The Extra Yard (10 page)

“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.”

“Yeah,” Teddy said, “I did that on a baseball field after supper, throwing to a—”

“Uh-oh,” Jack said.

Even though Teddy hadn't finished his thought, he knew he was in trouble. He saw Cassie's eyes narrow to slits. “I am going to pretend I didn't hear what I almost just heard,” she said.

Teddy grinned. “What I was about to say was that I was throwing to a gifted wide receiver who'd make anybody throwing to her look good.”

“You're not him,” she said, jerking her head in Jack's direction. “But you could do this.”

“We already have a quarterback.”

“No,” Jack said, “we don't.”

Teddy asked if they were done. Cassie said of course they were done, she'd proven her point, and her parents wanted her home before it started to get really dark. They walked through the door in the outfield fence and through Teddy's backyard and around to the front of the house, where she'd left her bike. Jack had called his mom, and she was on her way over to pick him up.

“This is crazy talk,” Teddy said to Cassie, “even for you.”

“Not if you want to win,” she said.

Then she hopped on her bike and sped away down Teddy's street. As she was about to turn the corner and disappear, she yelled one more thing over her shoulder.

“Maybe being a QB runs in the family!”

Then she was gone.

“She does like to get the last word,” Jack said.

“So I'm not allowed to say no to her?”

“I haven't found a way to yet,” Jack said.

“What if I ask Coach to play quarterback and then I can't do it?”

“You mean like you couldn't play catcher, and you couldn't make the football team?” Jack said.

Teddy shook his head. “Forgot who I was talking to for a second.”

Gail Callahan pulled up in her car. Jack said they could talk about this more tomorrow, before practice. But he told Teddy to think about what was best for the team. And what was best for the Wildcats was him at least taking a shot at being their quarterback.

“You really want some advice?” Jack said when he got to his mom's car.

“Whatever you got.”

“Go ice your arm,” Jack said. “We may need it on Saturday against Moran.”

B
y the end of the first quarter it was 13–0 for the Moran Mustangs. It wasn't all Danny Hayes's fault. But it was mostly his fault.

He had thrown an interception that led to the first Mustangs score. When he had the Wildcats driving the next time they had the ball, he got hit hard from both sides at the end of a nice scramble. The ball popped straight up into the air and into the hands of the Mustangs' middle linebacker, who ran sixty yards for a touchdown. The play turned around so quickly that Teddy, even chasing the play as hard as he could, was still fifteen yards behind the kid when he crossed the goal line.

When Teddy and Gus got back to their bench area, Gus said, “We're going to lose 50–0 the way things are going.”

Teddy's head whipped around, just to make sure Danny Hayes wasn't close enough to have heard. But he saw that Danny had already taken a seat at the end of the bench, where Coach Gilbert was kneeling and talking quietly to him.

“He's got to get better,” Teddy said.

Max Conte had walked over to join them. “He can't get any worse.”

Gus, keeping his voice down, said, “Listen, this has nothing to do with what kind of guy he is. We all know he's a great guy. But he's not a quarterback. At least not on this team.”

Andre Williams, Coach Williams's son, had told them during the week that Coach Gilbert had talked to his dad about bringing Bruce Kalb, the other kid who'd tried out for quarterback, up from Pop Warner. But they'd decided, at least for now, to leave Bruce where he was and just trust that Danny would figure things out. While he did, they were going to have Jake Mozdean be their backup quarterback.

Only Danny wasn't figuring things out. He
was
getting worse instead of better.

“Maybe they'll put Jake in,” Teddy said.

From behind them they heard Jake say, “But Jake doesn't want to go in. Jake wants to stay at halfback, where he belongs.”

Teddy turned around. “I hear you,” he said.

He looked up into the bleachers behind Jake on their side of the field. Moran was more than an hour away from Walton, but most of the parents had still made the trip. Even though Jack was hurt, Mr. and Mrs. Callahan had still driven him here. They were in the top row, along with Gus's parents and Teddy's mom. His dad had been standing next to Coach Gilbert from the start of the game. Now he was sitting next to Danny on the bench, an arm around his shoulder, clearly trying to give him a pep talk.

Teddy hoped it was a good one. After Danny had thrown his interception, Teddy had said to him, “You'll play your way through this.”

Danny, head down, said, “It'll be basketball season by the time I do.”

Right before the half, Danny seemed to find himself, completing a couple of short passes, one to Teddy, one to Gus. But mostly the 'Cats were running the ball, nothing fancy, almost all off-tackle stuff for Jake and Brian. The only time they ran wide, it was a little pitch to Gus that he nearly broke for a touchdown, but he was tripped up from behind by one of the Mustangs' outside linebackers.

