Two-Minute Drill (6 page)

Only he didn’t have the ball with him.

Just Brett.

Chris was right behind them.

He had the ball now.

“I think this belongs to you,” he said.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” Chris said.

“It’s cool.”

“No, it’s not cool,” he said. “I was out of line.

Like way out of line. Calling you the brain like Jimmy does.” He shook his head. “Talking to you like that . . . that’s not me.”

“I thought maybe I did something,” Scott said.

“Not you. Me. I’m the stupid one.”

“Not a problem.”

They were sitting in the grass. The dogs were gone.

Chris said, “I’m the one with the problem.”

“When you’re friends with somebody,” Scott said, “then it’s your problem, too.” He stopped there for a second, not wanting this to come out sounding like some big deal. But knowing that it was, right now, the biggest possible deal. “And you and me . . . we’re still friends, right?”

“We’re friends,” Chris said, “even if I didn’t act like one in town.”

“Now all you’ve gotta do is tell me what the problem is,” Scott said. “Reading or being on the team?”

“Both.”

Then he tried to explain to Scott about dyslexia.

And how it could drag him down from behind better than any tackler on a football field.

 

“You ever get cramps?” Chris said.

“Don’t laugh,” Scott said, “but I get them in my feet sometimes.”

“What I’ve got,” Chris said, “is like a permanent cramp of my brain.”

He said that he and Scott would read the same page in a book, but that some of the words would sound different inside his brain than Scott’s.

He said he could look at a word like
pen
and read
pin
instead, and then get confused, not knowing why somebody in the book was trying to write with a pin.

Or, Chris said, he’d read a word at the top of a page and then forget what it meant by the time he got down to the bottom.

Writing, he said, was even worse.

“I’m okay if I have to get up in class and talk about something we had to read, as long as I worked really, really hard on it the night before with my mom or one of my tutors,” he said. “But when I try to write out the same answer, I’ll just be getting started when you guys are putting your notebooks away.”

All of a sudden, Scott felt like he’d been in a dark room and somebody had hit the light switch.

“It’s why you run the wrong way sometimes,” he said, “on the field.”

Chris reached over and bumped him some fist. “If Mr. Dolan shows me the Xs and Os on a page, I get crossed up sometimes, just the way I do with my reading. But if he tells me what to do, then I’m pretty much good to go. It’s why even on some of our simplest plays sometimes, I ask him to break down every part of it, even have him walk through it like he’s the quarterback. That way I can really
see
it.”

But football wasn’t his problem, he said, even if he was the only one running right sometimes when the rest of the team was running left.

School was the problem, and it was getting worse, even though the year had just started.

“How are you when you have to work on the computer and type stuff?” Scott said.

“I’m the king of IM-ing people,” he said, “because nobody cares if you’re a lousy speller or not.”

“I still don’t get how this means you might have to quit the team,” Scott said.

Chris took a deep breath, let it out in a long whoosh. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If I can’t keep up this year, they want to put me in Special Ed. And I’m already not keeping up.”

Scott felt like the slow one now. “But what does this have to do with football?”

Chris said his parents had laid it out for him like this: If he couldn’t show that he was keeping up in his classes by the time the season started in a couple of weeks, then they were going to hire a full-time tutor. Full-time meant four nights a week. The tutor’s job was to get him ready for this big state equivalency test at the end of the semester.

“If I can pass that, I can stay in our regular class,” he said. “If I can’t, I go into Special Ed.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Listen, every grown-up who talks to me says that Special Ed isn’t like school for dummies,” he said. “They say that sometimes the opposite is true, that some of the smartest kids end up in Special Ed for all kinds of different reasons, not just dyslexia. But I don’t care. I want to stay with my friends.”

“Dude,” Scott said, “nobody’s gonna think any differently about you whatever class you’re in. You’re . . . you’re
you.
”

“You hear what the other kids say about Special Ed kids.”

“Well, then, you can be the one to show those kids that they’re the ones acting dumber than dirt.”

Chris’s face started to get red.

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.

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

From brunch.

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.”

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.

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 have 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.