Million-Dollar Throw (5 page)

When he’d asked his mom about it later, she’d said, “Your dad still needs a place to go in the morning.”

“What does he do there all day by himself?” Nate had asked.

“Sometimes he just waits for the phone to ring,” she’d said.

His dad put it another way: said he was just waiting for the game to change, the way he had been waiting for it to change since he’d lost his job at his old real estate company.

“We’re like the Patriots,” he’d said to Nate. “They were down when Belichick started coaching them, but look where they are now. They’re the team to beat pretty much every year now. It’ll be our turn again soon.”

Nate wondered when “soon” would arrive. He hoped it was before somebody finally bit on the “For Sale” sign that had been in front of their house since the end of last school year.

There was something about that sign that was like Abby’s sunglasses, a reminder that hardly anything in Nate’s life—outside of football—was the way he wanted it to be, or the way he’d always thought it would be before his dad lost his job and Abby started to lose her eyesight.

The day the “For Sale” sign first went up, his parents had told him there was nothing for him to worry about. They were always telling him there was nothing to worry about, that they wouldn’t be leaving Valley, that he wasn’t going to have to change schools, that Valley was too small for him to have to worry about being far from Abby or any of his other friends. They were just looking for a smaller house, one that fit what his mom liked to call their “new circumstances.”

Nate had tried to get used to those circumstances, had tried to get used to always keeping his room clean just in case somebody who might want to buy their house was coming by to look at it.

That was back when people were still coming by to look at it.

Some nights he would sit at his bedroom window, not looking at the stars the way Abby loved to, but looking out at that “For Sale” sign as though it were his address now—not 127 Spencer Street, just For Sale, Massachusetts.

He was doing that tonight, a few hours after he’d knocked off Abby’s glasses, unable to sleep. He thought about getting on his computer and seeing if Abby was still awake, instant-messaging her the way he did at night when he couldn’t sleep or couldn’t figure things out, when his mind seemed to be going in ten different directions at once. She’d figure things out for him or give him a pep talk in those huge letters they used now when they were IM’ing each other, or just make him feel better by using one of her favorite phrases:

And, just like that, he would.

Abby hadn’t been awake tonight and Nate had finally managed to fall asleep when voices from downstairs woke him up.

Nate couldn’t tell at first whether his parents were having an argument. He just knew that his dad’s voice was loud and he was saying something about how
some
body had better buy their house before the bank got it.

Then he heard his mom tell his dad to lower his voice or he was going to wake Nate.

“Maybe he needs to hear this,” he said.

“No, Chris,” his mom said, “he doesn’t. He’s got enough to worry about.”

And his dad said, “Do you think he doesn’t understand what’s going on around here? Do you think the boy doesn’t see what’s happening to us? Do you think he actually believes us when we tell him not to worry about money? He’s too smart for that.”

Nate’s chest tightened and his hands gripped the blanket hard. His dad wasn’t joking about “For Sale” signs now or anything else, not talking about game-changers, not talking about how the Patriots got things turned around. Not pretending that things were going to be the way they used to be.

His mom was doing her best to keep her voice low, as though it could somehow quiet his father’s loud one. But Nate heard every word in the still darkness.

“Sports is a job for you now, Chris. Not him. He’s just a boy.”

His father said nothing at first, and Nate thought it was over, that he could try to somehow get back to sleep.

Only it wasn’t over.

Nate heard him loud and clear:

“You know what we could use around here? A million dollars.”

N
ate loved practice.

Not everybody on his team did. Hardly
anybody
on the team loved practice, because more than anything, football practice was repetition, doing things over and over until you had them right, until you could make the decisions you had to make in the game—not just the quarterback, but everybody—in the tiny amount of time you had to make them.

Coach liked to say, “The biggest myth in the world is the one about
dumb
football players. That comes from people who’ve never played this game. Because once that ball is snapped, guys all over the field have about two seconds, tops, to decide where they’re going and what they have to do. So you’d better be prepared in this game, ’cause it comes at you
fast
. Dumb football players? No such thing.”

Nate wanted to be the most prepared guy out there. He figured that made him the opposite of Allen Iverson, who was in one of Nate’s all-time favorite YouTube clips, the one where he kept saying “practice”—“We’re talkin’ about
practice
”—over and over as if it were the dirtiest gutter word in the world.

Nate loved putting on his equipment, making sure his pads were just right, loved joking with the guys when they were stretching to get themselves warmed up. And he knew that the best part of practice, what Coach called their “team work”—two words, not one—where they’d work on plays until they got them perfect, hadn’t even started yet.

The great quarterbacks, Nate knew, were the ones who were most prepared. Starting with his man, Brady. Oh, Nate had read up on all that, on Brady and Peyton Manning, how they loved all their time watching game film and even being in the weight room with the big guys on their team, the linemen and the linebackers. He remembered reading somewhere that even before Brady stepped in for Drew Bledsoe the year the Patriots won that first Super Bowl, Coach Belichick used to say that not only did Brady know all the Patriots’ plays and all their options, he knew the
other
team’s plays and options better than anybody because he’d run those plays against his own defense in practice.

