Free Out of the Pocket by Bill Konigsberg

to begin with.
    If Austin had said what he’d said to stick up for me, then why was my stomach in knots?
    “You guys,” said Coach, his arms folded over his massive chest as he stood at the entrance to the shower room, standing next to Austin. He must have entered moments earlier.
    He looked at me and I felt naked, or actually more naked than naked, as if he could peer into my soul and see the things I didn’t want him to see. I was embarrassed, for all of us, myself included.
    If you’re gay, do you have to spend the rest of your life feeling bad every time guys joke around? Can you turn that part of your brain off? And how do you do it?
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    At dinner that evening, my mother entertained my father and me with stories about growing up in Birmingham, Alabama.
    As we passed around dishes of broccoli and pot roast, she told us about the time she put a cat into the oven, when she was nine, to see what would happen. My grandfather saved it from the heat after a few minutes, and told her to never, ever put another living thing in the oven.
    “And I didn’t,” she said, smiling and passing me the entrée,
    “until this here pot roast, today.”
    We all laughed. My mother’s sense of humor was cheesy, but I loved it anyway.
    My father seemed to be in a little better mood this evening. My dad owned his company, Framingham Refrigeration. They dealt in cooling products. The joke was that my father was successful in the 67
    field and therefore a “refrigerator magnate.” My mother coined the term one night, and it got us all laughing.
    “Refrigeration,” he had corrected, totally ruining the joke.
    My dad was usually funny, too, but lately he wasn’t like he used to be. When I was little we’d play tackle football in the living room, him on his knees and me standing up. Then, when I was about eight, we took it outside. We played one-on-one, and he taught me how to throw. And those games were great, and filled with jokes that would be repeated each time we played, like how he would pretend he was John Elway and if I sacked him Elway would be injured, and his replacement would be the Incredible Hulk, meaning suddenly my dad didn’t have to wait until I said “hike” to tackle me. I always knew the game was over when his tackles started getting more WWF and less football. He would tackle me, then pick me up by my feet and spin me around and it felt like I was fl ying.
    Then he became the boss of his own company, I got bigger than him, and we turned into more of a football-watching father and son.
    But my dad was still pretty cool.
    For a guy who sold cold air, anyway.
    Driving home after practice, I’d heard my name on the radio on KXIT, the sports talk-radio station here in Orange County. “This Framingham kid, I tell you, he’s a comer,” the radio guy said. “I watched him last week as he led Durango over Huntington Beach, and he’s probably the best high school signal caller in the area.
    Darned if he isn’t one of the finest QB prospects in the state right now.”
    That kind of talk used to make my day. Now it filled me with anxiety, and I wasn’t sure why.
    “They talked about me on KXIT today,” I said, dishing pot roast onto my plate.
    68
    My dad looked up at me. “What did they say?” he asked, a little of the old fire in his voice. I took a dinner roll and buttered it while I told him their exact words.
    He pushed a piece of pot roast on top of his mashed potatoes with a fork. “Did they mention what kind of school might recruit you?”
    I rolled my eyes.
    “No,” I said. I took a bite of the roll, which was perfect: crunchy on the outside, and hot and sweet and soft inside. I pointed to it and offered my mother a thumbs-up. She curtsied from her chair.
    “I wonder if you could wind up quarterbacking at Ohio State.”
    I loved my dad, but he really knew how to take praise and make it into something else. It’s like, tell him you’re a hot college prospect, and he’ll say, “Fine, but are you