False Start

by Paul Hoblin

  I’m not going to lie. I wasn’t too excited about the idea of tagging along as Jeff made a stop at his girlfriend’s. At best it sounded really awkward. We were in his car by now, moving through neighborhood streets, and I found myself hoping his friends were wrong. Maybe we weren’t going to his girlfriend’s. Maybe, instead, were going to the field to practice the plays I’d been trying to memorize. It was dark out, of course, but maybe Jeff knew how to turn on the lights. I imagined the two of us standing around the fifty yard line, running through one play after another.

  We were definitely heading in that direction.

  When we got there, though, Jeff didn’t stop or even slow down.

  We drove through neighborhood after neighborhood, toward the outskirts of town. We turned onto a dirt road, and then another. If he hated me then the way he hates me now, this would have been creepy. I would have been worried he was trying to find a quiet place to kill me and dump my body or something.

  But he didn’t hate me back then, so it never occurred to me to worry.

  Still, I was curious.

  “Are we really going to your girlfriend’s?”

  “Trust me. It’s just what you need,” he said.

  More like just what you need, I thought.

  “Couldn’t you have just dropped me off at my place first?” I asked.

  Jeff laughed. “It’s not like that. Just trust me,” he said again. “A little time in Morgyn’s world would do us both some good.”

  Was he talking about his girlfriend? What did he mean her world?

  A few minutes later we parked on the shoulder of the dirt road. Through some trees there was a small house with some lit-up windows.

  I headed toward the house, but Jeff grabbed my shoulder. “This way,” he said.

  He guided me away from the front door, around the back of the house. It was darker back here, and there were more trees. Branches scratched against our arms as we worked our way deeper into the trees. A few feet later we came into a clearing. Ahead of us was a pond.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” Jeff said.

  His voice sounded loud and echo-y over the water.

  “Shhh,” another voice said.

  It was dark enough that I couldn’t see the person very well until we were standing only a few feet away.

  “Sorry,” Jeff said. “Morgyn, meet Scooter. He’s the new guy I told you about. Scooter, meet Morgyn. Don’t try to talk to her about football, because she really won’t hear it—not enough time. She always says she doesn’t have enough time to get everything done.”

  “Shhhh,” she said again.

  Then she bent her legs and swung her arm. She stayed in a crouch, watching the black water.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. It wasn’t like me to blurt something out, but I was genuinely curious.

  “She’s skipping rocks,” Jeff said.

  “In the dark?” I asked. I wasn’t sure who the question was for—Jeff or Morgyn.

  “Who has time to skip rocks during the day?” she replied casually.

  Jeff turned to me and gave me a look. “See what I mean?”

  “Shhhhhh,” she said.

  Both Jeff and I listened. We waited for her to stop staring at the water.

  “How many skips did you get this time?” Jeff asked.

  “Eleven,” she said. She was talking normally now instead of in a whisper.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  But Morgyn didn’t answer. By now my eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness to see what she was doing: feeling around for another rock to skip. When she found one to her liking, she straightened up.

  “I listen,” she said. “If you’re totally quiet, you can hear the rock skimming off the water. It makes a pinging sound.”

  She threw the rock. The moon was bright enough that I saw the stone take its first big hop. Then it disappeared into the night.

  I tried to listen for the pinging, but Jeff interrupted the silence: “How many that time?”

  “Eight, I think,” she said. “It’s hard to hear when people are talking.”

  She was accusing Jeff, but she didn’t seem to be too angry about it. This was an argument they’d clearly had before.

  “Personally, I think she’s making it all up. What do you think, Scooter? Could you hear anything?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I want to try again.”

  Morgyn found another rock and sent it sailing toward the water. This time, I didn’t even try to watch. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  Ping . . . ping . . . ping . . . ping . . . ping ping ping ping ping.

  “Well?” Jeff asked again.

  “Nine,” we both said in unison.

  Morgyn must have smiled because I could see her white teeth in the darkness.

  “Ha! I knew you two would get along,” Jeff said. “You guys could probably spend days together not saying a single word. If Morgyn had come to that party she probably would have ended up on the porch too.”

  Jeff picked up a rock and chucked it at the water. It crashed into the pond with a giant splash.

  “Now that one I heard,” he said.

  We all laughed.

  Of all the great things that happened over the next few months, many of them on the field, that moment was probably my favorite. Feeling comfortable. All of us laughing.

  I didn’t know then how complicated things would get.

  Chapter 15

  Jeff

  We didn’t say much at first as I drove Scooter home.

  “You were right,” Scooter finally said.

  “About what?”

  I had the high beams on since we were driving on unlit dirt roads. Another car appeared, so I flipped the high beams off.

  “About Morgyn,” Scooter said. “She’s really cool. Hanging out with her, it was like . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he tried to find the right word.

  “A break from your life?” I suggested.

  He didn’t answer, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod.

