Million-Dollar Throw (16 page)

“I have a feeling he didn’t say it like that.”

“Maybe not in those exact words,” she said, her tone light and fun, as if they were discussing some must-see new YouTube video. “He did tell me that my vision shouldn’t be deteriorating this fast, not at my age. But it is, Brady. It just plain old is.”

Nate’s words came out hot and fast, the force of them surprising him. “There has to be something they can do to stop it!”

“They can’t, Brady. It’s why I’ve got to paint as fast as I can, whether I go back there or not.”

She just let that settle then in the quiet room, like the dust Nate could see in the shafts of light coming through her blinds. He sat in his director’s chair. His Nate chair. The easel she was working on was facing Abby. She didn’t want him to see what she was working on, and he knew well enough not to ask. Her brushes and paints were on the floor around her. She went to work now, her face serious. Solemn almost.

After a few minutes, her hand moving in every direction at once, or so it seemed to Nate, she said, “This is my favorite place in the world. Especially when you’re in it.”

She could talk while she painted or sketched, had always been able to do that. And Nate had always loved listening to her. It wasn’t like when he was alone with his mom and she talked just to talk sometimes, going on and on, eventually losing even Nate along the way. Making him want to get to the quiet of his room. Nate had never been afraid of quiet. He actually
liked
quiet.

It was why the guys on the team knew that when the game started, there was going to be only one voice in the huddle unless Nate asked somebody a question, and the voice was going to be his.

Yet the sound of Abby’s voice never bothered him.

Never.

It was the absence of that voice that bothered him.

She was talking about Perkins again now. The more she did, the more Nate could see something clear as day, like he could see forever:

The real reason she hadn’t called him while she’d been away wasn’t just because she was too busy. It was because she loved it there.

Loved being at a school for the blind.

This was her new world.

She needed it.

And Nate knew what
he
needed to do.

She finally took a break from painting and looked over at Nate. “So the last game stank, huh?”

“Like dirty laundry,” he said.

“Still plenty of season left,” she said. “You’ll figure it all out before Thanksgiving night.”

“You don’t know that!”

His words came out hot, even made Abby jump a little, startled.

“Whoa,” she said.

He took it down a couple of levels. “You
don’t
know that,” he said.

“I know you.”

He took a deep breath.

Like he’d made a snap decision at the line to change the play.

Knowing it was the right thing to do.

“You know the me I used to be when it came to football,” he said. “Not the player I’ve turned into. You probably hung around with guys at your new school who could throw more accurately than I can right now.”

“Not funny.”

“Not trying to be,” he said. He took a deep breath, let it out, and kept going. “I’m just tired of people telling me that the season’s going to work out fine, that everything is going to be the way it used to be. ’Cause it’s not.”

Then he quoted Parcells to her, telling her you are what your record says you are.

“Listen to me,” she said.

Abby’s voice was quiet, like she wanted the same from Nate. Like this room wasn’t a place for loud voices or angry words and never would be.

“You know you don’t really believe that,” Abby said.

“See, that’s what I mean,” Nate said. “That’s the thing. You think you know
every
thing about me, every single thought inside my head. And you don’t.”

He could see the hurt in her eyes. “I don’t think that,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, “you do.”

He looked at her. “You don’t always know me, Abs.”

“No,” she said. “I guess not.” Her eyes were locked on his, Nate not knowing in this moment whether she looked more surprised or hurt at what had happened to her first afternoon back.

“Maybe I should just leave,” he said finally.

“Maybe you should.”

And he did.

I
t was the first time he’d ever made it through a whole weekend, at least a weekend when he and Abby McCall were both in Valley, without calling her or talking to her online. Or seeing her.

Even though he wanted to.

At least there was a game for him to play and focus on, Saturday against Salisbury, a game the head coaches nearly called off because it was raining so hard. But because of the way the schedule was set up, there was no weekend the rest of the season when the two teams could play each other. So they played through the conditions, in what felt like the Mud Bowl game of all time.

Nate didn’t have to worry about his throwing because it was almost impossible to throw in the wind and rain. He attempted two passes in the first half, two in the second half, handed off the ball more than ever to his running backs, and watched the two defenses slug it out. Finally, after the wet ball launched awkwardly from the Salisbury long-snapper to their punter, Nate cheered as Ben slipped from the outside to block a punt with four minutes left, then recover it in the end zone for a 6-0 Valley victory.

When it was over, Malcolm Burnley came over to Nate and said, “We are never going to be clean again.”

Nate said, “I remember football in the mud being a lot more fun when we were little.”

“Dude, are you joking?” Malcolm said. “We
won
. If that isn’t fun, it’s gonna have to do until something more fun comes along.”

Nate thought about calling Abby when he got home, to tell her about the conditions at Salisbury, tell her what it was like trying to play football in what felt like quicksand. But he didn’t. Didn’t call her all day Sunday either, just spent part of the day on his computer and part of it at the library, feeling the way he assumed coaches had to feel when they were game-planning for the other team.

Looking for one opening that might change the game.

On Monday morning he and Abby sat next to each other on the bus the way they always did, acting as if nothing had changed between them, both of them knowing differently from the minute she sat down next to him.

