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  Landon raised his eyebrows.

  Katy frowned.

  Megan studied Landon’s face and seemed to read his mind. “That’s a great idea. I love cannonballs.”

  Landon grinned and disconnected his “ears” without hesitation, wrapping them in his towel and setting them on the table next to his chair beneath a wide green umbrella. He was bursting with pride as he stepped up to the board. He remembered his manners and invited the girls to go first. When they said no, he dove right in, showering them in a geyser of water. They all declared him the clear winner. After that, he sprang off the end of the diving board—time after time—sending up fountains of spray that reached for the sky and waves that had the girls giddy, laughing and rocking like ships in a storm on inflatable rafts.

  He didn’t have to hear to know they were bubbling with joy, even Katy. It was one of those summer days that were never meant to end. He’d even forgotten about football, until his father called them in for an early dinner. Landon saw the joy drain from everyone’s faces. He dried his head and then reattached his ears, nerves already back on edge.

  “Your friends are welcome to stay, Genevieve.” Their father stood in the kitchen doorway with an apron on and a spatula in his hand.

  The girls seemed shaken by his presence. They toweled off and said they had to get home.

  “But thank you, Mr. Dorch.” Megan gave a happy wave as she and Katy made a fast exit through the gate that led to a path through the bushes to the driveway.

  Dripping on the red brick terrace surrounding the pool, Landon said, “That was fun, Genevieve.”

  “You were great.” Genevieve reached up and put a hand on his shoulder. “Landon, they really like you.”

  Landon blushed. “Well, I think it’s you they like and they were just being nice.”

  She shook her head. “No, Landon, they liked you. Especially Megan.”

  Landon felt a jolt of pleasure at the sound of her name, and he stared at the gate through which she’d departed. “But she has a boyfriend. It’s gotta be that Skip kid you shoved.”

  Genevieve bit her lip. “It is him, but sometimes people make mistakes. Maybe he’ll turn out all right. Maybe when she tells him we’re all friends, he’ll be nice to you. Heck, you’re going to be teammates. That counts for a lot, right?”

  Landon studied her face. He wanted her to be right, but when he remembered the shove she’d given Skip, knocking him back into that table full of women and spilling their drinks and embarrassing him in front of everyone, he said, “I don’t know, Genevieve. Does it?”

  They both knew that as soon as dinner was over, he was going to find out.

  14

  A handful of signs taped to broomsticks and stuck into orange highway cones directed Landon and his father to the Westchester Youth Football League weigh-ins. They could have just as easily followed the crowd of parents and their sons ranging in age from four to fourteen.

  People were putting baked goods on the check-in table as if they were making an offering to the gods of football. Landon’s mom had had to work late, so his father set the oatmeal cookies made with honey down beside a plate of brownies. Landon’s father also had the list of things she wanted him to tell the officials, including the doctor’s clearance. Under an overhang outside the middle school gym, they got in line in front of the seventh-grade team check-in table. Landon mostly kept his eyes ahead, but stole secret glances all around and tugged his Browns cap down snug on his head. The man behind the desk wore stylish metal-framed glasses. When he saw Landon he reared back. “Whoa! Heh, heh. Guys, this is the seventh-grade line. Eighth is over there.”

  “No,” Landon’s dad said, getting out his checkbook. “He’s in seventh grade.”

  The man with glasses turned and nudged the tall man sitting next to him. “Bob, we got a bison here, for sure a Double X.”

  “What’s your name?” the man with glasses asked.

  “He’s Landon Dorch,” Landon’s father answered for him. “What’s that mean? Double X?”

  “Dorch, I got it.” The man with the glasses drew a line through Landon’s name on his list of registrants from the league’s website. “Uh, it means he can only play right tackle on offense and left end on defense. No big deal. A kid his size is a hog anyway, right?”

  Landon’s father frowned and he straightened his back. “Hog?”

  The man with the glasses laughed in a friendly way. “A lineman. A hog. It’s a good thing. A football term. We love a kid as big as yours. Coach Bell was a hog, right, Coach?” He turned to the man standing at the scale with a clipboard. Beside him was a boy nearly as big as Landon, but harder looking, like a big sack of rocks.

