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understand.

6
    KURT
    I n full pads and helmet, with autumn still feeling like summer, the players around me pant like sled dogs ten minutes into the tackle drills. The sun’s scorching and sweat’s running off me like rainwater but I ain’t winded like the others. Getting bigger, faster, stronger comes as natural to me as stuttering. When you got no money and home sucks, the free community gym and library are what’s to do besides watching TV, and Crud Bucket pretty much ruined TV for me. He loved it; loved drinking in front of it, loved talking back to it as he drained a twelve-pack, readying himself for one of us, rotating us to keep the bruising spread out.
    Back at the other place, I used to sneak over the neighborhood school’s fenced field and run bleachers. Or I’d run wind sprints on their track. But mostly I hit the weights. First time I ever tried it, I took to weight lifting. All I ever needed to know was that it made you bigger and stronger. And if you got big enough, you’d never suffer someone else’s temper ever again. No matter where the state shuffled me, I could always hunt down a weight room, stack the plates, and make all that iron rise again and again, muscles screaming with that final rep, me pushing even harder, imagining all the hurt I’d visit on Him when I finally—
    â€œBrodsky!” Coach Brigs barks, interrupting my favorite revenge fantasy. “You got cotton in your ears? I said I want you in on this drill. Need to see what my new fullback’s bringing to the table.” I nod, feel my helmet shift down on my forehead. “The play is twenty-one split,” Coach continues. “You fake the handoff from Scott and open a hole for Terrence coming up behind you. Full contact. Let’s see you create some space on the line.”
    â€œYes, sir!” I holler. On the field, behind a face mask, I hardly ever stutter. Gnawing on my mouth guard, I line up off quarterback’s left and glance over to make sure Terrence, the running back, is on my right.
    â€œStudblatz! Peters!” Coach barks over to the other side. “I just gave you the play. Won’t get any easier for a defense than that. I wanna see you two stuff this big ol’ sumbitch!”
    Scott Miller chomps out a hyena laugh. “Yeah,” he echoes in a way I don’t appreciate. “Stuff that ugly sumbitch!”
    I find the back of Jankowski, our offensive tackle. He looks bigger than he did in the locker room. Glad he’s on my side of the ball during real games. If he does his job right, creates daylight, then I won’t have to. But this is a drill and Coach wants me to make a statement on my own. Guess it’s his way of introducing me to the team.
    Something I learned in foster care is that power and size matter. So does toughness. All three are like math variables. Increasing any of them is a good thing if they’re on your side of the equation. Take Lamar, for instance. Not much size, not much power, but lots of toughness. He’d back down boys three years older than us just by clawing the air and spitting like a wildcat and telling them they’d lose an eye if they so much as touched us. No matter how bad he might have needed it, he kept his inhaler in his pocket until we were alone. Then, bent over, hands on his knees, wheezing hard but smiling like he’d just been handed the heavyweight title, he’d suck on his inhaler, look up at me, and shake his head. Boy, look at those feet. You gonna be huge. Big as an ox one day. Just you wait. If I had your size, I could rule the world. I’d show ol’ Crud where he could stick his thing . Lamar talked that way all the time, talked as if for all his toughness and my big feet there wasn’t a final variable neither one of us could ever match: cruelty.
    I look across the line and see Studblatz and Peters itching to double-team me now that they know the play, both grinning