Football Champ Read Free

plane,” he said. “Did it wait?”
    “Maybe. Are you okay?”
    “That guy grabbed me,” Troy said, explaining what happened as they sprinted, hand in hand, through the terminal.
    His mom flashed him a grin when he told her about stomping on Peele’s instep and she said, “You did good.”
    As soon as Troy and his mom reached the security gate, a Delta supervisor in a red blazer and a TSA agent hustled them past the line and down several back hallways until they were outside in the foggy light of the tarmac. The smell of spent fuel turned Troy’s stomach, and he plugged his ears against the scream of jet engines as they dashed across the grooved concrete. The Delta 727 charter sat by itself, away from the terminals. The team buses were chugging away, adding black clouds of diesel to the stench.
    Troy pointed to the stairway being tugged free from the plane by a small tractor and said, “They’re leaving.”
    His mom said nothing but dragged him toward the tail of the plane, where a narrow set of stairs still remained, like a forgotten toilet paper streamer. They dashed for the stairs, but with about twenty feet to go, the steps began to slowly retract into the tail of the plane. Troy’s mom shouted and grabbed for the railing.
    A flight attendant hollered something at her from inside the plane above them.
    “We’re with the team!” Troy’s mom shouted.
    The flight attendant’s mouth dropped open. She pushed a different button and the stairs began to grind back down. Troy’s mom leaped up the steps, and he followed.
    “I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said. “I thought we were supposed to leave without you.”
    “The terminal was swamped,” Troy’s mom said.
    Seth was sitting only a couple seats from the back, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a white button-down shirt. The other players around him, big men who spilled over the edges of their seats and into the aisle, were already playing cards with one another. Seth set down his Coke and hustled into the galley, where Troy and his mom stood.
    “Peele thinks we’re stealing the other teams’ plays when they make their calls,” Troy said.
    “Peele probably thinks he can win himself a Pulitzer Prize if he breaks a story and convinces people we’re stealing plays,” Seth said. “And if he can somehow ruin me in the process, all the better for him. The guy hates me.”
    Troy said in a soft voice, “But we’re not cheating. Why can’t we just tell Peele it’s me? That I know the plays from watching what they did before. That there’s a pattern. Tell him it’s the same thing that every team does with computers when they study game film to learn the other teams’ tendencies? Tell him I’m like this football ‘genius.’”
    “He’ll laugh,” his mom said. “He’s not going to believe us.”
    “I can show him,” Troy said, his face growing warm. “No one believes me until I show them.”
    “Except that Mr. Langan wants this to stay quiet, remember?” Seth said. “That’s part of the deal. If he knows Peele is on to us, he might just shut the whole thing down.”
    The pilot’s voice came on the loudspeaker and told everyone to find their seats and buckle in because they were cleared for takeoff.
    Troy’s mom said, “I better get up there with the rest of the staff. I won’t say anything until we get a chance to talk more after we land.”
    Even though Troy’s mom and Seth were a serious couple, they tried not to let anyone on the team—players or front office people—know about it. Troy’s mom had gotten the job with the team on her own, before she even knew Seth, and she didn’t want people to think anything different. So she sat up with the rest of the team’s front office employees. Troy, however, as a “ball boy” and well liked by everyone, got to sit in the players’ section.
    “We can’t let Peele stop us,” Troy said to Seth after his mom had gone and the two of them sat in their own row, with an empty seat