The Rising

by Heather Graham

  But she hadn’t and now the test for which Sam was supposed to provide the answers made a slight bulge in that side pocket of her backpack, overstuffed to the point of being stretched at the seams.

  You make up your mind yet?

  The truth was she hadn’t, and Sam turned back to the game to distract herself. She understood the concept of football. She just wasn’t sure that she liked the game. It was everyone trying to get the ball over the goal line—and willing to crunch, bang, and shove one another to do so.

  But Alex played football, and while Cara (of course) was dating Alex, it didn’t stop Sam from admiring him from a distance. In Sam’s code of honor—perhaps a foolish one at times—friends didn’t betray friends. In this group, she’d seen a lot of cheating and lying, and she kept her mouth shut when someone had said something in confidence. She wasn’t sure that paid, really.

  Sam was sitting down low in the stands, in the closest seats to the field, the only reserved ones, because Cara had secured the ticket for her. A nice gesture, Sam thought, until Cara had stuck the stolen test into her backpack along with the ticket.

  “We’re counting on you, girl.” Cara winked and bounced off with her tumbling hair glimmering over her shoulders in her prissy cheer uniform.

  Sam hadn’t had any intentions at all of going to the school’s first playoff game in fifteen years, but now she had a ticket and, well, her own reasons for going. All of which were spelled A-L-E-X.

  The thing was, Sam liked being friends with Cara, even though they weren’t friends anymore, not really. Sam holding on to what they used to have because some part of her still craved it, and Cara holding on for reasons akin to the test now stuffed in Sam’s backpack to claim her expert scientific eye. That must’ve been the main reason Cara seemed so happy when Sam landed the internship at NASA’s Ames Research Center, home to the Astrobiology Institute, located down in Silicon Valley. She should’ve just said she wasn’t about to answer the exam questions ahead of time and chance being caught as a cheater herself. Risk maybe her whole future, because she didn’t want to be the outcast she often felt like, because she was afraid of running afoul of Cara and the Clones, who could make her life a living high school hell.

  Well, screw the CatPack.

  Easier said than done, of course. The school belonged to this group, who loved parading about in their clingy uniforms, the halls lacking only red carpets rolled out ahead of their strut.

  Yeah, screw them.

  The cheer ended and Sam watched Cara shoot her a look that stopped just short of a smile, more a warning than a glance. Help us or else. Sam always helped because she didn’t want to find out what “or else” entailed.

  Sam imagined herself dressed in a CatPack outfit, bouncing about and playing to the crowd.

  No, actually, she shouldn’t imagine the sight because when she did, she’d see herself jumping about while trying to keep her glasses on at the same time—a book or her iPad stuck in the extra pocket she’d sewn into her short, short skirt falling out with each bounce. These girls didn’t care one iota, smidgeon, gram, molecule, or some infinitesimal quantum particle about anything in any way involving a worldview. Their lives were limited to the confines of the school and the city where they were treated like royalty simply because of who they were. Never mind the fact they hadn’t contributed or discovered a damn thing, never anything of worth to anyone beyond themselves.

  Sam, on the other hand, had just made an amazing discovery she couldn’t wait to share with Dr. Donati, her supervisor at Ames. Not that Cara and the Clones would understand, much less care. But Donati surely would, because the pattern she’d uncovered was undeniably there.

  Sam wanted a career in NASA. She wanted to become an astronaut and go into space as part of the next phase of the manned program. She wanted a different kind of crowd than this to applaud, as she made her way to the capsule of some futuristic spaceship.

  Now flying for the USA, Samantha Dixon!

  Just as she finished that thought, the crowd jumped to its feet, cheering. Sam returned her gaze to the field to find Alex Chin strutting away from a ball carrier he’d deftly avoided for a twenty-yard gain on a quarterback keeper, to the high-fives of his Wildcat teammates. She felt her own heartbeat slow again, after fearing herself caught in a fantasy.

