ALL THE HAIRY DETAILS

Okay, so this next part is awkward, even to write about. There were a few more things that needed to happen before I could play football. Stuff that has to do with science.

Well, okay, biology.

Well, okay, puberty. (There, I said it. Now you can just skip to the next chapter.)

See, I don’t know about your school, but at HVMS they have these Tanner Scale tests. They tell whether you’re ready to do stuff like play football against kids who are bigger than you. And by bigger, I mean more mature. And by more mature, I mean the guys whose voices have already started changing. Or who have hair under their arms. Stuff like that.

So if I wanted to play football, I had to take the tests. Whatever that meant, exactly.

I’m not going to go into details about what happened in there, but the nurse told Mom I was okay for playing football, anyway. At least that part was taken care of. Check!

But I wasn’t done yet. There was still one more totally embarrassing thing to go.

After that, Mom took me over to What’s Up, Sport? That’s the big sporting goods store at the mall where we could buy a mouth guard and… some other things. Trust me on this one. If you can ever possibly help it, you DO NOT want to shop for this stuff with your mom.

When we got home from the mall, Mom asked if I had any questions about how to put those things on, but I told her I was all set. I just took that bag and headed for my room so fast, you would have thought I was trying out for the track team too.

The truth? I wasn’t 100 percent sure about how that cup thing worked, but if I couldn’t figure it out myself, I’d ask Flip later. Like when no one else was around.

And even then—maybe not.