  “Yes, and so is my boy.” Coach Bell clapped the big bruiser on the shoulder. “You and Brett will be on the line together.”

  “Hi, I’m Brett.” Brett Bell stepped forward without hesitation and gave Landon a firm handshake and a smile. “See you out there.”

  Landon watched Brett march off toward the exit before turning toward the coach. Coach Bell was about six feet tall and easily three hundred pounds. He wore a bright green T-shirt, a Bronxville Football cap, and a whistle around his neck.

  “Coach Bell was a Division III All-American at Union, and his wife’s little brother plays for the Giants. You know, Jonathan Wagner? He’s the right tackle.” The man with glasses gazed at Coach Bell with respect. “Here, let’s get Landon on that scale, and Mr. Dorch, you’ll need to sign up for at least two volunteer jobs with Bob, but we’d be happy if you took three or four, depending on your work schedule.”

  “Let’s get Landon weighed,” Coach Bell said.

  “Should I take off my shoes?” Landon asked Coach Bell, awed by the coach’s All-American status and relationship to a real NFL player.

  At the sound of Landon’s garbled voice, all three men from the league looked at each other with alarm. The man with the glasses turned to Landon’s dad and spoke in a low voice so that it was hard for Landon to make out what he was saying. But if Landon read his lips right, he said, “Uh, Mr. Dorch. Is your son . . . uh, does he have a problem we should know about?”

  Landon’s dad gave Landon a nervous glance, then shook his head at the man with glasses. “Landon has a slight difficulty speaking, but he’s a B-plus student. He has cochlear implants to help him hear, so we’ve got a special helmet on order and a doctor’s clearance for him to play.”

  “Wait a minute,” the man said. “I need more than that.”

  Standing by the scale, Landon swallowed hard and bit his lip. This wasn’t how he wanted to begin his football career.

  15

  Landon’s dad went into his speech. “Landon is deaf. When he was four he got cochlear implants, so he hears sound and he can read lips. But to really understand speech it’s best if he hears and sees what’s said.”

  “He reads lips?” The man shot what looked like a nervous glance at Landon.

  “He uses a combination of sight and sound to understand,” Landon’s dad said.

  “But he can’t wear those things with a football helmet,” the man said.

  Landon’s dad nodded. “Yes, he can. There’s actually a company that makes custom helmets. Landon isn’t the first, either, and we have a doctor’s note.”

  “Okay, okay. That’s great. Really.” The man with glasses threw his hands up in the air in total surrender. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any offense at all, and if he has special needs we can work with that, but we just have to know.”

  Landon’s father gritted his teeth and shook his head. “No, he isn’t special needs. He just needs to see you speak.” He showed them all the doctor’s clearance.

  The men looked at the paper, and then Coach Bell said, “Super. Okay, let’s go. On the scale, Landon. Here we go.”

  “So, should I take off my shoes?” It seemed like years since Landon first asked this.

  Coach Bell looked down. “Yeah, it’s the rules.”

  Landon bent down and took his
shoes off. He tugged his T-shirt over his gut before he stepped onto the scale.

  “I knew it!” Coach Bell craned his neck to read the digital number. “Yup. Double X. You’ll be great on the line.”

  Landon’s father said, “But he can only play certain positions?”

  “Yes,” Coach Bell explained. “For safety these really big boys—the Double X’s—can only play right tackle on offense and left end on defense.”

  Landon didn’t know whether to feel proud or humiliated. The man with glasses gave him a mouth guard in a plastic bag and instructed him to go out on the football field and look for the coaches with the bright green T-shirts. Landon’s dad put a hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the field.

  When they got there, Landon’s dad pointed to one end where two fathers wore bright green T-shirts with matching caps and whistles around their necks, just the same as Coach Bell at the weigh-in. There were blocking dummies and small, bright orange cones set out in some kind of order Landon didn’t recognize from his YouTube study of the game. Some of the dummies, big yellow cylinders standing tall, were for blocking and tackling. Others, blue rectangles lying flat in the grass, were used for soft boundary markers. Beyond the end zone was a metal sled with five football-player-shaped pads whose single purpose he knew: blocking.

