go out for football and then hang in there, no matter what, so he could make a team for the first time in his life.
Now it was a team he didn’t even want to be on anymore.
He was better off here.
Scott kept throwing the ball, managed eventually to put a couple through the tire, Casey always bringing the ball back for another try. Then it was time for Scott to start kicking, first off the tee, then some dropkicks.
For some reason, even though that big heart Chris had talked about wasn’t really in it, he couldn’t miss with his dropkicks today.
He was on fire.
He hardly ever made a lot of dropkicks in a row, mostly because all you had to do was be a little off dropping the ball to throw everything off.
You could miss your spot. Or the ball would land crooked. Stuff like that.
Today he had made six in a row.
He wasn’t just money today. He was cash. That’s what his dad would say when they were out here together and Scott would really nail one. In fact, his dad was supposed to be out here by now, he’d said that he was coming out for one of their Sunday kicking contests for the championship of the entire known universe as soon as he made a couple of quick Sunday business calls.
But Scott wasn’t waiting for him now as he went for seven in a row, which would have been his all-time record. He was in the zone. Could not miss.
He made number seven.
Casey started barking, as if somehow he knew that Scott had earned a cheer, then went after the ball.
But instead of bringing the ball right back, Casey suddenly ran in the opposite direction, back toward the woods.
“Case, get back here,” Scott called out, his voice so loud on the empty field it sounded like it was coming out of speakers on a real field.
No sound from Casey.
No sight of his crazy dog.
Didn’t he know that when you got hot like this, when you had this kind of rhythm going for you, you didn’t want to wait? You wanted to kick the next one right away.
Only now his dog was freezing the kicker the way the other team did sometimes in the pros by calling a time-out.
“Case!” Scott yelled. “This is definitely delay of game.”
He started to go after him, then saw Casey coming out of the woods.
Only he didn’t have the ball with him.
Just Brett.
Chris was right behind them.
He had the ball now.
“I think this belongs to you,” he said.
NINE
“I came to say I’m sorry,” Chris said.
“It’s cool.”
“No, it’s not cool,” he said. “I was out of line.
Like way out of line. Calling you the brain like Jimmy does.” He shook his head. “Talking to you like that . . . that’s not me.”
“I thought maybe I did something,” Scott said.
“Not you. Me. I’m the stupid one.”
“Not a problem.”
They were sitting in the grass. The dogs were gone.
Chris said, “I’m the one with the problem.”
“When you’re friends with somebody,” Scott said, “then it’s your problem, too.” He stopped there for a second, not wanting this to come out sounding like some big deal. But knowing that it was, right now, the biggest possible deal. “And you and me . . . we’re still friends, right?”
“We’re friends,” Chris said, “even if I didn’t act like one in town.”
“Now all you’ve gotta do is tell me what the problem is,” Scott said. “Reading or being on the team?”
“Both.”
Then he tried to explain to Scott about dyslexia.
And how it could drag him down from behind better than any tackler on a football field.
“You ever get cramps?” Chris said.
“Don’t laugh,” Scott said, “but I get them in my feet sometimes.”
“What I’ve got,” Chris said, “is like a permanent cramp of my brain.”
He said that he and Scott would read the same page in a book, but that some of the words would sound different inside his brain than Scott’s.
He said he could look at a word like pen and read pin instead, and then get confused, not knowing why somebody in the book was trying to write with a pin.
Or, Chris said, he’d read a word at the top of a page and then forget what it meant by the time he got down to the bottom.
Writing, he said, was even worse.
“I’m okay if I have to get up in class and talk about something we had to read, as long as I worked really, really hard on it the night before with my mom or one of my tutors,” he said. “But when I try to write out the same answer, I’ll just be getting started when you guys are putting your notebooks away.”
All of a sudden, Scott felt like he’d been in a dark room and somebody had hit the light switch.
“It’s why you run the wrong way sometimes,” he said, “on the field.”
Chris reached over and bumped him some fist. “If Mr. Dolan shows me the Xs and Os on a page, I get crossed up sometimes, just th
e way I do with my reading. But if he tells me what to do, then I’m pretty much good to go. It’s why even on some of our simplest plays sometimes, I ask him to break down every part of it, even have him walk through it like he’s the quarterback. That way I can really see it.”
But football wasn’t his problem, he said, even if he was the only one running right sometimes when the rest of the team was running left.
School was the problem, and it was getting worse, even though the year had just started.
“How are you when you have to work on the computer and type stuff?” Scott said.
“I’m the king of IM-ing people,” he said, “because nobody cares if you’re a lousy speller or not.”
“I still don’t get how this means you might have to quit the team,” Scott said.
Chris took a deep breath, let it out in a long whoosh. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If I can’t keep up this year, they want to put me in Special Ed. And I’m already not keeping up.”
Scott felt like the slow one now. “But what does this have to do with football?”
Chris said his parents had laid it out for him like this: If he couldn’t show that he was keeping up in his classes by the time the season started in a couple of weeks, then they were going to hire a full-time tutor. Full-time meant four nights a week. The tutor’s job was to get him ready for this big state equivalency test at the end of the semester.
“If I can pass that, I can stay in our regular class,” he said. “If I can’t, I go into Special Ed.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Listen, every grown-up who talks to me says that Special Ed isn’t like school for dummies,” he said. “They say that sometimes the opposite is true, that some of the smartest kids end up in Special Ed for all kinds of different reasons, not just dyslexia. But I don’t care. I want to stay with my friends.”
“Dude,” Scott said, “nobody’s gonna think any differently about you whatever class you’re in. You’re . . . you’re you.”
“You hear what the other kids say about Special Ed kids.”
“Well, then, you can be the one to show those kids that they’re the ones acting dumber than dirt.”
Chris’s face started to get red.