Two-Minute Drill - Mike Lupica [15]
But Scott wasn’t waiting for him now as he went for seven in a row, which would have been his all-time record. He was in the zone. Could not miss.
He made number seven.
Casey started barking, as if somehow he knew that Scott had earned a cheer, then went after the ball.
But instead of bringing the ball right back, Casey suddenly ran in the opposite direction, back toward the woods.
“Case, get back here,” Scott called out, his voice so loud on the empty field it sounded like it was coming out of speakers on a real field.
No sound from Casey.
No sight of his crazy dog.
Didn’t he know that when you got hot like this, when you had this kind of rhythm going for you, you didn’t want to wait? You wanted to kick the next one right away.
Only now his dog was freezing the kicker the way the other team did sometimes in the pros by calling a time-out.
“Case!” Scott yelled. “This is definitely delay of game.”
He started to go after him, then saw Casey coming out of the woods.
Only he didn’t have the ball with him.
Just Brett.
Chris was right behind them.
He had the ball now.
“I think this belongs to you,” he said.
NINE
“I came to say I’m sorry,” Chris said.
“It’s cool.”
“No, it’s not cool,” he said. “I was out of line.
Like way out of line. Calling you the brain like Jimmy does.” He shook his head. “Talking to you like that . . . that’s not me.”
“I thought maybe I did something,” Scott said.
“Not you. Me. I’m the stupid one.”
“Not a problem.”
They were sitting in the grass. The dogs were gone.
Chris said, “I’m the one with the problem.”
“When you’re friends with somebody,” Scott said, “then it’s your problem, too.” He stopped there for a second, not wanting this to come out sounding like some big deal. But knowing that it was, right now, the biggest possible deal. “And you and me . . . we’re still friends, right?”
“We’re friends,” Chris said, “even if I didn’t act like one in town.”
“Now all you’ve gotta do is tell me what the problem is,” Scott said. “Reading or being on the team?”
“Both.”
Then he tried to explain to Scott about dyslexia.
And how it could drag him down from behind better than any tackler on a football field.
“You ever get cramps?” Chris said.
“Don’t laugh,” Scott said, “but I get them in my feet sometimes.”
“What I’ve got,” Chris said, “is like a permanent cramp of my brain.”
He said that he and Scott would read the same page in a book, but that some of the words would sound different inside his brain than Scott’s.
He said he could look at a word like pen and read pin instead, and then get confused, not knowing why somebody in the book was trying to write with a pin.
Or, Chris said, he’d read a word at the top of a page and then forget what it meant by the time he got down to the bottom.
Writing, he said, was even worse.
“I’m okay if I have to get up in class and talk about something we had to read, as long as I worked really, really hard on it the night before with my mom or one of my tutors,” he said. “But when I try to write out the same answer, I’ll just be getting started when you guys are putting your notebooks away.”
All of a sudden, Scott felt like he’d been in a dark room and somebody had hit the light switch.
“It’s why you run the wrong way sometimes,” he said, “on the field.”
Chris reached over and bumped him some fist. “If Mr. Dolan shows me the Xs and Os on a page, I get crossed up sometimes, just the way I do with my reading. But if he tells me what to do, then I’m pretty much good to go. It’s why even on some of our simplest plays sometimes, I ask him to break down every part of it, even have him walk through it like he’s the quarterback. That way I can really see it.”
But football wasn’t his problem, he said, even if he was the only one running right sometimes