Rise Above

by Shannon Knudsen

  Anyone who’s not a complete moron knows that steroids can mess you up. But when you play football, you learn on day one that when a coach says jump, not only do you ask how high, you ask how far and whether it’s okay to land when you’re done. What Coach Z says goes. And if Coach Z isn’t around, you respond to his assistant coaches just like you’d respond to him.

  Maybe that’s why I didn’t ask any questions. I figured, no way would a coach give me something that’s not okay. Right? He says it’s vitamins, that’s good enough for me.

  I was last in line. “Down the hatch, Burns,” Coach Kramer said.

  The pills looked like candy—little pink tablets with five sides. I popped them and took a slug of water. Coach was still showing that big wolf grin, like we were getting away with something clever.

  “Listen up,” he told us. “Every day after team practice, this group will stay behind to get your supplements. Now, I’d give these things to the whole team if I could, but they’re expensive. So we keep this to ourselves. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir!” we responded, just like we’d all been taught.

  “Hands in!” We circled and extended our arms to the middle, palms facing down.

  “Who are you?” Coach Kramer thundered.

  “We! Are! Elite!” we yelled, pumping our arms at each word.

  Coach set up an efficient system. One dose each day after practice or right before kickoff on Fridays. Even on Sundays, he pulled the Elite Warriors together for an hour of drills followed by supplements. After the first couple weeks, he swapped the pills for injections. He just pulled a bunch of syringes and a vial out of his black gym bag, casual as could be, and told us to line up.

  Nobody said a word. Including me. And that’s how I became, in the words of my best friend, a cheater.

  5 / MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18—TEAM PRACTICE

  Next day at practice, Coach Z had us run through a bunch of plays. He told us we’d run the same pattern four times, twice with me in and twice with McNamara. It was obvious what he had in mind. He wanted to see how we stacked up against each other.

  First came blasts. Coach gave us a scenario: third and one. My job was to take the handoff from Shane Hunter, our QB1. I’d find the hole Dylan made ahead of me and dive through for enough yardage to make first down. Sounds simple enough, right? Sure it is, if you’re at home watching it happen on TV. Out on the field, with guys coming at you from every direction, it’s another story. You aim for the hole, lower your head, and try to move the pile before the pile obliterates you.

  The main reason I’m not crazy about blasts is that I’m on the smaller side for a halfback. Sprinting is my game, dodging and dancing on the open field, not in a big pile. It’s a critical skill, though, so I’d been pushing hard on it. And that day, I converted on both tries.

  Ian had a couple of inches on me, plus maybe twenty pounds, so he excelled at punching through holes to pick up a yard or two. It came as no surprise that he made both his first downs too.

  Next, we ran counters and reverses. McNamara made an impression, but so did I. My footwork was maybe a little faster than Ian’s, but I couldn’t tell what Coach Z was thinking. Unless that man is screaming or quoting Vince Lombardi, he’s pretty hard to read.

  When it came time to run pitches, I nailed it again, both times. But when Ian’s turn came, it didn’t go so well. He caught the pitch from Shane just fine, but as he dashed for the hole, the ball popped right out of his arms. Nobody had even hit him. He just fumbled without cause. He fell right on the ball, but the damage was done.

  Coach blew the whistle, but before Ian could even get up, Terry Foster was all over him.

  “You idiot!” he yelled, bending over Ian and yelling right in his face. “You think your job is to give away the ball? You think it’s Christmastime for the Clinton Tigers and you’re Santa Claus?”

  “Jeez, man. Chill,” McNamara said. He scrambled up, giving Terry a shoulder bump as he got to his feet.

  Terry responded with a push. Ian said something too low for the rest of us to hear, and then Terry hauled back like he was about to punch him.

  “You wanna see roid rage?” Terry yelled. “I’ll show you some roid rage, you moron.”

  Coach Kramer got between them then, probably just in time to prevent a serious fight. I’d seen Terry get bent out of shape before but never like this. Not over something as minor as a fumble in a practice. He really looked like he wanted to pound Ian into the ground.