  But she wasn’t a cheater in the fantasy. There was no place for cheaters at NASA.

  APPLICATION FOR SPACE PROGRAM SUMMARILY DENIED.

  Sam saw that in her head now, her whole life ruined by one stupid mistake because she wasn’t brave or strong enough just to say no. Maybe she could tell Cara she’d lost her backpack, and thus the test.

  Maybe she should just tell Cara to go to hell. A year from now, she’d be at Harvard, or Brown, or MIT, or Stanford. But they didn’t accept cheaters, either, much less give them the financial aid Sam needed with her overgrown-hippie parents too busy making pesticide-free products to make any money. Setting up “grow” communes for anyone who paid them a small deposit, with the balance almost never paid in full. No money, but a fridge full of tomatoes and a nook full of homemade jellies and jams. Wonder if one of my schools of choice might accept those in lieu of tuition? Strange how all Sam could think of was growing up while her parents never seemed to have grown up at all. Her father still called people “dude.”

  Really?

  Now they had taken to growing medical marijuana, having secured their grow license for a local dispensary. It had made her very popular in school once word got out, since any number of kids who’d never said a single word to her thought it would be no problem for her to clip a few buds off the plants for them. Sam reminded them that constituted a crime; “Just say no,” the saying went, and that’s what she did.

  To distract herself as much as anything, Sam turned her attention back to the game, seeking out Alex, who was calling the signals from behind center. At least when she tutored him, she got paid. Even though she would’ve done it for free. And there was at least one good thing about being at the game tonight, at field level, no less: she got to watch Alex play, the crowd cheering as he threw a perfect strike over the middle for a thirty-yard gain that put the Wildcats in easy range of the Granite Bay end zone. The crowd leaped to its feet en masse, pounding the stands so hard the ground actually shook. In front of Sam on the sidelines, the CatPack bounced as if their sneakers were equipped with springs, pompoms shaking in rhythm.

  That’s when she felt a man squeeze into the flat bleacher seat behind her. Sam smelled something like motor oil combined with fresh tire rubber and figured he must be an auto mechanic. But a quick glance revealed him to be well dressed all in black, the hands pressed atop his knees looking so clean the skin seemed sprayed on. Their eyes met but the man’s didn’t really regard her, and Sam turned away fast, trying to figure out why she suddenly felt so unnerved.

  3

  THE SECOND COMING

  “HEY, STAY DOWN, FOOL! Come after me, and that’s how you land!” Alex Chin taunted, as the running back he’d drilled into the turf from his free safety position on defense was helped back to his feet and moved woozily toward the sideline. “Yup, yup, time to leave the field and don’t bother coming back!”

  The other team’s trainer came out onto the field to help number twenty-four, as Alex summoned the defense back into the huddle. They were taking the game—but he didn’t like the way it was going, just one score up late in the fourth quarter after a glut of penalties called on the home team had kept the game close. Maybe the ref was still pissed at Alex for stealing the game ball prior to kickoff.

  He hadn’t thrown his flag once for all the hits after the whistle Alex had taken while in at quarterback. Alex had the feeling that the coach of the visiting Granite Bay Grizzlies had put a bounty out on him or something—free pizza for whoever knocks Alex Chin out of the game. Even on defense, the fullback hadn’t just tried to block him on the last play; he’d tried to elbow-jab him in the back between the ribs. The blow had stung and stolen
his breath, but Alex showed no response at all, didn’t even complain to the ref. There were better ways to get even.

  “This is our house,” he told his teammates, back in the defensive huddle. “Fourth quarter and they’re still trying to play dirty. Let them. One stop to go for the CCS championship. We own this field. Let’s send them home! Let’s go to state! What are we?”

  “Glue!”

