Football Genius (2007) Read online

  “What happened?” he asked, out of breath. “Did you get it?”

  She shrugged and said, “Maybe. Now they’re saying they might not know until tomorrow, or maybe Tuesday, after Labor Day.”

  Too late for the game. Too late to keep Jamie from laughing at him, telling everyone he was a liar, and flashing that nasty smile. That was too much for Troy to think about. Especially because of what he knew was on the other side of that wall. A mesh bag full of Falcons footballs. A bag so full, no one would miss just one.

  That’s why the three of them stood there in the moonlight, staring. That’s why Troy didn’t look at his friends as he ducked down and squeezed sideways through the dark hole.

  Into a place he knew he shouldn’t be.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TROY’S MOM HAD A saying she used all the time: “Some things are just meant to be.”

  He left his friends and dodged and ducked from tree to tree, from one clump of bushes to another, past the giant homes with their wrought-iron fences and their big swimming pools. It took ten minutes before he stood bent over with his hands on his knees, peering through the branches at the gray stone mansion where Seth Halloway lived.

  It was meant to be.

  A fountain trickled into Seth’s pool and a raft floated along under the moonlight, bumping the stone side. The lawn was littered with footballs like strange Easter eggs in a magical land. Under the shadow of one giant oak tree was a JUGS machine, with its two tan rubber wheels that spun and fired footballs like bullets. It was an awkward machine that reminded Troy of a stork, with the motor and wheels perched at a funny angle on top of its three metal legs. NFL players used it to practice catching.

  Troy looked up at the big house. Three scattered windows shone with yellow light, but nothing moved inside. He waited and watched, then realized if he kept waiting, he’d never do it. He thought about Jamie and that nasty smile. He took three deep breaths, counting them out loud. Then he ran out of the shadows and into the bright moonlight of the lawn.

  He scooped up a ball and, clutching it tight, darted back into the bushes. Branches and brambles whipped his arms and face. Thorns bit at his bare legs. Still, he ran, plowing forward away from the house, heading for the wall.

  Somehow, in the trees, he got turned around. When he burst through a hedgerow, he tripped and tumbled down a grassy bank, flat onto the blacktop of a street. He picked the gravel out of his mouth and got to his knees. He was wet, and it took him a minute to realize that the sprinklers were running. He heard the security truck before he saw its big white shape with the yellow light on top turn the corner and blind him in the glare of its headlights. Without thinking, he shot back up the bank, but his sneakers slipped on the grass. His feet shot out from under him and he tumbled back down.

  The ball, wet and slick, popped out of his arms and rolled out into the street. The truck came to a stop, its headlights burning the pavement all around Troy. He shivered, partly from the chill, but mostly from fear. The door opened.

  “Hey!” the security guard shouted. “You! Kid!”

  Troy hesitated, but only for a second. He darted out into the street, scooped up the ball, and started to run. This time he stayed on the road.

  Behind him, the truck door slammed and the engine revved up. Troy’s legs were numb. He knew he was fast, but he didn’t know he was that fast. He got to the end of the street and took a left, out of the truck’s headlight beams. He kept going, but there were no turnoffs, only driveways to the big homes, and soon the headlights were on him again and the yellow light on top of the truck was flashing. Finally, he came to another intersection. This time he went right, and before the truck’s lights could catch him, he jumped over a low hedge and flattened himself under some bushes.

  His head thumped and his lungs burned. The truck eased past him and drove up the street. But then its taillights glowed red. It stopped and turned around, pulling up to where he hid, stopping on the street right in front of him. Its engine purred, and Troy heard the electric window hum down.

  The truck door opened and the security guard got out. When he crossed the beam of the headlights, Troy saw the blue pants of his uniform with their white stripe and he saw the man reaching for the gun in his belt. As he moved toward the hedge, the guard switched on a flashlight. Closer and closer he came, swinging a flashlight. Twenty feet from Troy, he stopped.

