Left Out (6 page)

Landon's dad went into his speech. “Landon is deaf. When he was four he got cochlear implants, so he hears sound and he can read lips. But to really understand speech it's best if he hears and sees what's said.”

“He reads lips?” The man shot what looked like a nervous glance at Landon.

“He uses a combination of sight and sound to understand,” Landon's dad said.

“But he can't wear those things with a football helmet,” the man said.

Landon's dad nodded. “Yes, he can. There's actually a company that makes custom helmets. Landon isn't the first, either, and we have a doctor's note.”

“Okay, okay. That's great. Really.” The man with glasses threw his hands up in the air in total surrender. “I'm sorry. I
didn't mean any offense at all, and if he has special needs we can work with that, but we just have to know.”

Landon's father gritted his teeth and shook his head. “No, he isn't special needs. He just needs to see you speak.” He showed them all the doctor's clearance.

The men looked at the paper, and then Coach Bell said, “Super. Okay, let's go. On the scale, Landon. Here we go.”

“So, should I take off my shoes?” It seemed like years since Landon first asked this.

Coach Bell looked down. “Yeah, it's the rules.”

Landon bent down and took his shoes off. He tugged his T-shirt over his gut before he stepped onto the scale.

“I knew it!” Coach Bell craned his neck to read the digital number. “Yup. Double X. You'll be great on the line.”

Landon's father said, “But he can only play certain positions?”

“Yes,” Coach Bell explained. “For safety these really big boys—the Double X's—can only play right tackle on offense and left end on defense.”

Landon didn't know whether to feel proud or humiliated. The man with glasses gave him a mouth guard in a plastic bag and instructed him to go out on the football field and look for the coaches with the bright green T-shirts. Landon's dad put a hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the field.

When they got there, Landon's dad pointed to one end where two fathers wore bright green T-shirts with matching caps and whistles around their necks, just the same as Coach Bell at the weigh-in. There were blocking dummies and small, bright orange cones set out in some kind of order Landon didn't
recognize from his YouTube study of the game. Some of the dummies, big yellow cylinders standing tall, were for blocking and tackling. Others, blue rectangles lying flat in the grass, were used for soft boundary markers. Beyond the end zone was a metal sled with five football-player-shaped pads whose single purpose he knew: blocking.

“Okay.” His father stopped at the sideline and pointed. “There's your group—your team. Good luck, son.”

Landon looked up at his father, who studied the team from beneath the shade of his hand. When he realized Landon wasn't moving, he gave him a little push. “Go ahead. You can do this, Landon. Everything new is always a little scary.”

He nodded. “Okay, Dad.” Landon put one foot in front of the other and headed toward the growing group of kids wearing shorts and T-shirts and cleats who milled around the coaches in green. Skip was throwing a ball to his spiky-haired friend, and when he saw Landon he called out, “Hey, Mike, the baby giant came back.” Landon moved toward the other side of the field where two other boys huddled together on a tipped-over blocking dummy, whispering. Landon sat down on the dummy directly across from them. He looked intently at them until they suddenly stopped talking.

The two boys looked at Landon like he was crazy, then at each other, and simply got up and walked away without a word.

Landon scanned the area and picked some grass. He knew he should have just said hello, but he wasn't comfortable doing it. He knew his speech sounded off. The other kids were fooling
around, pushing each other with foam shields or tossing footballs.

That outsider feeling he'd lived with his whole life tightened its grip on Landon's heart, threatening to turn him into a mound of jelly. It felt like the drop at Splash Mountain all over again, so Landon clenched his teeth and dug deep. This was his chance to be a football player, and if he did what he thought he could do, they'd all respect him—and maybe outright
like
him. One coach noticed him and headed his way with a bright white smile that made him feel much, much better.

The coach smelled of citrus cologne, but he looked like a triathlete. His cabled muscles were tan and his close-set, dark eyes intense without effort. Up close, Landon could see a dusting of gray at the edges of his dark, short hair. The coach stopped in front of Landon and extended a hand weighed down by some kind of championship ring. “Hey, buddy, I'm Coach Furster, the head coach. Look, you don't want to sit on the bags like that.”

Landon popped right up. “Sorry, Coach. I . . . the other guys . . .” Landon stopped because he didn't want to seem like a rat.

