by Mike Lupica
ALSO BY #1 BESTSELLER MIKE LUPICA
Travel Team
Heat
Miracle on 49th Street
Summer Ball
The Big Field
Million-Dollar Throw
The Batboy
Hero
The Underdogs
True Legend
QB 1
Fantasy League
Fast Break
Shoot-Out
Last Man Out
Lone Stars
No Slam Dunk
Strike Zone
PHILOMEL BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Philomel, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Mike Lupica
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Ebook ISBN 9780525514923
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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This book is for Hannah Grace Lupica.
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by #1 Bestseller Mike Lupica
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
About the Author
PROLOGUE
All I wanted was to play football.
This is what happened because I tried.
1
Alex’s father denied it every single time she’d ask.
“I know you wanted a boy, Dad. It’s okay, I get it,” she’d tease.
They were having the conversation again, on their way to the Orville town fair in western Pennsylvania. They’d spent the afternoon at the Pittsburgh Steelers training camp in Latrobe, a couple of towns over.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” Jack Carlisle said to his daughter. “You were exactly what I wanted. It was almost like I ordered you from Amazon Prime. Free shipping and everything.”
“Then answer me this,” she said. “Why’d you give me a boy’s name?”
Jack Carlisle breathed a deep sigh. “Your mom and I didn’t give you a boy’s name,” he said. “We named you Alexandra. You’re the one who wanted us to call you Alex.”
Alex smirked at her dad from the back seat. She never tired of messing with him like this. And despite the sighs and headshakes, she knew he loved it, too. It happened a lot when they were together. And they were together all the time. Jack Carlisle and Alex’s mom had divorced when Alex was only four. Her mom moved to the West Coast to become a surgeon and remarried, leaving Alex and her dad in Orville. Alex had regular phone calls with her mom, but she was closest to her dad. They were two peas in a pod. They both loved sports, but they loved each other more.
Alex’s dad was a Steelers fan through and through. He followed other sports, too. Just not as closely as football, and not with the same enthusiasm as he rooted for the Steelers. When Alex was around eight years old, her dad began to notice how much she loved running and catching balls, and throwing them most of all. He used to joke that sports were one of the few things he’d passed on to his child. That, and his piercing blue eyes.
Nevertheless, Alex was still convinced he’d wanted a boy. And she told him so now in the car.
“I’m a lawyer, and I can’t even argue with my own daughter,” he said, shaking his head like he did when the Steelers were forced to punt.
They were stopped at a light now. He used the brief pause to turn to Alex in the back seat and said, “You know how much I love you, pumpkin pie.”
He had a lot of nicknames for her, so many that Alex lost track of them all. But “pumpkin pie” was the first one she could remember.
“I do,” she said, giving him a playful wink so he knew she was joking. “Admit it, though. You would have loved me a little more if I were a boy.”
He sighed, resting his forehead against the steering wheel. “Alexandra Carlisle.”
“Call me Alex,” she said, and her dad chuckled. She loved making him laugh. It made her feel as if she’d scored a goal in soccer or struck out a batter in softball.
They’d had a great day at Saint Vincent College watching the Steelers practice. Now they were heading back to Orville, because Jack Carlisle had promised to take Alex to the fair. Her dad had told her about a famous Steelers wide receiver, way back in her grandpa’s time, named Jimmy Orr. Jack Carlisle explained that their town wasn’t named after Jimmy Orr, but probably should have been.
It was already the third week of August. The Steelers were playing preseason games, and Alex knew that the National Football League now had strict rules limiting the number of contact drills between games. But that was fine with her. She enjoyed watching all the passing drills, particularly the amazing accuracy of the three Steelers quarterbacks, from the shortest handoffs to the longest deep throw. She never got tired of watching the running backs and receivers run their patterns with such precision, making their cuts to the inside and outside from almost the exact same points on the field.
More than anything, Alex loved watching the flight of the ball, perfect spirals finding their way to their intended targets.
At one point her dad asked her if she was getting bored.
“Are you serious?” she said. “This is my team in front of me. It’s our team.”
“It’ll be better when they start playing season games,” Jack Carlisle said.
“Yeah.” Alex nodded. “And we’re back at Heinz Field.”
