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  Thrash didn’t care much for football, though, and since I was on my way to the second round of tryouts for the junior-high team, there was no point in dragging him along. There wouldn’t be much to watch anyway. For the first round, all we’d had to do was bring our signed permission slips, turn our heads and cough, and then run some sprints and drills. The slowest runners met the assistant coach, the fastest ones were introduced to the head coach, and everybody in between kind of wandered up behind their friends in one group or the other. Then they lobbed some balls at us to see who could catch and who would get hit in the face. That was it. Today would be a little different because we were going to do more or less the same thing in helmets and shoulder pads. No, it wasn’t the most rigorous process, but if you couldn’t make the junior-high football team in this town, then the rest of your life wouldn’t be too promising anyway.

  The equipment was laid out on the side of the field when I got there: one pile of helmets, one of shoulder pads, and another of red mesh jerseys. A lot of the guys were scrambling to get their stuff because there weren’t enough helmets to go around, so some would have to share, and those who did would have to sit out for part of try-outs. Nobody wanted that because this was our chance to impress, and you couldn’t impress if you were standing on the sidelines with no helmet on, digging the wedgie out of your ass. But I took my time. I knew there’d be only one set of equipment sized extra small and I’d be the only one who could use it. That’s the way it’d been last year in peewee league, so I couldn’t see how things would be any different now.

  I got my stuff, no problems, and went off to the side to suit up. I fitted the jersey over the shoulder pads before I put them on, like draping a shirt on a hanger, because if you did it the other way, you couldn’t get the jersey over the shoulder pads without asking someone to help you, and I already knew that no one was gonna help me, because the other guys didn’t want me there. Yeah, I was on my own and I knew it, but all it really meant was that I had to plan ahead. I could handle that. I laced up the cleats that were in my backpack, slid the shoulder pads on, made sure they were tight across the front, and fixed the straps under my arms. I wedged the helmet down on my head, started adjusting the chin strap, and was looking around to see if Orlando was there when I heard Coach Rose calling me.

  “Smalls! Front and center, on the double!”

  Coach Rose, the head coach, was the sort of guy who was born to be in the military but somehow wasn’t bright enough to find his way to the recruitment office. Not that missing out on his destiny had ever stopped him from wearing a crew cut and a whistle, barking orders, telling time the army way, and making everybody call him sir.

  “Smalls,” he grunted as I hustled over to him, “are you squared away on the parameters of today’s exercises?”

  I could see the beads of sweat on his upper lip, and warped versions of myself reflected in the lenses of his mirrored sunglasses.

  “Smalls! You have a problem, son? Don’t you know to sound off when I ask you something?”

  I didn’t know which question he wanted me to answer—if I had a problem or knew to sound off—so I didn’t say anything.

  “All right, Smalls, let’s take this slow,” he said through clenched teeth. “Are you … squared a-way … on the pa-ra-meters—”

  “Yeah,” I cut him off. I hated it when people treated me like I was suffering from imbecility instead of rage.

  “Yeah what?”

  “Yeah, I know there’s no contact, so I can’t run around laying into people.”

  “Can’t run around laying into people what?”

  “You know, like hitting them and tackling them and stuff.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “Smalls, what do I look like to you?”

  The word penis came to mind.

  “Do I look like some kind of pansy school counselor or one of your imaginary friends?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No, he says,” Coach Rose exclaimed to no one in particular. “So you’re not brain-dead. And if you’re not brain-dead, then you must know what you’re supposed to call me.”

  “Coach?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

  He let out this agonized groan, as if he’d swallowed his whistle and was trying to hock it back up. “Smalls,” he whispered, his teeth flashing in front of my face mask, “I don’t give two shits if you’re the fastest kid in the seventh grade or the whole damned school, you will call me sir or you’ll be watching this season from the bleachers. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but made him wait a few seconds before adding the rest.

  “That’s better. Now remember, no contact. Well, what are you waiting for? Get out of my face.”