He took a deep breath.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey yourself.”

“Good weekend?”

“Yeah. You?”

“We beat Salisbury on Saturday in the storm. Ugliest game of all time. I kept expecting a cow to come flying across the field like in that movie
Twister
.”

“How’d you do?”

“I didn’t make any mistakes,” he said. “For a change.”

“Cool.”

Normally she would have wanted to know all about it. Abby was always interested in the game even though she wasn’t interested in football, interested in it because of Nate. It was the same way he felt about her painting: All paintings looked pretty much the same to him unless they were hers.

But things felt different today, not just on the bus.

At school, Abby sat in a front seat in every single classroom now, no matter where she’d been sitting before. And in Miss Buchanan’s math class, their first class after lunch, her desk now had a small monitor that was like her own closed-circuit TV, Abby getting a close-up of the problems Miss Buchanan was writing out on the blackboard.

When math was over, Abby said to Nate, “This was one of the things they suggested at Perkins, and it turned out audiovisual was able to hook it up for me. You think it looked totally weird?”

“Nope. You know the deal with Miss Buchanan: The rest of us weren’t even peeking at your desk. We have a hard enough time just getting it right at our own.”

“It was either the monitor or wearing the glasses in class,” Abby said.

“Which you hate.”

“More than spinach,” she said.

They were the last two in the room now, Miss Buchanan and everybody else having cleared out, Nate waiting for her out of force of habit. Abby was standing next to her desk and Nate was all the way in back, where he had always been in math.

It was when Abby started to walk back to him that she tripped over the leg of a chair that was sticking out in the aisle and went down.

Nate shoved his own desk out of the way to get to her, then hopped over a chair. But when he tried to help her up, she shook her head, no, and pulled herself up, like a fighter trying to bounce right back up after a knockdown.

It was when she was standing again that Nate saw the panic on Abby McCall’s face, like the girl who couldn’t even see the chair she’d tripped over had managed to see something else that scared her to death.

“You okay, Abs?” he said.

She didn’t say anything right away, wasn’t looking at him now, was looking over her shoulder, as if checking to see if it was still just the two of them in Miss Buchanan’s classroom.

When she turned back around, she said, “Don’t tell anybody, Brady.
Please
.”

“Tell anybody what? That you tripped?”

“Just promise you won’t,” she said, the scared look still on her face. “Because if any of the teachers find out, they’re supposed to tell my parents.”

“Abs,” he said, “you’ve fallen before, even at school. Then you do what you just did, which is get back up.”

“I know. But I’ve been falling a
lot
.” Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper now. “Even at Perkins. That’s why they started teaching me to use a cane.”

Nate knew what kind of cane she meant. Right away he pictured the blind people he would see in the street, cane out in front of them, tapping the sidewalk.

“They told me I should start using one at school, just to get used to it,” she said.

Nate said, “But just a couple of weeks ago, we were at Coppo playing catch . . .”

He knew she had fallen that day, too, but in his mind he saw her before that, running on her long legs, running the way she used to.

Laughing her head off.

Being the Abby he still wanted her to be.

“It’s been getting worse,” she said. “I’ve been able to fake you out about how bad it’s getting because I know you don’t want to see it. Like you’re the one with the bad eyes. You just see the stuff you want to. It’s just . . . I can’t fake myself out anymore.”

“A cane,” he said.

“They told me it was better for me to learn with it while I can still see. It will make it easier when I can’t.”

Nate thought she might cry then. The girl who never let him see her cry.

“I don’t want to use a cane at school,” she said. “It would make me feel like I was officially leading the freak parade.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“It would be worse than the glasses,” she said. “Worse than that monitor, or the extra time they give me on tests now.” She looked at Nate, somehow managed a small smile. “Worse than falling down.”

“But when you got back from Perkins the other day,” he said, “you acted like you were getting used to . . .” He put his hands out, like he was defenseless suddenly. “Getting used to the deal,” he said.

“Getting used to going blind, Brady,” she said. “It’s okay, you can say it.”

“You said you learned stuff there, how to be better at it.”

“But I was
there,
” she said. “Not here. There everybody was like me, or worse off than me, people who have been blind since they were born. Here they’re not. Here I don’t fit in anymore.”

They just stood there now, a desk apart, Nate feeling as if that space were a canyon, knowing he had to say what they both were thinking before he lost his nerve.

“Maybe you need to be there,” he said.

Abby didn’t say anything. He thought she was about to, but she didn’t, and she didn’t cry.

She just closed her eyes and nodded.

G
ame day.

Valley Patriots versus the Whitesboro Panthers.

The opening drive for the Patriots took seven minutes off the clock, an eighty-yard drive that resulted in a 7-0 lead. They mixed short passes and runs, most of the passes coming on first down, Coach Rivers and Coach Hanratty having decided they were going to use their passing game to set up their running game today, the way the pros did with the West Coast offense.

Nate had told them he was
so
down with that.

It was one of the best things about playing on this team, every game plan being different, no Saturday being anything like the one before it.

And it had worked. Nate had managed to complete all five of his passes on the drive, even though those five completions had gone for a total of only thirty yards.