Free Million-Dollar Throw by Mike Lupica Page A

just wanting to go home so that what was now officially an all-time, historically bad, epically bad Saturday could finally be over. “I know you’ve had a bad day, way worse than mine . . .”
    His dad, shaking his head, like he was locked in now, said, “Pressure is never having enough money and starting to think you’re never going to have enough again.”
    Then, as quickly as he had started, he was finished. He said he’d see Nate at home and started walking across the soccer fields toward the parking lot, Nate watching him until it was as if he had just walked off into the night.
    Nate stood there, not moving, feeling the same way he had after the ball had gone over LaDell’s head. No. Feeling even worse now.
    And Nate knew the real reason he was feeling this lousy was how sorry he was feeling for himself. Because of the way he’d complained about pressure. Whined about it, really. Because of the way his dad had called him out on it.
    He wondered what Abby would think of him right now. Abby who never complained, even facing the worst kind of pressure in the world.
    She came close sometimes. How could she not? She had come close today when she had admitted to Nate that she just plain stank at going blind.
    But Abby McCall, who was going blind, never felt as sorry for herself as Nate did right now at Coppo.
    It’s not Dad I don’t know today, he thought.
    It’s me.

CHAPTER 12
    N ate didn’t watch the Patriots-Jets game with his dad on Sunday even though his dad had the day off. Mostly because he was having as hard a time letting go of the things that had been said the night before as he was the Blair game.
    This was a time, he decided, when that sports amnesia Coach liked to talk about wasn’t working at all, when he couldn’t forget what he wanted to forget, and wasn’t even sure he really did want to.
    So instead of watching football the way he usually did on Sundays, he went over to Abby’s. Abby had a new toy she wanted in the worst way to show off that made it easier for her to read.
    “You have got to see this thing,” she said over the telephone, Nate glad that at least somebody sounded happy about something this weekend. “It is fresh to death .”
    It was called a knfb Mobile Reader, and as soon as Nate saw it, he thought it had to be some kind of trick, because it didn’t look like a “mobile reader” at all. It just looked like your regulation cell phone.
    It wasn’t a trick. And turned out to be a lot more than that to Abby, for whom reading and books had become more and more of a problem, especially when it came to homework assignments. Now here she was with a gadget that was like some kind of magic wand she could wave over books and have them talk to her.
    They went up to her room and she showed Nate how she could activate the Mobile Reader with the push of a single button. Then put the phone, which was really like a scanner, over the page of the book they were reading right now in English for Mr. Doherty, The Diary of Anne Frank .
    She handed the Mobile Reader to Nate.
    “Check it out, Brady,” she said, as proud as if she’d invented the thing herself, pressing another button. “It’s the ultimate in text messaging. From Anne Frank to me.”
    Nate put the magic gadget to his ear and heard the same page Abby had just scanned being read to him, only it wasn’t the voice of the girl Nate had imagined when he was reading, when he’d heard the story inside his head. It was a man.
    “This sounds like the voice of Batman on the cartoon show,” Nate said.
    “Missing the point, Brady,” she said. “Not an altogether uncommon experience for you.”
    “He’s talking about Anne hiding with her family,” Nate said. “But he sounds like he should be telling Alfred the butler to fire up the Batmobile. Even though the Batmobile that Bale drives in the movie is a lot cooler than the one in the TV show, frankly.”
    “And here I was afraid this thing was going to be wasted on you,” she