  What a cock. Of all the nose pickers and wussies farting around on the field, he had to single me out, and I was one of the few who could actually play the game. But ever since the end of peewee league last year, I’d gotten a bad rep, and he was acting on it. I’d spent most of that season on the bench; the coaches wouldn’t play me because I was so small that I had to stuff rolls of quarters in my jockstrap each week at weigh-in to make the official minimum weight, and they used that as an excuse to keep me off the field. That was, until the third-to-last game, when we were getting blown out by Red Bank, 37–0. They put me in with about two minutes left, just so they could tell all the parents at the annual team dinner that everybody had seen playing time. Whatever. I’d never gotten my uniform dirty and I was rabid to get in and hit somebody—hard. Luckily, they put me in on defense, at safety. Of course, at safety, I was furthest back from the action, so they probably put me there hoping I wouldn’t get any. But I had other ideas. The first play Red Bank ran was a sweep to our right, and I’d taken off in that direction with the snap. I wasn’t even looking for the ball, just the biggest guy on their team I could get a clear shot at. Somehow that guy turned out to be their halfback, ball in hand. I turned my legs loose, and while it seemed to cause Coach Rose some kind of moral crisis, he was right, I was fast, really fast, and I met the halfback in a dead sprint, top speed, head-on, as he turned up the field. Blam! I guess he dropped his head just as I hit him, because I got up and he didn’t and there was the ball, lying on the field about three yards away. I scooped it up and ran it in and we lost 37–6 instead of 37–0. It felt great.

  They started me on defense for the last two games, but other players and coaches complained because it seemed that every time I tackled somebody, they got carted off the field. It happened in practice, too, with my own teammates, and that’s how I got pegged as some kind of maniac. But it was all bullshit. In football, you either hit somebody or got hit. Period. And it wasn’t my fault that a lot of kids still cringed at the first hint of contact. It just meant I was going to have to listen to Coach Rose talk to me like an idiot all season. But at least he didn’t call me Genie.

  We did some warm-ups, ran agility drills, got timed in sprints, and then the veteran players who hadn’t graduated joined us at the end of their practice to run some plays so the coaches could get a feel of who was who and what was what.

  That’s when I finally spotted Orlando, although it was probably easier to miss an aircraft carrier in a duck pond. He’d been almost six feet tall in sixth grade, and now, going into eighth, he had to be at least three inches taller, maybe fifteen pounds heavier, and was starting to get buffed all over. In the midst of the others, he looked like the only Doberman at a Chihuahua convention, and it almost didn’t seem fair—he was too good for a bunch of saps to try out against. Shit, he was probably too good even to practice against, unless what you really needed was practice getting knocked on your ass.

  It wasn’t easy picturing Orlando as some kind of superstar athlete, because he couldn’t have been further from one when we’d met outside the counselor’s office in fifth grade. That was the year I got left back, but it was before the shit really hit the fan, so I was still in voluntary counseling. My sessions came right after his, and we saw each othe
r coming and going at the office all the time, and after a while, we stopped feeling like freaks enough to say “hey” to each other. Shortly after that we started having lunch together, just facing each other across the cafeteria table, eating our sandwiches and snack cakes, not saying anything beyond “hey” and “later.”

  It took some getting used to at first, because Orlando always had his head down and whispered rather than spoke—like the last thing he wanted was for you to actually hear him—and because we were such opposites. His family lived by the reservoir, in a big house with huge lawns and a pool, and although there were plenty of black families in our area, his was the only one that lived there. I thought that’s what made him so shy, always standing out like that, because he wasn’t just the only black kid who lived by people like Darren and Sticky and Razor, he was also one of the biggest kids around.

  And he dressed funny. Well, not funny, but sort of fancy. He always had on sweaters with collared shirts and ties, dress pants, really shiny leather shoes, and he carried this brown leather briefcase with his initials on it. His eyeglasses were the coolest ones in style, but the lenses were pretty thick, and because he kept his head down all the time, it looked like they were too much weight for his neck to support. We were opposites in that way too, I guess, because I was dressed like everybody else and was the sort of kid nobody seemed to notice, unless they were looking for trouble.

