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he also couldn’t help feeling
like he’d been thrown under a bus. In his calls home throughout the season, he’d
had inklings that Mama wasn’t happy with Crocker, but he hadn’t faced both
barrels yet. Merry Christmas, ho-ho-freakin’-ho , he thought, biting off
the head of a gingerbread man.
    Mama had only paused to reload. “And
if that’s not bad enough... No. No, this is even worse. They brought in Ryan
Hutchinson? And what in God’s name was he thinking of, going to Crocker?
After Jimmy Givens ruined your chances at State, that Hutchinson kid could’ve
written his own ticket. You can’t tell me he couldn’t get a better deal from ‘Bama
or TCU. Or even Georgia, if it came to that. This situation with Hutchinson
stinks of conspiracy. Or lunacy. Recruit you both and let you fight to the
death? It makes no sense whatsoever. For a supposedly elite school, they’re a
bunch of idiots.”
    She never raised her voice. That
was not her style. She simply spoke as if everything she said was so obvious
and true that everyone in the world believed it, and there could be no
rebuttal. Sometimes Erick was up for the challenge -- he loved using logic to
undermine her linchpin arguments -- but not today. It wasn’t that she was right
this time, but she wasn’t wrong, either.
    Not entirely. She was wrong about
Terrence Duran. She hadn’t seen him in the Oregon game, and damn, if only he’d
had the team around him to back him up that day. No offense to his teammates,
but they simply hadn’t played on his level. And she hadn’t seen Duran against
Rockridge, when he had had the team with him.
    But what could he say about Ryan
Hutchinson? Nothing. He had learned in middle school what happened when the
quarterback didn’t support his players. You didn’t get a good team out of trash-talk
and petty rivalries. The only person he wished he could talk to about Ryan was
Ryan himself, and he knew that was never going to happen. Ryan hated him in
every way possible, he’d made that explicitly clear in private. And it was to
Ryan’s credit -- as little credit as he had around the team these days -- that
he kept his hatred hidden in public.
    Erick, for his part, didn’t hate
Ryan but couldn’t understand him. His overriding emotion when it came to Ryan
was frustration. How could the best high school quarterback in Texas turn up
for college ball and blow it so consistently? He didn’t shine in training camp?
Fine. College jitters. But in practice, by now, he should be dazzling everyone,
and there was no dazzle. Ryan on his best days was barely as good as Duran on
his worst days, and the tragedy of it was Erick knew Ryan had it in him.
He knew what Ryan was capable of. And was utterly disappointed that Ryan kept
proving him wrong.
    So the best he could answer his
mother with on Christmas morning was to grab another gingerbread cookie and
excuse himself from the table to go out for a walk.
    The air was crisp and cold, and
there was a sprinkling of snow on the ground. Erick didn’t know the
neighborhood well. His father had accepted a job as athletic director of a
state college in Virginia just before Erick’s senior year. To finish high
school and stay with his team, Erick had lived with his grandmother in Dallas,
and Mama had driven out to watch him play a few times. A hellishly long drive,
but she’d said she made the most of it listening to audiobooks.
    It was very strange to spend
Christmas in a house that was his parents’ but not his. Strange to sleep in the
guest bedroom, devoid of any trophies and team photos; those were all proudly
displayed in the den downstairs, where they were public and didn’t belong to
him anymore. Strange to be away from Crocker for his first break and not see
any of his friends from high school. The strangeness of it all turned his
thoughts back to familiarity -- Crocker football -- as he walked along the
curving, sloped road, next to barren trees and sleeping houses.
    Damn. Mama had put