Million-Dollar Throw (9 page)

“You’ll get up, though. You always do.”

“What are you doing here, by the way?”

“Your mom informed me that you needed company even though she said you didn’t
think
you needed company.”

“Maybe she was right.”

“Oh no, big boy. Not maybe. Our story is going to be that she was definitely right, that you were thrilled to see your old man, and that she still knows you better than anybody. It’ll make her whole week.”

He put out his fist and Nate gave him some back. “I’m totally down with that,” he said.

“Trouble is, you still
look
down.”

Maybe it was everything that had happened, because of the game and Abby. Or maybe it was just because it was him and his dad on a field alone and it never seemed to happen that way anymore, at least not as much as Nate
wanted
it to happen.

But it just came out of him, like a genie jumping out of a bottle.

“Why’d they have to pick me to make this stupid throw?”

His dad didn’t act surprised, or startled, just made a casual motion for Nate to toss him the ball. Nate did. And then, barely looking at the target, his dad whipped a throw at the tire from the Million-Dollar Throw distance, nearly putting it through on the first try, hitting the side of the tire so hard it spun the thing around.

“Is
that
what all this moping is about?” his dad asked.

“I didn’t think I was moping.”

“Looks like it to me.”

Nate didn’t know what to say to that, so he ran after the ball and brought it back. “I mean, I’m excited about doing it, at least some of the time, when I’m not geeked out of my head about it,” Nate said. “But most of the time, it’s like it’s one more thing I don’t need right now. Like one more guy piling on when I’m already down.”

In a voice that wasn’t much louder than the wind at the tops of the trees, his dad said, “When you’re down.”

“Yeah,” Nate said.

“So the thing that’s bringing you down,” his dad said, “is the chance to do something you’d rather do than eat: throw a football. Live out every kid’s dream and maybe win a million dollars doing it. You’re telling me
that’s
what has your insides tied up in a sailor’s knot?”

“No,” Nate said, not liking his dad’s tone now, not liking the way this was going, wondering how things could get sideways between them this quickly.
“No,”
Nate said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that it’s like more pressure than I need right now, that’s all.”

“Pressure?”
his dad said.

And in that moment, it sounded like Iverson talking about “practice.” As if Nate had not just said a bad word, he’d let one slip out in front of a parent.

“
You’re
under too much pressure?” his dad said.

His voice sounding completely different from when he’d first shown up at Coppo.

Like it belonged to somebody else.

Nate just stood there, not knowing how to talk to this dad.

“You know what pressure is?” Chris Brodie said. “Pressure is not even getting the chance to do anything you love anymore. Or even like.”

“Dad, I get that, I really do.”

Nate felt like he was standing there against a blitz he hadn’t seen coming.

“Do you get it?” his dad said. “Because I’m not sure you do. I’m not sure anybody does.
Pressure?
” he said again. “Pressure is doing a job you hate, that even makes you hate sports sometimes, so you can hold on to what’s supposed to be your real job, except you can’t make a living at that job anymore.”

Nate looked down and saw him clenching his fists now, unclenching them, over and over, those big hands of his, ones Nate always thought could grip a football as easily as if it were a baseball.

“Dad, I didn’t mean to make you mad,” Nate said. “I don’t even know how we got to talking about this.” Just wanting the conversation to be over, just wanting to go home so that what was now officially an all-time, historically bad,
epically
bad Saturday could finally be over. “I know you’ve had a bad day, way worse than mine . . .”

His dad, shaking his head, like he was locked in now, said, “Pressure is never having enough money and starting to think you’re never going to have enough again.”

Then, as quickly as he had started, he was finished. He said he’d see Nate at home and started walking across the soccer fields toward the parking lot, Nate watching him until it was as if he had just walked off into the night.

Nate stood there, not moving, feeling the same way he had after the ball had gone over LaDell’s head. No. Feeling even worse now.

And Nate knew the real reason he was feeling this lousy was how sorry he was feeling for himself. Because of the way he’d complained about pressure. Whined about it, really. Because of the way his dad had called him out on it.

He wondered what Abby would think of him right now. Abby who never complained, even facing the worst kind of pressure in the world.

She came close sometimes. How could she not? She had come close today when she had admitted to Nate that she just plain stank at going blind.

But Abby McCall, who
was
going blind, never felt as sorry for herself as Nate did right now at Coppo.

It’s not Dad I don’t know today, he thought.

It’s
me.

N
ate didn’t watch the Patriots-Jets game with his dad on Sunday even though his dad had the day off. Mostly because he was having as hard a time letting go of the things that had been said the night before as he was the Blair game.

This was a time, he decided, when that sports amnesia Coach liked to talk about wasn’t working at all, when he couldn’t forget what he wanted to forget, and wasn’t even sure he really did want to.

So instead of watching football the way he usually did on Sundays, he went over to Abby’s. Abby had a new toy she wanted in the worst way to show off that made it easier for her to read.

“You have
got
to see this thing,” she said over the telephone, Nate glad that at least somebody sounded happy about something this weekend. “It is fresh to
death
.”

It was called a knfb Mobile Reader, and as soon as Nate saw it, he thought it had to be some kind of trick, because it didn’t look like a “mobile reader” at all. It just looked like your regulation cell phone.

It wasn’t a trick. And turned out to be a lot more than that to Abby, for whom reading and books had become more and more of a problem, especially when it came to homework assignments. Now here she was with a gadget that was like some kind of magic wand she could wave over books and have them talk to her.

They went up to her room and she showed Nate how she could activate the Mobile Reader with the push of a single button. Then put the phone, which was really like a scanner, over the page of the book they were reading right now in English for Mr. Doherty,
The Diary of Anne Frank
.

She handed the Mobile Reader to Nate.

