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talking about our preparation for the State Cup, and I zoned out.
    â€œKevin, eye contact is not an option. It’s mandatory.” Coach gave me the eye and I thought he was going to get mad, but he didn’t. Police sirens sounded in the distance, and a few kids instantly looked in my direction. That pissed me off.
    â€œI think we can go pretty far this year as a team, but our midfield needs to get their act together. We can’t just have good defense and forwards, ’cause the ball can’t just magically go from one end to the other without going through the midfield.”
    Coach Hill had played professionally but had suffered a career-ending injury. He didn’t like to talk about it, though. I wondered if it was hard, watching us play, while he walked with a limp. I heard he had been in a car accident. Now he was heavy, mostly bald, and wore a small goatee that made him look more like a pro wrestler than a soccer player.
    We split our team up and played an eight-against-eight game at practices. We always started practice with one drill that Coach Hill thought was key. It was a mix of conditioning and dribbling. This was the part of the practice where guys regularly puked.
    â€œYou know what?” Coach Hill said after we completed the drill and guys were huffing and puffing on the ground. “I think we need to do that drill again. I didn’t like the enthusiasm,” he said, chuckling.
    â€œFrom the beginning?” I groaned.
    â€œNo, first we’re going to do the middle, then move to the beginning and then the end,” Coach said sarcastically.
    â€œThat’s what I thought,” I mumbled.
    â€œOf course from the beginning,” Coach Hill yelled. “And Kevin, you can do it twice more. Let’s go!”
    That was Coach Hill for you. I guess you had to learn not to take him personally, but it was hard.
    Coach Hill felt that most drills were a waste of time. He said the only way we were going to get better was to play games. “How do you think the guys from Latin America got good? They played in the streets with their friends every chance they got. By playing a game, you get conditioning, skills, and awareness.”
    Coach put me in at forward, and I knew he’d be keeping an eye on me. If I messed up at practice, he wouldn’t start me in the tournament.
    I remembered his words at our last practice, when I had come down the sideline and lost the ball.
    â€œKevin, it does no good if you can get to the goal but can’t finish. You can dribble up to the goal all you want, but until that ball hits the back of the net, we’re not going to win games.” I knew Coach was right.
    Ricky Sorin was Coach Hill’s favorite player, and he put him in at the other forward position on our side. Ricky was full of himself and had a lot of confidence. He walked around like he was better than everyone else, strolling in late to practice and making a big deal of texting on his cell phone as if everyone in the world was trying to reach him. He got away with things that I knew the other guys on the team would have been killed for. He was good but not that good.
    Someone passed the ball to me and I wasn’t paying attention. It went between my legs. “What was that, Kevin?” Coach Hill yelled. “Get your head in the game!” That was impossible.

Chapter 05
    The assistant DA called and said that he had spoken to McNamara and that it looked like he was going to press charges. If all McNamara needed was to get his car fixed, I knew that would have been a simple way out if Kevin’s mom had had the money to pay for it. I knew I could have probably raised the money from the guys at the precinct if it wasn’t outrageous, but I also knew that McNamara might have thought he had hit it rich.
    I called Kevin and asked him if he would meet me after school, and he said he would. I also asked Paul Gross, my partner, if he would look up McNamara to