by Mike Lupica
“Separated shoulder,” Cassie said. “Grade two.”
Teddy grinned at her. “Thanks for the diagnosis, Dr. Bennett.”
“You didn’t specify that Jack had to be the one who answered,” Cassie said.
“Let her have her fun,” Jack said. “You know how obsessed she is with having the right answer in class.”
“Separated shoulder doesn’t sound like much fun,” Teddy said.
“Doc said it could have been worse,” Jack said. “For now he’s saying eight weeks. Six, if I’m a fast healer.”
Teddy said, “I should have been faster putting a body on the guy who hit you.”
“Stop,” Jack said. “It’s a contact sport. Stuff happens.”
“It shouldn’t have happened to you in the first half of the first game of the season.”
“We’ll be fine,” Jack said. “We won, didn’t we?”
“Barely,” Teddy said. “How much does it hurt?”
“Little bit if I’m careful, a lot if I try to make any kind of move with my right arm,” Jack said. “Doc told me to start learning how to be a one-handed typist, and to brush my teeth with my left hand.”
“You brush?” Cassie said.
“This stinks,” Teddy said. “Totally.”
“Dude,” Jack said. “I’ll survive. And you get to be happy. You just won the game for us. And Gus says it was your dad who sent the play in.”
Teddy looked out at the field and saw his dad throw another high five Coach Gilbert’s way.
“Yeah,” Teddy said. “Maybe we should give him the game ball.”
“But they’re giving it to you, right?” Cassie said.
“Cassie!” Jack and Gus shouted at the same time.
“He doesn’t know?”
Jack and Gus slowly shook their heads.
Cassie said, “Well, the next time something is a secret, maybe one of you two could tell me that.”
Coach Gilbert yelled at his players then, waving them out to where he’d been standing with David Madden. When they got around him, the first thing he did was present Teddy with the ball he’d been holding.
“It’s always the same in sports,” Coach said. “You make a play or you don’t. And you made one when we needed one today.”
Teddy thanked Coach Gilbert and said, “It feels a little light. You didn’t take any air out of it, did you?”
Coach was a Patriots fan and was still taking heat for that time when the Patriots had been accused of taking air out of their game balls in an AFC Championship game.
“Just how long are you guys gonna make fun of me about Deflategate?” he said.
“Only when we’re not making fun of you for the two Super Bowls the Giants got off you,” Teddy said.
“Thanks a bunch,” Coach said.
The guys laughed and pounded on Teddy a little more. When he broke away from them, he walked back over to Jack and tried to hand him the ball.
“This is yours,” he said.
“Don’t even think about it,” Jack said, taking a step back. “It’s all you.”
“Okay, I’m not gonna fight you. Even though I’m pretty sure I could take you right now.”
Teddy didn’t even notice that his dad had joined them.
“You know what wasn’t a fair fight?” David Madden said. “Two of them against you.”
“Thanks,” Teddy said.
He felt himself getting annoyed all over again, like his dad had joined a party that Teddy hadn’t invited him to. But it was clear now that there was nothing to do about it. And that his dad wouldn’t be leaving the party anytime soon.
Jack said he had to go home, his parents wanted him to rest. But he said for Teddy and Gus and Cassie to check with him later—maybe they could all come over.
Teddy went and collected the big bag he’d brought with him to the game, put his helmet and the game ball inside it, walked past the bleachers, and started to make the turn for the parking lot. Before he did, though, he took one last look back at the field.
Wow, he thought.
Wow, wow, wow.
What a day.
When he got to his mom’s car, she said, “Where’s the ball?” As if he’d lost it.
“In the bag.”
“We’re going to need a trophy case!” she said.
“Okay, Mrs. Madden,” he said. “Let’s put the brakes on here.”
“Got carried away there, didn’t I?”
“Little bit.”
When they were both in the car, they saw Coach Gilbert and David Madden heading into the parking lot, arms around each other’s shoulders. Teddy imagined they’d left a lot of fields in their lives the same way.
Teddy’s mom said, “He really seemed to enjoy himself today.”
“Gee, I hadn’t picked up on that.”
“Let’s face it, honey,” she said. “This is all new to him, too. He’s just trying to figure things out the way the rest of us are.”
“Now you’re defending him?” Teddy said.
“Not defending him. Just looking out for you.”
“By defending him?”
“No,” she said. “By telling you that you can’t let everything he does get under your skin. If you do, you’re going to be angry every time he’s around. And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that he’s going to be around.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Really,” she said.
He turned to face her in the front seat. “You’re saying I don’t have a right to be at least a little sketched out now that he’s barged his way onto my team the way he barged his way back into our life?”
“Honey,” she said. “I get it. I do. But you’ve got to get past being angrier now that he’s back than you ever were when he was away.”
Teddy slumped back into his seat as she put the car into gear.
“Just because Coach is letting him call some plays doesn’t mean he gets to call all of them.”
“Tell him that the next time you’re alone,” she said. “But right now, we’re going to go home and you’re going to clean up, and then you’re going to enjoy the rest of the day with your friends. You did win today, remember?”
