Last Man Out

by Mike Lupica

  “It would be my pleasure,” Tommy said.

  “Just don’t let him push your buttons,” Greck said to Tommy.

  “He doesn’t push my buttons,” Tommy said. “He just annoys me. I hate that smile of his.”

  Greck grinned and said to Danny, “Huge difference.”

  “Well, if all goes to plan,” Danny said, “we’ll be the ones smiling when the game’s over.”

  On the Wildcats’ first possession, Blake started off spreading the ball around. He completed pass after pass, mixing it up, hitting his tight end, his favorite wide receiver, and his tailback. It felt like only a minute had passed by the time the Wildcats were within striking distance of the end zone.

  On first and goal at the Bears’ seven-yard line, Blake took the snap and immediately ran the ball to the outside on a designed rollout. His lead blocker took out a Bears’ defender, and then set his sights on Tommy. By the time Tommy wrestled past the blocker, Blake was practically skipping into the end zone, but not before giving Tommy a little straight-arm as he crossed the goal line, like he was putting an exclamation point on the play.

  “Hey!” Tommy said. “What was that?”

  Blake smiled.

  “Force of habit,” he said. “When I see you coming, I protect myself.”

  “You sure that’s all it was?”

  “C’mon, man,” Blake said. “I’m just competing, same as you. Same as we always have.”

  Tommy blitzed on the conversion when Blake dropped back to throw, and Tommy nearly got to him before Blake threw the ball away. But Tommy got close enough to get a hand on the ball, and couldn’t resist brushing Blake just a little bit as he ran through the play.

  His own exclamation point.

  Now Blake was the one eyeballing Tommy.

  “Game on,” he said.

  “You mean it wasn’t already?” Tommy smiled at him, flashing his teeth.

  They stopped talking after that. But they were still in each other’s space, playing a game within a game. They stopped using words, but started talking with their eyes. Every time Blake would make a play, he’d make sure to look at Tommy until Tommy looked back at him. Tommy knew it was all playground-silly. But he did the same thing when he’d knock down a pass in coverage, or bring down Blake on a running play.

  Kid stuff. But in Tommy’s mind, it was just part of the competition. They were both playing a game they wanted to win. Badly. Even if they didn’t like each other very much, they both loved to compete. And hated the idea of losing. Especially to each other.

  The game was tied 20–20 five minutes into the fourth quarter. It meant that for the first time all season, the Wildcats were in a real game. So the Bears had won something already. Not enough for Tommy, though. Brighton still needed to win the day.

  Wellesley had the ball on the Bears’ forty-seven-yard line, having just squeaked past midfield two plays back. Not within scoring distance yet, but the Wildcats had started this particular drive on their eight-yard line, so Tommy could feel them gaining some momentum back.

  It was second and nine. Coach Fisher signaled an all-out blitz, Tommy coming from the outside and Greck straight up the middle. Before Tommy moved away from Greck to take his position, he said, “Meet you at Blake.”

  The ball was snapped and Tommy felt like he was walking through air—which was exactly what he was doing, no blockers in his way, jetting into the backfield untouched. Greck must have done the same, because he was on Blake faster than Tommy was. Somehow, under heavy pressure from both of them, Blake was able to get rid of the ball and avoid a sack at the last second. Greck ran into Blake first, then Tommy clocked him good, because there was no way for Tommy to stop his momentum. They were hard hits, but clean hits. After barely releasing the pass in time Blake went down.

  Tommy got to his feet, but made no move to help Blake up. He’d usually stick out a hand to help up the opposing quarterback. Just not this guy.

  Blake didn’t need any help, jumping to his feet in a split second. As soon as he got up, he started waving his arms and yelling, “Where’s the flag?”

  Tommy couldn’t believe it.

  “Are you serious?” Blake said. He wasn’t looking at the nearest ref, but was clearly addressing him. “That wasn’t a late hit?”

  Everybody on the field could hear him. Tommy had the feeling that if the Patriots were practicing in Foxborough right now, they could hear Blake Winthrop.

  He told himself not to say anything, or engage, or even eyeball Blake in that moment. He and Greck started walking back to their huddle.

  “They just get away with a cheap shot like that?” Blake yelled.

  Tommy stopped and turned around. Greck was standing behind him. But in Tommy’s mind, Blake was pointing at him. Talking about him.

  Now he was eyeballing Blake again.

  He started to walk toward him. Greck grabbed him and said, “This is what he wants.”

  Tommy ignored Greck and said to Blake, “You calling me a dirty player?”

  Greck tried to get his arms around Tommy from behind, wrapping him up. But Tommy shucked him off with his arms, like he was rushing Blake all over again.

  “You didn’t have to hit me,” Blake said. “What you did was the same as piling on top of me.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Tommy could see the ref who’d been closest to the play, but had walked away, now moving quickly, trying to get between him and Blake. He could feel Greck trying to stop him, again.

  “We just made a big play, T,” Greck said. “Don’t give it back.”

  Blake must have heard him, because he smiled that smile and said, “Who’s that guy, your dad?”

