Free The Blind Side by Michael Lewis Page A

the easy way. Or we can do it the hard way. Take your pick.”
That worked, sort of. She learned that he’d not laid eyes on his father in many years. He never had much to do with his grandmother, who was now gone. He had a sister but didn’t know where she was. His mother was, Leigh Anne surmised, an alcoholic. “But he never actually used the word ‘alcoholic.’ He let me say it and never corrected me. I didn’t know then, but Michael will let you believe what you want to believe.” After torturing him for a bit, she decided to leave him be. She’d had too much success getting what she wanted to pay much attention to temporary setbacks: it was only a matter of time before he’d tell her everything. “I knew that 103.5 FM was kind of a black station so I had that playing,” she said. “I didn’t want him thinking this was some charity thing and ‘oh poor, pitiful me.’ So I said that the Briarcrest basketball team needed its players looking spiffy and we were just going out to make sure that happened.”
If it were up to her, she would have driven him straight to Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren, but she realized it might make him feel uncomfortable.
“No offense, but where do you go to buy clothes?” she asked.
He mentioned a place—it was in a less affluent section of Memphis. Not the safest neighborhood. She set off in that direction, heading west.
“You okay going there?” he asked.
“I’m okay going there with you. You’re going to take care of me, right?”
“Right,” he said. She sensed a little shift in him. Sooner or later she’d break him. “I can talk to a wall,” she liked to say.
For the next couple of hours that’s just what she did. She was facing a new problem: trying to guess, from his body language, what a sixteen-year-old black child of the ghetto might wear to his new white Christian school. They arrived at the first of many Big and Tall shops and ran smack into another problem: nothing fit him! He wasn’t big or tall. He was big and tall. The selection of clothing into which he could painlessly squeeze himself was limited, and he reduced it by refusing to wear anything that wasn’t loose-fitting. For twenty minutes or so she pulled the biggest articles of clothing she could find off shelves and racks, without a comment from the boy.
“Michael!” she finally said. “You got to tell me if you like it or not. I cannot read your mind. Or we’ll be here till Christmas, with me trying to guess what you like.”
She pulled down the absolute biggest shirt she could find.
“I think that’s okay,” he said, at length. For him it counted as a soliloquy.
“No! Not okay! You need to love it! If you don’t love it in the store, you’ll never wear it once you get it home. The store is where you like it best.”
She pulled down a gargantuan brown and yellow Rugby shirt.
“I like that one,” he said.
She was five one, 115 pounds of blond hair, straight white teeth, and the most perfect pink dress. He was black, poor, and three times her size. Everyone—everyone—stared at them. And as they moved from shop to shop, the surroundings, and the attention, became more discomforting. At the final Big and Tall Shop on the border of what had just been pronounced, by the 2000 United States Census, the third poorest zip code in the country, Leigh Anne said, “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never been to this neighborhood.” And Big Mike finally spoke up. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got your back.”
Along the way she asked him more questions. “But of course they were the wrong questions,” she said later. She noticed little things about him, however, and in these were tiny clues. “I could tell he wasn’t used to being touched,” she said. “The first time I tried to touch him—he just freezes up.”
When they were finished shopping, he was heaped with packages and yet he insisted he wanted to take the bus home. (“I am not letting him ride the bus with all