Her dad had a pair of season tickets to Steelers games, on the thirty-yard line, visitors’ side of the stadium. Jack Carlisle said he liked it better over there, because the Steelers coaches and players would be facing them, ev
en from the other side of the field. One ticket for dad, one for Alex. They went to two preseason games and eight regular season games every year. Then, fingers crossed, to a home playoff game or two after that. The preseason games took place in August, and even though the quality of play wasn’t much, the weather was usually pretty nice. Toward the end of the season, though, western Pennsylvania could feel colder than Alaska.
Even so, Alex and her dad never missed a game.
Loving the Steelers was one of the things that bonded Alex and her dad. They were as close as a father and daughter could be, and Alex could never imagine loving anybody or anything as much as her dad.
“My football girl,” he called her, and not just during football season.
* * *
• • •
The Orville fair was set up on the grounds of the local church. They’d parked their car in the lot, bought tickets, and walked under the balloon archway at the entrance. Now they made their way across the fair, the sun still high, with plenty of daylight left before they’d have to head home for dinner. Seventh grade for Alex wasn’t starting for a couple more weeks. She knew all her friends were trying to milk those last precious days of summer vacation and dreading the first day of school. But not Alex Carlisle. The start of the school year meant that the start of the NFL season was just around the corner. Pretty soon, she and her dad would have their Steelers back. Alex was always a little sad when they broke camp at Saint Vincent, just because the college was so close to where they lived. It made her feel as if the Steelers were practically living in her neighborhood. Heinz Field, on the other hand, was more than an hour away.
Alex still liked football better when the games counted, no matter how many times her dad took off work to take her to training camp. She liked her own sports better when the games counted, too. Softball in the spring, soccer in the fall.
Soccer was supposed to start up the week before she went back to school. Alex was a good enough player. She was a right backer, which meant she mostly played defense. Everybody talked about her passing and her vision and her decision-making.
She was a good, solid player.
But Alex wanted more than that from sports. From anything, really. She didn’t talk about her dreams much. Didn’t talk about them at all, in fact. Not even with her dad.
But her biggest dream was this:
Alex Carlisle wanted to be great at something.
Her favorite teacher at school, her English teacher, Ms. McQuade, always said the greatest adventure of all was the journey to finding your passion.
Alex hadn’t found her passion yet.
Oh, she knew she had a passion for football, and for the Steelers. But that was different. No matter how much you loved your team, you were on the sidelines watching them. From the stands or the sofa.
You weren’t in the game.
Yeah, she told herself. You are good at soccer. Really good. But not great.
The previous year, Alex and her teammates had watched together as the United States women’s team won another World Cup. She had secretly rooted harder for the star player she considered her namesake, Alex Morgan. Her passion was clear. So was Megan Rapinoe’s.
Alex Carlisle wished she could feel that way about soccer. And as good of a pitcher and hitter as she was, she didn’t feel that way about softball, either. Neither sport was her dream. But she had a dream all right. It was just out of her reach. Like trying to grab a star out of the night sky and drag it down from the heavens.
“Hey,” her dad said. “Where were you?”
“What?” Alex said, pulling herself out of her reverie.
“I felt like you left me there for a second,” he said. “I asked what you want to do next.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. It’s like you always say: my head was full of sky.”
“So what do you want to do?”
Alex put her hands on her hips and looked around, getting a panoramic view of the place.
Then she spotted the coolest and biggest stuffed animal she had ever seen in her life. But not just any stuffed animal . . .
“I want you to win me Simba!” she said.
The Lion King was Alex’s favorite movie of all time. She loved the original animated version and watched it over and over to the point where she had the whole thing memorized. When the new live-action movie came out, she had dragged her dad to the Orville Cinema the day it opened for the midnight screening. They went back three or four times after that. One day she hoped to see the Broadway musical in New York City.
Of all the characters, Simba was her favorite. She thought Simba was the bravest. But more than that, Simba’s story resonated with her. It took him a while to realize his own dream, about being king. Just like Alex was taking time to figure out hers.
Alex’s love for The Lion King rivaled even her love for the Steelers.
“Dad,” she said, tugging on his arm, “come on. You’ve got to win me Simba.”