  Tommy was close enough to Blake now to see his eyes above his face mask, to see that Blake knew he’d said the worst thing he could possibly have said to Tommy Gallagher, only realizing it after the fact.

  Too late.

  The ref didn’t get between them in time and Greck couldn’t hold him back. Tommy wrenched himself free and slammed into Blake, throwing him to the ground, in the high heat of the moment.

  He could feel people trying to pull him off Blake, but he wouldn’t let go. Finally somebody strong was pulling him out of the pile of players, lifting him into the air. Somehow Tommy’s helmet had come off. He swiveled his head around to see who had him.

  It was Coach Fisher.

  “This is over,” Coach said.

  Tommy wiped the back of his hand across his lips, and when it came away, he saw blood on it.

  “I’m going to let you go now,” Coach said.

  Tommy nodded. Blake’s coach turned and walked Blake away from the pile. As Blake was walking away, he turned and mouthed one more word at Tommy:

  Sorry.

  Too late for that, too.

  Tommy and Blake were ejected from the game for fighting. As big a loss as Tommy was to the Bears’ defense, Blake was a much bigger loss for the Wildcats. They had lost their only offensive star.

  Which was almost like losing their whole offense.

  On the next play Greck and Liam flushed the ’Cats’ backup quarterback out of the pocket and he tried to scramble. But Mike was a blur closing in on the play, and stripped the ball out of the kid’s grasp. Bears’ ball.

  Nick took them down the field, mixing passes and runs the way Blake had for most of the day. On third and goal from the seven-yard line, he hit Danny in the middle of the end zone for the score that made it 26–20, which was the way the game ended.

  Tommy watched it from the sideline, seated alone at the end of his team’s bench. Feeling like a loser on a day when his team had won big.

  THIRTY

  AFTER THE GAME ENDED the two coaches stayed on the field and talked to the refs for a long time. When they were finished talking, Coach Fisher came over to where Tommy was standing with some of his teammates,
looked right at Tommy, and jerked a thumb toward the end zone where Danny had caught what turned out to be the game-winning pass from Nick.

  The two of them walked slowly in that direction. When Coach was sure no one else could hear them, he said, “I know what he said. But you know he didn’t mean it the way it came out.”

  “I know,” Tommy said, head down.

  “Look at me, son.”

  Tommy did. Coach was leaning against one of the goalposts now, Tommy in front of him.

  “Even if he had meant it, there’s never an excuse for fighting,” Coach said. “You didn’t just make yourself look bad, you made all of us look bad. Including your mother up in the stands. And you could have cost our team the game.”

  “I know,” Tommy said again, finding himself short on words. He swallowed hard. “What’s going to happen?”

  “It’s in the hands of the league’s board of directors,” Coach Fisher said. “It’s a league rule that if you get kicked out of one game, you miss the next one as well.”

  Tommy closed his eyes, shook his head, just wanting this day to be over, even though it had a long way to go. “I can’t do anything right.”

  “There’s going to be a conference call later this afternoon,” Coach said. “I’ll be on it. And everybody else who’ll be on it is a parent. I’m going to speak to them as a parent, not a coach. And remind them of everything that’s been going on in your life.”

  “It’s still no excuse for what I did,” Tommy said.

  “You got that right. But it is still a lot for anybody, especially a twelve-year-old boy, to handle,” Coach said. “And I will point out that it’s a twelve-year-old boy who’s never done anything like this before.” Coach smiled at him. “And will never, ever, ever do anything like it again, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “I will call you after the conference call,” Coach said. “Now go over to Blake and apologize.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He made the long walk back up the field, and then toward the Wildcats’ bench. Blake saw him coming. They met at midfield, not so far from where Tommy had put him down. Tommy held out his hand.

  “I shouldn’t have jumped you like that,” Tommy said.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything about anybody’s dad,” Blake said. “Especially not yours.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” Blake said.

  Tommy could tell this was as weird and awkward for Blake as it was for him. He thought: All day long I wanted to be right on top of the guy, and now I just want to get out of here.

  Neither one of them said anything until Tommy said, “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, either.”

  Blake turned and walked back toward his teammates. Tommy did the same. Tommy was ready to go home. He didn’t always love being in the house these days. But today was different. He saw his mom waiting for him behind the bench. He gave her a small wave.

  For the first time since his dad died, maybe the first time ever, he was glad his dad hadn’t been at the field today, watching from his corner of the stands.

  Tommy knew the ride home wasn’t going to be silent like the one they’d taken when Em had quit soccer, and his mom hadn’t forced her to talk about it.

  It was the three of them again, because Em had come to the game. But today, Mom wanted to talk all about what had happened between Tommy and Blake. Tommy was sitting next to Em in the backseat. It was as far away from his mom as he could be and still be in the same car.

  “Robert and some of the other boys told me what happened,” she said. “But now I want to hear it from you, Thomas.”

  Thomas was never good. Thomas Patrick Gallagher was worse. But Thomas was never good.

