Tracy got up, mumbled she was sorry, and left.
I apparently had never gotten through to her before about how much she’d hurt me. At the time I had bigger issues going on, like recovering from the accident, and my mom having cancer. I hadn’t realized until just now how much resentment I’d been carrying around about what she’d done.
Monday September 8
DURING ENGLISH, I WAS called to the office where I found Mom with Jeff Delahey, waiting for me. When I got there, Mr. Hicks, the athletic director, and Mr. Spooner, the school district’s attorney, invited us into Mr. Hicks’ office. They had my steroid-test results.
“David’s results are the last to be opened. To this point, no one has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs,” Mr. Spooner told us.
He handed the envelope to my mom. She took her time so as not to mess up the envelope while opening it. I personally would have ripped it open, but not Mom. She pulled out the test results and read them. Her face fell, and my stomach tightened up in a knot. Everyone in the room could tell it was bad news. She handed the report to Jeff to read. He read it, and then folded it in half, and sighed. We were going to have to forfeit the game, and I was out of football. I was stunned.
Coach Hope entered the office, and the look on everyone’s faces caused his shoulders to sag. To hell with this. I grabbed the test result out of Jeff’s hand and read it.
It said I had passed with flying colors. I wadded the paper up and threw it at Jeff, who burst out laughing. It seems he and my mom pulled one over on me. Mr. Hicks was confused.
“Did you pass or not?” he asked.
“I passed. We play Washington on Wednesday,” I told them.
I wasn’t expecting Coach Hope to pick me up like a rag doll and swing me around. He was happier than I was. I guess he needed some good news. I sent a text to Lily to tell her we had all tested clean.
I also sent a text to the Washington guys who went with us to the Kentucky camp. I still had their contact info. I sent them a blast: ‘Game is on, Boys.’
Lily had allowed me to have the password to my Twitter account again. I was on probation after the tweets about Adrienne having my alien baby and the bad Photoshop picture of her with a baby bump. Lily told me if I tweeted anything like that again, she would lock me out until I graduated. I tweeted out the results to the rest of the world.
AT LUNCH, I FOUND ONE of the freshman football players sitting at our table with Kylie: Nick Rake. Nick was one of the guys who had some real potential. I worked with him to get him started learning how to play cornerback. He had plenty of speed. He just needed to get stronger Because as it was, receivers could wrestle the ball away from him. He looked nervous. I would’ve been too if I’d been thrown into the deep end the second week of high school.
“Hey, Nick. I see you guys put a beating on Washington Saturday,” I said.
Our freshman team had won 21–10. The JV squad had lost 7–0. Unfortunately, Nick had given up the touchdown in the freshman game.
“Yeah, but I had a bad game,” he said.
“You did fine. Playing cornerback, you’re going to get burned sometimes. Except for that one play, you did well.”
“You came to our game?” he asked, looking surprised.
“Of course I did.”
He slumped into his seat.
“Then you saw it,” he stated.
“Yep, you were peeking into the backfield instead of keeping your eyes on the receiver. That’s a hard habit to break, once it gets started, so work on it in practice. And I wasn’t hearing was your teammates calling ‘ball’ when it was in the air. You guys need to help each other out,” I coached him.
“Yes, sir,” he said, smirking at me.
The freshmen had started calling me that in practice as if I was one of their coaches. They knew I hated it. I just glared at him. Emma came up while I was giving Nick the eye and thought I was being protective like I had been with Ed and Faith.
“David, you can’t date all of us at once,” she scolded me.
I looked at Kylie and Nick, and they blushed, so I got a mock scowl on my face.
“When were you going to tell me we were breaking up?” I asked Kylie.
Nick went pale. The rest of the cheerleaders had shown up when I asked that question. They all stared at Kylie. I thought she was going to cry, so I winked at her. She slugged me in my arm.
“You are such a bully sometimes.”
I just reached over, put her in a headlock, and gave her a noogie. She had a lopsided grin on her face when I let her go. Nick wasn’t quite sure if I was serious or not. I let him stew in his self-doubt.
I INVITED ALAN, JEFF, Gina and Lily to my place after school. I had a project I wanted their help with.
“I have an idea for helping the football team. I think this could be big if we do it right,” I started as I pulled out a packet for each of them. It had the forms Kentucky used to evaluate film.
“When I went to Kentucky, they taught us a systematic way to view game film. This got me thinking that we could make this more dynamic. What if we automated this, and put a database behind it?” I asked.
I could see Alan and Jeff deep in thought. Then Gina shocked us all.
“You say you’re using this to watch game film. What if you could link the video to each play, so you could have the captured data and the video feed?”
“You know, I saw on ESPN they had a touch-screen TV where they could click on an icon like an arrow with a line. They would touch a player and then use the graphic to show where he would go. They also had icons to show how the blocking was done,” Jeff added.
“Could we use the touch-screen graphics, and turn a tablet into a playbook?” I asked.
From there the ideas started flying. We spent over an hour brainstorming. Lily brought us back to reality.
“Who’s this for, and how do we make money doing it?”
“You know what? She’s right. We could make money doing this, big money!” I said with a huge smile. “We need to do two things. The first is to figure out what the final product might end up being. Knowing that will dictate how we build it. The second is we need to break it into manageable parts. I’d like to see the game film review basics worked on first. I could use that part now.”
Jeff jumped in.
“This needs to be cloud-based. We can make more money by doing this as a subscription service than we can selling it as a one-time package. Look at what they’re doing with Office 365. Instead of spending several hundred dollars for software, you spend ten bucks a month and get automatic upgrades.
“We also need to take advantage of touch-screen technology. I can see this having implications beyond football. We could do basketball, baseball and soccer, just off the top of my head,” Jeff told us.
“Before we waste a lot of time, shouldn’t we see if there’s already software out there that does what we need?” Gina asked.
“I’ll look into it,” Alan offered.
I felt good that we had the start of an idea.
Chapter 2 – Droid
Wednesday September 10
I woke early and went for a long run. It was going to be a hot day, as it was already warm out. As I ran through the neighborhood, there were signs of people starting to stir for their day. I heard someone yell “Go Bulldogs!” I turned to see one of my neighbors getting their paper, waved and kept running.
I felt good, knowing the big day was finally here. After all the drama, it was nice to know it was behind us. I could now focus on what I loved: football. Coach Hope, Mike and I had shown the other players how to watch game film. We’d learned a lot at the Kentucky Camp. I reviewed Washington’s formations as I ran. I was fixing my keys in my head, so I could recognize the defenses quicker. I then switched to when I played defense and remembered what they ran out of each formation.