  Anyway, after about a week or so of grunting and nodding, Orlando and I started talking. I don’t remember who talked first or what we said, but after breaking the ice, we always looked for each other, ate our lunch together, and then walked around during recess before we went back to class. Once I’d learned that Orlando didn’t fit in anywhere either, I could see it was kind of natural for us to fit together the way we did. Orlando kept to himself as much as possible, just like me, but other kids took that to mean something else, like they always did with everything. The white kids who lived by him told him he should go hang out with his “own kind” if he was too good for them, but his “own kind,” the other black kids at school, told him he wasn’t one of them, because of the way he dressed and where he lived and because he didn’t hang out in their part of town, or go to church or dances with them. So he got it coming and going, all the time.

  Orlando said the one time he’d tried to tell the other black kids it wasn’t his fault that his parents were really strict and wouldn’t let him hang out in their part of town, it only got worse because they pulled out all these insults that black people reserved for themselves. I didn’t know there were such things; I thought insults were insults and all the same. But Orlando told me they started calling him “sellout” and “incog-negro,” which was their way of saying he wasn’t black enough. That confused the shit out of me because Orlando had to be the darkest person I’d ever seen outside of National Geographic, and I told him if he wasn’t black enough for them, then I couldn’t imagine who would be. He told me that sometimes being black had nothing to do with how dark you were, but with how you acted, and if you were different, like he was, then some black people would always say you were acting white, which was the worst thing to be.

  I already knew a hell of a lot about people telling me what I was or wasn’t, so I thought I understood what he was going through. But what I couldn’t understand was why it didn’t drive him mad and crazy, like it did to me. I’d seen a group of four or five kids standing around him as he waited for the bus after school one day, and they were laying into him something awful, taunting him, mocking him, throwing his briefcase on the ground, pushing him—even a couple of girls were getting in on it. But he just stood there and took it, and he was a head taller than all of them and could’ve beaten the snot out of every single one, all at the same time. I got so mad that I was heading over to jump into the teeth of it; I didn’t care how many there were, I wasn’t afraid, and it was the first time I’d ever thought all the nastiness I had inside me might be useful for something. But the bus got there before I did, and Orlando just picked up his briefcase, got on, and rode off, like nothing happened.

  The next day at lunch, I told him what I’d seen and how nuts it made me, and I asked him why he never stood up for himself. He said when people picked on him, it hurt his feelings, but he didn’t feel it like I did; it didn’t make him angry, just really sad and afraid, like he was falling deeper and deeper into a pit he could never get out of. The only thing he wanted to do was cry, and he knew he couldn’t do that in front of them, so he didn’t do anything. That’s why the counselors said he was depressive, because he felt like most everything was pointless, or his fault, and because of that, he didn’t even try to actualize, although it was pretty obvious he could do all kinds of things, both good and bad, if he wanted to. I told him it was the other way with me, that I was more or less okay until I wanted to do something but realized I couldn’t, and then I’d be stuck wanting it more and more and grinding my gears until all that energy and friction burst in this wild explosion.

  We talked a lot about stuff like that and stuck pretty close, so I guess you could say we were friends. He’d even invited me over to his house one time and gave me a birthday present (a book, actually), and no other kid had ever done anything like that before or since, so that had to count for something. But it didn’t last long. After I got suspended, Orlando’s mom wouldn’t let him talk to me anymore, and when I got left back, we stopped being in the same grade together. Shit, we’d hardly said a word to each other in more than two and a half years.

  Once I made the team, though, I figured we’d finally be able to pick up where we left off. I got into football and would’ve wanted to play anyway, but I didn’t see how Orlando’s mom could keep us from speaking to each other if we were teammates, even if she told the coaches to make sure we didn’t, because teammates had to communicate to be successful. And if she tried to make Orlando quit on my account, then Coach Rose would probably kill himself on their front lawn in protest, and I was pretty damn sure she wouldn’t want to clean up a mess like that.

