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Antonio.” He said it kind of boastfully.
    “They say Texas high-school football is the best.”
    He gave me a long look, as if to say he couldn’t believe I would actually question this. “Sho nuff,” he said finally.
    The cocky bastard.
    Then Moose said in English, “Maybe you would desire to play for the Diables Rouges?”
    Freeman didn’t respond; he just stared back at Moose, face blank, clearly surprised. And I remember thinking, Sure, why not? Like me.
    If he was for real, that is.
    Moose said, “What age do you have?”
    “Seventeen.”
    “ Parfait ,” Moose said.
    Freeman looked Moose up and down, as if he wasn’t taking him seriously.
    “Why not?” I said. “Under-20 teams can field two foreign players. We only have me.”
    “I start college at the end of January,” Freeman said.
    “Postpone until the fall,” I told him. “That’s what I’m doing.”
    Moose looked more and more excited by the prospect of it.
    “Playing football in Paris,” I said. “How many opportunities like this do you think you’ll get? I mean, if you think you could make the team, that is.”
    “I’d own this league!” Freeman said.
    I got up, and Moose followed. We started back down the bleachers.
    “We practice here tomorrow at six,” I told Freeman. “Come by. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

FREEMAN OMONWOLE BEHANZIN
    Finding out about the game had been a complete fluke. I didn’t know that Villeneuve even existed, much less that they played football there. I’d come upon a poster in the metro the day before. It had a picture of a running back, a buff Brother, straight-arming a would-be tackler, some high-rise buildings off in the background, Match Amical de Football Américain block-lettered along the top. And I was like, For real?
    But sitting on the RER train headed back into the city after meeting Matt and getting the Arab’s invitation to try out for the team, I knew there was no way I’d go back up there the next day—no way!—’cause I had to get home to the States, to Mama and Tookie and Tina. Then to Iowa State. There wasn’t no way I could stay longer in France, so why even mess with it? Still, the whole ride back, my mind kept troubling the possibility of it.
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    My host family’s building, by the Parc Monceau, was fly: marble floors and fancy ironwork on the windows and doors. Their apartment was bigger than our whole house back in San Antonio.
    When I walked in the door, Françoise, the mom, called from the kitchen, “Just in time. Dinner is almost ready.”
    In the family, there’s Françoise, Georges, the dad, and a daughter named Marie, who is away at college. Georges was sitting on the sofa, listening to the news on this old-school transistor radio, holding it up to his ear, the volume turned low. He clicked it off and asked me how the game was.
    “ Merveilleux ,” I said.
    “You see, Françoise?” he called toward the kitchen. “I told you it would be fine.”
    I had told him and Françoise that the game was a class excursion because they had been worried about me going up to Villeneuve. “It is a very dangerous neighborhood,” Françoise had said, looking grave, when I’d asked where to find it on a map. Me, I was like, Paris, dangerous? But Georges had chimed in, all serious too, “People don’t go there.”
    I thought, Well, somebody must, because folks live there. I had seen the poster.
    But Georges wasn’t all wrong. Villeneuve, when I first stepped out of the RER station, was not Paris. For real. Not like the Paris I’d been getting to know anyway. The train dropped me next to some projects—straight-out-of-the-hood projects. Jacked-up cars on cinder blocks, tagged-over concrete and steel. Everybody hanging about was colored folk, like me: African and Arab, a smattering of Asians. White folks too, but they blended in, carried themselves like the rest.
    The place was more Arab than not though. On the boulevard beside the station was a bunch of