“And lose the hat, buddy.” Coach Furster glowered so that his eyes almost appeared to have crossed, and Landon wondered if he had some deep-seated hatred of the Cleveland Browns. “You see anybody else wearing a
hat
?”

“Oh, um,” he started, but with Coach glaring at him, Landon reluctantly tugged off his hat. Coach Furster's jaw fell. “What? Whoa. Hey, what the . . .”

“It's . . . it's just my hearing stuff, Coach. My mom calls them my ‘ears.' They help me hear.”

Coach Furster waved a hand. “No worries, buddy. Hey, you're okay with the hat. That's fine. I had no idea. I know you're new and I was just thinking you'd want to fit in. That's always what you want, but you're fine with the hat.”

Landon replaced the hat and studied the coach intently. Coach Furster stood straight and wiped his mouth like there was food on it. “What? What are you looking at?”

“Just . . . your face, Coach.”

“Why?” Coach Furster wrinkled his thick brow so that his eyebrows sank and his eyes nearly crossed again.

“Just”—Landon pointed in the general direction of his ears—“so I can hear what you're saying, or know what you're saying.”

Coach Furster only blinked at him.

“It's easier to understand when I can see your lips,” Landon explained.

“Well, you're apt to miss a lot that way.” Coach Furster twirled his whistle and the tattoo on the side of his biceps—some Chinese symbol—jumped and quivered. “But don't worry. We can bring you along slow. Was Coach Bell at your check-in?”

“Yes,” Landon said. “He told me I was a Double X player.”

“Coach West and I will have to talk to him,” Coach Furster said. “Meanwhile, you just watch how we do things and then we can see how you do.”

“I'll watch everything, Coach.” Landon nodded vigorously. “For sure. I watch drills on YouTube all the time.”

“Great.” Coach Furster put a hand on Landon's shoulder and escorted him over to the sideline in a cloud of that citrus cologne. “You know what? Heck, who cares?” Coach Furster knocked over a blocking dummy and dragged it ten feet off the field. “You can sit right there. That's fine. You sit and watch and you'll pick up a lot, right? You're a careful observer, I bet.” Coach Furster pointed at him and winked.

“For sure, Coach.” Landon took a seat and beamed up at his new coach.

“That's great, Landon.” Coach Furster patted his shoulder. “This is gonna work out just great. Glad to have you on the team.”

Landon followed the coach with his eyes, the smell fading into the grass. Coach Furster returned to the other coach—Coach West—a tall, thin man who made Landon think of an undertaker. They were soon joined by big Coach Bell. They had a short, animated discussion. Landon couldn't make it all out, but he knew by the way they kept looking at him that he—or really his ears—was the topic.

Then he caught a full view of Coach Bell's red face and could clearly see what he was saying. “—not mentally challenged. He talks funny because he's
deaf.
He's huge, and he's got a doctor's clearance and a custom helmet and his dad says he can read lips.”

At that, all three coaches looked his way and Landon quickly averted his eyes, studying the grass. The blast of whistles got his attention and he saw that the coaches had moved on. The team fell into five lines, creating a rigid order where before it had been mayhem. Skip and his two friends, floppy-haired Xander and
spiky-haired Mike, headed up three of the five lines. Another was headed by Coach Bell's son, Brett.

Whistles tooted and players took off from their lines, running with high knees from the goal line to the thirty-yard line and then stopping and reforming the lines, only to return some other way. They went back and forth with a backward run, a sideways shuffle, cross-over steps, butt kickers, and some runs Landon couldn't even describe.

After about ten minutes of that, everyone spread out and they did some more stretching. Five minutes later they were broken into three equal groups and running through agility drills overseen by the coaches. On the whistle, the players would sprint from one station to the next, with the coaches issuing an occasional bark—it seemed to Landon a mixture of criticism and praise.

After that they worked on form tackling drills, just going through the precise movements of a tackle in slow motion since no one had pads on. Then the team split up into skill players—mostly the smaller guys like Skip and Mike and a kid named Layne Guerrero—who went with Coach Bell, and the lineman, or hogs, like Brett Bell, who went with Coach Furster and Coach West.

When the lineman began getting into stances and firing out into the blocking dummies held by their teammates, Landon stood up.