  “Okay.” His father stopped at the sideline and pointed. “There’s your group—your team. Good luck, son.”

  Landon looked up at his father, who studied the team from beneath the shade of his hand. When he realized Landon wasn’t moving, he gave him a little push. “Go ahead. You can do this, Landon. Everything new is always a little scary.”

  16

  He nodded. “Okay, Dad.” Landon put one foot in front of the other and headed toward the growing group of kids wearing shorts and T-shirts and cleats who milled around the coaches in green. Skip was throwing a ball to his spiky-haired friend, and when he saw Landon he called out, “Hey, Mike, the baby giant came back.” Landon moved toward the other side of the field where two other boys huddled together on a tipped-over blocking dummy, whispering. Landon sat down on the dummy directly across from them. He looked intently at them until they suddenly stopped talking.

  The two boys looked at Landon like he was crazy, then at each other, and simply got up and walked away without a word.

  Landon scanned the area and picked some grass. He knew he should have just said hello, but he wasn’t comfortable doing it. He knew his speech sounded off. The other kids were fooling around, pushing each other with foam shields or tossing footballs.

  That outsider feeling he’d lived with his whole life tightened its grip on Landon’s heart, threatening to turn him into a mound of jelly. It felt like the drop at Splash Mountain all over again, so Landon clenched his teeth and dug deep. This was his chance to be a football player, and if he did what he thought he could do, they’d all respect him—and maybe outright like him. One coach noticed him and headed his way with a bright white smile that made him feel much, much better.

  The coach smelled of citrus cologne, but he looked like a triathlete. His cabled muscles were tan and his close-set, dark eyes intense without effort. Up close, Landon could see a dusting of gray at the edges of his dark, short hair. The coach stopped in front of Landon and extended a hand weighed down by some kind of championship ring. “Hey, buddy, I’m Coach Furster, the head coach. Look, you don’t want to sit on the bags like that.”

  Landon popped right up. “Sorry, Coach. I . . . the other guys . . .” Landon stopped because he didn’t want to seem like a rat.

  “And lose the hat, buddy.” Coach Furster glowered so that his eyes almost appeared to have crossed, and Landon wondered if he had some deep-seated hatred of the Cleveland Browns. “You see anybody else wearing a hat?”

  “Oh, um,” he started, but with Coach glaring at him, Landon reluctantly tugged off his hat. Coach Furster’s jaw fell. “What? Whoa. Hey, what the . . .”

  “It’s . . . it’s just my hearing stuff, Coach. My mom calls them my ‘ears.’ They help me hear.”

  Coach Furster waved a hand. “No worries, buddy. Hey, you’re okay with the hat. That’s fine. I had no idea. I know you’re new and I was just thinking you’d want to fit in. That’s always what you want, but you’re fine with the hat.”

  Landon replaced the hat and studied the coach intently. Coach Furster stood straight and wiped his mouth like there was food on it. “What? What are you looking at?”

  “Just . . . your face, Coach.”

  “Why?” Coach Furster wrinkled his thick brow so that his eyebrows sank and his eyes nearly crossed again.

  “Just”—Landon pointed in the general direction of his ears—“so I can hear what you’re saying, or know what you’re saying.”

  Coach Furster only blinked at him.

  “It’s easier to understand when I can see your lips,” Landon explained.

  “Well, you’re apt to miss a lot that way.” Coach Furster twirled his whistle and the tattoo on the side of his biceps—some Chinese symbol—jumped and quivered. “But don’t worry. We can bring you along slow. Was Coach Bell at your check-in?”

  “Yes,” Landon said. “He told me I was a Double X player.”

  “Coach West and I will have to talk to him,” Coach Furster said. “Meanwhile, you just watch how we do things and then we can see how you do.”

  “I’ll watch everything, Coach.” Landon nodded vigorously. “For sure. I watch drills on YouTube all the time.”

