QB 1 Read Free

man.”
    Nate, who looked like the old Hall-of-Fame player Warren Sapp, everything about him big, starting with his smile, said, “My mama thinks I’m a dreamer, too!”
    Nate Collins was six four and two hundred and sixty pounds already. And was still growing, both up and out. By next year, when some of the other guys on the O-line had graduated, Jake was sure they were going to move Nate over to left tackle, the
Blind Side
position on the line, the glamour position, the one where offensive linemen made the biggest money in the pros.
    In his spare time, he was also the biggest cheerleader at Granger High.
    For Jake, that is.
    From the time they’d started playing together when they were in grade school, Nate had always had way more confidence in Jake as a quarterback than Jake had in himself.
    It wasn’t that Jake didn’t think he had talent; he knew he did, had an ability to get the guys around him to play better, a knack for figuring out a way to make a play and win a game. He definitely had the brains for the position, grades in the classroom being the one shadow Jake had no trouble emerging from. He was a straight-A student. And it was his brains that made him a realist. He knew already that he just wasn’t going to be the player his dad had been before him, certainly wasn’t going to be the player his big brother had been.
    He had talent, just not
Cullen
talent, at least not that he’d noticed so far in his young life.
    â€œI know you get tired of hearing this,” Nate said. “But you got that magic in you.”
    â€œHere we go with the magic,” Jake said. “You brag on me like I’m Harry Potter trying to run a spread offense. Except we both know if my last name wasn’t Cullen, I’d be lucky to get time on special teams this season.”
    â€œYou got to show Coach, every time you can, that when you absolutely got to make a play, you do,” Nate said. “Even if it isn’t always as pretty as, say, Sarah Rayburn.”
    â€œAsk you something?” Jake said. “You think you could ever go one whole conversation without mentioning her?”
    â€œUnlikely,” Nate said. “It’s too much fun for me, the way you’re crushin’ on her.”
    â€œReally? Hadn’t noticed.”
    â€œYou just got to approach this with a better attitude,” Nate said.
    â€œSarah or football?”
    â€œFootball, least for now. Can’t let you just give up before the season begins, assume there’s no way for you to move up this season.”
    â€œYou’ve got enough attitude for both of us,” Jake said. “I’m just being honest, is all.”
    â€œYou know what the problem really is?” Nate said. “You’re the one needs to be more of a dreamer.”
    Jake sighed. Different day, same song. Nate was always giving him pep talks like this, on the field and in the locker room, at his house or Jake’s. Sounding like Jake’s mom sometimes.
    But never his dad.
    Troy Cullen kept telling his youngest son to just look at this season as a “learning experience.”
    And Jake would think to himself,
Yeah, learn how to be the Cullen standing next to Coach McCoy while somebody else plays quarterback for good ol’ Granger High.
Wyatt had started as a freshman, of course, becoming the first guy to ever be a four-year starter at quarterback for the Granger Cowboys—something even their dad hadn’t done. And yet Jake was already bigger than Wyatt, who stopped growing at six two. Jake? He at fourteen was already a skinny six three, on his way to what the doctors said would be six five when he finally stopped growing.
    Somehow, though, in all the important ways, Wyatt Cullen was all growed up, as they said in Granger, when
he
was fourteen, as if he had already been an upperclassman when he was a high school freshman.
    Jake was different, in so many ways he’d lost count. He had