Million-Dollar Throw

by Mike Lupica

  It’s not Dad I don’t know today, he thought.

  It’s me.

  CHAPTER 12

  Nate didn’t watch the Patriots-Jets game with his dad on Sunday even though his dad had the day off. Mostly because he was having as hard a time letting go of the things that had been said the night before as he was the Blair game.

  This was a time, he decided, when that sports amnesia Coach liked to talk about wasn’t working at all, when he couldn’t forget what he wanted to forget, and wasn’t even sure he really did want to.

  So instead of watching football the way he usually did on Sundays, he went over to Abby’s. Abby had a new toy she wanted in the worst way to show off that made it easier for her to read.

  “You have got to see this thing,” she said over the telephone, Nate glad that at least somebody sounded happy about something this weekend. “It is fresh to death.”

  It was called a knfb Mobile Reader, and as soon as Nate saw it, he thought it had to be some kind of trick, because it didn’t look like a “mobile reader” at all. It just looked like your regulation cell phone.

  It wasn’t a trick. And turned out to be a lot more than that to Abby, for whom reading and books had become more and more of a problem, especially when it came to homework assignments. Now here she was with a gadget that was like some kind of magic wand she could wave over books and have them talk to her.

  They went up to her room and she showed Nate how she could activate the Mobile Reader with the push of a single button. Then put the phone, which was really like a scanner, over the page of the book they were reading right now in English for Mr. Doherty, The Diary of Anne Frank.

  She handed the Mobile Reader to Nate.

  “Check it out, Brady,” she said, as proud as if she’d invented the thing herself, pressing another button. “It’s the ultimate in text messaging. From Anne Frank to me.”

  Nate put the magic gadget to his ear and heard the same page Abby had just scanned being read to him, only it wasn’t the voice of the girl Nate had imagined when he was reading, when he’d heard the story inside his head. It was a man.

  “This sounds like the voice of Batman on the cartoon show,” Nate said.

  “Missing the point, Brady,” she said. “Not an altogether uncommon experience for you.”

  “He’s talking about Anne hiding with her family,” Nate said. “But he sounds like he should be telling Alfred the butler to fire up the Batmobile. Even though the Batmobile that Bale drives in the movie is a lot cooler than the one in the TV show, frankly.”

  “And here I was afraid this thing was going to be wasted on you,” she said. “You’re just not a gadget guy.”

  “I still can’t believe they can use a headset in football to send in plays to the quarterback,” he said.

  “This is my way of getting books sent in to me,” she said. “Mr. Doherty says that I can use this in class when we do classroom reading and he wants us to write an instant synopsis when we’re done.”

  “It’s like your own audiobook,” Nate said.

  “I could have gotten Anne Frank as an audiobook,” Abby said. “But not all the books on our reading list are available as audio-books. This way, they’re all available.”

  “It’s cool, Abs, it really is. The coolest. Like you.”

  He made sure to sound excited because she was excited, like she’d gotten a surprise, a didn’t-even-ask-for-it present on Christmas. And Nate knew that the Mobile Reader now meant she wasn’t going to need the magnifying computer screen on her desk in English, something Mr. Doherty had discussed with Abby’s parents, something that would have been yet one more cause of embarrassment for her.

  “I know I’m turning into a special-needs kid,” she’d said to Nate. “I just hate when I have to advertise it.”

  “You know what’s going to happen, right?” Nate said. “All the other kids in class are going to want their own Mobile Readers. Total status deal. It’s going to be like you showed up with some kind of new iPhone that isn’t even in the stores yet.”

  Abby, her face serious now, said, “I need it, Brady. I was starting to fall seriously behind. That’s me, though, isn’t it? Getting good at falling. Down at football games, behind in school.”

  “Abs, you’re the smartest kid in our grade and everybody knows it. If you’re falling behind a little, it just means you’re leveling the playing field for everybody else.”

  “We both hate being behind,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She cocked her head a little to the side, as if she’d heard something. More and more lately, Nate was starting to believe all the things he’d ever read or heard about people losing their eyesight and having their other senses become new and improved. More acute, that was the word people used to describe it. He was seeing it with Abby, with her hearing most of all, like it was superhero acute these days. If there was something even slightly off in Nate’s voice, no matter what they happened to be talking about, she jumped all over it.

  She could still see right through him, of course, no failing vision there.

  “You okay about yesterday’s game?”

  “Fine.”

  “What?”

  “What what? I said I was fine.”

  “Something’s not fine today. Starting with the fact that you’re here instead of watching your guy.”

  “I was footballed out.”

  “On what planet?”

  “Really.”

  “You think you can fool the all-knowing, all-seeing Oz? Even if Oz needs reading gizmos now?”

  “Abs, I’m fine!”

  “Are not.”

  He grabbed the Mobile Reader out of her hand, started talking into it in his own deep Batman voice. “It turns out Nate Brodie did suffer a minor injury during yesterday’s Valley-Blair game,” he said, “but only to his ego.”

  “Did something happen after you left here yesterday?”

