“Why not?”
“Cause our first home game’s coming up.”
He was right. Cresthaven was an away game. Willard would be home. But so what? All the more reason to quit. Who wants to have his friends come out and watch him sitting on the bench?
“I’m quitting,” I said.
“You can’t. We’ll win. You always play better on your home field. And Willard stinks.”
Well, I don’t know why, but I let him talk me into staying. For one more game anyway. I sure am glad I did—and not for any reason Richie gave me either.
There we were in the first quarter against Willard, all of us bench-warmers warming the bench, Richie alongside of me, and all of a sudden I hear something behind us. I turn around… cheerleaders! A whole line of them. Only about ten feet away, between us and the bleachers. There’s more of them (nine, I count) than people in the stands (three), but they’re there cheering away like it’s the Super Bowl or something.
I just keep looking. They have on white sweaters and crimson skirts. (They’re our colors. “Crimson,” you have to say. Not “red.”) Then, when the cheer was over, the cheerleaders turn back to the game, facing us now, and the one that was right behind me comes ahead a couple steps and all of a sudden she jumps up in the air and pumps her arms and yells, “Go, Bulldogs!”
While the game went on I kept looking behind me more than at the field.
I nudged Richie. “Rich. Look.”
He looked. “Yeah?”
“Cheerleaders.”
“So?”
“Waddaya think?”
“I don’t know. What about?”
“Ever have cheerleaders before?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
He turned back to the game.
“Hey Rich.”
“What?”
I cranked his head around. “Waddaya think of that one?”
“What one?”
“Right here. This one.”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“What about her?”
“Waddaya think?”
“She’s okay.” He turned back.
I can tell you, she was more than okay.
“You know her name?” I said.
“Nope.”
“She in seventh grade?”
“How do I know? Watch the game, willya.”
Around the middle of the second quarter she did something that really got to me. Trexler, our best runner, got loose on an end run and comes running down the sideline right past our bench, and next thing I know there’s this screaming in my ear. It’s her. She’s not only behind me, but over me too. That’s because I’m standing up with all the other guys yelling at Trexler, and what she did was jump up onto the bench where I had been sitting. And there she is yelling. “Go, Billy! Go, Billy! Go, Billy!” Her sweater is flapping over my face and I can see little spit specks flying from her mouth and even her eyes are screaming. And I know right then, just like that, that what I really really want is for some cheerleader—I was already praying for it to be her—some cheerleader someday to be yelling my name like that. Go, Jason! Go, Jason! Go, Jason!
I kept thinking about that all during the halftime meeting. And then it hit me: nobody’s going to cheer for a linebacker. Who was going to notice me, down there in the trenches? You had to be out in the open, the open field, racing down the sidelines, the lunks on the other team eating your dust—Go, Jason! Go, Jason! Go, Jason!
“Coach,” I said on the way back to the field, “can I be a halfback?”
“Hey,” he goes, “tiger like you? Playing a twinkletoes position? Better to tackle than be tackled, right?” He smacked me on the butt. “Let’s go, tiger!”
So much for that.
Then, late in the game, Morgan got hurt. His leg. He was lying out there on the field for a long time, twisting all around like he was in agony. Then a stretcher came and he was carried off the field. They drove a station wagon right up to our bench and loaded him in the back of it and took him away. To a hospital, I guess.
But the thing is, while all this was going on the cheerleader was practically going crazy. “Oh God!” she kept going. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”
She really got bad when they brought him over on the stretcher and he was covering his face and moaning and all. She buries her face in another cheerleader’s shoulder. “Oh God! I can’t look. Is he okay? Please be okay. Oh God oh God oh God.”
And then when they were putting him in the station wagon: “Please be okay, Russell.”
And then when they drove away. Kind of squeaky: “Yea, Russell!” There were tears rolling down her cheeks.
Yeah, I thought. That’s it. I gotta get myself injured.
Well, I did two things between then and the next home game. (Richie was wrong about Willard. They didn’t stink. They beat us 13–2.)
First I found out all I could about the cheerleader. Her name is Debbie Breen. She lives on Willow Drive. She’s a general student. (I’m academic: ahem, college material.) She has a little brother, like me. Her father is a real-estate agent. She has pierced ears, wears makeup, likes boys but nobody special, has a crush on Mister Harbison, the new gym teacher, hates spaghetti, loves the Tilt-A-Whirl, hangs around outside the front door till the last microsecond in the morning, and passes me in the hallway going to classes twice on Tuesday and Thursday, once on Monday and Wednesday, and not at all on Friday. But I’m working on some new routes for myself, so that’s going to be upped.
The second thing I did was a lot of thinking and planning about how to get injured. And a lot of daydreaming about what it was going to be like when they carried me off the field. Here’s the stuff I thought about:
1. Has to be close to the home side of the field. What a bummer if I go and do it, then they carry me off to the visitors’ side of the field!
2. Try to actually, really get myself injured.
a. Just stand there and let the fullback run over me.
b. Get myself between two blockers and let them sandwich me.
c. Curse at the biggest guy on the other team.
