Football Champ (8 page)

PEELE FUMBLED WITH HIS
tape recorder, snapping it off and jamming it into his pocket. Troy reached for the deadbolt.

“No.” Peele hissed, blocking Troy’s hand and shaking his head from side to side. “Don’t let him in.”

“It’s Seth,” Troy said.

“He’s an animal,” Peele said. “Who knows what he’ll do? Wait. Let me get out of here first.”

Peele crossed the small kitchen and reached for the service door before he turned and said, “Give me a minute or who knows what he’ll do.”

“Well, don’t write that about him,” Troy said.

“I won’t,” Peele said. “That I won’t write, but let me get away. I don’t want any trouble right now. I’ve got a deadline for this thing.”

Peele disappeared, and Troy winced at the loud pounding from the other side of the door.

Finally, he said, “Seth, stop it. I’m here. Everything’s fine.”

“Then open up,” Seth said.

“Okay, but calm down,” Troy said, sliding the bolt free.

Seth pushed inside, nearly knocking Troy over. The star linebacker was wearing his football pants and turf shoes with just a sleeveless, sweat-soaked undershirt so that his shoulders and arms bulged like cannonballs above fists clenched for fighting. The underside of his right forearm bore a bleeding welt where a nasty rub on the artificial turf had burned right through his outer layer of flesh. His hair, wet and stringy, spattered flecks of sweat across Troy’s face as Seth whipped his head around, looking for Peele. Behind Seth, Tate and Nathan peered through the doorway into the kitchen.

“Where is he?” Seth growled. “That rat.”

“Why did you guys do this?” Troy asked his friends.

“We took Mr. Langan’s elevator down to the tunnel to get your mom,” Tate said. “I went looking for her, but Nathan saw Seth coming out of the press conference room on his way into the locker room and…”

“It’s a good thing they did,” Seth said, banging a taped and bloodstained fist against one of the cabinets level with his head. “You might have talked to that guy.”

“I…did talk to him,” Troy said, softly.

Seth froze and stared down at him.

“It’s okay, Seth,” Troy said, smiling. “He wants the team to win, too. You think it does him any good if the team loses? We win and he sells papers.”

“Is that what he said to you?” Seth asked in a quiet, furious voice, barely moving his lips.

“Well, it makes sense,” Troy said, looking toward his friends now, eager for their support.

Nathan nodded and quietly muttered his agreement. Tate kept her lips sealed tight.

Seth shook his head, exhaled sharply, and said, “Well, what’s done is done. Come on. You might as well all come back down with me and wait in the family lounge. There’s no sense in Troy hiding up here anymore. He’ll be famous in the morning.”

Without explaining, Seth pushed past them, through the suite where the remaining guests were. They broke out into polite applause for the star linebacker. At the door, Nathan spun around and took a bow.

“Come on, hambone,” Tate said, tugging him by the belt. “They’re not cheering for you.”

Seth took them down the private elevator and showed them the family lounge.

“You guys wait in there. I’ll see your mom and tell her to meet you, and I’ll get showered up.”

Seth started to turn, but Troy put a hand on his arm.

Seth winced, snapping his arm away and shaking it.

“Sorry, Seth,” Troy said, realizing that he had mistakenly touched the bloody turf burn.

“That’s all right,” Seth said, gritting his teeth. “I’ll get it covered up with a bandage and it’ll be a lot better.”

“I mean, about Peele,” Troy said. “It’s just that I keep telling everyone that I’m not doing anything wrong, and I’m not.”

Seth put one of his taped and bloody hands on Troy’s shoulder and looked down at him sadly. “I know that’s what you think, Troy. And I know you didn’t mean anything, but tonight, we better go out and celebrate and have a real good time and enjoy the Falcons being in first place.

“I know you didn’t mean it, but I think when you see what’s in the newspaper tomorrow morning, this whole thing is going to come crashing down.”

TROY LAY AWAKE WITH
only the whisper of the pine boughs outside his window to keep him company. The moon, so bright the night before, could make itself seen only as a pale ghost through an occasional thin spot in the dark, rolling clouds. He wished his mother had yelled at him, stamped her foot, grounded him, something, anything but what she’d really done. Instead, after hearing everything that had happened, she’d only looked at her feet and shaken her head slowly back and forth. When they dropped Tate and Nathan off at their homes, his mother barely had enough breath to say goodnight. The rest of the evening, she sat in her chair with the TV off, sipping tea and staying quiet. When Troy tried to talk to her, she told him it was okay, but
she looked at him in a sad and hopeless way that let him know it wasn’t.