  Nate laughed now. Loudly. Not a sound he expected to be making today, but there it was. “I give,” he said, and told her about what had happened the night before.

  The things his dad had said.

  “Maybe that was just his way of saying ‘I give,’” Abby said when he was finished.

  “He sounded more beaten than I felt,” Nate said. “It’s why I was only mad at myself after. I must have sounded to him like the biggest whiner boy in the universe.”

  “Nope,” she said. “Not your style, Brady.”

  “Abs,” he said. “You know what you said yesterday about being no good at . . . what’s happening with your eyes?”

  She nodded, eyes right on him.

  “Well,” he said, “sometimes I’m really lousy at acting excited about making this throw when there’s so much lousy stuff going on around me. And instead of feeling excited, what I really feel is guilty.”

  Abby grabbed for the Mobile Reader, taking it back from him, and began speaking into it like it was a microphone.

  “Earth to Brady,” she said. “That is absolutely not allowed.”

  “I just want you to understand,” he said.

  She smiled now.

  “I do,” she said. “But you need to understand something, about why you’re not allowed to feel guilty, about why you should be marking off the days to this throw like you’re marking off days on a Christmas calendar.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because that throw is the one good thing for all of us right now,” she said. “Your dad and me and everybody. That throw isn’t just for the money, it’s for something a lot more valuable than that.”

  Nate smiled back at her.

  “I give,” he said. “Again.”

  “That throw is the thing that we all gotta believe in, Brady, what keeps us all going,” Abby said. “That great things can still happen.”

  CHAPTER 13

  He wasn’t going to say this to Abby or his mom or to any of his teammates. He definitely wasn’t going to say this to his dad, figuring it mi
ght get him grounded until he was old enough to have his driver’s license.

  But whatever pressure Nate was feeling last Saturday didn’t amount to a pile of dirty socks compared with what he was feeling this Saturday against the Manorville Rams.

  It wasn’t just that Manorville was loaded this season, a favorite along with Valley to win their league. It wasn’t just that Nate, more than ever, wanted to do well in front of his dad, who had been given the day off from Big Bill’s and would be coming to the game.

  There were a few other people in the crowd Nate wanted to impress, in the worst way:

  People from The Today Show were there to do a feature on him, and a reporter from Sports Illustrated was on hand to write a piece about the eighth-grade quarterback who was going to throw a ball for all that money on Thanksgiving night.

  On the way to the game Abby had said, “I used to tell people I was your publicist. But it’s sort of starting to look as if you don’t need one, Brady.”

  They were in the backseat of the used Taurus Nate’s dad had been driving lately, this car a lot smaller than the Cherokee they used to have.

  Nate said, “And this would be your way of trying to relax me?”

  Abby said, “I think the only people not here today are Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood.”

  She looked as happy sitting next to him as if they were going to a party or to the mall.

  “Can I be serious for a second?” Nate said.

  “No,” she said. “Are you serious about being serious? This is way too much fun.”

  “The thing that sketches me out about the whole thing,” Nate said, “is that usually you have to actually do something to get this kind of attention. I’m just a guy who got his name picked out of a hat, basically. It’s not like I did anything to deserve this.”

  “Okay, now I’m gonna be serious, but only for a second,” Abby said. “You don’t get to decide stuff like that. Nobody gets to decide who deserves anything.”

  She turned and looked out the window when she said the last part. She certainly had a point. The last person who deserved what was happening was Abby.

  He decided to change the subject.

  “One promise today, Abs? No sudden moves into the open field. Or the open bleachers.”

  “Good one, Brady. Now you make me a promise, or I may have to beat on you until we get to the field.”

  Nate went into a crouch, even with his seat belt fastened, like a fighter trying not to get punched. “No,” he said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “You know how you’re always going on and on about how good I am with color?” she said. “How about you make sure you’re throwing to the right color uniforms today?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said.

  Abby turned now in the backseat, facing Nate, and patted her heart twice. “No kidding around?” she said. “You’re going to be great today.”

  Nate always trusted Abby on everything, on big things and small things and just about everything in between.

  He wanted to trust her today more than he ever had.

  It was another home game for Valley, so they were in their white uniforms. Manorville wore the same cool deep blue that the St. Louis Rams did, even had ram horns on the sides of their helmets. Last year Valley had beaten them in the last game of the regular season to knock them out of a shot at the league championship, number one versus number two, same as this year. Nate had thrown three touchdown passes that day and run for another and even scored two of their conversions himself. He had as much of what he called a “No. 12 day”—a Brady day—as he’d ever had in his life.

  The difference between that day and today, he was thinking halfway through the second quarter, was that the last time he’d faced the Manorville Rams, he hadn’t felt as if the whole world were watching every move he made, whether he was on the field or on the sidelines or just getting a drink of Gatorade.

  It made him think of one of Malcolm’s favorite expressions, from when they’d be hating on a video or a homework assignment or sometimes a player on the other team who was annoying them: He felt like he ought to be sipping on some “Hater-ade,” because he was righteously hating all the attention, the idea that he was being followed and that there was nowhere for him to hide. And knowing at the same time that his mood wasn’t lousy just because of the TV crew and the reporter from SI, but because he was just one-for-eight so far in the game and that one was a four-yard completion to his tight end, Bradley Jacob, that he could have thrown lefty.