  The defense clapped in cadence and fanned out to take their positions, then rapidly shifted about as Alex called out defensive signals. Pretty much the only television he’d been watching lately had been the opponents’ game films, something he was much better at studying than his senior year subjects. Every time he resolved to pay more attention to this or that subject, there was an offensive tendency to be studied or defensive weakness to be exploited. That was the thing about calling signals on both offense and defense. You had to know your opponent on both sides of the ball, instead of just one.

  “Forty-three Juke!” Alex called out, as the quarterback backpedaled from center into the shotgun set. “Forty-three Juke!”

  He could tell from the tight end going into motion that Granite Bay was going to run a screen to that side, hence his defensive signal to shift the Wildcats’ outside linebacker into a slot where he could disrupt the play. Alex rotated toward that side at the snap, saw the screen taking shape, and outside linebacker Tommy Banks, all 150 pounds of the legendary Tom Banks’s son, propelling himself toward an offensive lineman who looked twice his size, moving out to block.

  Alex heard the bone-jarring impact as he rotated into position and charged the line, the crackle of helmets and shoulder pads crunching against each other. Tommy Banks disappeared under a sea of churning feet and black pellets kicked up from the turf field, as Alex knifed in through the gap Tommy had created and tackled the running back, who’d caught the screen low, for a five-yard loss. Then he bounced back up and moved straight to Tommy, who’d just made it up to his knees.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, four-two!” he said, helping the smallest kid on defense back to his feet. “That was on you, all you! You made your dad proud, you hear me? You made your dad proud!”

  And the crowd erupted in cheers again, for Tommy Banks this time as he jogged back a bit dazedly to the huddle with Alex’s hand wrapped around his shoulder.

  “Let me see something,” Alex said, turning the kid’s face toward him with both hands on his helmet.

  “You’re not gonna kiss me, are you?” Tommy mused through the blood from a cracked lip.

  “Another play like that, and I just might. Follow my finger,” Alex instructed, holding up his middle one to make sure the crunching tackle hadn’t left Tommy’s eyes glassy.

  “Very funny.”

  Alex glanced at the scoreboard, which showed the Cats up seven points with twelve seconds to go and the Grizzlies forty yards from the end zone.

  “Third down, boys,” he said in the huddle. “Stop them two more plays, we go to state. One deep-zone blitz to go. Let’s do it!”

  The standing-room-only crowd began hooting it up as soon as they broke the huddle and spread out into position across the line of scrimmage. They got really loud when the Grizzlies’ quarterback brought his team up to the line and tried to shift the offense from the unexpectedly aggressive man-up coverage he was facing. The whole offense looked rattled. The quarterback took the snap, fumbled it, and covered up fast, no choice but to use his final time-out.

  “There you go, there you go!” Alex said, slapping the pads of his teammates. “Almost over now, almost done!”

  Having no idea in that moment how right he was about to become.

  4

  STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  IT FELT WEIRD, SAM thought as both teams gathered on the sidelines during the time-out, not to have her nose in a book. She was currently re-reading Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, one of her all-time favorites along with Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and pretty much anything by Isaac Asimov. She loved reading science fiction dating all the way back to H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, never ceased to be amazed at the ability of those authors to foresee the future.

  She’d read the books and saw herself doing something similar for NASA. Not just foreseeing the future, but planning and helping to bring it to pass.

  Unless she was suspended for cheating on an AP bio exam. Unless she got caught supplying Cara and her bouncing cheer buddies the answers to the test they’d stolen.

  Sam wanted to take it out of her backpack pocket and tear it up then and there. Otherwise, she might very well find herself explaining to her boss at NASA why she’d been expelled from high school instead of expounding on the discovery she couldn’t wait to share with him.

  The information was on her iPad, currently stuffed into the backpack pressed against her on the bench. The findings she’d come across could have been coincidence, but she doubted it. And, assuming there was some validity in those findings, what exactly did they suggest?

  Maybe nothing.

  Maybe lots.

