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was already too high when it went over my head for me to make out what airline it was. Thought it might be jetBlue but, like I said, no way of knowing for sure.”
    Nate didn’t miss everybody by that much. And he didn’t miss with every ball he threw. But for the first time all season, practice or game, for the first time in a long time, he felt as if he had borrowed somebody else’s arm.
    In baseball they talked about “command” with pitchers.
    Tonight Nate had no command.
    Short passes, long passes, didn’t matter. The surprise tonight was when he completed one. When Coach finally gave Eric a few snaps before they finished, the way he always did, he pulled Nate aside and said, “Your arm okay?”
    “I’m feeling fine,” Nate said. “I just feel like my brain and my arm didn’t know each other tonight.”
    “Maybe that was your problem tonight,” Coach Rivers said. “Maybe you were just thinking too much.”
    Nate knew Coach was probably right. What he couldn’t figure out was this:
    Thinking too much about what ?

CHAPTER 8
    A ll week long, Nate was expecting his dad to go to the Blair game. Chris Brodie had said he’d switch his schedule around, that instead of working on Saturday this week, he’d work one extra night at Big Bill’s the following week.
    Nate told his dad he didn’t have to do that, give up one of the few times during the week when he could still have dinner with Nate and his mom. He knew what a grind it was for his dad to come home at eleven most nights, then get up the next morning and try to sell real estate.
    “I’m not doing it because I have to,” his dad had said. “I’m doing it because I’ve got prime tickets to watch the best thirteen-year-old quarterback in the state.”
    “Dad,” Nate said. “It’s just one game.”
    And his dad had said, “Someday when you have a son who’s the quarterback and realize just how few of these Saturdays there really are, you’ll understand.”
    It was eight o’clock Saturday morning when the phone rang, and Nate got a sinking feeling in his stomach. It was the manager at Big Bill’s, calling to tell Chris Brodie that the man he’d switched with had called in sick and that Nate’s dad was going to have to work that day after all.
    Nate could hear only bits and pieces of his dad’s side of the conversation, because as soon as his dad knew who it was on the other end of the line, he walked out of the kitchen. But one word Nate kept hearing over and over was “please.”
    His dad pleading with the man.
    When he came back into the kitchen, he said, “I have to work,” in a voice that sounded as small as if it were coming from upstairs.
    “I’m sorry,” he said to Nate.
    Then he looked at Nate’s mom for a long time, what felt like forever to Nate just because the look on his dad’s face was so sad, and said, “I hate this.” He walked out of the kitchen again and they heard the slow, heavy sound of him walking up the stairs.
    When he came back down, he was wearing the red “Big Bill” shirt that he had to wear to the store, one that Nate knew his dad had come to hate, knew because he had once heard him tell Nate’s mom he hated it, that it was like a uniform announcing to everybody what was happening to him.
    Like Abby’s orange sunglasses.

    Blair called themselves the Bears.
    “Pretty sure it isn’t short for Care Bears,” LaDell said when they started their stretching.
    “Oh, they care all right,” Malcolm said. “Mostly about giving smackdown beatdowns.”
    “You really think they want to do both?” Nate said.
    “Remember last year’s game against those suckers?” Pete said. “They thought they had given us a smackdown beatdown, and then you hit them with those two long passes in the fourth quarter.”
    “I remember,” Nate said.
    He remembered because that was the beauty of sports. There were games you watched and games you played that you knew you’d never forget as long as you lived.
    He didn’t