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says,” Coach Rose exclaimed to no one in particular. “So you’re not brain-dead. And if you’re not brain-dead, then you must know what you’re supposed to call me.”
    “Coach?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.
    He let out this agonized groan, as if he’d swallowed his whistle and was trying to hock it back up. “Smalls,” he whispered, his teeth flashing in front of my face mask, “I don’t give two shits if you’re the fastest kid in the seventh grade or the whole damned school, you will call me sir or you’ll be watching this season from the bleachers. Do I make myself clear?”
    “Yeah,” I said, but made him wait a few seconds before adding the rest.
    “That’s better. Now remember, no contact. Well, what are you waiting for? Get out of my face.”
    What a cock. Of all the nose pickers and wussies farting around on the field, he had to single me out, and I was one of the few who could actually play the game. But ever since the end of peewee league last year, I’d gotten a bad rep, and he was acting on it. I’d spent most of that season on the bench; the coaches wouldn’t play me because I was so small that I had to stuff rolls of quarters in my jockstrap each week at weigh-in to make the official minimum weight, and they used that as an excuse to keep me off the field. That was, until the third-to-last game, when we were getting blown out by Red Bank, 37–0. They put me in with about two minutes left, just so they could tell all the parents at the annual team dinner that everybody had seen playing time. Whatever. I’d never gotten my uniform dirty and I was rabid to get in and hit somebody—hard. Luckily, they put me in on defense, at safety. Of course, at safety, I was furthest back from the action, so they probably put me there hoping I wouldn’t get any. But I had other ideas. The first play Red Bank ran was a sweep to our right, and I’d taken off in that direction with the snap. I wasn’t even looking for the ball, just the biggest guy on their team I could get a clear shot at. Somehow that guy turned out to be their halfback, ball in hand. I turned my legs loose, and while it seemed to cause Coach Rose some kind of moral crisis, he was right, I was fast, really fast, and I met the halfback in a dead sprint, top speed, head-on, as he turned up the field. Blam! I guess he dropped his head just as I hit him, because I got up and he didn’t and there was the ball, lying on the field about three yards away. I scooped it up and ran it in and we lost 37–6 instead of 37–0. It felt great.
    They started me on defense for the last two games, but other players and coaches complained because it seemed that every time I tackled somebody, they got carted off the field. It happened in practice,too, with my own teammates, and that’s how I got pegged as some kind of maniac. But it was all bullshit. In football, you either hit somebody or got hit. Period. And it wasn’t my fault that a lot of kids still cringed at the first hint of contact. It just meant I was going to have to listen to Coach Rose talk to me like an idiot all season. But at least he didn’t call me Genie.
    We did some warm-ups, ran agility drills, got timed in sprints, and then the veteran players who hadn’t graduated joined us at the end of their practice to run some plays so the coaches could get a feel of who was who and what was what.
    That’s when I finally spotted Orlando, although it was probably easier to miss an aircraft carrier in a duck pond. He’d been almost six feet tall in sixth grade, and now, going into eighth, he had to be at least three inches taller, maybe fifteen pounds heavier, and was starting to get buffed all over. In the midst of the others, he looked like the only Doberman at a Chihuahua convention, and it almost didn’t seem fair—he was too good for a bunch of saps to try out against. Shit, he was probably too good even to practice against, unless what you really needed was practice getting