Chapter 4

Scooter

I sometimes wish I never moved to Small Valley.

It’s not like it was my choice.

My mom got a job here as a bank teller. She’d been applying for months, and this was the best job available. The problem, she said, was that she didn’t have a college degree. That’s why she wanted me to get more involved in school; she read somewhere that kids who were in school activities were more likely to get college scholarships.

“Tell you what, Scott,” she told me back then, “if you promise to try your best at Small Valley, I’ll let you join the football team.”

I’d wanted to play football since I was a kid, but my mom thought I was too little.

I am little. But so are a lot of running backs. My all-time favorite running back is Barry Sanders. He had already retired from the NFL by the time I was born, but his YouTube highlights are amazing. He was little too, but he juked and deked and ran circles around all the big guys trying to tackle him.

I’m a lot like Barry Sanders. Like me, he was really quick. Like me, he was really soft-spoken. (Soft-spoken is the word my mom uses to describe me. I think it just means really shy.)

I thought that maybe if I joined the football team, I wouldn’t have to talk that much. Maybe I could just run the ball instead.

Then again, maybe Mom was right. Maybe I’d get crushed.

There was only one way to find out.