First & Then(26)

“Not like him.”

I thought about what Lindsay had said at the game: High school kickers are really hard to come by.

“But freshmen don’t play varsity.”

“Ezra did, up at Shaunessy. And we all know Shaunessy could crush our little team.”

“Yeah, but that’s Ezra. When he was born, he probably sprinted out of his mother and charged the delivery nurse.”

Jordan laughed. “It’s a wonder he wasn’t drafted right out of the nursery.”





12


I didn’t tell Foster what Jordan had said, in case it wasn’t true. But we didn’t have to wait long to find out. Foster was called out of gym class on Wednesday and it was made official. He brought home the varsity warm-up jersey that night to show my parents.

I thought they would injure themselves smiling. One of those “be careful or your face will freeze that way” type situations.

Foster seemed happy but a little confused about the whole thing. He just kept asking, “But I’m going to get to play, right?”

“If the coach puts you in,” I said.

“But he wouldn’t want me if he wasn’t going to put me in, right?”

“Either way, it’s better to be a benchwarmer on varsity than the star of the C team.”

“Not if you don’t get to play. I want to help the team accomplish stuff. Like Ezra says.”

“Just be grateful. This doesn’t happen often. This doesn’t happen, like, ever. You’re a lucky guy.”

I blanched inside as soon as I said it. Football aside, Foster was a pretty unlikely candidate for “lucky guy.”

But he just looked at me placidly and said, “I must be,” and there was not a hint of irony or sarcasm or anything.

News of Foster’s move spread through school pretty fast. Cas shrugged it off, and I didn’t play up that he had been wrong about the whole thing.

“It’s cool,” he said, as we passed through the lunch line on Thursday. “Get a little young blood on the team.”

“Young blood? Yeah, you guys are ancient.”

“Reggie’s almost nineteen.”

Reggie Wilcox was the quarterback, a pretty nice guy with a pretty good arm who unfortunately lacked the skills to pass trigonometry.

Usually the quarterback is the lifeblood of a team, and almost always he’s the captain. But I don’t think Reggie ever had the motivational skills necessary to be captain. He was just a laid-back sort of guy who was good at throwing a ball around and, because of seniority, happened to find himself quarterback. Sometimes I wondered if I would ever be lucky enough to fall into some sort of talent like that.




Before I knew it, it was Friday night. I was down on the sidelines with Mr. Harper’s camera bag on my back, and for the first time, Foster was down there with me.

Well, not with me, but with the team. Wearing that TS red and white and stepping onto the field under the floods.

Most of the other guys eclipsed him. He even looked small next to Jordan, who was by no means a mountain. I watched as Jordan clapped Foster on the back and said something that was no doubt devastatingly charming. I was too far down the field to hear, so I just shouldered Mr. Harper’s camera bag and craned my neck to get a better look.

Foster went out with the rest of the team to warm up. They seemed to be taking to him pretty well. I guess it’s because Foster was just about as nonthreatening as it got; he was small, he was inexperienced, and he wasn’t about to take time from anybody on the field. Except maybe Marcus Whittier, of course, but it wasn’t as if he were being ousted all together. I knew enough about the dynamics of a team from Cas to know that the future of the team always had to be kept in mind. A star senior lineup was great, but you always had to have an eye on the next generation to see what you’ll be left with when that lineup moves on.

The game began after the usual roll call of starters. The roar of the crowd and the coin toss. Marcus handled the kickoff, just as Jordan said he would, and after TS scored in the first quarter, he stepped in for the extra point as well. I guess they weren’t going to sic Foster on Hancock—or rather sic Hancock on Foster—right off the bat.

Hancock was a pretty good team, and Temple Sterling didn’t score its second touchdown until the end of the first half. Ezra took a handoff and made a spectacular run down the field, propelling himself into the end zone and raising the score 13–6.

And then it was time for the extra point. Surely they would send Marcus in. But there was Coach, pointing right at Foster.

Foster trotted out onto the field and got into place. Play started. Marshall Samford hiked the ball. Eliot Price caught it and set it, and Foster ran, ran, and connected with the ball. It shot into the air, arched gracefully, and landed right between the goalposts.

The crowd erupted, and I realized I had been holding my breath.

There were three more extra points that night. Marcus took two of them, but Foster had the last, and he nailed it. It was official: He was a hit.

“Fantastic!” My dad slapped Foster on the back in the parking lot. “You were incredible. Really showed ’em your stuff.”

Foster looked past my dad to my mom. “Can I go to the party with Dev?”

Don’t get me wrong—I was happy for Foster. But that was the last thing I wanted to hear. No, okay, second to last thing. The last thing I wanted to hear was my parents say yes.