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called after us, “The flag team has practice tomorrow. Come by, and you’ll see exactly what girls can do on a football field.”

MATT
    It took a few days for things to cool off with Juliette. But I’ll confess: at first I didn’t think they would at all. I thought she’d still see me as the bratty, egotistical kid she used to babysit, and I would have to live out in Villeneuve with Yazid.
    And my mom and dad…well, let’s just say it took a bit more than a few days, and I had to make some big concessions—mostly about Orford—to get them to sign the permission forms and not fly over to drag me back to Montreal.
    The first two weeks I commuted up to Villeneuve, and I had some pretty good practices. It felt great to be suited up and zipping passes! The level of play was really uneven though—more so than I’d imagined. Guys like Moose and Sidi—Aïda’s brother, the one Moose got into trouble protecting—stood out, not for their skill but for pure athleticism. Others looked the part in pads, even if they were a little clumsy. Jorge was bigger than my center back home. But a lot of it was kind of comical. I could see why US Football magazine had ranked the team so low.
    Still, the guys were super pumped that I was there and excited for our home opener in two weeks, against a team called the Jets from another Parisian suburb. All the guys really hated the Jets. I didn’t know what the Jets were like, but I hoped we could get by on enthusiasm and guts.
    The senior team’s season opened that Sunday, the week before our opener—a “friendly” game, as they called them here, against a team from a lower division. It was at home in Villeneuve, so all of us went, the Under-20s, the bantams, the flag team, including Aïda and Yasmina. We all wore our home jerseys, like the senior side. I had to pay off Sidi to get to wear 15 for the season; it was my number back home, but he typically wore it for the Diables. It only cost me bottomless Cokes at the café beside the RER station while we played foosball after practice one night—pretty cheap in the big scheme of things.
    The senior team was sixty deep, some with good size; in uniformed rows, stretching before kickoff, they looked good. The three leading warm-up—the QB from the cover of US Football , a lineman and what looked to be a linebacker—were obviously North American. You could tell by the way they carried themselves, the easy swagger—though whether they were from the United States or Canada, I couldn’t say. The visitors, the Sphinx, were a pretty ragtag bunch by comparison. Some had white helmets with white face masks; others, white helmets with black face masks. A few wore black on black. During their warm-up, they weren’t sharp at all. If they had an American on their side, he was disguising it pretty well.
    Music blared over the loudspeakers—French hip-hop. I couldn’t really make out most of the words. Something like “ J’suis trop ghetto pour cette France … D’où vient le malaise … Trop de différence de rue case nègre à Paris seize …” The stands were filling up. I noticed this kid six or seven rows up from us, sitting by himself, away from everybody else. He was black but clearly not from here. In fact, he was pretty obviously American, certainly an athlete, probably a football player. He looked wiry but was broad-shouldered, and his neck was too thick for a French player. Safeties back home were built like him (though by the way he carried himself—kind of guarded, uneasy, hands deep in his pockets and hunched into himself in his letterman’s jacket—I’d have said he was from the States, not Canada).
    I pointed him out to Moose. “From one of the other teams?” I asked. “A scout or something?”
    “A spy?” Moose said. He leaned into Sidi, on the bench below us, and whispered something in his ear. Sidi looked up at the kid and shrugged. Moose turned back to me. “Let’s go see.”
    The American turned toward us as