Two-Minute Drill - Mike Lupica [16]
School was the problem, and it was getting worse, even though the year had just started.
“How are you when you have to work on the computer and type stuff?” Scott said.
“I’m the king of IM-ing people,” he said, “because nobody cares if you’re a lousy speller or not.”
“I still don’t get how this means you might have to quit the team,” Scott said.
Chris took a deep breath, let it out in a long whoosh. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If I can’t keep up this year, they want to put me in Special Ed. And I’m already not keeping up.”
Scott felt like the slow one now. “But what does this have to do with football?”
Chris said his parents had laid it out for him like this: If he couldn’t show that he was keeping up in his classes by the time the season started in a couple of weeks, then they were going to hire a full-time tutor. Full-time meant four nights a week. The tutor’s job was to get him ready for this big state equivalency test at the end of the semester.
“If I can pass that, I can stay in our regular class,” he said. “If I can’t, I go into Special Ed.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Listen, every grown-up who talks to me says that Special Ed isn’t like school for dummies,” he said. “They say that sometimes the opposite is true, that some of the smartest kids end up in Special Ed for all kinds of different reasons, not just dyslexia. But I don’t care. I want to stay with my friends.”
“Dude,” Scott said, “nobody’s gonna think any differently about you whatever class you’re in. You’re . . . you’re you.”
“You hear what the other kids say about Special Ed kids.”
“Well, then, you can be the one to show those kids that they’re the ones acting dumber than dirt.”
Chris’s face started to get red.
His eyes, too.
“I just want things to stay the way they are,” he said. “I want to be with my regular teachers. I want to be with my friends. And I want to keep playing football instead of getting tutored every stinking night.”
“Your parents wouldn’t really make you quit the team,” Scott said, “would they?”
“Two weeks,” Chris said. “I’ve got two weeks.”
“Then we need a plan.”
“Yeah, and here it is: In the next two weeks I’ve got to become more like you.”
Scott couldn’t help it when he heard that.
He laughed.
“You think this is funny?”
No, Scott said, it wasn’t that at all.
“It’s just that nobody ever said that to me before,” he said.
Scott didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have anything close to a plan. He sat there feeling as helpless as he did at sports sometimes.
It was Chris who changed the subject, just by standing up, grabbing the ball, motioning for Scott to get up and go long.
Scott did that, running away from the goalposts at Parry Field, running down the sideline until he couldn’t see the white line underneath his sneakers anymore.
When he looked back, the ball was right on top of him.
Unfortunately, so were the dogs.
They had come running back out of the woods at the worst possible moment, Casey in the lead, tracking the ball as if Chris was throwing it to him instead of to Scott, cutting Scott off the way a free safety would, and taking his legs right out from under him.
The ball landed harmlessly in the grass.
“My own dog can cover me,” Scott said to himself.
Even Casey’s better at football than I am.
And then, for some weird reason, it wasn’t his own voice inside his head, it was his dad’s.
From brunch.
You don’t always get to pick the things you’re best at.
Sitting there, brand-new grass stains all over his knees, the idea came to him. And not just any old idea. A totally fantastically brilliant idea.
He jumped up and tried to beat Casey back to where Chris was standing at the other end of the field.
Out of breath he said to Chris, “Make you a deal.”
“Deal,” Chris said, “or no deal.”
Trying to sound like the guy on the TV show.
“No, really,” Scott said. “Listen to me. The deal is, you make me better at football, and I’ll make you better at school.”
Scott was feeling so brilliant.
“And how are you going to do that, exactly?” Chris said.
“You forget