Two-Minute Drill

by Mike Lupica

  His eyes, too.

  “I just want things to stay the way they are,” he said. “I want to be with my regular teachers. I want to be with my friends. And I want to keep playing football instead of getting tutored every stinking night.”

  “Your parents wouldn’t really make you quit the team,” Scott said, “would they?”

  “Two weeks,” Chris said. “I’ve got two weeks.”

  “Then we need a plan.”

  “Yeah, and here it is: In the next two weeks I’ve got to become more like you.”

  Scott couldn’t help it when he heard that.

  He laughed.

  “You think this is funny?”

  No, Scott said, it wasn’t that at all.

  “It’s just that nobody ever said that to me before,” he said.

  Scott didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have anything close to a plan. He sat there feeling as helpless as he did at sports sometimes.

  It was Chris who changed the subject, just by standing up, grabbing the ball, motioning for Scott to get up and go long.

  Scott did that, running away from the goalposts at Parry Field, running down the sideline until he couldn’t see the white line underneath his sneakers anymore.

  When he looked back, the ball was right on top of him.

  Unfortunately, so were the dogs.

  They had come running back out of the woods at the worst possible moment, Casey in the lead, tracking the ball as if Chris was throwing it to him instead of to Scott, cutting Scott off the way a free safety would, and taking his legs right out from under him.

  The ball landed harmlessly in the grass.

  “My own dog can cover me,” Scott said to himself.

  Even Casey’s better at football than I am.

  And then, for some weird reason, it wasn’t his own voice inside his head, it was his dad’s.

  From brunch.

  You don’t always get to pick the things you’re best at.

  Sitting there, brand-new grass stains all over his knees, the idea came to him. And not just any old idea. A totally fantastically brilliant idea.

  He jumped up and tried to beat Casey back to where Chris was standing at the other end of the field.

  Out of breath he said to Chris, “Make you a deal.”

  “Deal,” Chris said, “or no deal.”

  Trying to sound like the guy on the TV show.

  “No, really,” Scott said. “Listen to me. The deal is, you make me better at football, and I’ll make you better at school.”

  Scott was feeling so brilliant.

  “And how are you going to do that, exactly?” Chris said.

  “You forget something,” Scott said, almost in a cocky way.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m the brain.”

  TEN

  It was later that same afternoon, and Scott and Chris were in the Conlans’ living room with Chris’s mom and dad.

  “Nothing else we’ve tried has worked out that great,” Chris said. “Why can’t we try this?”

  Scott and Chris had done most of the talking from the time they’d all sat down, taking turns like they were some kind of tag team, not really giving Chris’s parents a chance to interrupt them. That was always the way you did it with your parents when you weren’t just talking to them, but trying to talk them into something.

  When you were afraid that the second you stopped talking they were going to say no.

  Only that didn’t happen, at least not right away.

  All Chris’s dad said, in a nice way, was, “Are you two finished?”

  Chris’s dad was tall, the way Chris was, and looked like an athlete. But Chris said he really wasn’t, that all he did was jog. He had no real interest in sports unless he was watching one of Chris’s games.

  “You two really think you can pull this off?” Bill Conlan said.

  “We do,” Scott and Chris said, almost at the exact same time.

  “I’ve heard what a wonderful student you are,” Chris’s dad said to Scott now.

  “Not as good as he says I am.”

  “I doubt that, just listening to you speak today, the way you present things. But you’re talking about being the first eleven-year-old teaching assistant I believe I’ve ever heard of.”

  Chris’s mom hadn’t said anything yet. She was mostly smiling, like she knew something the rest of them didn’t.

  “All we’re asking for is a shot,” Chris said.

  “For two weeks,” Scott said.

  “Scott,” Chris’s dad said, “has Chris really explained to you the issues he has in the classroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re saying you can help him get past them?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Then he added, “Sir.”

  “No?”

  “I’m saying that I’m willing to try, Mr. Conlan,” he said. “And my mom says she’s willing to help, too. She used to be a guidance counselor before she married my dad, and she says she can help me plan stuff out.” He turned toward Chris, grinning. “Like a game plan.”

  “I’d rather have Scott than another new tutor,” Chris said.

  Now Mrs. Conlan said, “Maybe this is so crazy it might work, Bill. Peer support instead of peer pressure.”

  “It’s going to work!” Chris said. “I’m going to work twice as hard as I ever have!”

  “Your plan is to study before every practice, is that right?” Bill Conlan said.

  “That’s the plan,” Scott said. “Sometimes here, sometimes at my house.”

  “And you study together from then until it’s time for football?”

  Scott and Chris nodded, hard.

  Mrs. Conlan, whose first name was Gail, said, “And two weeks from today, we talk to Chris’s teachers and see where he is.”

  Talking about it like it was a done deal already.

  Scott and Chris waited, not saying anything now.

  Then Chris’s dad looked at his mom, turned back to them and said, “You’ve got a deal.”

  “Yessssss!” Chris said, leaning over in his chair to bump fists with Scott and nearly falling over as he did.