“Check it out, Brady,” she said, as proud as if she’d invented the thing herself, pressing another button. “It’s the ultimate in text messaging. From Anne Frank to me.”

Nate put the magic gadget to his ear and heard the same page Abby had just scanned being read to him, only it wasn’t the voice of the girl Nate had imagined when he was reading, when he’d heard the story inside his head. It was a man.

“This sounds like the voice of Batman on the cartoon show,” Nate said.

“Missing the point, Brady,” she said. “Not an altogether uncommon experience for you.”

“He’s
talking
about Anne hiding with her family,” Nate said. “But he
sounds
like he should be telling Alfred the butler to fire up the Batmobile. Even though the Batmobile that Bale drives in the movie is a lot cooler than the one in the TV show, frankly.”

“And here I was afraid this thing was going to be wasted on you,” she said. “You’re just not a gadget guy.”

“I still can’t believe they can use a headset in football to send in plays to the quarterback,” he said.

“This is my way of getting books sent in to
me,
” she said. “Mr. Doherty says that I can use this in class when we do classroom reading and he wants us to write an instant synopsis when we’re done.”

“It’s like your own audiobook,” Nate said.

“I could have gotten
Anne Frank
as an audiobook,” Abby said. “But not all the books on our reading list are available as audio-books. This way, they’re
all
available.”

“It’s cool, Abs, it really is. The coolest. Like you.”

He made sure to sound excited because she was excited, like she’d gotten a surprise, a didn’t-even-ask-for-it present on Christmas. And Nate knew that the Mobile Reader now meant she wasn’t going to need the magnifying computer screen on her desk in English, something Mr. Doherty had discussed with Abby’s parents, something that would have been yet one more cause of embarrassment for her.

“I know I’m turning into a special-needs kid,” she’d said to Nate. “I just hate when I have to advertise it.”

“You know what’s going to happen, right?” Nate said. “All the other kids in class are going to want their own Mobile Readers. Total status deal. It’s going to be like you showed up with some kind of new iPhone that isn’t even in the stores yet.”

Abby, her face serious now, said, “I
need
it, Brady. I was starting to fall seriously behind. That’s me, though, isn’t it? Getting good at falling. Down at football games, behind in school.”

“Abs, you’re the smartest kid in our grade and everybody knows it. If you’re falling behind a little, it just means you’re leveling the playing field for everybody else.”

“We both hate being behind,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

She cocked her head a little to the side, as if she’d heard something. More and more lately, Nate was starting to believe all the things he’d ever read or heard about people losing their eyesight and having their other senses become new and improved. More
acute,
that was the word people used to describe it. He was seeing it with Abby, with her hearing most of all, like it was superhero acute these days. If there was something even slightly off in Nate’s voice, no matter what they happened to be talking about, she jumped all over it.

She could still see right through him, of course, no failing vision there.

“You okay about yesterday’s game?”

“Fine.”

“What?”

“
What
what? I said I was fine.”

“Something’s not fine today. Starting with the fact that you’re here instead of watching your guy.”

“I was footballed out.”

“On what planet?”

“Really.”

“You think you can fool the all-knowing, all-seeing Oz? Even if Oz needs reading gizmos now?”

“Abs, I’m fine!”

“Are not.”

He grabbed the Mobile Reader out of her hand, started talking into it in his own deep Batman voice. “It turns out Nate Brodie did suffer a minor injury during yesterday’s Valley-Blair game,” he said, “but only to his ego.”

“Did something happen after you left here yesterday?”

Nate laughed now. Loudly. Not a sound he expected to be making today, but there it was. “I give,” he said, and told her about what had happened the night before.

The things his dad had said.

“Maybe that was just his way of saying ‘I give,’” Abby said when he was finished.

“He sounded more beaten than I felt,” Nate said. “It’s why I was only mad at myself after. I must have sounded to him like the biggest whiner boy in the universe.”

“Nope,” she said. “Not your style, Brady.”

“Abs,” he said. “You know what you said yesterday about being no good at . . . what’s happening with your eyes?”

She nodded, eyes right on him.

“Well,” he said, “sometimes I’m
really
lousy at acting excited about making this throw when there’s so much lousy stuff going on around me. And instead of feeling excited, what I really feel is guilty.”

Abby grabbed for the Mobile Reader, taking it back from him, and began speaking into it like it was a microphone.

“Earth to Brady,” she said. “That is absolutely not allowed.”

“I just want you to understand,” he said.

She smiled now.

“I do,” she said. “But
you
need to understand something, about why you’re not allowed to feel guilty, about why you should be marking off the days to this throw like you’re marking off days on a Christmas calendar.”

“Why is that?”

“Because that throw is the one good thing for all of us right now,” she said. “Your dad and me and everybody. That throw isn’t just for the money, it’s for something a lot more valuable than that.”

Nate smiled back at her.

“I give,” he said. “Again.”

“That throw is the thing that we all gotta believe in, Brady, what keeps us all going,” Abby said. “That great things can still happen.”

H
e wasn’t going to say this to Abby or his mom or to any of his teammates. He
definitely
wasn’t going to say this to his dad, figuring it might get him grounded until he was old enough to have his driver’s license.

But whatever pressure Nate was feeling last Saturday didn’t amount to a pile of dirty socks compared with what he was feeling
this
Saturday against the Manorville Rams.

It wasn’t just that Manorville was loaded this season, a favorite along with Valley to win their league. It wasn’t just that Nate, more than ever, wanted to do well in front of his dad, who had been given the day off from Big Bill’s and would be coming to the game.

There were a few other people in the crowd Nate wanted to impress, in the worst way:

People from
The Today Show
were there to do a feature on him, and a reporter from
Sports Illustrated
was on hand to write a piece about the eighth-grade quarterback who was going to throw a ball for all that money on Thanksgiving night.