3. If time is running out and I’m still okay, fake it.
a. Empty out Contac capsule. Fill with catsup. Put in mouth. Bite down to look like bleeding. Like in The Sting.
4. Show a lot of pain. Make it look as bad as possible. Moan. Groan. Beat fist on stretcher.
5. Don’t cry.
Every night when I went to bed I practiced keeping my eyes just a tiny bit open, so I could see Debbie Breen’s crying face following me to the station wagon and sniveling, “Oh God! Oh Jason! Please be okay! Oh Jason!” and then burying her face in another cheerleader’s shoulder and sobbing uncontrollably.
The day came. The game was against Ellis Township. I stuck the capsule in my jockstrap. Funny thing was, Ellis Township stunk as bad as us. The score was 0–0 after the first half, and it stayed that way till late in the fourth quarter. Then we scored a touchdown and went ahead 6–0.
I guess I should have been happy, but what it meant was I didn’t get a chance to play. I played a little at the end of the other games because we didn’t have a chance. But now the coach was keeping the first-stringers in to make sure we didn’t blow it. So I had to sit there and listen to Debbie Breen scream for Trexler and all the other heroes all day long.
When the game ended, everybody on the bench jumped up and ran out to grab the guys on the field and celebrate. So I had to too. Then we all came running back, all bunched up like a herd of monkeys, and the next thing I know I’m tripping over the stupid bench and my face falls forward right into somebody’s heel coming up and my whole body becomes like loose change.
I remember being on the ground and looking up and seeing these faces and helmets floating in and out of each other. If Debbie Breen was crying for me I don’t remember hearing her. All I remember is somebody saying, “He got kicked in the head, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“So what??
?s he doing with all this blood between his legs?”
BIRTHDAYS
IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. OCTOBER 15. I’M THIRTEEN.
I’m a teenager.
In a couple minutes my mother will come into my room, open the shade, and say, “Rise and shine, birthday boy! How’s it feel to be thirteen?”
Then I’ll bump into Ham in the kitchen, and he’ll say something really clever, like, “What? Your birthday? Uh-oh.” (He always pretends he doesn’t know when your birthday is, so you’ll think you’re not getting anything.) Or, “What are ya now—ten?” (He pretends there’s so many of us he can’t remember our ages.) Or, “Well, since it’s your birthday, you’re allowed to sneak down here and eat my lunch out of the refrigerator every night for a week.” (Fat chance.)
Then Timmy will come over and say, “Hi, Jason. Happy birthday. Look at the card I made for you.” So I’ll have to look at this ratty piece of paper with some crayoning on it. He’ll say, “Guess what it is,” and I’ll say a dinosaur or something just to give him an answer, and it will turn out to be a bird’s nest.
Cootyhead Mary will just come down as usual, snatch up the milk, slop down her cereal, and leave. She won’t say anything. Not to me anyway.
At school nobody will know it. It won’t feel like my birthday even to me. Just another day of trying to shove my taped-up right eye in front of Debbie Breen and getting her to ask me about it.
Then it will start again when I get home from school.
There will be cards from all three sets of grandparents. The grandmothers, actually. They’re the ones that remember. The cards will each have $2. My mother will say, “Did you bother to read the card?”
My father’s card will come a couple days late. It will be a funny one, and it will have a homemade coupon for the present he’s going to give me when I see him next.
And sooner or later, sooner or later my mother will say what she’s been trying out on me for the last year or so: “Well Jason, this is the day I’ve been telling you about. Starting now you’re going to start pulling away from your mother. The little boy who used to kiss me and bring me dandelions won’t even say goodbye now when he leaves for school. He’ll be ashamed to be seen with me. He’ll forget to give me Mother’s Day cards.”
And Ham will say, “How’s it feel to be a rotten teenager, Jason old boy?”
And then the worst part: Everybody (except Cootyhead of course) singing “Happy Birthday.”
And then the best part: the presents. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t go through the whole mess.
What none of these grownups know is, I’ve been thinking about thirteen for a couple weeks now. Getting a head start, sort of. I keep remembering this dumb thing Ham said when we were at the mall. Richie came along with us. It happened when me and Richie were at the big gusher water fountain, the one you throw pennies into. We were just sitting at the edge part, eating ice cream cones and rolling pennies back and forth to each other. If your penny veered off into the pool, you lost a point.
Then all of a sudden there’s Ham standing over us. I got the feeling he was there for an hour, just watching us with this weird grin on his face. When we look up he shakes his head like he’s sad and smiling at the same time and he says, “Hold on to it, boys. Life is never better than it is for a twelve-year-old boy. Right at this very moment, you may not know it, but you are living the best minutes of your whole life.” And then he walks away.
I don’t know what all that was supposed to mean, except he didn’t know what he was talking about when he said twelve is the perfect age. Can I drive a car? Can I buy whatever I want? Can I bounce a basketball in the house? Eat both chicken legs? Stay up late? Drink beer? (If I wanted to?) Have a BB gun? Get the sneakers I really want? Trip Cootyhead? Burp anytime? I could list about a million.
A couple days later I asked Richie when he was going to be thirteen.