  “Hey, boy. I know you’re here,” the man said in a soft, creepy voice. “And I know you ain’t from here. You little thief.”

  Slowly, he moved toward Troy, stabbing the flashlight into the hedge, angling it all around. Troy wiggled down deeper into the bush, then froze. The light came his way. He put his head down.

  When the light hit him, he shut his eyes and held the football tight, thinking of his mother’s words, wishing he’d listened to her when she said he didn’t belong there. Wishing he hadn’t said his hothead words to Jamie.

  Now he was caught. A boy who lied. A boy who snuck out at night. A boy who took something that didn’t belong to him. It was stealing. He knew the word.

  Maybe he really was that kind of a kid, and maybe this was what was really meant to be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BUT THE SECURITY GUARD kept going down the hedge. He called out a few more times, “Get out here, boy. You little thief.” Then, after one final snarl, he cursed and got back into the big white truck and drove off.

  When the pain in his chest started to fade, Troy stood and brushed off the pine straw and the dirt. He turned the ball in the moonlight and read the words ATLANTA FALCONS. It was official. He swallowed hard and crept out onto the street. He had no idea where he was.

  The moon.

  He’d seen it shining through his bedroom window. He found it now and went the other way as best he could, chasing his own shadow. Sooner or later, with the moon to his back, he had to find the wall. And he did.

  His hands touched the cool surface. He put his cheek against it and looked down its length, straining for something he recognized. He walked one way for a long time. Panic began to rise up in his chest. That’s when he heard a whistle. A whistle, clear and keen, like when you call a dog. A whistle like Tate McGreer.

  He’d been going the wrong way, but now he doubled back, past where he had started, until finally he found the hole. His friends were waiting for him.

  He squeezed through and held the football high, rolling it with his fingers so they could see where “Atlanta Falcons” was stamped into the leather.

  “You’re bleeding,” Tate said, touching his arm.

  “It’s okay,” Troy said, swatting at a mosquito.

  Nathan asked what happened, and as the three of them walked back to the railroad tracks, he told them about the security guard.

  “I heard that truck racing after you like a crazy man,” Nathan said. The whites of his eyes glowed in the moonlight.

  Troy shivered, then yawned.

  “Well,” he said, looking down the tracks in the direction of the apartment complex, then up ahead at the thick pines that surrounded his own home.

  “You did it,” Tate said, patting his shoulder.

  “Here,” Troy said, handing her the ball.

  “What?” she said, rolling it in her hands.

  “That whistle saved me. I’d still be in there,” he said.

  “No,” Tate said, shaking her head and handing back the ball. “I can’t.”

  “You helped,” Troy said, pushing it at her.

  “No, Troy, I can’t.”

  “I mean it. Here. You can be the one to shove it in Jamie’s face, the way he always pulls your ponytail.”

  But Tate wouldn’t take the ball. She stood looking down at her feet, nudging a rock with her toe. Nathan, too, was looking down.

  “There were footballs all over the yard,” Troy said, his voice sounding small next to the song of the crickets. “He’s not going to miss this one.”

  “Okay, Troy,” Nathan said, holding out his hand for Troy to
slap him five. “I gotta go. Good job.”

  Troy gave him five.

  “Yeah, good job,” Tate said. She slapped hands with Troy, too, then the two friends turned and started down the tracks.

  Troy looked at the ball, running his fingers over the “Atlanta Falcons” imprint.

  “Hmmph,” he said, tucked the ball under his arm, and marched home, thinking about the look he was going to see on Jamie Renfro’s face. Jamie’s dad might be the big shot with a junior league football team, but that was nothing compared to being connected to a real NFL team.

  When he saw his own face in the mirror, he gasped and winced at the same time. He examined his arms and legs under the light. Scratches everywhere, dried dribbles of blood. Pink welts. Too many to hide. His mother would know he’d been out. He would be grounded. He might even be sent off to military school. That subject came up whenever he was unruly. His mom said boys sometimes needed that kind of discipline.