  Then the two of them were running out of the living room, colliding with each other in the Conlans’ front hall before heading up the stairs to Chris’s room.

  When the door was closed, Chris said, “Do you really think we can pull this off?”

  “I do if you do,” Scott said. “Who’s the one always saying that you can’t do stuff in sports unless you think you can?”

  “I am so hearing you,” Chris said.

  Then Scott told Chris to get out the flash cards he said he tried to use for English sometimes, so the two of them could get busy.

  It wasn’t so long ago that Scott was the new kid at school.

  Now he was the new teacher.

  ELEVEN

  After the first week of real practice, with one more week to go until the first game, Scott’s dad said to him one night at dinner, “So what position do you think you’re going to end up playing?”

  Being serious.

  Scott decided not to paint one of those dopey smiley faces on the whole thing.

  “I don’t have a position,” he said, trying to make himself look busy cutting another piece of steak. “I’m probably not going to have one, either, other than maybe glorified water boy.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s still way too early to be talking like that.”

  “Dad, we play our first game in a week.”

  Hank Parry said, “Most coaches I ever had wanted to keep guys off balance about who was going to get the most playing time until the last possible moment.”

  So his dad was the one drawing the smiley face.

  As usual.

  “Well, he must love me, Dad. Because I’m always off balance.”

  His dad laughed and said, “Good one, kiddo.”

  Yeah, Scott thought, when it comes to football, I’m hilarious.

  “Well, does he h
ave you working more on offense or defense?” his dad said.

  “Special teams.”

  It was the truth. Not that it made him feel very special. When he did get on the field now, it was almost always as one of the guys running downfield on punts, even if he hadn’t made a single tackle yet. Not one. He’d be close to the guy with the ball sometimes, even throw himself down near the real tacklers just to feel as if he’d been part of the play. But he knew he wasn’t fooling anybody.

  Starting with himself.

  Sometimes on punts Mr. Dolan would put him on the receiving team, on the outside, lining him up against the fast guys who could actually run down and make a tackle, telling him to try to throw a block as a way of slowing them down.

  Then another outside guy on the kick team would run around him as if he wasn’t even there.

  Jimmy Dolan, just for the fun of it, would go out of his way to knock Scott down before running down the field, even though he knew it would cost him a few seconds getting to the punt returner, and that he would hear it from his dad when the play was over. Which he did.

  “Use your head once in a while,” Mr. Dolan would say to Jimmy, trying to act as hard on him as he was on everybody else, even though not one single player on the team believed it. They knew that Jimmy got away with stuff that nobody else on the team could, stuff nobody would even dream about trying to get away with on the field.

  “Sorry, brain,” Jimmy would say when the play was over. “But there’s just something about putting you on the ground that is so totally awesome. It’s like I’m racking up points playing video.”

  Water boy would actually be a step up, he realized.

  “Your chance will come,” his dad said from across the dinner table now.

  “Dad, I’m trying not to get my hopes up,” Scott said. “All I see myself doing this year is riding the bench, unless we’re winning, like, 100-0.”

  His dad put down his knife and fork and in a soft voice said to him, “Hey, what happened to my Rudy?”

  Rudy was one of their favorite sports movies to watch together. No, that wasn’t right. It was one of their favorite movies, period. The story of the Notre Dame guy, a little guy who wasn’t supposed to make the team and then, once he was on the team, wasn’t ever supposed to get in a game. But he finally got in for one play and made a tackle and got carried off the field by his teammates at the end.

  It said on the screen at the end of the movie that it was the only time in the whole history of Notre Dame football that any player had ever been carried off the field.

  “You just gotta be ready for your Rudy moment,” his dad said.

  “But what difference does it make if I’m ready if I can’t even make a tackle in practice?” Scott said. “If the only person I can bring down most of the time is myself?”

  “Yet,” his dad said. “You haven’t made a tackle yet.”

  Scott said, “The only big play I’m gonna make this season is in your dreams.”

  “Let me worry about my dreams,” his dad said. “You just worry about your own.”

  He called into the den and told his parents he was going to take Casey for a walk.

  “With the leash,” his dad said.

  “Case won’t go anywhere,” Scott said.

  “Case goes everywhere,” his dad called back, “especially at night. And, besides, you know the rules.”

  “At night he’s on the leash.”

  “And don’t—”

  “—leave the neighborhood.”

  Casey had never liked being on a leash, from the time he was a pup. But he knew the leash was a signal he was going outside, and he loved going outside. So he’d get almost as excited when he saw Scott with the leash in his hands as he did when Scott came walking down stairs with a ball.

  “Let’s go, pal,” Scott said.

  Casey’s answer was to come sliding right into Scott on their slippery kitchen floor.

  As soon as they were out the door, Casey was pulling him down the front walk. It was completely dark by now, and the old-fashioned streetlights were lit. When they got to the sidewalk, Scott saw a woman he recognized from up the block walking at them from the other direction, power-walking the way his mom did sometimes, earphones in her ears.

  As she passed them, she said to Scott, “Very cool dog.”

