Two-Minute Drill - Mike Lupica [13]
“Dude,” Scott said, when he thought it was safe to say anything, “what does that mean, somebody’s going to take your season away?”
Chris turned toward the water now. Scott couldn’t get a good look at his face and wasn’t sure he wanted to, because the coolest kid in school was blinking his eyes, fast, biting down on his lower lip, like he might start crying any second.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you for a couple of days,” Chris said finally. “I might have to quit the team before the season even starts.”
“Quit the team?” Scott said. “You can’t quit the team. You’re the best player. There is no team without you.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t read,” Chris said.
Then he turned and ran.
EIGHT
Scott was afraid to call Chris the rest of Saturday.
He wanted to call him, wanted in the worst way to understand what was going on with the only friend he had at school.
But he didn’t pick up the phone. He thought about going online and trying to instant-message him, which sometimes was an easier way to talk to somebody.
He didn’t do that, either.
He mostly just sat up in his room, Casey lying there on the floor next to his bed, thinking the same thing over and over again: How crazy this was.
This was Chris Conlan. How could he be this crazy about some book he was having trouble reading?
Except that’s not the way it came out. It came out like he couldn’t read at all. But how could that be? Everybody could read by the time they got to the sixth grade.
Couldn’t they?
When he finally left his room for dinner that night, his mom said, “Did you and Chris have some sort of fight?”
“No.”
He stared at his plate like he was trying to read something.
“Because he left in a pretty big hurry.”
“There was no fight, Mom.”
No way he was going to tell his parents what had happened. Chris hadn’t said it was a secret, hadn’t said another word before he’d bolted. But Scott wasn’t taking any chances until he talked to him again.
Still his mom, being a mom, wouldn’t let it go.
She said, “He just came in, asked if he could use the phone to call his mom, then said he was going to wait outside for her. Then when you didn’t come back right away—”
“Mom!” It came out too loud and Scott knew it. “Nothing happened!”
“Don’t raise your voice to your mother, bud,” his dad said. “She didn’t do anything.”
“Sorry,” he said.
He wanted to ask his parents if there was any way somebody as smart as Chris couldn’t read. Or if it was possible that any sixth-grader couldn’t read.
But he had made up his mind that he wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until he saw Chris at school on Monday.
He didn’t have to wait that long.
Every Sunday Scott and his parents had brunch at their favorite restaurant in town, the New Paradise Café.
They would leave their car at church and walk down Main Street and usually sit in the first room at the New Paradise. Scott ordered the same thing every time: blueberry pancakes, tall stack.
Today Scott had polished off his stack in record time, finished eating so fast that his parents weren’t even close to finishing their omelets. He asked them if he could walk down to the video store, which opened at noon on Sundays, then meet them back here in a little while.
His dad gave him some money, saying, “In honor of making the team, you can rent a game if you want.”
“Dad,” Scott said, “I didn’t make anything, and you know it. I just stuck it out.”
“So get a game in honor of that,” his dad said.
“I’m not any better at football this week than I was last week.”
“You know what we say in this family,” his dad said, smiling that smile at him. “You don’t always get to pick the things you’re best at.”
Scott was walking toward Gramophone Video, still thinking about Chris because he hadn’t been thinking about anything else since yesterday, when he saw Chris walking toward him, along with Jimmy Dolan and Jeremy Sharp.
No place