  He looked back into the mirror at his own green eyes, the eyes he thought he got from his mother. But sometimes he looked at those eyes staring back at him and wondered if they really were his mother’s eyes, the eyes of a good kid. Because maybe they were the eyes of his father. The eyes of a person who’d leave his family and never return.

  Troy knew how he could get away with having scratches all over him. The answer came to him without even trying. It was kind of like the gift his friends said he had with football, but this gift was nothing to be proud of.

  He would have to lie.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BECAUSE HE DIDN’T FEEL so good about tricking his mom, it took a while for Troy to get to sleep. When the alarm clock went off in the morning, though, he jumped out of bed before she could hear it. He stuffed the ball deep into his football equipment bag and hurried out the back door before his mother woke up.

  He stayed outside for a while, sitting on the train tracks, listening to a pack of blue jays call the day to life and watching the sun’s rays as they began to glint through the trees. It was going to be a hot one. He’d wear eye black for the game, even though he might not get in for a single play. The air got warm and the tar in the railroad ties began to cook and bleed, and then he smelled something else. He got up and followed it all the way to his house.

  When he walked through the screen door, he heard the spatter of eggs frying and he inhaled the rich scent of bacon. His mom turned his way from the stove with a spatula in her hand.

  “Troy White! What happened?” she said, setting the spatula down and walking over to touch the scratches on his face.

  Troy shrugged. “Chasing a snake.”

  “A snake?”

  “For science, Mom. He got into the thick stuff. Just a garter.”

  “My God, you’ve got cuts all over you. You’ve got a football game. I don’t want those things in the house.”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he said, pulling away. “And you don’t have to worry about the game unless Jamie Renfro breaks his leg, which I wish he would.”

  “Troy,” she said, frowning. “We don’t wish other people ill. Get clean. Your eggs are ready.”

  “Okay, Mom,” he said.

  When his mom dropped him off at the game, Troy searched the sidelines for Jamie Renfro. He was standing in a loose circle with a couple of his buddies, bloodying each other’s knuckles in a vicious game of slaps. Troy hovered behind them, waiting for Jamie to get a particularly hard penalty smack on the back of his hands after pulling away too soon. He was shaking the sting away when Troy handed him the ball and waited.

  The other boys crowded in to see. Jamie glared at Troy, then turned the ball over and over, scowling and acting like it wasn’t real. Then he shrugged and flipped it back at Troy.

  “My dad says this ball’s too big,” he said. “We have to use a youth league ball. But you can play with it. On the bench.”

  Jamie’s dad blew the whistle and shouted to his team that it was time for warm-ups. The starting offensive players jogged out onto the field and huddled up, and Jamie sauntered over, snapping his chinstrap.

  Troy looked at the ball and suddenly didn’t feel as good as he imagined he would, realizing that he would have traded a hundred Falcons footballs to be the one walking out to that huddle, and a hundred more to have a dad who coached the team. But, after everything he’d been through, he was going to get as much out of the Falcons football as he could. So, during the game, whenever Jamie came off the field, Troy made a point to spin it into the air and catch it with a thump, caressing it like a championship trophy. A couple of times he was sure he caught Jamie looking.

  As the game unfolded, he fought back the urge to tell Jamie’s father how to win. Even though he didn’t like the man, Troy wanted Coach Renfro to know that he had a special gift. The Roswell Raiders safeties, who should have been worried about a deep pass, were crowding the line of scrimmage. The linebackers were playing too close to the line as well, all of them focused too much on stopping the Tigers’ running back, and not paying any attention to the wide receivers.

  Troy knew Jamie’s father should have the offense fake the run and have both wide receivers go deep. One of them was certain to be wide open for a touchdown. But Troy knew Jamie’s dad didn’t like hearing what Troy had to say. He was a coach who believed in yelling, not strategy. So the Tigers kept running the ball, getting stuffed by the safeties, and every so often having Jamie throw short little wobbly passes that people, more times than not, couldn’t catch. The Raiders beat them 42–10.