“Did I?” Teddy said.
THIRTEEN
His dad showed up for two of the three practices before their next game, on the road, against the Moran Mustangs. The only one he missed started too early for him to get there from his job.
Teddy just accepted it as being part of what Cassie liked to call his “new normal,” knowing there was nothing he could do to stop his father from becoming more and more involved with the team. If Coach Gilbert wanted him as an assistant coach—it was what he’d become, even if nobody was calling him Coach Madden yet—it wasn’t as if Teddy could do anything to change his mind.
And as much as Teddy hated admitting it, even to himself, his dad knew his football. It turned out Coach Gilbert had been right when he’d said that his old quarterback saw things on the field that nobody else did, sometimes before they even happened.
“I know you probably don’t want to hear what I have to say,” Gus said during a water break at Thursday night’s practice, “but I’m going to say it anyway.”
“What if I tell you that I not only don’t want to hear it, but I really don’t want you to say it?” Teddy said. “Think of all the trouble that might save both of us.”
“But you don’t know what it is yet.”
“Just making what they call an educated guess.”
“Meaning I’ve said things before that you didn’t want to hear, but I said them anyway.”
“Yes!”
Gus looked like he was trying not to laugh, but did.
“Anyway, here goes,” he said.
“Has anybody ever told you that listening is not one of your strong suits?”
“I’m not listening,” Gus said. “But what I’m trying to tell you is that your dad is making us better, whether you like it or not.”
“I don�
��t like it.”
“Him making us better?”
“No,” Teddy said. “Him being around.”
“Wow,” Gus Morales said. “I hadn’t picked up on that.”
Coach blew his whistle, letting them all know the break was over. As they walked back to the field, Teddy said in a voice only loud enough for Gus to hear, “Listen, I can deal with having my dad around. But can we deal with having Danny be our quarterback?”
“Dude,” Gus said, keeping his own voice low, always a struggle. “I hear you.”
Teddy didn’t know enough about Danny Hayes to know if he’d ever been a good quarterback in organized football before this. And he had been good enough to make the team as Jack’s backup, no doubt. But the way he’d thrown the ball last Saturday and the way he’d been throwing it all week in practice made Teddy—and Gus, and Jack, who’d come to the two previous practices—wonder if he couldn’t deal with the pressure of being the starter.
He wondered at the same time if Danny just couldn’t think of himself as anything other than a backup.
Teddy knew something about that from his own life. His old self. If you thought of yourself in a certain way long enough—the way Teddy used to think of himself as the funny, out-of-shape loser—you finally just became that kid.
But whatever was going on inside Danny’s head, and maybe in his heart, the harder he tried, the worse his control got. Every time he dropped back to pass—in practice—it was as if the whole season were riding on his next completion.
Teddy and Gus and the rest of the players waited while Coach Gilbert, Coach Williams, and Teddy’s dad huddled up, deciding how they wanted to scrimmage tonight.
“He was throwing spirals in tryouts,” Teddy said. “I saw him. Now he can’t even do that.”
Gus said, “He’s aiming every ball, even when he checks down to me or one of the backs. I feel bad for the guy.”
“Me too,” Teddy said. Now he was whispering. “But if this is as good as he can do, what are we gonna do?”
“Punt?” Gus said.
The coaches decided that they’d have a short scrimmage to end practice, the offense starting at the defense’s thirty yard line. If they scored, the defense had to run two laps around the outside of Holzman Field.
If the defense could keep them out of the end zone, the guys on offense had to run.
After six plays, it all came down to fourth-and-goal from the nine. Danny hadn’t completed a single pass to get them there, missing throws to both Gus and Teddy when they were both wide open. But the O-line had been terrific, opening up big holes for Jake and Brian, and Danny had managed to scramble for one of their first downs.
Now Coach Gilbert—or maybe Coach David Madden—called for the same screen to Teddy they’d used to beat Hollis Hills.
Only this time the throw was even worse than it had been against the Bears. This time Danny’s pass floated into the flat, hanging in the air like a beach ball.
Andre Williams, coming from outside linebacker, read the play the whole way, seeing what Teddy did, that Danny had been eyeballing him from the time he got the snap in the shotgun. Teddy had no chance to cut him off; Andre was at full speed when he picked the ball off and ran ninety yards the other way.
Teddy chased him all the way, but as fast as he was, Andre was faster. He would have been better off saving his strength for the laps he was about to run.
When he and the rest of the guys from the offense finished, his dad came over to him and said, “This might not be the perfect moment to ask, but you want to grab a burger after you get cleaned up? When I talked to your mom, she said she hadn’t even started dinner yet.”
Teddy was sitting on the grass, gassed. He looked up at his dad and said, “You’re gonna think I’m blowing you off.”
“You mean like the other time when I asked and you blew me off?” his dad said, smiling as he did.
He had asked, the day after the Hollis Hills game, but Teddy already had plans to eat at Jack’s house that night.