During a night of fitful half sleep, bad dreams, and lying awake, Troy’s mind revolved around many different emotions: despair, frustration, fear, even anger. But when he woke for the final time and enough light seeped in through the curtains of his small bedroom so that he could call it morning, it was anger that prodded him free from the tangle of covers. Didn’t his mom see? Why shouldn’t he be famous? He’d take care of her when he was. He told her that. He wasn’t like his father. Not at all. Didn’t she believe that?

Troy yanked his clothes on and snatched his jean jacket from the front closet, then marched down the winding dirt track. Troy sniffed the air, smelling the red clay soil, the pines, and what he thought would be the coming rain. A black squirrel darted out into the path with a nut of some kind filling its mouth, flicked its tail, then darted back the other way, afraid of a twelve-year-old boy. His own heart began to race at the sight of the newspaper, lurking in its own bright blue plastic capsule beneath the mailbox.

Troy tugged it free and held his breath. He expected to have to dig two or three pages into the sports section to find whatever Peele had written. He didn’t have to go that far.

On the front page, right beneath the paper’s own
banner, standing three inches high in black ink, the headline cried out:

BAD BIRDS

A picture of Seth’s snarling face behind his helmet’s mask bore the caption
Falcons’ Seth Halloway and owner John Langan conspired with PR assistant Tessa White to use a twelve-year-old boy—White’s own son
,
Troy—to help steal opposing teams’ plays for Atlanta’s playoff run.

Troy’s legs turned to jelly. He staggered and stumbled on the lip of the dirt track, plopping down on his bottom in the long, damp grass.

With trembling fingers, Troy read through the article, which covered another ten inches of the front page before continuing on the inside. No one else had said anything to Peele. Mr. Langan, Seth, and his mother had all given the response of “No comment,” and Mr. Langan referred the newspaper to his lawyers. Troy read all the way to the end in the futile hope that somewhere in the story, Peele would reveal the truth the way Troy had explained it.

Instead, the writer had twisted Troy’s words to fit Peele’s own theory that they were stealing their opponents’ play calls by intercepting the radio signals between the coach’s headset and the quarterback’s helmet, or by using an uncanny ability to read lips, even
though most coaches covered their mouths as they spoke into their headsets to call the plays. Peele even interviewed the head of research at a military contractor who said reading lips through a piece of paper was extremely easy with thermal imaging. That section was followed by Troy’s own admission that they had used “a combination of ingenuity and technology.”

Troy didn’t know how long he sat there. Several cars whooshed past on the rural highway, kicking up small clouds of grit and dust that floated down on Troy like nightmare snow. When he heard crackling sticks in the nearby pine trees, he looked up and saw Tate, breaking one last branch to gain entrance to the dirt driveway.

“I saw you,” she said in a harsh, accusing tone. “I saw you from the path in the woods, sitting up here, hiding in the grass.”

“I wasn’t hiding, Tate,” Troy said, his voice sounding weak and pitiful as she brandished a rolled-up morning paper.

“I’d hide if I were you,” Tate said, waving the paper even higher. “I can’t believe you did it. After everything Seth’s done for you? Coaching you? Believing in you? How could you?”

Tate snapped open her paper and read, “‘Troy White readily admitted that Seth Halloway’s recent incredible performances couldn’t have happened without the specific knowledge of the plays that opposing teams were about to run.’”

Tate slapped the paper down at her side and asked, “How could you do that to him?”

“I didn’t,” Troy said. “I didn’t mean to. Peele lied about everything. He’s making it sound so bad, but all I wanted to do was tell the truth. We’re not doing anything wrong. It’s a gift. You called it that. Why do I have to hide it? It’s all lies.”

“That’s why you had to hide it,” Tate said, raising her voice to a shout. “Everyone told you this would happen, but you didn’t listen. You think Seth’s going to coach us now, after this? You wanted people to know. You wanted to be in the paper. Well, now you’re in the paper, and so is everyone else, and you’ve
ruined
everything.”

Tate wadded up the paper and threw it at him and ran off down the dirt track, turning into the trees and disappearing toward the Pine Grove Apartments.

Troy just sat there, listening to the sound of his own breathing and wanting to wake up and have it all be a dream. His chest ached, he wanted it so bad. When he heard the sound of his mom’s VW Bug chugging up the dirt path, he looked at the pale green car with a dull face. He hadn’t moved from the grass.

The Bug stopped and his mom reached across the passenger seat and rolled down the window.

