eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
As the Pride of the Panthers, football star Austin Reid is a likable guy, good with the ladies. Lately though, he doesn't like his life -- or anything else -- so much. And the worst part is that he can't seem to figure out why.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061964565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2009 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Lexile: | 700L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 716 KB |
| Age Range: | 13 Years |
About the Author
A. M. Jenkins is the award-winning author of Damage, Beating heart: A Ghost Story, and the Printz Honor Book Repossessed, and lives in Benbrook, Texas, with three sons, two cats, and two dogs. Jenkins received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for night road.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
It's all yours. Your hands rise, fingers spread, ready to feel the firm scrape of the football, ready to pull it to you, ready to tuck it safely in.
But the ball bumbles against your fingertips. It lurches away, and that beautiful spiraling pass ends its life in a series of ugly bounces across the field.
Then there's just a football lying untended on the grass, just that -- and your empty hands.
When you open your eyes, the joyless feeling has already crawled onto your chest. The ceiling of your room presses you down into the mattress. The air settles in your lungs so heavy that it's almost too much trouble to breathe.
You kind of remember having some bad dreams, but you can't remember what they were. You just lie there, flat as the faded streak of afternoon sunlight that slants through the western window and impales your bed.
It's almost night. You're supposed to pick up Curtis and Dobie, so the three of you can go out. Your eyes move, skimming the room, trying to grab hold of anything that will break the suction of the bed.
A newspaper clipping tacked to the bulletin board. It's a black-and-white head shot of a guy in a football jersey, and underneath in bold print:
Austin Reid: Pride of the Parkersville Panthers
That picture smiled out of the sports section during last year's state semifinals. Now it smiles out over the bedroom.
It's you.
Shoot, that guy in the picture there wouldn't lie around on a Saturday night. He wouldn't think how it's too much trouble to breathe.
So you roll slowly to sit up. Get to your feet. Lumber down the hall, past your sister Becky's room, into thebathroom. Stop in front of the sink. Raise your head to look into the mirror.
The guy reflected back at you is the same one from the picture. Only he's not smiling. And he hasn't got a jersey on. Not even a shirt. But still, that is him -- dark hair, straight white teeth, a strong jawline, a nose that's not anything special.
You lean forward, looking into his eyes. They're blue.
What do other people see when they look into them -- those eyes in the mirror? Are they flat? Cold?
Or just nothing at all?
You look harder, trying to feel anything for him. You try to get him to smile, to see if that will help.
All you can get is a dull stare.
Your gaze slides down to your own hands. Even now they can almost feel the football bulleting into them. Your hands are big, strong. Like your dad's hands, you remember, even though he died when you were only three. That's what you remember about him; strong hands, lifting you up to sit on the bathroom counter.
You're staring at your hands and the memory runs, like a movie: the hiss of shaving cream escaping into a frothy white pile; the sharp clean scent. The soft light foam hanging off your cheeks like a floppy beard. The connection, you and your dad, both scraping tracks in white lather, you with a toy razor.
You raise your head to stare into the mirror again. Those three-year-old cheeks belonged to you. Not some guy in a picture. You.
You turn the faucet handle all the way to the right. Shoot, there's plenty of people who are abused or neglected, plenty of people who would probably love to have your particular life instead of their own. Your life that's a gift from God.
It'll be an outright sin if you don't snap out of feeling this way.
The water rushes down the drain, running from cold to hot, sounding so alive and urgent that it gives you the traction you need to climb out of this rut.
Okay. So you're going to clean up a little. Then you're going to put on a fresh shirt. Put on that smile, like clicking on a button.
And then you're going to go out.
You've parked your truck in the usual spot, past your country neighborhood with its patchwork of trailers, houses, small farms, and ranch land, out where the old railroad tracks disappear into dirt and tall grass. You and Curtis are sitting on the tailgate, but Dobie slouches long legged in the bed of the pickup, carelessly leaning against the wheel well next to the ice chest.
This is partying, Parkersville style.
Your beer bottle's empty now, but you don't move to throw it away.
“You all right?” Curtis asks, eyeing you as he takes another swig from his longneck. Curtis Hightower is your closest friend, your next-door neighbor, too -- not in the town sense, where neighbors live right in one another's back pockets without ever knowing each other, but in the country sense, where neighbors are like family, yet everybody's got a little elbow room.
“Yeah,” you say. You are all right, and what would you tell him, anyway?
Sometimes I can't face getting out of bed? Sometimes I feel so crushed I can't move? Like Curtis can do anything about it anyway. “I'm fine,” you add.
Dobie pats the ice chest. “Want another?”
“No thanks.”
Dobie looks at you for a moment, confused like a dog, like you didn't speak his particular brand of English. Then he nods. “It won't hurt to lay off for one night,” he says, as if to comfort you. “You drank enough at the lake last week to last you through a dry spell.”
“Hell, Austy's probably still getting over that one.” Curtis swings his legs idly, as relaxed looking as ever, but his dark eyes are sharp on you. He does that sometimes, his words dry and teasing, his eyes searching.
Tonight you think they might be searching for something Curtis feels but can't name. You swing your legs, too, your hands gripping the edge of the tailgate, trying to think of the right words to say. Curtis has a head-on, outspoken way of looking at things, and you don't particularly want him looking at you right now.
Damage. Copyright © by A. Jenkins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.