“It’s just that I promised Cassie that I’d study with her for a history test tonight,” Teddy said. “I just forgot to tell Mom.”
He had to hand it to his dad. It was hard to knock that smile off his face. “Next time, then,” he said. “Just wanted to talk a little bit about the team with you.”
“Next time for sure!” Teddy said, trying to make himself sound a lot more fired up about the prospect than he actually was.
As soon as his dad was out of earshot, Teddy grabbed his phone out of his equipment bag and called Cassie. Of course she picked up right away.
“We’re studying for history tonight at my house, okay? Half an hour?”
“You don’t need my help with history.”
“Just your help,” Teddy said. “I told my dad I couldn’t have dinner with him because we had to study.”
“Loser.”
“I just look at it as calling an audible,” he said.
“See you in a few,” she said, quickly throwing one more “loser” at him before she hung up.
Gus’s mom dropped Teddy off, and he had enough time for a quick shower and a plate of pasta with his mom before Cassie showed up on her bike. When they were in his room, they didn’t talk about school right away, or the test. Teddy told her what had happened with the team all week, how badly Danny was playing, how practice had ended tonight with Andre’s pick six.
When he finished, Cassie looked at him and said, “You should play quarterback.”
FOURTEEN
Teddy laughed, but then noticed that the expression on her face hadn’t changed.
“Oh,” he said, “you’re serious.”
She nodded her head slowly.
“You’ll need to leave now,” he said. “Studying with someone whose brain has stopped functioning does me no good.”
Cassie stood up. “Get your football,” she said. “There’s still enough daylight for us to go over to school and play catch.”
She got up and walked out of his room. Teddy grabbed his football from his closet and followed her, saying, “You do remember that I just finished practice and then had to run laps after practice and might be a little footballed out?”
“Maybe I should have said I was Teddy-ed out when you called me,” she said as she headed out his back door. “Do you get my meaning?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to ma’am me?” she said. “I’m not your mother.”
“Even if you act that way sometimes,” he said under his breath.
“I heard that.”
And then they both heard Jack Callahan say, “Even I heard it.”
There he was, standing on the home-run side of the outfield fence, arm in his sling, smiling at both of them.
“You just happened to wander by?” Teddy said.
“She texted me and told me I had to come,” Jack said. “What would you have done?”
“Run,” Teddy said. “So you’re in on her little plan too?”
“All in,” Jack said. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Cassie said. “I never know when these genius thoughts are coming to me. And when they do, I can’t stop them.”
“It’s best that you don’t try,” Teddy said.
Cassie had been right about the light; there was enough of it left, in the cool of the early evening, for them to play catch. It was actually Teddy’s favorite time of the day to do it.
“Okay,” Cassie said after they’d soft-tossed to warm up. “Tonight I’m the receiver, which I would be good enough to be on your fancy-pants team if I wanted to be. And you’re the quarterback.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m a tight end, not a quarterback!”
Jack had come through the door in centerfield and was standing with them.
Teddy turned to him, “Help me out here.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do.”
“I’
ve seen your arm,” Cassie said. “I saw it in baseball, and I saw it the other day when you were chucking rocks at Small Falls. You are a quarterback. You just don’t know it. Yet.”
Teddy sighed. “That burger with my dad is suddenly sounding better and better.” He turned back to Jack. “And I thought you were supposed to be my wingman.”
Jack shrugged and patted his injured shoulder. “Maybe a bad wing turns you into a bad wingman,” he said.
“Good one,” Teddy said.
“Are we gonna do this before it starts to get dark or not?” Cassie said. “And we’re not here to talk about your dad tonight. We’re here to talk about you.”
“Don’t you mean talk at me?”
They were about twenty yards apart by now. She whipped a hard pass at him that would have hit him right in the face if he hadn’t gotten his hands up. “Have it your way,” she said.
Teddy wondered what would have happened if she’d tried out for the Wildcats. He already knew how fast she was from watching her run the bases for her softball team. And he knew she could catch from the times she’d shown up on this field when Jack and Gus and Teddy were goofing around.
But when she started running real patterns now, which Teddy would call out to her, inside cuts or outside cuts or fly patterns down an imaginary sideline, she just looked like a football player, with hands and moves and the ability to look like a streak of light when she really turned it on.
They had been at it for about twenty minutes when Jack told Teddy to have her run a deep post.
“Let’s see how accurate you are when you really air it out,” Jack said.
“You want to see if I can be as accurate as you are.”
“Just cut it loose,” Jack said.
Teddy yelled at Cassie and told her what he wanted her to run. “I know what a deep post is,” she yelled back. Then she took off, flying across the outfield grass before she broke off a sharp cut and angled toward the infield. She caught the ball in stride and kept running all the way to the pitcher’s mound before she spiked the ball like a champion.
She picked up the ball and jogged back to where Teddy and Jack were waiting for her near the right-field wall. Cassie said, “You can throw it a mile. And you almost always hit what you’re aiming at. And that, my friend, is what real quarterbacks do.”