  Coach Z had no patience for that kind of garbage. He sent us all to run laps. As I jogged, I thought about the exchange. Ian must have said something to Terry about roid rage.

  It was pretty weird—Terry yelling about the treatments in front of the whole team. Just a couple days ago, he’d bitten Ian’s head off for calling me Roid Hot at Elite Warriors. What was going on with him?

  I’d heard of roid rage before, but I figured it was some kind of myth. One of those things doctors come up with to scare people away from doping. Now I had to wonder. What if it wasn’t?

  I needed some answers. Not from Coach Kramer, not from Curtis, and definitely not from my parents. I needed to do my own research.

  6 / TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19—AT HOME

  That night, I fired up my laptop and sat with my back to the wall, facing the door in case Monique wandered in or my parents knocked. Now was not the time for anybody to look over my shoulder while I surfed.

  For weeks, I’d made a point of trying not to find out about the so-called supplements Coach Kramer had been giving us. It was like I needed not to know. All of a sudden, I felt the opposite—like I couldn’t go another night without the truth.

  I didn’t know the name of either the pills or the injections. I’d never seen the pill bottle, and Coach Kramer always wrapped his hand around the vial when he drew the liquid into the syringe. At least he used a different needle for each of us, so I didn’t have to worry about catching a disease from one of my teammates. But would I have even said anything if he’d used the same needle on all of us? I hoped so. I didn’t know, not for sure.

  Anyhow, no way could I identify the injections without getting a look at that vial. But the little pink pills had a funny shape—five sides, a pentagon. I went online, typed in a quick image search, and bam. There they were. I was taking something called Dianabol.

  I started scanning websites—official-looking ones from the government and medical clinics, plus bodybuilding sites. No surprise there: I got a different story depending on the source. The only thing all the sites agreed on was that without a doctor’s prescription, Dianabol was illegal. The bodybuilding sites were pretty enthusiastic about careful, supervised steroid use. The medical sites, not so much.

  I wondered if getting dosed by your football coach with no doctor’s exam or tests counted as “careful, supervised use.” Probably not.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  It was time to face the music. I took a look at the list of side effects on three medical sites. First up: acne, which made me remember that Ian was sporting quite the pizza face at practice that day. Well, fine. Who cares about a few zits if you’re winning games?

  Then the list turned serious. High cholesterol. High blood pressure. Possible cardiac arrest. Heart enlargement. Extreme mood swings—that must have been the “roid rage” Terry had exhibited. Stunted growth in teenagers. Liver malfunction. And on and on.

  When I couldn’t stand to read any more, I pulled out my phone. It was time to do one right thing for a change. I sent Curtis a text: U around? Need to talk about that thing from the other night.

  The reply came within seconds: Pick u up in 5.

  I didn’t want to go to Doyle’s—it wouldn’t be good to run into anybody from the team. So I had Curtis drive to a Burger King on the other side of town. We snagged a couple of combo meals and sat for a few minutes, just eating.

  “Look,” I said finally. “What I’m gonna tell you has to stay here. You repeat it to no one, okay? No one.�
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  “Sure, man, you got it,” Curtis replied.

  “No matter what.”

  “What, you wanna pinky swear on it? Relax, Darius. This is me.” I could see from the look in his eyes that he meant it. My best friend still had my back.

  I took a deep breath and then told Curtis the whole thing. All of it. The pills, the injections, the results I’d had, the side effects I’d read about online. Finally, I told him I felt terrible about lying to him.

  He listened intently, not saying a word till I was done. Then he gave a long, low whistle.

  “You got some trouble here, D,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Coach Kramer’s got some guts, telling you guys to do this. It ain’t right. It’s dirty play.”

  “Yeah.”

  Curtis scowled. “Don’t he think we’re good enough to win on our own talent?”

  I’d thought about that question myself. Truth was, I was pretty sure I wasn’t good enough to get the starting slot on my own talent. Not without the juice. Maybe Coach Kramer felt that way about the team as a whole.