  So he told her, going all the way back to the beginning with him and Blake Winthrop, how they’d been chafing each other in football their whole lives. He told her about what had been going on all game long, the looks and the smiles. The exclamation points. All of it leading up to when Blake had accused him of being a cheap-shot artist, and then hitting Tommy with what he thought was the cheapest shot of all by using the magic word:

  Dad.

  “He told me afterward that he hadn’t been thinking straight,” Tommy said. “I guess both of us weren’t.”

  Before she could say anything, the words were coming out of Tommy in a rush.

  “I know everything you’re going to tell me, I know I should have swallowed it and walked away. I know I was wrong. But, Mom, in that moment, I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Em had been sitting quietly, just listening to both of them.

  Until now.

  “I wish you’d punched his face in,” she said. “His sister’s a jerk, too.”

  “Emily Catherine Gallagher!” their mom said.

  Three names were never good for her, either.

  “You always tell me to be honest,” Em said. “I’m being honest. I wish I could have smacked that guy.”

  Making sure Mom couldn’t see them, he reached over and pounded her some fist. It was like the old Em had suddenly shown up.

  “This is the last thing I’m going to say, because I know you feel badly about what happened,” their mom said. “Fighting never solves anything.”

  Then Tommy told her he might be suspended for next week’s game, and about the conference call, and what Coach planned to tell the other board members.

  “I agree with Coach,” his mom said. “Without condoning what you did, there has to at least be some understanding of why you did it.”

  “I don’t want to lose football,” Tommy said, “even for one Saturday.”

  “I think you’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” she said. “You are not a fighter.”

  Tommy wasn’t sure who he was anymore. He wondered how you were supposed to turn on the fight in you one second, trying to fight through the pain of losing someone, and turn it off the next, keeping your fists to yourself.

  “You’re good,” his mom said, “and you’re strong.”

  He was tired of being strong. Or maybe just tired, period. He wanted to get home, go up to his room, change into his skateboarding gear, and trek over to Wirth Park as fast as he could.

  No rules there, no opponents, no trash talk, no fighting.

  Just him and his board.

  The idea of it made Tommy feel free.

  He knew he’d taken himself down as much as he had Blake, maybe even taken himself out of next week’s game. But just the thought of being on his board and flying down a hill made him feel as if he’d already gotten back up.

  THIRTY-ONE

  HE STARTED IN THE BOWL, which was empty of other skateboarders by the time he got to Wirth, and went at it hot, like he was trying to release all his anger on his first run.

  There was no way he was staying at home waiting to hear from Coach about whether or not he had been suspended for the Bears’ game against the Needham Colts. Just sitting around would have made the wait worse.

  On top of that, he didn’t want to be home. He wanted to be here, alone with his board and his jumps and his angles, trying to picture in his head the way Mike did things in midair, the way he seemed to be riding some invisible wave.

  There were a few times when he lost his focus and nearly lost his balance, before he reminded himself that he wasn’t here to replay the Wellesley game, and the way it had ended for him.

  He was here to let the game go.

  Tommy had heard athletes say that the place where they went to eliminate distractions was the field. Except that on the field today, Tommy had been the distraction.

  Which was exactly why he was here. When he finished with the bowl, he was sweating and out of breath, like he’d just finished playing another game. He was even a little tired, but he knew it was a good kind of t
ired. He drank some water, checked the time on his phone, and was ready to go again. The conference call with Coach was still a couple of hours away. It meant that as far as Tommy was concerned, he was just getting started.

  Mike talked all the time about how there was a whole wide world of skateboarding waiting for them outside Wirth. When Tommy would ask him where it was, Mike would always say the same thing: You’ll see. And leave it at that. But if it involved runs that were more difficult and more fun—and even a little riskier—than the ones at Wirth, Tommy was ready for them. He was all in, ready to keep testing himself and challenging himself.

  But Mike wasn’t here today, because Tommy wanted to be alone, so Tommy decided to find his own challenges. He skipped the easy hill that Mike had taken him to that first Sunday, and made his way to the back of the park, to a place Mike had only ever talked about, called Heartbreak Hill. Like it was an advanced course Tommy would eventually have to pass in skateboarding. Tommy knew that was the name of a famous part of the Boston Marathon course, in the hills of Newton, because his dad had taken him there once to watch the runners streak by.

  The Heartbreak Hill at Wirth Park looked like it went straight downhill, with a bend in it about halfway to the end. It was part of the bike paths that snaked their way through Wirth, and had recently been paved over, which made it as safe for a skateboard as it could possibly be. Unless you were afraid of heights.

  “Smooth as ice,” Mike had said the first time he’d described Heartbreak Hill to Tommy.

  “Yeah,” Tommy had said. “Probably just as fast, too.”

  “But you’re the guy who keeps telling me he feels the need for speed, right?”

  “Totally.”

  “You really are starting to scare me,” Mike had said.

  “I thought being scared was what this was all about?”

  He looked down the hill now, having to lean to the side to see the bottom. Then he got on his board and pushed off, feeling the wind in his face, almost wanting to laugh, that’s how good it felt to be going so fast. But he felt in control at the same time. Athletes and coaches always talked about wanting the game to slow down in big moments. Out here, though, it was the opposite.