  After shaking hands with the Raiders and gathering around with the rest of the team to get yelled at some more by Jamie’s dad, Troy tucked the Falcons football back deep into his equipment bag and walked slowly toward his mom. She rubbed his hair and told him not to worry. You can’t win them all. Troy looked up at her with damp eyes and opened his mouth to speak.

  “What, Troy?” she asked, looking at him with those kind green eyes. She was pretty, even though she was his mom and even though she rarely wore makeup.

  Troy wanted to tell her about the safeties playing too close to the line, wanted to tell her that he was a better quarterback than Jamie and the only reason he didn’t play was that he didn’t have a dad. But his mom didn’t like to talk about Troy’s dad, a man Troy never knew, and Troy loved his mom a lot, so he said, “Thanks for coming, Mom.”

  They stopped at Krispy Kreme on the way home for a box of glazed donuts. On the corner where their dirt driveway butted into Route 141, the same old man who was there beside the highway every Saturday morning stood mixing his black pot full of boiled peanuts. Troy’s mom pulled over, and he groaned.

  “Who would eat those things?” he said.

  She smiled at him, patted his leg, and as she got out of the car she said, “Random acts of kindness.”

  “Hello, Tessa, my beauty,” the old man said, grinning at her with a wrinkled and toothless smile. He tipped his faded red cap and hurried back to his steaming pot, spooning mushy peanuts into a rolled cone of newspaper.

  Troy’s mom took two dollars out of her purse and handed them to the old man. The money quickly disappeared into the front pocket of his overalls, and he handed her the peanuts. Troy turned his head away for a moment and made a face.

  “When I franchise these ole peanuts,” the old man said, looking into the blue sky above the trees and sweeping his hand, “I’ll put your face on a billboard. I’ll fly you around on a private jet, my gal, and put you on a TV commercial. That’s where you belong, billboards and TV commercials.”

  Troy’s mom touched the old man’s shoulder and told him she was counting on it. As they drove down the twisty dirt driveway toward the house, Troy slumped in his seat. It was hot enough now to roast a peanut without a pot. As they walked into their little house, he was thinking about hiking down to the river that afternoon with Nathan and Tate.

  That’s when the phone rang.

  That’s when his mom found out she got the job with the Atlanta Falcons.

  Th
at’s when their whole world got turned upside down.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON TUESDAY MORNING, THE day after Labor Day, when Troy saw his mom ready for work, all he could say was “Wow.”

  His mom’s face went pink. She turned around for him, heels clicking the floor, the hem of her blue blazer spinning and floating in the air, and her silk blouse billowing even after she stood still. Troy was used to her dull-brown UPS uniform. The cap that hid her long brown hair. The stiff shorts and brown socks that made her legs look so thin. Now she looked like one of the women he saw on the covers of her magazines.

  “Okay,” she said, letting her hands fall. “Get your backpack. Here’s your lunch.”

  She was going to drop Troy off at school on her way to work. When she worked at UPS, she had to leave before the school opened and Troy had to walk up their dirt drive to Route 141 and wait for the bus. He liked getting out of his mom’s new pale green VW bug and hoped his friends saw just how important she looked, her hair down and dressed for her job with the Atlanta Falcons.

  No one did notice, but that didn’t keep Troy from getting detention for drawing a falcon on his desk in social studies. While his teachers droned on about math and science, he imagined his mom standing with Josh Lock and maybe even Seth Halloway. He could see them listening to what she told them. He could see their serious faces, their hands on their chins, as she shared her wisdom about how to behave in their interviews with reporters.

  The only thing that broke his smile was Jamie Renfro at lunch. Troy was explaining how closely his mom would be working with the Falcons players when he noticed that the friends at his lunch table were staring behind him. Troy turned around and saw Jamie with his arms crossed. He wore a sneer on his face and a blinding white Cowboys jersey. Number 81. Terrell Owens, T.O.