  All week long he had tried to make a joke out of the Blair game, at least when he was with his teammates, and they had done the same with him as a way of putting it behind all of them. Pete even called the game The Blair Glitch Project, after the old movie, telling Nate that his version was scarier than the original.

  Now the first quarter and a half of the Manorville game was beginning to feel like a sequel.

  Valley was winning, but only because of their defense. Malcolm and Sam seemed to be all over the field on just about every play, disrupting everything Manorville tried to do on offense. It was Sam who caused the fumble that set up a twenty-yard touchdown run by LaDell. And Malcolm who batted away a fourth-down pass from the Valley 2-yard line, keeping the game at 7-0 for Valley.

  So Manorville, who had as many weapons on offense as Valley did, including the best running back their age in the state—a kid as big as a nose tackle, named Johnny Farr—was having as much trouble putting the ball into the end zone as Nate was.

  But none of that was making Nate feel any better.

  Because the more throws he missed, the more he felt as if he had a giant spotlight on him. No matter how hard he tried, he kept looking over to the sidelines to where the cameraman from Today was, seeing him at one end of the bench or the other, watching him run down behind the goalposts one time.

  With six minutes left in the half, the Patriots began a drive on their 35-yard line. On first down Nate threw the ball downfield on a fade route, missing badly, the ball not anywhere near Pete, landing ten yards out of bounds. On second down he went with a short pass, a little five-yard curl, and bounced the ball in front of Bradley this time. Looking over to the sideline and seeing the camera right on him, again, Nate wondered if the camera could see right inside him the way Abby could.

  With the defense expecting another pass on third-and-ten, Coach Hanratty crossed them up and called for a running play, LaDell finding a big enough opening, right up the middle, for fifteen yards and a first down. Nate saw the rest of the guys on offense breaking into smiles as they huddled up. Nate wasn’t smiling, though. He wanted to disappear.

  And he pretty much did disappear after LaDell’s run, because Coach Hanratty stayed on the ground now, calling running play after running play. Nate might have had no confidence at that moment, but Malcolm and the boys up front had, and they were suddenly opening up holes big enough to drive school buses right through.

  Ben ran for twenty more yards.

  Then LaDell took a pitch—Nate could still throw underhanded, like he was with Abby in the park—and ran for twelve more.

  The Patriots finally ended up at the Manorville 15-yard line, third-and-eight, ninety seconds left in the first half, a chance to go up two touchdowns on a day when Nate had been sailing the ball around the field like it was a Frisbee.

  The hot read on the board was the second one:

  “FadE.”

  Capital E on the end, for Eric Gaffney. He would split out by himself on the right side, drive hard to the middle of the field on the cornerback covering him, really selling the fake, even trying to get an inside shoulder on the guy. Once he did, once he had a step on him, he was supposed to fade back in the other direction, toward the right corner of the end zone.

  That was the play Nate relayed to his teammates in the huddle, telling Malcolm to snap him the ball on the first sound he made and for everybody to be paying attention. Everybody nodded, knowing it was a perfect play to run in this situa
tion.

  Everybody ran it to perfection.

  Everybody except Nate, that is.

  He took two steps back, carrying the ball high toward his right shoulder, dropping back into the pocket. Yet those two steps were as far as he was going in that direction, because Nate Brodie had no intention of passing the ball.

  He waited just long enough to sell the fake, even to his own teammates. Then he took off running. He could have sworn he heard Malcolm yell, “What the . . .” as Nate ran right past his block.

  Nate saw only open field in front of him. The only Manorville Ram with a decent shot at him was the middle linebacker, who’d backed up into coverage, trying to spot LaDell as he’d circled out of the backfield. When the linebacker realized it wasn’t a pass, saw Nate running open throttle at him down the middle of the field as if he planned to right run through the goalposts, he got his feet tangled up and nearly went down.

  Nate didn’t even need to juke the guy to glide right past him, almost like he was riding a wave.

  So Nate went into the end zone untouched, tossed the ball to the nearest ref, and ran right for Eric Gaffney, standing in the corner of the end zone, no blue jersey even close to him.

  “Sorry, dude,” Nate said.

  “Sorry?” Eric Gaffney said. “That audible was dirtier than a sewer.”

  “It’s not an audible when only one guy knows the play,” Nate said.

  “Long as the one guy is our QB.” Eric grinned. “And long as it works, of course.”

  Then Malcolm had Nate in a bear hug, carrying him to the sidelines, Nate finally telling his center to put him down or they were going to get an excessive celebration penalty.

  “Brilliance,” Malcolm said. “Sketchin’, kickin’ brilliance.”

  Nate just shrugged, like it was no big deal. There was still a whole half to play. No point in telling Malcolm or Eric or any of his teammates that brilliance had nothing to do with it.

  Wasn’t even a factor.

  Fear factor was more like it.

  Their quarterback had just been afraid to put the ball up.