“Get in,” she said, her voice as flat and lifeless as a pancake without syrup.

Troy stood and stepped toward the car.

“Bring that paper,” she said without looking at him,
her hands clasped to the steering wheel.

Troy looked back at it, lying there in the tall grass next to Tate’s crumpled version.

“I don’t want you to read it, Mom,” he said. “Please.”

“I already heard what’s in it,” his mom said. “Bring it. I need to see it all before our meeting.”

Troy picked it up off the grass and asked, “Who are we meeting?”

“
PLEASE GET IN
,”
TROY’S
mom said with an edge in her voice that he wasn’t used to.

Troy climbed in, set the newspaper down between them, and buckled his seat belt. His mom threw the car into gear and they jumped forward, swerving out onto the country road.

“You gonna tell me where we’re going?” Troy asked.

“Mr. Langan wants to see us,” his mom said.

“What about school?” Troy asked.

“You’ll be a little late,” his mom said.

As they approached the main highway, the old peanut man looked up from his pot on the side of the road and waved. Troy’s mom glanced at her watch, then put on her blinker and turned into the dirt spot on the side of the road.

“What about Mr. Langan?” Troy asked

Troy’s mom said nothing and rolled down her window.

“How’s my beauty today?” the old-timer asked in a thick southern drawl.

“Today’s not a great one,” she said, “but I’ll take some peanuts.”

“’Course you will,” the old man said.

He tottered over to the black pot that hung over a wood fire behind his ancient pickup truck. Carefully, he ladled a portion of boiled peanuts into a cone of newspaper. When he returned, he deftly seized Tessa’s two dollars, the bills disappearing into the front of his overalls like magic as he handed her the peanuts.

“Thing about newspapers these days,” he said, nodding at the paper cone, “ain’t really good for much other’n boiled peanuts or maybe if’n you got a puppy you aim to house train.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Tessa’s lips as she thanked the old-timer and pulled away.

Troy didn’t let her smile fade completely before he said, “Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t say that stuff. I mean, I didn’t say it like that.”

His mom bit into her lower lip, keeping her eyes on the road, and said, “Everyone told you not to talk to him, Troy.”

“Everyone said he was trying to hurt the team,” Troy said, “but that’s not what he said. He made it like
he wanted to help, like the best way to handle it was to get it out, the truth.”

“But that’s not what came out, is it?” his mom said bitterly. “I mean, you don’t really think that’s the reason the Falcons hired me, do you?”

“Mom, you know I don’t,” Troy said. “You had the job before any of this. I just said that I got you fired by my screwing up and then they rehired you after they saw what I could do.”

“Or that we’d ‘kill you’ if you didn’t help steal the plays?” she said, throwing a nasty glance his way that cut him to the bone.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Troy said, hanging his head. “I just said it, you know, like an expression.”

They pulled up to a red light, and his mom closed her eyes for a moment before exhaling through her nose and nodding her head. “I know you didn’t mean it, Troy, but unfortunately, I don’t think it matters what you meant. The damage is done.”

“What did Mr. Langan say?” Troy asked.

“I didn’t even speak to him,” his mom said. “I just got a call from his assistant, who said you and Seth and I need to be in his office as soon as possible.”

“Seth, too?”

She nodded and said, “He’s the one who told me what the article said. He’s already there with a bunch of the other players, getting their lifting and treatment done early.”

When they pulled into Flowery Branch, the Falcons facility, Troy couldn’t bring himself to look at the guard, but the man’s voice sounded strained, as though he, too, knew what Troy had done. Troy’s mom pulled into the employee lot. The two of them got out and circled around to the front of the building, where they went in the main entrance and up the carpeted stairs to the team’s executive offices. Seth sat in the board room, looking out of place, dressed in workout gear as if he’d come right from the weight room. Across from him at the big mahogany table were Mr. Langan and Cecilia Fetters, all of them waiting for Troy and his mom.

They sat down next to Seth and across from Cecilia Fetters, his mom’s boss. Mr. Langan sat at the head of the table in a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a tie, his chin propped up on a steeple of fingers and his eyes red and moist around the edges.

“Thank you for coming in so early, Tessa,” the owner said to Troy’s mom. “As you know, we’ve got a serious problem. I’ve been up all night talking with the lawyers and the commissioner. I knew from the nature of the call I got from Peele last night that it was going to be bad.”

Mr. Langan raised the newspaper before letting it drop back down onto the conference table and said, “I just didn’t know it would be this bad.”