Over the End Line Read Free Page A

single mom in this rich town, much of the time feeling way out of place. I think she knows I feel like this—my mom kind of reads me really well. Who knows? Maybe she feels the same way.
    My mom finished cleaning the floor. She walked in from the kitchen and leaned against the doorway. She had another glass of wine in her hand.
    "Should I leave the outside lights on?" she asked.
    "No."
    "Not going out?"
    I shook my head.
    "Where's Kyle?"
    "Don't know."
    I could've told her Kyle was partying at the circle, but she wouldn't have known what or where the circle was, and then I'd have to explain it all. Then she wouldn't have understood why I wasn't there, too, and I'd have to explain that as well. It's just easier to let her think her son is this really happy kid who's friends with all the popular people at school.
    "Everything okay?" she asked.
    "Yeah."
    "You sure?"
    "Yeah."
    "I don't know..." she said. It seemed she was trying to get at something. "The two of you have been friends a long time."
    "Ma, I'm fine. Kyle's fine. We're all fine." I sank down in the couch and stared at the television.
    Kyle and I had been close since the day the Saint-Claires moved in across the street. As kids, we played capture-the-flag until midnight in the summer. Often I stayed at the Saint-Claires' shore house in Brielle. We built snow forts in the winter and played ice hockey on North Pond when the flag was up. Kyle would sleep over at my house and I'd sleep over at his. We grew up catching lightning bugs, colds, Yankee-Red Sox games, and a fist fight or two. Or three. We were best friends, and best friendships endured anything. At least I thought.
    Then things changed. I don't think my mom had a clue about that. Kyle and I trained together for the upcoming varsity season and, when school started, I'd get a ride from him on most mornings. But that was it. The truth was, ever since seventh grade, we lived different lives at Millburn. I sometimes wondered what would've happened to me if I'd never quit baseball to concentrate on soccer. I was going to be a soccer star, I'd convinced myself. But it never happened, and that decision was now long in the past.
    "My son," my mom said, with a thoughtful smile, "a senior in high school."
    I frowned. "It's no big deal."
    "You'll be the talk of the school."
    "Not likely."
    People at Millburn saw only what they wanted to see. If they wanted to think you were cool, then you were cool. Or smart. Or an athlete. Or hot. If they wanted to think you were a nobody, then you were that, regardless of how you saw yourself. Some thought my friendship with Kyle was a fraud, that he had taken pity on me. Others believed I had dirt on Kyle and that he only maintained the façade of a friendship in return for my silence. But no one knew the real me. No one could get inside my head. Of course, that didn't matter. What the people in my class thought of me was my reality. And, in the end, my reality was that I couldn't go with Kyle to the circle to hang out with the crowd—people I've lived in the same town with all my life—because of the ladder. Sure, I was about to be a senior. Sure, I should've felt something special. But I didn't.
    "It'll be the time of your life," my mom said, as if she were imparting wisdom for the ages.
    "And you know this how?" I said.
    She shook her head. "You don't think I was a high school senior once?"
    "Way back when," I said with a grin.
    "It wasn't
that
long ago, mister," she said. "High school is high school. Senior years are special. You'll see what I mean."
    I rolled my eyes. "Whatever."
    The Tuesday after Labor Day, the sun would come up, I'd dress, get a ride, then walk in the Millburn High main entrance as I had hundreds of times as a sophomore and junior, as I had as a seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grader at the junior high. Senior year would be just another in a long chain of endless years of academic endurance. There'd be different teachers, different classrooms, different