I was sitting in a meeting room with the rest of our receivers, waiting for the coaches to arrive. The seniors had been giving me a ton of static for refusing to carry their shoulder pads to practice. But I didn’t care about any freshman tradition. I was here to be a football player, not a pack mule.
“You still got a lot to learn,” whispered Alex from the seat next to mine. “Remember, you’re a freshman. When one of these seniors tells you to carry their pads, you do it. No questions asked. And you better smile about it. Or else a dozen of them will jump you after practice and duct-tape you to a goal post.”
“I’m not bowing down to anybody whose job I’m trying to take,” I said.
“There’s a big difference between how you can act on the field and off it. Between the white lines, yeah, rock ’em. Hit ’em in the mouth,” said Alex. “But for now, before you’ve even played a single game as a Gator, in the dorm, on the sidelines, and in meetings—you’re the low man. It’ll be over after this season. I went through it, same as you. Your turn will come. That’s the natural order of things.”
“I’m tired of waiting my turn. Seems like there’s always somebody ahead of me who shouldn’t be. I want to make sure things are different here.”
“You’re my roommate. That means I’m responsible for you, to teach you how it goes. Don’t embarrass me—especially with both of us being from Alachua. Being roommates, that’s supposed to make us closer than brothers on this team.”
“Yeah? What’s closer than brothers?” I asked.
I already knew Alex was an only child. That it was just him and his mother.
“I don’t have any blood brothers. But I’ve got more than one hundred football brothers on this team. I’ve got their backs and they’ve got mine. Inside of that circle, there’s family.” Alex interlocked his fingers. “Maybe one day I won’t just call you brother. I’ll call you fam. But that’s still a ways off. Something you’ve got to earn.”
Coach Harkey came into the meeting room and walked up to me.
“Hey, Gardner, I’ll need your brother’s cell phone number.”
“Uh, sure, Coach,” I answered, reaching into my sweats for my phone, while my brain tried to make sense of his request. “Why?”
“I want to start him off on a proper conditioning program,” answered Harkey. “It’s going to be easy for him to think he has to overdo it.”
“Overdo what?”
“Haven’t you heard? Coach Goddard offered him a scholarship about an hour ago.”
“What? Is this some kind of joke?” I asked, shooting Alex a quick look and watching for his expression. I figured those seniors were messing around with me for not carrying their shoulder pads to practice.
“No joke, Gardner. He’s the newest Gator—five years down the line. It’s already been reported in most of the media outlets. Now, have you got that number for me or what?” Harkey asked.
“You mean this is for real?”
“I’m way too busy to play games,” Harkey said as he copied the number off my phone.
Soon as Harkey left, the seniors in the room let the disses fly.
“Gardner made such a bad impression, Coach G. went to Pop Warner to replace him.”
“We should make him carry his little brother’s shoulder pads.”
I said to Alex, “This is completely insane.”
“Why? Sounds exactly like what you were asking for,” Alex replied. “You’re not the low man anymore. You got your baby brother beneath you.”
“Or way over me,” I said, before I stood up and left to call Mom.