  “I guess it’s kind of like insurance,” I said. “And he says the other teams are doing it too, so why shouldn’t we?”

  “And another thing.” Curtis stabbed at the air with his finger. “Somebody’s gonna get caught now that we’re going to the playoffs. They test for this stuff, don’t they?”

  “Coach Kramer said not to worry about it. They pick random players to test, but they let you pee in the cup in your own locker room. So if any of us gets picked, Coach’ll be ready with clean samples for us to use.”

  “Jeez,” Curtis said. “The man’s thought of everything, hasn’t he?”

  “Seems like it.”

  “You think Coach Z knows about it?”

  I took a bite out of my burger before I answered. It tasted like cardboard. “I can’t tell. I mean, he knows everything that goes on with the team, right? But then again, Coach Z has always played a clean game far as I know. It’s kinda hard to believe he’d let this go on under his nose.”

  Curtis nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right. I bet he agreed to let Coach Kramer set up the Elite Whatevers, and then Kramer started the juicing on his own.” He slapped the table. “That’s it, man. Coach Z can save the day here.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Tell him.”

  I felt my eyes practically pop out of my head. “Just like that? What if he already knows? He’ll kick my butt off the team for betraying Coach Kramer.”

  “Naw, you don’t tell him in person. E-mail him. You know, anonymously. He’ll deal with it, he’ll make Kramer stop, and nobody’ll ever know it was you who spilled the beans.”

  Curtis was making sense. It was a better idea than anything I’d come up with, that was for sure.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. I felt something shift inside, like the weight in my stomach lifted for a few seconds. “Yeah,” I said. “I will definitely think about that.”

  7 / WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20—TROY PUBLIC LIBRARY

  It was one thing to think about playing narc, another to actually do it. I’d never ratted anybody out for anything. Then again, I’d never had any reason to. Probably the most illegal thing I’d ever seen was kids smoking pot at parties. I always figured, somebody wants to put that stuff in their body, who am I to care?

  But now I was the one putting stuff in my body that didn’t exactly belong there. And it was turning out that I cared a lot.

  I chose the public library. The computer lab at school wasn’t safe, and I didn’t want to use my laptop. Paranoid? Probably. But if any kind of investigation ever came out of this, the last thing I’d need was my own computer incriminating me.

  What I didn’t know was that at the public library, they make you sign up for computer time with your library card. I gritted my teeth, decided that paranoia only made sense to a certain point, and got myself a seat at a PC. Seconds later, I’d created a Gmail account under a fake name.

  I looked around to see if anybody was paying attention to me. Nope. A couple people were at terminals nearby, but they seemed to be engrossed in whatever they were doing. I started typing:

  Coach Zachary,

  Something dangerous to the team is going on. Check Coach Kramer’s black gym bag.

  A Concerned Fan

  Okay, so it wasn’t subtle. I didn’t want it to be. Sure, Coach Z would see right through the “concerned fan” thing, but it seemed like a more strategic choice for my signature than Wanna-Be Starting Halfback.

  “Darius!” A girl’s voice rang out—it sounded a bit loud for the library, but that wasn’t my worry. I clicked Send and minimized the browser window just as the voice’s owner draped an arm around my shoulder. Charise Hawkins. Wow.

  I tried to play it cool, like hot chicks singled me out every day instead of not at all. “Hey, girl, what up?”

  Charise had the whole package: jaw-dropping curves, smooth skin, and a mind sharp enough to match all of it. She sat two seats in front of me in AP American Lit, and believe me, the girl knew her Fitzgerald from her Hemingway. I won’t lie. I’d been crushing on her since seventh grade. But she was a junior, and I knew she wouldn’t be caught dead with a tenth grader who didn’t even have a driver’s license. So I had never even tried.

  Now here she was, acting like we were pretty close. The arm around my shoulder felt soft yet solid. Real, you know? She smelled good, like some kind of flower. Or a lot of kinds of flowers.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” she said. “Working on that Faulkner paper?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. Wait, did that sound too geeky? “I mean, no—I mean, yes and no.”