“Next year,” he said. “May second. What about you?”
“October fifteenth.”
“Next year?”
“Nah. This.”
“Man, that’s almost here.”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna get more allowance?”
“Probably not.”
“Stay out later?”
“Definitely not.”
“Hey Jason,” he goes, “remember that stuff your stepfather said at the mall? Weird, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think twelve’s so great?”
“Twelve? Nah. I had enough of it. I’m getting out. You comin’?”
“Man, I wish I could.” He punched a tree. “Hey, think you’ll ever be thirty?”
“That’s dumb,” I said. “Yeah. If I don’t get hit by a truck.”
“No, no. I mean, I know you’ll be thirty, someday, but I mean”—he was grunting trying to squeeze out the words—“you know it and you don’t know it. Know what I mean?”
I knew exactly what he meant. “You know it in your head, but you can’t believe it’s really gonna happen.”
“Yeah, yeah!”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I mean, I can’t even believe I’m ever gonna be twenty.”
“I got news for ya,” I told him.
“What?”
“I’m never gonna die.”
We were standing at Eagle Road, where the cars go by pretty good. I stepped off the curb. (I remembered Ham saying once, when we almost hit some kids on bikes without reflectors: “They think they’re invincible. They actually believe they cannot be hit by a car.”)
Richie nodded. “Yeah, I know—”
“No,” I said. “I’m serious. Just think about it.” I turned to him. I had to look up since he was still on the curb. “Most people died because they made some mistake. Like they ate too much cold cuts and got cancer. Or they didn’t exercise and they got a heart attack.”
“Or they didn’t be careful crossing the street.”
“Or they didn’t lay down flat when there’s lightning.”
“Or they went swimming with sharks around.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “See what I mean?”
“Or they left the car running in the garage.”
“Right.”
“Or they parachuted into a volcano.”
I knuckled his forehead. “Right. Right. Now cool it.”
“So what about old age?” he goes.
“What about it? Know what old age is?”
“What?”
“It’s hardening of the arteries,” I told him. “That’s all. And not everybody gets it. That’s the one thing you have to be lucky about. If hardening of the arteries misses you, and you don’t make any of those dumb mistakes”—I stepped back up onto the curb—“there’s no telling how long you can live.” I let that sink in. Then I said, “Ever hear of Mathusah?”
“Who?”
“Mathusah. He’s a guy in the Bible. Know how long he lived?”
“How?”
“Nine hundred and sixty-nine years. Bay-beee.”
“Man!” he goes. “That’s true?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s in the Bible. Look: there was no cancer then, right? No cold cuts. No cigarettes—”
“No asbestos.”
“Right.”
“No fumes.”
“Right right right. No alotta things. No cars to run you over. No airplanes crashing. The only mistake you could make was let yourself get caught in a war.”
“Or go to sleep right where some camel was ready to take a shit.”
I cracked up. “Right! Stop!”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s not the Bible now.”
I said, “Ever hear of the guy down Florida?”
“What guy?”
“Some slave. Well, he’s not a slave now. He used to be. A black guy. He lives in Florida.”
“What about him?”
“What about him is, the dude is a hundred and thirty years old, that’s all.” Richie whistled. “Yeah, that??
?s right. And they think he might even be older than that. Because they can’t find his birth certificate.”
“What’s he do?”
“I don’t know. Hangs around, I guess. They tricked him to get him out of Africa.”
“Wha’d they do?”
“They told him there’s pancake trees in America.”
His eyes get wide. “Ain’t there?” he goes.
I punched him. “You wanna talk or not?”
“So, he believed it?”
“Yeah. He was just a kid then.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s living so long,” Richie said. “He’s so dumb.”
We walked up to the light and waited for green. “Well anyway,” I said, “all I’m saying is, this guy’s a hundred and thirty years old, and if he can do it, I can do it.”
Richie poked me. “Yeah, but you said you weren’t gonna die at all. You were gonna live forever. That’s what you said.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I said it. Look: what’s the difference between a hundred and thirty years and forever, anyway? Huh? You can’t even believe you’re ever gonna hit twenty. I’m telling ya—” The light was green. We crossed. “When I grow up I’m gonna start being careful: no mistakes, no hardening of the arteries, knock on wood”—I knocked on his head—“before you know it I’ll be at a hundred and thirty. And then, who knows? Look at Mathusah. Nine hundred and sixty-nine. I’m telling ya, once you get past the first fifty or hundred years, you got it knocked!”
HAYRIDES
“GOIN TO THE HAYRIDE?” I ASKED RICHIE.
“I don’t know. You?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s all everybody was talking about. It was just for the seventh-graders, and it was going to be up at this place called Gwendolyn Orchards.
Richie grinned. “You’re goin’.”
“That so?”
“Yeah. You’re goin’.”
“Who says?”
“Me.”
“How do you know if I don’t even know? You turn into a mind-reader all of a sudden?”
“Nope.”
“So?”
“So?”
“So, how do you know, fishfart?”
“Because somebody you know’s goin’.”
My face was getting warm. I stared at our bus, which was just pulling up. “Yeah? Who?”