They’d already been to a booth where you tried to win prizes by tossing softballs underhand into a milk crate. That didn’t quite pan out for Alex and her dad. They’d stopped at the dunk tank, where Jack Carlisle hit the buzzer, plunging one of Orville’s high school seniors into the water. The students were raising money for a local charity, so it was for a good cause.
But in the next booth over, where Alex spotted Simba, you had to toss a football through a hole that looked barely wide enough to fit, well, a football. The odds were unfavorable, to say the least. On the wall, an image of a football player was painted with his arms up, as if receiving a pass. The hole was where the hands came together.
Jack Carlisle had once been the starting quarterback at Orville High. He wasn’t good enough to play college ball at Penn State or the University of Pittsburgh. But he’d had enough of an arm to lead the Orville Owls to the league championship in his senior year.
“I’ve got no arm anymore,” he said to Alex. “Heck, when we’re playing catch in the backyard, you throw better than I do.”
Alex knew he was right about that but didn’t want to discourage him from trying to win her the enormous stuffed animal. It would take up the whole back seat of her dad’s car. It was amazing. She couldn’t leave the fair without it.
Jack Carlisle made a beeline for another carnival game, but Alex grabbed his shirt sleeve and pulled him back toward the booth.
“Come on, Dad,” she said. “Aren’t you always telling me the most important thing for a quarterback is hitting what they’re aiming for?”
“Yeah, when you’ve still got the arm,” he said. “I left mine back in high school.”
“You’ve still got it!” she said. “Who’d know better than your favorite wide receiver?”
“I’ve still got it in the backyard,” he said.
“Please, Daddy,” she said, looking up at him with big, pleading eyes. She knew she was being dramatic, but it was fun to tease him.
“Oh, here we go with the please, Daddy,” he said. “I’m assuming that’ll be the same tone of voice you use when you want your own car someday.”
“Today I just want a lion,” she said.
It cost five dollars for three throws. The young man running the booth said that nobody had put a football through the hole since they’d opened that morning.
Now that they were standing at the counter, Alex understood why. She was pretty good at judging distances. This was at least a fifteen-yard throw from where they stood. Maybe even a little more. She looked at the hole, then over at Simba, and thought:
Really big prize.
Really small target.
“You got this,” she said to her dad.
“In your dreams,” he replied.
Alex smiled.
If he only knew.
Her dad made a big circle motion with his right arm, giving himself a quick warm-up. H
e groaned as he did.
“Nobody likes a whiner,” Alex said to him.
Her dad huffed at that. “You better hope I don’t pull a muscle,” he said, “or you’ll be driving us home.”
“Really?”
“No,” he said, laughing.
The young man handed Jack Carlisle a beat-up-looking ball from a basket of them on the counter and grinned.
“I don’t want you to think I’m betting against you,” he said. “But my shift ends in half an hour, and I bet one of my buddies twenty bucks that nobody would make this throw today. Nobody made it yesterday, either.”
“You can start counting your money right now,” Jack said.
“Hey!” Alex said. “A little positivity couldn’t hurt.”
“More like wishful thinking,” he replied.
Then he took his first shot.
The throw missed the player completely. He groaned even more loudly than he had while warming up. “That was pathetic,” he said.
“You said it, not me,” Alex said, throwing her hands up in defense.
“Hey,” he said, grinning. “Who’s got the bad attitude now?”
His second throw hit the player.
In the knee.
“Getting closer,” Alex said.
“That’s your pep talk?”
Alex just shrugged, but flashed her dad a quick smile.
His last errant throw, to Alex’s great amusement, hit the player right below the belt.
“Now that,” the guy behind the counter said, “has got to hurt.”
Alex couldn’t help it. She laughed. Even though that last miss meant her dad had lost his chance at winning the prize.
“Oh, you think it’s funny, hotshot?” her dad said, giving her a playful nudge. “Why don’t you try?”
“You’re willing to lose another five dollars?” Alex said.
“I’ve seen that arm of yours,” he said. “Maybe I’m looking to win a bet. Even if it costs our friend here his.”
“It’s on,” Alex said.
Her light brown ponytail was sticking out of the opening in the back of her black-and-gold Steelers cap. She removed it so she’d have a clear view of the target. Then she secured the rubber band on her ponytail nice and tight. She didn’t warm up or anything. Just looked up at the guy behind the counter and held out her right hand, palm up. Asking for a ball.