  She gave me a sly little grin and raised her eyebrows.

  “Gotta love a man who knows his own mind,” she said.

  I had to laugh. A girl like Charise probably had guys stammering and drooling all over themselves day in and day out. At least she didn’t seem to be holding it against me.

  “I would’ve thought you’d be, I dunno, lifting weights or something, not haunting the library.” Her fingers played with my hair a little bit, casually, as if it was no big deal.

  “Oh, there’s no shortage of weight lifting in my life, believe me.”

  “You must be stressing out over the playoffs, huh? You gonna carry us the way you did last Friday?” she said.

  “That’s the plan. You’re gonna be there, right?” Relief. I’d finally found my big-boy voice.

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t wanna miss your next touchdown.”

  I gave her my best smile. “How ’bout I dedicate it to you, Miss Hawkins?”

  Her eyes sparkled. I swear they were the deepest brown I’ve ever seen.

  “You do that. I’ll see you later, Red Hot Burns,” she whispered in my ear.

  That’s when it hit me—when she called me Red Hot. Charise was no snob, but she’d never noticed me until I started to shine on the football field. Not that I blamed her. It’s not exactly a surprise when a jock gets the girl, right?

  But the thing was, the juice did it. The juice made her notice me. It wasn’t me. At least not the real me. Knowing that somehow made the moment a little less sweet.

  Still, I’d done what I came to do. I grabbed my backpack and dialed my dad on my phone. I needed a ride home.

  8 / THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21—TWO DAYS BEFORE PLAYOFFS

  The next day, school whizzed right by. For the first time in weeks, I felt like I could really breathe. Pretty soon this whole thing would be over. Coach Kramer would be mad, sure, but if he wanted to keep his job, he’d have to do what Coach Z said. No more injections, no more pills. We could concentrate on tearing apart the Clinton Tigers in the playoffs and then cap it all off with a state championship.

  Team practice was tough, just like it should be two days before the biggest game of the season so far. Between drills, I sneaked glances at Coach Kramer, looking for signs that he felt upset or anxious. But he chatted with Coach Z
on the sidelines as usual, shouting out encouragement or criticism at whoever caught his eye.

  I had another sharp day, handling the ball like I owned it, dancing around linemen and breaking tackles almost every play. I even blocked harder than normal, putting guys on the turf who would normally be wiping their cleats on me. As for Ian McNamara—well, let’s just say that I had no worries about getting the start Friday night.

  I figured Coach Kramer would hold his usual Elite Warriors practice after the team practice broke, and I was right. But I didn’t expect it to end the way it did.

  “Line up!” he yelled after our hour of drills. “Show me some hustle, men!”

  On the locker room bench next to him sat the black gym bag where he kept the roids.

  I blinked to clear my vision. Was I seeing things? No, there was the vial. And he had the syringes out too.

  Coach Z hadn’t put a stop to it. I wondered if he had read my e-mail. Could it have gone into his spam folder? Or maybe he’d read it but hadn’t had a chance to check Coach Kramer’s gym bag?

  “Burns,” Coach Kramer said when my turn came up. “You’re looking good out there, son. Keep it up. I know you’re gonna shine come Saturday.”

  “Uh, yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “No, you won’t,” he answered. “You’ll do better than your best.” He flicked the tip of the syringe to clear out any air bubbles. “Sleeve up.”

  As I felt the needle go in, I thought about the other possibilities. Maybe Coach Z did read my e-mail. Maybe he hadn’t looked in the gym bag because he already knew what was in there. Or maybe he had his suspicions but didn’t want to find out for sure. Or maybe he looked, saw, and decided to play dumb to protect his own butt and increase our chances of winning state.

  Keep your cool, Darius, I told myself. No way to know yet. Give Coach Z another day.

  And I did. But the next day was a rerun of the same scenario.

  So much for Coach Z coming to the rescue. It was pretty clear now the position I was in. If anybody was going to keep me from juicing, it would have to be me.