THE GYM WAS A HUGE, MODERN building that looked like a long egg carton and had been designed by someone from Finland. A bronze lion statue stood in front of it looking angry. I saw a hockey rink, four basketball courts, two pools, and a dozen glass-walled squash courts before I found the football locker room.
And—damn—there was Ward himself, standing at the door wearing a blue and gold Oakhurst Hall warm-up suit and an Oakhurst Hall baseball cap, so you couldn’t tell he was going bald. He looked at his clipboard like he’d never seen me before.
“Lefferts . . . receiver? You catch passes?”
“Yeah,” I said. Because I did. Well, I’d caught one here, and lots in the Giants’ parking lot.
“JVs and thirds locker room. Locker thirty-four. That’s your number. Grab some cleats from the pile. Be down on the field by the pond in ten minutes. Not eleven. Not twelve. Ten. Or don’t show up at all.”
I had to walk through the varsity locker room where four blue leather couches surrounded a blue and gold Oakhurst Hall emblem on the carpet. A huge flat-screen was tuned to the NFL Network.
The JV locker room was small, with cinderblock walls and a cement floor. Pipes zigzagged across the ceiling. I pulled a pair of cleats out of a canvas laundry hamper and found 34: blue jersey, gold pants with the knees wearing thin. On the top shelf of the locker sat a scuffed white helmet. On the floor were some shoulder pads, some socks, and a T-shirt. On a hook, a jock with 34 Sharpied on it. I changed into the jock, and somehow I got it right on the first try. The pants felt good—tight, like a second skin. I put on the T-shirt, then pulled the shoulder pads over my head. I adjusted the straps under the arms. The jersey went over the pads. It was too loose, but it was sort of cool to have my own number, even if it had been someone else’s the year before.
I hooked a finger into the face guard of the helmet. It was a lot heavier than it looked. Then I followed a group of kids out a back door, down across the main field with light towers like those machines from War of the Worlds. The hillside on the home side was empty, like the stands on the opposite side, at the foot of the mountain. But the field looked primed. The lines had been chalked into a perfect grid, and the end zones had been painted blue and gold.
Then we went down a path through the woods, to a field next to a large pond where Jarvis was herding about three dozen of us into groups. I hadn’t seen Jarvis as a football-coach type. But that was cool. At least it wasn’t Ward back up with the big boys. Next to him stood a young teacher I hadn’t seen. He looked outdoorsy.
“Welcome to the JVs and thirds,” Jarvis said. “There might still be a few slots up on the varsity, but for you JVs, I’m your coach, and Mr. Devin here will coach the thirds. We may not be the varsity, but that doesn’t mean we don’t play real football. But don’t forget: you’re supposed to have some fun here. So let’s get going. Linemen, linebackers, over there with Mr. Devin. Quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, defensive backs, over here with me. Let’s do it.”
I put my helmet on my head, felt it pinch my temples, and tugged it down—and suddenly I was in another place, like I’d shifted into a different world or something. Shut off from the outside. I couldn’t see to either side. The face guard masked half the front. The smell was plastic and dried sweat. I could hear myself taking breaths. It was like there was the rest of the world and then there was me, in my own little space. Like it was a real helmet. A battle helmet. Like the shoulder pads were armor.
“Thirty-four! Hey! Huddle up! Get in here!”
I trotted into the pack of receivers. Jarvis explained the drill: three quarterbacks were throwing to six receivers and three running backs. I was last in line for the receivers. I watched the kids ahead of me. Some caught the ball. Some dropped it. A few tripped over their own feet. Some of the throws were good, some sucked.
Then it was my turn. My quarterback was number 2, a tiny kid about five foot four. Seriously. His helmet looked about eleven sizes too big for his head.
“Okay, Lefferts,” said Jarvis. “Square out, ten yards.”
“Right,” I said. “Square out.”
“Run ten yards, turn right. And a yard is three feet, in case you were wondering.”
The little kid’s pass was behind me and low, so I reached back and, somehow, caught the ball a few inches off the ground. It seemed to stick to my hands.
I might actually be able to do this.
On the next round, I ran a buttonhook: five yards straight downfield, turn around. But when I turned around, the little kid’s pass was flying way over my head. I reached up with my right hand and tipped the end of the ball into the air. It twirled around, came down, and I caught it.
“Good concentration, thirty-four!” shouted Jarvis. Pure luck was more like it. On the third round, the receivers ran a flat-out bomb route: “Just run your balls off, as far as you can, as fast as you can,” said Jarvis.
I figured there was no way the little kid could throw it far. So I sprinted full speed for thirty yards, then looked back over my shoulder—and the pass was a perfect spiral, but it was going to be too long. Then, and I don’t know why, time slowed down again. And I remember thinking how amazing it was that such a little kid could throw such a good pass. Maybe that’s why when I dove flat-out and stuck my hands out, the ball landed in them: I hadn’t been thinking about catching it.
As I ran back to the group, it was like something had shifted a little inside me. This was something I did. This was something I could do. Even though nobody had ever told me I should do it.
“Lefferts,” said Jarvis. I wasn’t a number anymore. “Where’d you play last year?” The rest of the kids had gathered in a loose semicircle.
“I didn’t play last year,” I said.
The laughs were stopped by Jarvis’s voice. “Well, you’ve got one hell of a pair of hands.” He looked at his clipboard. “Let’s try some line drills.”
For the next ten minutes, I tried to learn how to get hit without getting hurt. Most of the time I got bowled over on my ass. But some of the time, the Outward Bound stuff did its work, and I stayed on my feet. And a few times, if I timed it right, I was suddenly standing over a kid I’d just knocked down. Okay, they were probably ninth graders, but that power was in there somewhere.
Finally, Jarvis called for five sprints from one end of the field to the other.
The little quarterback whined, “Five? That’s five hundred yards!”
“Good math, two,” said Jarvis.
The other coach, Devin, ran with us. The first two hundreds were easy. By the middle of the third, Devin led the pack. There were only four or five kids within ten yards of him. By the fourth leg, though, I was the only kid near him. When I pivoted at the goal line for the final hundred, I caught a glimpse of the sun off the pond and flashed back to the Reservoir at home and suddenly forgot how much it hurt.
I caught Devin at the fifty. The coach looked over, smiling—and notched it up a gear. But I passed him. In the end zone, I bent over, gasping. Devin high-fived me.
On the long walk back from the pond, Jarvis told us to be sure not to walk on the varsity field, with its perfect grass and its heavy soundtrack: crunching pads, grunts, Ward’s drill-sergeant screams.
Standing next to him was a bald man in a sweat suit, watching the team: Bruno. The history guy.
Suddenly, Jarvis was loping up beside me.
“Goddamn.” He laughed a friendly laugh. “Too bad you weigh ninety pounds. You got better hands than anybody on the V.”
“I got a lot to learn,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” said the English teacher, “football ain’t rocket science, Jack. The less you think, the better. Take some spare time to practice catching, if you can. You might even have some fun.”
“I just did,” I said, and the words were unfamiliar, but I liked the way they sounded.