Read Skipped Parts: A Heartbreaking, Wild, and Raunchy Comedy for Free Online Page B

bump me a time or two, figuring the poor schlock’s ego needed a buildup. He had red hair and an overbite you could open a can with. Red-headed children tend to feel inferior.
    When it came to the real drill, our punter was so awful that Stebbins did the kicking himself. He said, “Yup, yup, yup,” and everybody took off. I faked O’Brien’s jock to the outside and zipped right up the middle. The punt boomed off Stebbins’s left foot, traveled maybe nine inches and caught me dead in the lungs.
    I rolled over and over, wound up armadilloed on my back. Try breathing when you can’t. It’s a panic deal. I couldn’t see squat, but I could hear, and I felt someone pull me off the ground an inch by a belt loop, then lower me again. God knows why.
    Stebbins’s voice floated in. “Nice block, Callahan. Get up, we’ll try it again.”
    My mouth and nose felt sealed in Saran Wrap. The thing lasted forever.
    More voices. “Think he’ll die?”
    “Doubt it.”
    “He don’t look like a nigger.”
    “His mom tried to pick up Ft. Worth at the White Deck last night.”
    “I heard it other way around.”
    A toe poked me in the ribs. “He’s turning blue.”
    “Maybe the nigger comes out when he’s hurt.”
    Stebbins’s voice again: “He’s no nigger, he’s not fast enough.”
    I pretended to pass out.
    ***
    I got the wind knocked out of me one other time. In North Carolina, I was little, six or seven, and Lydia and I were playing seesaw. She had to scoot way up near the middle so our weights sort of balanced out. It was fun because the air was nice that day and Lydia didn’t play outdoors stuff with me too often. About all I could ever get out of her was an occasional game of crazy 8s.
    So I’m going up and down, up and down, admiring to myself how pretty Lydia is down the board from me. She had on a gray sleeveless shirt and white shorts. She’d spread a magazine out on the board in front of her so she could amuse herself and me at the same time. Every now and then she’d raise her face to swipe the bangs off her forehead, and she smiled at me kind of absentmindedly, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
    Then, while I’m way up a mile high on top of the world, the damn coach of some swim team walks up in his stretchy trunks and rubber thongs. Had a blue whistle on a cord around his neck. I hate coaches.
    He cocked his head to one side and banged on the skull bone over his right ear. “Does your little brother know how to swim?”
    Lydia marked her spot in the magazine with her finger and turned to stare at the bare-chested coach.
    He switched sides of the head and banged some more. “Every young man should know how to swim. It is vital to his safety and the safety of his loved ones.”
    Lydia looked up the board at me. “Sam, do you know how to swim?”
    “No.” I wasn’t happy about being passed off as a little brother.
    She turned to the coach. “No.”
    “I could teach the little snapper. Maybe you and me should walk over to the ice cream stand and discuss it. My treat, I’ll even stand the boy a single cone.”
    Lydia stared at him a few seconds more, just enough to cause him to stop banging on the sides of his head, then she said, “I do not receive gentlemen without the decency to cover their repellent chest mange,” and dignified as all get out, she swung her right leg across the board and got off the seesaw. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t breathe for five minutes or stop crying for an hour, not until the stupid swimmer went away.
    ***
    I was depressed that fall. I’d never been depressed to the point where I knew it before. Depression is like a headache or true love or any of those indefinable concepts. If you’ve never been there, you don’t know what it’s like until you’re too far in to stop the process.
    But I remember coming home from football practice to entire evenings on the couch next to Lydia, neither of us talking or reading or anything. We’d just sit with our eyes