Free Million-Dollar Throw by Mike Lupica Page B

said. “You’re just not a gadget guy.”
    “I still can’t believe they can use a headset in football to send in plays to the quarterback,” he said.
    “This is my way of getting books sent in to me, ” she said. “Mr. Doherty says that I can use this in class when we do classroom reading and he wants us to write an instant synopsis when we’re done.”
    “It’s like your own audiobook,” Nate said.
    “I could have gotten Anne Frank as an audiobook,” Abby said. “But not all the books on our reading list are available as audio-books. This way, they’re all available.”
    “It’s cool, Abs, it really is. The coolest. Like you.”
    He made sure to sound excited because she was excited, like she’d gotten a surprise, a didn’t-even-ask-for-it present on Christmas. And Nate knew that the Mobile Reader now meant she wasn’t going to need the magnifying computer screen on her desk in English, something Mr. Doherty had discussed with Abby’s parents, something that would have been yet one more cause of embarrassment for her.
    “I know I’m turning into a special-needs kid,” she’d said to Nate. “I just hate when I have to advertise it.”
    “You know what’s going to happen, right?” Nate said. “All the other kids in class are going to want their own Mobile Readers. Total status deal. It’s going to be like you showed up with some kind of new iPhone that isn’t even in the stores yet.”
    Abby, her face serious now, said, “I need it, Brady. I was starting to fall seriously behind. That’s me, though, isn’t it? Getting good at falling. Down at football games, behind in school.”
    “Abs, you’re the smartest kid in our grade and everybody knows it. If you’re falling behind a little, it just means you’re leveling the playing field for everybody else.”
    “We both hate being behind,” she said.
    “Yeah,” he said.
    She cocked her head a little to the side, as if she’d heard something. More and more lately, Nate was starting to believe all the things he’d ever read or heard about people losing their eyesight and having their other senses become new and improved. More acute, that was the word people used to describe it. He was seeing it with Abby, with her hearing most of all, like it was superhero acute these days. If there was something even slightly off in Nate’s voice, no matter what they happened to be talking about, she jumped all over it.
    She could still see right through him, of course, no failing vision there.
    “You okay about yesterday’s game?”
    “Fine.”
    “What?”
    “ What what? I said I was fine.”
    “Something’s not fine today. Starting with the fact that you’re here instead of watching your guy.”
    “I was footballed out.”
    “On what planet?”
    “Really.”
    “You think you can fool the all-knowing, all-seeing Oz? Even if Oz needs reading gizmos now?”
    “Abs, I’m fine!”
    “Are not.”
    He grabbed the Mobile Reader out of her hand, started talking into it in his own deep Batman voice. “It turns out Nate Brodie did suffer a minor injury during yesterday’s Valley-Blair game,” he said, “but only to his ego.”
    “Did something happen after you left here yesterday?”
    Nate laughed now. Loudly. Not a sound he expected to be making today, but there it was. “I give,” he said, and told her about what had happened the night before.
    The things his dad had said.
    “Maybe that was just his way of saying ‘I give,’” Abby said when he was finished.
    “He sounded more beaten than I felt,” Nate said. “It’s why I was only mad at myself after. I must have sounded to him like the biggest whiner boy in the universe.”
    “Nope,” she said. “Not your style, Brady.”
    “Abs,” he said. “You know what you said yesterday about being no good at . . . what’s happening with your eyes?”
    She nodded, eyes right on him.
    “Well,” he said, “sometimes I’m really lousy at acting excited about making this throw when