  “That’s how I feel too. Morgyn couldn’t care less about my football career,” I said. “I mean that in a good way. She’s got her own priorities. Her parents are wilderness guides—they’re gone a lot. She does a lot of fending for herself.” Scooter still didn’t say anything, but he was looking at me so I figured he was interested. “She goes to St. Amelia’s, which is an all-girls, Catholic school. Sports really aren’t a big deal there, and they definitely don’t have their own team. She’s never been to a pep rally in her life.”

  “How’d you meet her?” Scooter asked.

  “Boy Scouts,” I told him.

  He lifted his eyebrows in surprise.

  “She switched over from Girl Scouts. Said she’d rather learn how to build a fire than go door-to-door selling cookies.”

  “Is that allowed?” Scooter asked.

  I turned onto the highway and felt the road go from bumpy to smooth.

  “There was some special program. Not everyone in the troop liked it at first, but eventually we realized she was a better Boy Scout than we were. Then she quit.”

  “Why?”

  “I think she was sick of the group projects. I mean, she likes people—but she wants to do her own thing.” I paused for a moment. “Kind of like how I need a break from our school sometimes. From football.”

  Scooter told me which roads to turn on to get to his apartment.

  “Why do you need a break from football?” he asked.

  I know I had brought it up, but the question caught me by surprise.

  “I mean,” he continued, “you’re a star player. Everyone at the party clearly thought you were awesome. Why do you want a break from that?”

  I pulled up to his apartment and put the car in park.

  I’d just gotten done telling him all about Morgyn, but I wasn’t ready to tell him about me. The answer to his question was that I needed a break from the pressure. Ever since I was in m
iddle school I’d been training—running, hitting the weights—all so I could get a scholarship and keep playing football in college. But so far that scholarship hadn’t come. And I was running out of time. Every carry felt like one of my last chances to impress college scouts who probably weren’t even in the stands. I needed a break from football because I needed to figure out what to do if I couldn’t keep playing.

  But I didn’t tell him any of this because I barely knew him. I didn’t mind hanging with him outside of football. But on the field, we weren’t friends or even just teammates. We were rivals.

  It’s not that I thought he was a bad guy—or that I even believed he was going to take my snaps. But I’m competitive. And I wasn’t about to bare my soul to my competition.

  “Long story,” I told him instead. “See you at practice, man.”

  Chapter 16

  Scooter

  We played Deerwood that Friday. I was nervous, but I couldn’t figure out why. As far as I could tell, Coach Douglas had no plans to put me in the game. All week I’d taken part in drills, but that was it. Jeff got all the carries when we ran plays in practice.

  For good reason too. The guy is a beast. And he’s even more intense in actual games.

  He spent the first half against Deerwood colliding into their defensive line, wearing them out. His legs never stopped churning. It always took more than one guy to take him down, and even then, he always fell forward—never backward.

  That was Coach’s plan all along: ram into the defensive line until it started to give in. That’s how he laid it out for us at practice, and it’s exactly what happened. We didn’t score in the first quarter but we scored twice in the second—a bone-bruising six-yard touchdown run by Jeff and a thirty-two-yard field goal. In the third, we broke the game loose. It’s not that we scored that many points; it’s that Deerwood couldn’t get our offense off the field. Jeff ran for first down after first down. He routinely got past the line and into the secondary, where he’d steamroll two or three defensive backs before they collectively brought him to the turf.

  By midway through the fourth quarter, we’d had drives that lasted seven and ten minutes. We were up 24–3.

  A few minutes later, Coach called my name: “Williams! Go in there and run out the clock!”

  “I got this, Coach,” Jeff said. “Let me finish what I started.”

  “You’ve done enough, Stoddard.”

  “They know we’re running out the clock, Coach,” Jeff said.

  There was panic in his voice, and it took me a second to figure out why. If they knew we were running, Deerwood would put extra players in the box to clog the running lanes. Jeff was worried that I was going to get crushed.

  Which made me mad. I mean, I knew his heart was in the right place, but I wasn’t a baby. I didn’t need his protection. How pathetic did he think I was?

  “Are you up for it, Williams?” Coach asked.

  The true answer was that I wasn’t sure. But the true answer wasn’t the right answer. If I wanted to play in the future, I knew what I had to say. I had to prove to Jeff—and even myself—that I could do it.

  “Absolutely, Coach.”

  Chapter 17

  Jeff

  I understood what Coach was doing. He was taking me out of the game to make sure I was still healthy for next week’s game.

  I understood the decision, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it. Adrenaline was flooding my body, so any pain I’d feel the next day was a non-issue right then.

  But I also thought it was cruel to send Scooter out there. It wasn’t just Deerwood; everyone in the stadium knew that we were running the ball. With a guy Scooter’s size, it seemed to me that we should only be putting him in on plays where the defense thought we might pass. That way, they wouldn’t have so many players looking to pounce on him.

  It was better to have our QB sacked by whoever got to him first than to have eight guys pile on top of Scooter. At least Joey was a big enough guy to be able to take a hit.

  I give Scooter credit though. It took courage for him to take that handoff.