He felt silly just sitting and was pretty certain he could do what they were doing. There was one guy without a partner, a kid not as big as Landon but with even more girth around the belly and big Band-Aids on each knee. Landon grabbed the
dummy he'd been sitting on and dragged it over to him.

“Hey,” Landon said cheerfully. The kid looked at him like he was nuts, but Landon pressed on. “I can be your partner. Here, you go first.”

Landon hefted the bag between the two of them, grabbed the handles on both sides, and leaned into it just the way the others were doing. The kid got down, and on the coach's cadence, he fired out into the dummy, jarring Landon, who fought to keep his feet.

“Hey! Hey!” Coach West was shouting, and he flew over to Landon's new partner and got right in his face. “Did anyone tell you to pair off with this kid, Timmy?”

The boy named Timmy shook his head with a terrified look.

A whistle shrieked and all motions stopped. Coach Furster marched over in a cloud of cologne. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Landon, what are you doing, buddy?”

“I just . . .” Landon hefted the bag. “I can do this, Coach. It's easy.”

The word “easy” set Coach Furster off. He was suddenly furious. “Easy, Landon? Glad you think it's easy. Okay, let's give you a shot and see how
easy
it is. Ready?”

Coach Furster jammed the whistle in the corner of his mouth and snatched the dummy from Landon, spinning it around without any regard for the fine gold watch on his wrist. “Down!”

Landon looked all around. The kids were all smirking, and some were giggling.

“I said, ‘Down!' Come on, you been watching.” Coach
Furster's face was turning red. “You know what to do. Down!”

A light went off in Landon's head and he put his hand down in the grass, just one, palm flat in a three-point stance.

“Set . . . Hut!”

Landon stumbled into the dummy with his shoulder and started pumping his feet up and down the way he'd seen the others do, pushing with all his might. Coach Furster dragged the dummy backward and Landon felt it slipping away. He churned his feet, grabbed for the handles on the bag but missed, caught the coach's fine watch, let go with a gasp, tripped, and fell flat on his face. Landon could taste the grass and feel the vibration of laughter all around him. He didn't have to see it.

He didn't have to hear it.

In his ears rang his mother's words: “Be careful what you wish for, Landon, because you just might get it.”

“How was practice?” Landon's mom looked up from her cup of tea as he and his dad walked in through the garage door. Her eyes were red-rimmed and drooping with exhaustion. She had her shoes off and her feet up on an ottoman, stretching her toes. Beside her, a briefcase bulged with papers, and her dress was wrinkled.

Landon didn't want to alarm her, or anyone. “Fine.”

“Just fine?” She arched an eyebrow and studied his face.

His father stepped into the scene from the kitchen. “He has lots to learn, is all. They don't give the babies rattles in this town; they give them footballs.”

Landon shook his head. “We had to run about a million sprints at the end of practice. I'm tired.”

He thought she might have said, “Me too,” as he walked on past, heading for the stairs and a shower.

It was under the safety of the pounding water, without his ears and in the silence of his own world, that he let himself sob. Football practice was nothing like he had expected. Instead of being glorious and uplifting, it had confused and belittled him. He felt like an orange with all its juice squeezed out. When he got out of the shower his eyes were so red that he decided to get in bed with his book and the clip-on reading light that wouldn't let his parents get a good look at him when they came in to kiss him good-night.

After a short time, his mother appeared. She gave him a kiss and a hug, and he could tell she was exhausted because it was a rare thing to see her shoulders slump.

His father came in a few minutes later, sat on the edge of the bed, and patted his leg to get his attention.

Landon sighed and looked up. “Tired.”

His father looked at the ears Landon had placed on the nightstand beside his bed, and then he made a fist with his thumb sticking out. Even though they didn't use sign language, there were a few signs they all knew, and when his father kept his fist tight, put the thumb into the right side of his stomach, and drew a straight line up toward his face, Landon knew what it meant.

Proud.

Landon bit the inside of his lip and hugged his dad. He tried not to cry again, but it hit him like a tidal wave.

“I don't want to be deaf, Dad,” he cried out, painfully aware that he couldn't hear his own words. “I don't want to be different.” His whole body lurched and shook, and he squeezed his father tight.

His dad simply hugged him tighter as they sat together in the dim light.