“He was never surprised,” Belichick said about the Tom Brady he knew before everybody else did.

Nate wanted to be that kind of quarterback. Nate
wanted
to put in the work. He knew they had more plays—there were seventy-five in all—than any other eighth-grade team around. He knew they had a whole separate offense run from the shotgun formation when no other team in their league did. Nate learned that the way he learned everything else in Coach’s offense—studying as if for a final exam.

Valley’s backup quarterback was Eric Gaffney, one of the team’s wideouts and almost as much of a favorite receiver for Nate as Pete Mullaney was. As they were getting ready for practice the Thursday before the Blair game, Nate had been talking about a new play from the shotgun they were going to use on Saturday, and why he thought it would work.

“Coach doesn’t even know these plays the way you do,” Eric said.

Nate grinned. “I just read the playbook,” he said. “Coach wrote it.”

“You sure it’s not the other way around?” Eric said.

Nate said, “C’mon, if I get hurt or something, you know this stuff as well as I do.”

“Dude, no one does.” They were finishing warm-ups up now with some hamstring stretches. “And dude?” Eric said. “Please don’t get hurt.”

Coach Rivers had been a quarterback himself in college, at the University of Massachusetts, and every once in a while he would take a couple of snaps and make a couple of deep throws just to show his players—his words—that he wasn’t some kind of “chopper.” Tonight he said they were going to start out running plays in their red-zone offense, which meant that Nate and the guys would start on the defense’s 20-yard line.

Sometimes they did it that way the last practice before a game, Coach telling them they had two minutes to score. Or a minute. Or even thirty seconds. Sometimes he’d do it the way he did in a game, have his assistant coach for the offense, Coach Hanratty, hold up a chalkboard with three plays on it, only Nate knowing which one was his “hot read”—the play he was actually going to call.

Sometimes he’d even let Nate call the plays himself.

“The one thing most coaches at this level don’t realize,” Coach had said the first week of practice, “is that you guys
want
to learn. You’re like sponges when it comes to learning. So you’d better know from the jump that we’re not going to play your father’s style of eighth-grade football. If anybody here thinks ball control means running with it, grab a ball and go run some laps.”

Their defensive coach was Coach Burnley, Malcolm’s dad. Malcolm pulled double-duty as the Patriots’ middle linebacker in addition to playing center.

While he huddled up with his guys, Coach Rivers pulled Nate aside and said, “There’s gonna be plays up on the chalkboard, like always. But call what you want tonight, as long as you throw every down.”

Nate said, “Well, if you insist.”

Then Coach walked away from him, telling everybody that the offense had a minute and a half, no time-outs.

Throw every down, Coach had said.

In Nate’s mind, it was like telling a bird to fly.

First down he split out Pete and Eric to the right side, a play they called “L Wait.” It meant LaDell. He was supposed to hold his place in the backfield for a couple of beats, then swing out to the left sideline and look for the ball once he crossed the line of scrimmage. If the linebacker came up on him, LaDell could try to blow by him, knowing Nate would read the move.

Nate took the snap from Malcolm, dropped back, rolled a little to his right, trying to make it look as if he had Pete and Eric over on that side of the field for a reason, that he planned to end this imaginary ninety-second game—the best kind of fantasy football—on the very first play.

He eyeballed his wideouts just long enough, then looked to his left, saw LaDell over there, saw their right linebacker, Sam Baum, giving him way too much room, five yards at least, LaDell wide open.

A beautiful thing. LaDell being open that way.

It was the pass that was ugly. Hideously ugly. Nate knew as soon as he released the ball, knew it was a bad throw the way he knew when it was all good.
Knew.
He had given the ball too much hang time, led LaDell by too much. And even though Sam Baum had to be as surprised as anybody on the field that Nate would give him this kind of bunny on the first play of practice—or ever—he knew what to do when he saw the ball floating in front of him like a beach ball.

He closed on the ball as if the play had been called for him, as if he were Nate’s primary receiver, and there was nothing LaDell could do to stop him. Sam caught the ball in stride and ran the other way with it until Coach, the only one who
could
stop him, did that by blowing his whistle.

As practice wore on, the harder Nate tried, the harder it got for him to hit what he was aiming at.

When they moved the ball back later, in a part of practice called “Stretching the Field”—you could only try for pass plays of fifteen yards or more—he had Pete wide open on a Hutchins-and-Go and overthrew him by ten yards.

When Pete got back to the huddle, he tried to make a joke of it, saying to Nate, “It was already too high when it went over my head for me to make out what airline it was. Thought it might be jetBlue but, like I said, no way of knowing for sure.”

Nate didn’t miss everybody by that much. And he didn’t miss with every ball he threw. But for the first time all season, practice or game, for the first time in a long time, he felt as if he had borrowed somebody else’s arm.

In baseball they talked about “command” with pitchers.