  Either that or it took stupidity.

  Once he had the ball, Scooter managed to squirm through a crack in the offensive line.

  Then, a mass of Deerwood bodies closed in on Scooter.

  But Scooter emerged on the other side of the pile. To this day I don’t understand how he did it. The entire defensive line had thrown themselves at him in one giant clump of players. It was pure chaos, with limbs flying everywhere and Scooter buried somewhere in the middle, but then out of nowhere Scooter emerged, somehow unscathed. It was surreal—almost like an old cartoon where the hero emerges from the middle of a giant fight, leaving the bad guys to continue beating each other up. Scooter ran away from the pileup of other players and scampered down the sideline.

  There were two Deerwood players left to beat—the free and strong safety—but he had nowhere left to run. The sideline cut off any escape route except going out of bounds. And that’s exactly what I expected him to do. Sure, running out of bounds would stop the clock, which we didn’t want to do. But honestly, Scooter had done more than enough. This was supposed to be a one-yard run. Instead, he’d turned it into a thirty-eight yarder. The next thing to do was step out of bounds and run another play.

  But that’s not what Scooter did. He planted his foot and turned back into the field. The two safeties arrived at the same time, and they did indeed bring him down—but somehow he wriggled his body so that neither defender hit him very hard.

  Chapter 18

  Scooter

  When I got up and went back to the huddle for one more play (a QB kneel), I was surprised by all the cheering.

  The truth? I was disappointed in myself. I’d been trying to figure out a way to get into the end zone, but I’d stupidly let myself get pinned to the sideline.

  That’s not how anyone else saw it though. In the days after the game, teammates and other students told me my run was the highlight of the game. They said I’d pulled a Houdini. I still don’t see what the big deal is. I made a few stutter steps and faked a few guys out. What’s so magical about that?

  Every time I tried to shrug these people off though, they said things like “Oh, and he’s modest too!”

  That was maybe the weirdest part. All my life, my shyness had been a bad thing. My mom and other teachers had tried to get me “out of my shell.” Now it was just me being humble.

  Apparently, in Small Valley one run was enough to make me a star.

  Don’t get me wrong. I was glad to prove myself. Jeff had clearly thought I’d get crushed. I think even Coach didn’t trust that I would be able to pull off another great run.

  But the hype was way over the top. It was Jeff who had been the star of the game. How could no one see that?

  By the middle of the week, it seemed like everybody was insisting that there was some kind of huge running back controversy. People were debating the pros and cons of big vs. small running backs. And then on Thursday, Coach Douglas called the two of us into his office after practice.

  “Stoddard, you’re not going to lose your starting job,” he said.

  Which made sense to me.

  “You’re going to share it,” he said.

  Chapter 19

  Jeff

  “Coach?” I was stunned.

  This had to be a joke. How could Coach Douglas honestly consider demoting me because of one run?

  “Take it easy, Stoddard,” Coach said. “This is a good thing—for both of you.”

  My face must have looked skeptical because Coach continued, “Just hear me out. Ever heard of Mike Alstott and Warrick Dunn?”

  I knew who they were, but I didn’t answer. Scooter didn’t either. I think we were both trying to figure out where this was going.

  “They were both running backs for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 1990s. They went by the nicknames Thunder and Lightning. Alstott was a power back. Dunn was a speedster. Do you see where I’m goi
ng with this?”

  Again we didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to expect us to.

  “You’re going to share the carries, boys. Stoddard, you’re going to hit the defensive line like a sledgehammer to a plaster wall. Williams, you’re going to shoot past their crumbling defense and run circles around the secondary. How does that sound to you?”

  We still didn’t answer.

  Coach was beaming. I’d never seen him look so happy. “Thunder and Lightning, boys. Thunder,” he paused for dramatic effect, “and lightning.”

  Chapter 20

  Scooter

  “This is crazy, right?” I asked Jeff.

  It was a real question. I honestly didn’t know for sure if Coach had lost it.

  We were in the locker room, sitting on the bench by our lockers.

  He grunted. “You can say that again.”

  “How do you think it’s going to work?” I asked. “Will we switch off every series, or every quarter, or . . . ?”

  “I don’t know, Scooter. I’m still trying to figure out why Coach thought I’d be happy sharing carries.”

  Jeff stood up. “I gotta get out of here.”

  “Where you going?” I asked.

  “Someplace where I don’t have to think about football.”

  I was pretty sure I knew where that was. I almost asked if I could go with him, which I know sounds crazy. When he said he wanted to get away from football, he was saying he wanted to get away from me—or at least the situation I had caused.

  But I hadn’t stopped thinking about Morgyn since the other night. She was a little weird, but in a good way. Here I was hoping Jeff would say everything was fine, that he’d be happy to share carries with me—but it was more complicated than that. All of the politics and pride wasn’t what I wanted. I liked football because it was the one place where I didn’t have to try to talk to people and explain myself. I didn’t even have to think. But Morgyn seemed to always do that. She did what she wanted to do without needing to give an explanation.