Read Out of the Pocket for Free Online

could be.
    He was going to win by a lot, so I did the next best thing: I fell to the ground, grabbing my ankle and howling.
    “Oh, shit!” Austin yelled as he crossed the finish line and looked back at me, writhing in pain on my back. He sprinted back over and knelt next to me. “Bobby, you okay?”
    It was a trick I’d learned back when I wrestled in junior high. I quickly grabbed him by the arm and flipped him. Austin might be bigger than me, but he wasn’t stronger. I pinned him easily.
    “Get off me, dude!” Austin was squirming under me, trying his best to break free.
    “Make me,” I said, panting.
    “Try this on a girl,” Austin said, and I rolled off of him. He fell away and collapsed on the grass, huffi ng.
    I stood, and wiped the dirt and grass off my arms and legs. Austin and I have been wrestling like that for maybe ten years, and it wasn’t the first time he’d called me gay in one way or another. But it just hit me different this time. Maybe it was all the time I’d been spending thinking about coming out. I looked down at him, lying in the grass.
    Austin was more than just a teammate, he was like a brother to me.
    We didn’t have as much in common at seventeen as we did at nine, but here we were, still together.
    “So where’s my dollar?” Austin said as he got up to his feet.
    I turned away and looked up at the sky, which was unbelievably blue. “Calm down, I’m good for it,” I replied.
    I heard Austin rustling through his pockets, and when I turned 35
    and looked, he had dug a circular green container out of his pants.
    At fi rst I thought it was gum, but when he pried the top off, the powerfully bitter, fruity-mint smell told me it wasn’t.
    “What the hell?” I said as he pinched a small amount of black gunk between his thumb and forefinger and put it in his mouth, between his bottom lip and gum.
    “Tell me you’re not dipping,” I said.
    Austin shrugged. “I like it,” he said.
    “Austin, that’s disgusting. Not to mention how bad it is for you.”
    He shrugged, and put the container back in his shorts pocket.
    “This is the apple-fl avored kind.”
    “Man, if only there was another, less lethal way to get the taste of apples in your mouth,” I said, shaking my head.
    “Shut the hell up,” he said, a tiny bit of brown dribbling from the side of his packed lip.
    I worried about Austin sometimes. His judgment.
    “What do you wanna do?” I asked, trying to forget the fact that he had tobacco in his mouth.
    “Watch TV?” he said. “We never do that.”
    I gave him a dirty look. I barely ever watched, unless it was a football game or maybe baseball with my dad. I preferred actually doing things, but that’s just me.
    He rolled his eyes. “Oh, I forgot, you’re Amish.”
    I laughed. “I’m Amish because I don’t watch TV?”
    “You don’t do a lot of things, dude,” he said, walking to the front door. As he swung it open a blast of air-conditioning hit us in the face. It felt good. We walked in and sat on the living-room couch.
    My folks were out. “You hardly ever drink, don’t smoke, you don’t do drugs, and I don’t even think you have sex.”
    I grabbed my dad’s L.A. Times and rearranged it more neatly on the glass coffee table. “Whatever,” I said.
    36
    “What’s up with you and Carrie?” Austin asked.
    I laughed, because we didn’t have serious talks, like almost ever.
    Rahim and I did that, but not me and Austin. But he didn’t laugh.
    The house was incredibly quiet. My folks were both still at work.
    I looked away from Austin, studied the beige walls. There was a crack near the ceiling.
    “You think anything could ever stop you from . . .” and I couldn’t finish the sentence. Being my friend, I thought, but I couldn’t say the words.
    Austin looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. “Dude, you just have a stroke or something?”
    I turned to Austin and smiled. “Could anything stop you from playing football?”
    “No way, dude. I