But with thirty seconds left and the Wildcats with a third-and-goal at the Mustangs' eight, Danny rolled to his right to escape pressure from a blitz. But instead of just throwing the ball away, as he was taught to do near the goal line, he stopped and just flung the ball across the field in Gus's general direction.

And got intercepted again.

Of all the bad balls he'd thrown so far, this was by far the worst. The Mustangs' quarterback took a knee, and that was the end of the half.

When Danny got back to the bench along with the rest of the guys on offense, Coach Gilbert spoke to him again, and then turned and told Jake to start warming up. Jake nodded his head.

But as soon as Coach turned away, Jake looked at Teddy and shook his head before grabbing a ball and waving Gus to soft-toss with him.

Jack was standing behind the bench. He waved Teddy over to him.

“Now or never,” Jack said.

“In the middle of the game? Without having taken any snaps at practice?”

“We should be out of this game already,” Jack said. “But we're not. We can still win. If you don't want to ask Coach, ask your dad what he thinks.”

“That would be a first.”

“Go,” Jack said.

Teddy took a deep breath, walked past where Jake was throwing with Gus, and walked around the bench, to where his dad was flipping through the pages of Coach Gilbert's playbook.

“Talk to you for a second?” Teddy said.

His dad stopped what he was doing, a surprised look on his face. Once the game had started, they hadn't talked at all. But then they hardly spoke at practice, either.

“What's on your mind?”

“We're gonna start Jake at QB in the second half?”

“Looks like. Dick—Coach Gilbert thinks the best thing for Danny, and for the team, is if he watches for a little bit.”

Teddy took another deep breath, like he wanted to swallow up all the air around them before he said what he was about to say.

“Put me in,” he said.

“Really?” his dad said.

“Really,” Teddy said. “I've been practicing on my own, just in case. I can do this.”

•  •  •

Teddy's dad walked over to Coach Gilbert and told him what Teddy had just suggested.

“You want to play quarterback?” Coach said.

“I didn't say I wanted to, Coach,” Teddy said. “I just told my dad that I think I can.”

Coach Gilbert turned and looked at the scoreboard clock. There were just under five minutes left before the second half started. He turned back to Teddy.

“It's one thing to know what you're supposed to do on a given play,” he said. “Where you're supposed to be. It's another to know where everybody's supposed to be.”

“But that's the thing. I do.”

“You do.”

“I learned the playbook the way Jack did,” he said. “I do know where everybody's supposed to be and what they're supposed to do.”

Coach stared at Teddy. He looked at David Madden, who smiled and shrugged. Coach said to Teddy, “You think you can do this.”

“Here's what I know,” Teddy said, knowing there was no turning back now, and knowing they were running out of time. “I know that Jake doesn't want to play quarterback. I know we're better off with him at halfback. So we'd be hurting two positions by moving him.”

“It makes sense,” Teddy's dad said. “He must get his common sense from his mother.”

“Teddy,” Coach said, “we all know by now you can catch it. But can you throw it?”

“Oh, he can throw it,” Jack Callahan said. “Coach, you gotta trust me on this. I saw him throw out guys in baseball after he hadn't ever really played baseball. He can play quarterback even if he's never played quarterback.”

Nobody said anything. Now Teddy checked the clock. Two minutes until the second half.

Finally Coach Gilbert laughed. “Why not?” he said. “Why the heck not? Teddy, go take the ball away from Jake and warm up.
Quickly.
”

Teddy said to Jack, “You want to hang around down here?”

“I've got nowhere else to be,” Jack said.

Teddy ran down and said to Gus, “I'm going in at quarterback.”

“Are you buggin'?” Gus said.

“Nope.”

“Word!”
Gus said.

He did warm up his arm as quickly as he could, putting some zip on the last few throws. Then Charlie Lyons came over, Teddy got behind him, and Charlie snapped the ball to him five or six times. When they finished, and the Wildcats and the Mustangs were lining up for the second-half kick, Teddy said to Jack, “I actually feel pretty good.”

“When you get out there, don't think the first time you throw. Just let it go.”

“Thinking not always being my strong suit in sports?”

“Comes and goes,” Jack said, and then carefully put out his left fist so Teddy could bump it.

The Wildcats were receiving. Teddy could feel his heart inside his chest like it was somebody beating on a door. When the ball was in the air, his dad came over and stood next to him.