  Scott smiled and said, “I know,” wondering if she even heard him over whatever it was she was listening to.

  When the sound of her footsteps was gone, there was just the panting Casey the dog, straining against the leash the way he always did once they got going, wanting Scott to go faster.

  Alone on the street, Scott began to announce an imaginary game.

  “Welcome to Bloomfield North Field,” he said. “It’s a perfect morning for football as the Eagles prepare to open their season against their cross-town rival, the Jets.”

  Not a great voice, he thought.

  But not bad.

  “The Eagles have won the toss and elected to receive,” he said.

  On the quiet street, his voice sounding loud, Scott said, “Scott Parry to kick off. . . .”

  TWELVE

  Chris’s big day in class was the Thursday before their first game.

  Mr. Dykes, their English teacher, was going to give them a passage from a book, ask them to read it in an allotted period of time, then quiz them on it right after they finished reading.

  Quiz them and grade them.

  “It will be like a homework assignment, just in class,” Mr. Dykes had told them on Monday. “And it will give me a good read, early in the semester, on your ability to not just read, but understand what you’re reading.”

  On the bus home on Monday, Chris had said, “If I have to read a chapter fast, I’m done like dinner. You know how slow I read.”

  “So you pick up a step by Thursday,” Scott had said.

  “You sound pretty confident.”

  “I am.”

  Actually, he wasn’t.

  That afternoon they figured out that it took Chris about two minutes to read a page. The book they were using was one they were reading in school, called My Brother Sam Is Dead, about a family during the Revolutionary War.

  When Scott put himself on the clock, they found out he needed fifty-five seconds to read the same page.

  “Great,” Chris said. “You’re more than twice as fast as me.”

  Scott smiled.

  Chris said, “You’re smiling because?”

  “Because I just came up with another one of my brilliant ideas.”

  “Your brilliant ideas usually mean more work for me,” Chris said.

  “You want to hear it or not?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Nah.”

  “Before we get to Mr. Dykes’s class on Friday,” he said, “your time is going down, sucker.”

  “You sound like Mr. Dolan when he takes his stopwatch out.”

  “Exactly,” Scott said. “You’re going to compete. Against yourself. And I’m going to time you.”

  The hero of My Brother Sam Is Dead was a boy named Tim Meeker, and the story was about how his brother Sam runs off to fight for the American rebels and against the British army in the late 1770s, before America won its independence. Scott, who’d finished the whole book even though the class hadn’t been required to do that yet, thought it was a solid book. Chris was only about halfway through, but Scott could see that he was getting into it, too.

  “I still can’t believe I actually like a book,” Chris said.

  Scott looked at him, curious now. “You’ve never read just for the fun of it?”

  Chris shook his head. “Would you, if you were me? And who said this is fun, anyway?”

  “You’re liking this book, you said so yourself.”

  “I like it okay.”

  “That’s good enough for now,” Scott said.

  As the week went on, Scott saw the athlete in Chris coming out a little more every day, saw how competitive he was
getting, how he was pushing himself. Could see how Chris would finish a page, say “done,” then look at Scott and ask with his eyes what his time was without saying a word.

  “Eighty-five seconds,” Scott would say.

  Or eighty-three. Whatever it was. Chris seemed to knock off a couple of seconds every time Scott put him on the clock.

  When they did their last page on Wednesday, studying at Scott’s this time, he got under eighty seconds for the first time.

  “And I slowed down for a second when I got here,” Chris said, pointing to the word sight. “Another one that doesn’t sound the way it looks,” he said.

  Words like that, ones he couldn’t sound out, were still a problem for him, Scott had discovered. But he kept telling Chris that he couldn’t let words like that make him feel like he’d run into a door.

  “You just gotta keep moving,” Scott said.

  Chris grinned. “Like I’m getting chased by a couple of linebackers.”

  “If you stop,” Scott said, “you’re gonna get sacked.”

  “Mr. Dolan calls it getting dough-popped,” Chris said. “Some kind of Southern expression.”

  “Yeah,” Scott said. “And, remember, dough is spelled d-o-u-g-h.”

  “I hate words like that!”

  Scott said, “Get over it and start reading the next page.” Pointing to his watch as he said that.

  “You have turned into Mr. Dolan,” Chris said.

  They read until Scott’s mom said Chris’s mom was there to pick him up. Wednesday wasn’t a practice night this week, but they were studying together anyway, because the test was tomorrow.

  When Chris was gone, Scott’s mom said, “So how are we looking there, Professor?”

  “Chris calls me Coach.”

  “So how is he doing, really? He seems to be in a much better mood lately. Mrs. Conlan says she’s noticed it, too.”

  Scott said, “He’s gotten a lot better in just a week. The last page we did today, he had his best time ever. Then I had him read a whole chapter and talk about it afterward. Mom,” Scott said, excited, “he got it.”

  “You think he can get through this tomorrow?”

  “He’s definitely nervous,” Scott said. “Chris said he never chokes at football, but when it comes to quizzes, he gags his lungs out.”