  She wouldn’t know until she shared the information with Dr. Donati. The findings may well not amount to much, even if they were accurate. But Sam had never been shy about showing initiative with anything related to science and she wanted NASA to see her as the kind of free, creative thinker they so valued.

  But how much would they value a proven cheater?

  Again she thought about tossing the stolen exam in the trash and again she stopped short of doing it. Fixating on that again, both the game and the findings stored on her iPad flitting at the edge of her consciousness. All of a sudden, the hero of Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith, seemed eerily easy to relate to. A human raised by Martians who finally comes home to Earth to find it’s not really home.

  A stranger in a strange land, indeed, just like her.

  Sam didn’t feel she belonged here right now any more than Valentine when he first came to Earth. And he never stopped being a stranger, she remembered, as the teams broke from the sidelines and gathered in their respective huddles.

  Time for just one more play, Samantha thought, rising to her feet with the rest of the crowd and smelling the odd motor oil–like scent again as the man behind her rose too.

  5

  IMPACT

  FOURTH DOWN AND HALF the field to go now. Alex bobbed up and down in the ground mist gathering on the dew-rich field, the halogen lights strung from poles overhead slicing through the gathering fog to create a haze-like effect that covered only the field. As if the stands were walled off. As if the world extended no farther than this.

  With time stopped, Alex glanced toward the sidelines, reminding himself to enjoy the moment, savor it, because being on top of the world wasn’t something that happened every day—never, for most people. But his gaze again drifted to Tom Banks, who was nervously clutching his football like it was a newborn baby.

  The “Second Coming,” the most seasoned of Wildcat football fans called Alex, Banks being the first.

  Granite Bay came to the line of scrimmage and Alex called out the defensive signals, reading the formation to identify the coming gadget play, a flea flicker or something, with the receiver in motion lagging behind the play to accept a toss from either the running back or tight end. The Grizzlies needed this score just to tie, but he’d seen stranger things happen and crept closer to the line of scrimmage, ready for the snap.

  It came without the quarterback noticing Alex sliding to the left to shoot the gap between offensive linemen moving out to block, reaching the running back at the same time as the ball. Alex hit him with enough force to jar the ball loose and send it floating through the air.

  Straight into the arms of Tommy Banks, who caught it clean and seemed to freeze.

  Game over, Alex thought, just go down and cover up.

  Then instinct took over and Tommy started running instead, twisting toward the sideline en route to the end zone, near which his father was seated. The quarterba
ck and one of the linemen had a direct bead on Tommy, their angle certain to cut him off before he turned upfield.

  * * *

  Sam watched a kid who looked too small to be playing for the Wildcats chugging down the sideline. They were on defense a minute ago, meaning he must’ve gotten the ball after an interception or a fumble. A pair of Grizzlies, Bears, or whatever they were called converged for the tackle from two different angles, certain to sandwich the smaller kid between them. Then, though, a blur of motion zoomed into the picture, another Wildcat slicing to cut the tacklers off.

  Alex.

  * * *

  Go out of bounds! Alex thought, but Tommy clearly had other thoughts as the quarterback’s and lineman’s focus was entirely on him, all their pent-up frustration over the impending, now inevitable loss about to be unleashed in a single violent moment. Tommy would never see it coming, the tackle sure to crush him. Alex could see it all happening on a Jumbotron in his head as if it were a done deal. Only it wasn’t, and he still had as good an angle on them as they had on Tommy.

  Alex charged across the field, looping ahead to cut off the would-be tackle, stop Tommy from getting crunched just as his father had a generation before. Running as fast as he’d run in his entire life and catching a glimpse of Tom Banks cringing in his wheelchair.

  * * *

  Sam was on her feet with everyone else in the stands, practically bouncing up and down. The bleachers reverberated in a tinny echo she could feel at the core of her eardrums. Hardly a football fan, she couldn’t help rooting for the kid who looked too small to be out there streaking for the end zone, with Alex slicing in to throw him a block.