  “Great.” Coach Furster put a hand on Landon’s shoulder and escorted him over to the sideline in a cloud of that citrus cologne. “You know what? Heck, who cares?” Coach Furster knocked over a blocking dummy and dragged it ten feet off the field. “You can sit right there. That’s fine. You sit and watch and you’ll pick up a lot, right? You’re a careful observer, I bet.” Coach Furster pointed at him and winked.

  “For sure, Coach.” Landon took a seat and beamed up at his new coach.

  “That’s great, Landon.” Coach Furster patted his shoulder. “This is gonna work out just great. Glad to have you on the team.”

  Landon followed the coach with his eyes, the smell fading into the grass. Coach Furster returned to the other coach—Coach West—a tall, thin man who made Landon think of an undertaker. They were soon joined by big Coach Bell. They had a short, animated discussion. Landon couldn’t make it all out, but he knew by the way they kept looking at him that he—or really his ears—was the topic.

  Then he caught a full view of Coach Bell’s red face and could clearly see what he was saying. “—not mentally challenged. He talks funny because he’s deaf. He’s huge, and he’s got a doctor’s clearance and a custom helmet and his dad says he can read lips.”

  At that, all three coaches looked his way and Landon quickly averted his eyes, studying the grass. The blast of whistles got his attention and he saw that the coaches had moved on. The team fell into five lines, creating a rigid order where before it had been mayhem. Skip and his two friends, floppy-haired Xander and spiky-haired Mike, headed up three of the five lines. Another was headed by Coach Bell’s son, Brett.

  Whistles tooted and players took off from their lines, running with high knees from the goal line to the thirty-yard line and then stopping and reforming the lines, only to return some other way. They went back and forth with a backward run, a sideways shuffle, cross-over steps, butt kickers, and some runs Landon couldn’t even describe.

  After about ten minutes of that, everyone spread out and they did some more stretching. Five minutes later they were broken into three equal groups and running through agility drills overseen by the coaches. On the whistle, the players would sprint from one station to the next, with the coaches issuing an occasional bark—it seemed to Landon a mixture of criticism and praise.

  After that they worked on form tackling drills, just going through the precise movements of a tackle in slow motion since no one had pads on. Then the team split up into skill players—mostly th
e smaller guys like Skip and Mike and a kid named Layne Guerrero—who went with Coach Bell, and the lineman, or hogs, like Brett Bell, who went with Coach Furster and Coach West.

  When the lineman began getting into stances and firing out into the blocking dummies held by their teammates, Landon stood up.

  He felt silly just sitting and was pretty certain he could do what they were doing. There was one guy without a partner, a kid not as big as Landon but with even more girth around the belly and big Band-Aids on each knee. Landon grabbed the dummy he’d been sitting on and dragged it over to him.

  “Hey,” Landon said cheerfully. The kid looked at him like he was nuts, but Landon pressed on. “I can be your partner. Here, you go first.”

  Landon hefted the bag between the two of them, grabbed the handles on both sides, and leaned into it just the way the others were doing. The kid got down, and on the coach’s cadence, he fired out into the dummy, jarring Landon, who fought to keep his feet.

  “Hey! Hey!” Coach West was shouting, and he flew over to Landon’s new partner and got right in his face. “Did anyone tell you to pair off with this kid, Timmy?”

  The boy named Timmy shook his head with a terrified look.

  A whistle shrieked and all motions stopped. Coach Furster marched over in a cloud of cologne. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Landon, what are you doing, buddy?”

  “I just . . .” Landon hefted the bag. “I can do this, Coach. It’s easy.”

  The word “easy” set Coach Furster off. He was suddenly furious. “Easy, Landon? Glad you think it’s easy. Okay, let’s give you a shot and see how easy it is. Ready?”

  Coach Furster jammed the whistle in the corner of his mouth and snatched the dummy from Landon, spinning it around without any regard for the fine gold watch on his wrist. “Down!”

  Landon looked all around. The kids were all smirking, and some were giggling.

  “I said, ‘Down!’ Come on, you been watching.” Coach Furster’s face was turning red. “You know what to do. Down!”