  There was one final ace up my sleeve. I knew football was part of Orlando’s therapy, just like it was part of mine, so there was no way in hell his mom was gonna make him quit. Like I said, we couldn’t have been more different, but that didn’t matter to our counselors. Since Orlando’s family didn’t trust the new pills some kids were getting and my family couldn’t afford them, we both got the same fallback prescription: sports—to bring him out of his shell and give him some confidence, and to provide me with some nondisruptive, non-criminal outlet for all that violence. Shit, our counselors had to make it look like they were doing something to collect their pay, and they probably figured that if slamming into people didn’t straighten us out, then nothing would.

  We walked through some offensive and defensive formations, whistles blowing now and then, and Wally, this fat kid who loved to talk tough, got bumped into, swung his arms in slow, giant circles, fell backward onto his ass, and started to cry. After everybody finished laughing, we lined up for special teams, punt coverage. Coach Rose told me to return it, wanted to see what I was made of. Fuck him. Greg, the punter, was supposed to be this awesome Dungeon Master, but that didn’t make his kicking leg any stronger, so I lined up about twenty-five yards from the line of scrimmage in the defensive backfield. It took a while for the coaches to get everybody into place and explain to them what a punt was all about: snap the ball to the punter, block the man in front of you, wait for the punter to kick it away, and then break your ass down to the guy who catches it (me) and drill him.

  I was visualizing catching the ball—punts could be tricky—when I saw Orlando lining up at the end position on my left-hand side, his sports goggles making him look like Eric Dickerson without all that slimy Jheri curl. That could be good, I thought. Unlike the other players on the punt team, the ends released with the snap, running downfield as fast as they could to cream the guy fielding the punt as soon as he caught it. That’s why they were called headhunters
, because their only mission was to get to the guy returning the ball first and knock his block off. It was good because I was every bit as fast as Orlando, maybe a little faster now, and if I caught the punt, gave him a juke, and dusted him, then I’d be practically guaranteed a starting position.

  After about five minutes of the coaches explaining and yelling, we were set to go. I looked at Orlando just before the ball was snapped and nodded at him. He saw me but didn’t nod back. That should’ve told me something was wrong. But the ball was already in play, and the next thing I knew it was in the air, a low, wobbly duck drifting to the left. If I wanted to catch it on the fly, I had to get moving. I had plenty of wheels to cover the ground, all I wanted and more, but I had to be careful. Even when I thought it wasn’t possible to run any faster, I always had something in reserve, like a few more horses or an extra gear. The final burst into that higher register of motion felt like ripping through a barrier, or taking flight, but I couldn’t control it for more than a step or two. Every time I hit it, it was like I outran myself, lost the rhythm, and crashed to the ground. Someday I might learn the trick of toeing that line between velocity and disaster, but I couldn’t risk it now. The ball was sinking fast, so I leaned down into my sprint, pumped my knees, not up but forward and back, staying low to the ground, my eyes fixed on the ball. I got there just before it hit the turf, stuck my hands out, and snared it about six inches above the grass.

  I didn’t even hear him coming.

  I wasn’t afraid. Then again, there was nothing to be afraid of. There was only darkness, as if this dense black curtain had suddenly snapped down and blocked everything out, covering my whole brain and the rest of me with it. It was so dark and silent and numb that I couldn’t feel a thing, and I guess I probably could’ve stayed that way forever without knowing it or caring. But as soon as that darkness began to break, I started to feel again. I didn’t feel fear, though. I felt pain, lots and lots of pain, and this sadness like my heart was dying. It seemed like something was really wrong with the world lighting up around me, as if it were more sinister somehow, or less complete. I’d walked right into a trap and I knew it as soon as my eyes finally blinked open. Although the rain had started to fall and was stinging my face as I lay there on my back, I saw Orlando standing over me. It took a few seconds for me to recover consciousness, focus, and draw a bead on his face, but as things started to sharpen I could see his mouth was all twisted and that there were tears welling up behind his goggles. Shit, I knew exactly how he felt.