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around. Not pretending that things were going to be the way they used to be.
    His mom was doing her best to keep her voice low, as though it could somehow quiet his father’s loud one. But Nate heard every word in the still darkness.
    “Sports is a job for you now, Chris. Not him. He’s just a boy.”
    His father said nothing at first, and Nate thought it was over, that he could try to somehow get back to sleep.
    Only it wasn’t over.
    Nate heard him loud and clear:
    “You know what we could use around here? A million dollars.”

CHAPTER 7
    N ate loved practice.
    Not everybody on his team did. Hardly anybody on the team loved practice, because more than anything, football practice was repetition, doing things over and over until you had them right, until you could make the decisions you had to make in the game—not just the quarterback, but everybody—in the tiny amount of time you had to make them.
    Coach liked to say, “The biggest myth in the world is the one about dumb football players. That comes from people who’ve never played this game. Because once that ball is snapped, guys all over the field have about two seconds, tops, to decide where they’re going and what they have to do. So you’d better be prepared in this game, ’cause it comes at you fast . Dumb football players? No such thing.”
    Nate wanted to be the most prepared guy out there. He figured that made him the opposite of Allen Iverson, who was in one of Nate’s all-time favorite YouTube clips, the one where he kept saying “practice”—“We’re talkin’ about practice ”—over and over as if it were the dirtiest gutter word in the world.
    Nate loved putting on his equipment, making sure his pads were just right, loved joking with the guys when they were stretching to get themselves warmed up. And he knew that the best part of practice, what Coach called their “team work”—two words, not one—where they’d work on plays until they got them perfect, hadn’t even started yet.
    The great quarterbacks, Nate knew, were the ones who were most prepared. Starting with his man, Brady. Oh, Nate had read up on all that, on Brady and Peyton Manning, how they loved all their time watching game film and even being in the weight room with the big guys on their team, the linemen and the linebackers. He remembered reading somewhere that even before Brady stepped in for Drew Bledsoe the year the Patriots won that first Super Bowl, Coach Belichick used to say that not only did Brady know all the Patriots’ plays and all their options, he knew the other team’s plays and options better than anybody because he’d run those plays against his own defense in practice.
    “He was never surprised,” Belichick said about the Tom Brady he knew before everybody else did.
    Nate wanted to be that kind of quarterback. Nate wanted to put in the work. He knew they had more plays—there were seventy-five in all—than any other eighth-grade team around. He knew they had a whole separate offense run from the shotgun formation when no other team in their league did. Nate learned that the way he learned everything else in Coach’s offense—studying as if for a final exam.
    Valley’s backup quarterback was Eric Gaffney, one of the team’s wideouts and almost as much of a favorite receiver for Nate as Pete Mullaney was. As they were getting ready for practice the Thursday before the Blair game, Nate had been talking about a new play from the shotgun they were going to use on Saturday, and why he thought it would work.
    “Coach doesn’t even know these plays the way you do,” Eric said.
    Nate grinned. “I just read the playbook,” he said. “Coach wrote it.”
    “You sure it’s not the other way around?” Eric said.
    Nate said, “C’mon, if I get hurt or something, you know this stuff as well as I do.”
    “Dude, no one does.” They were finishing warm-ups up now with some hamstring stretches. “And dude?” Eric said. “Please don’t get