Free 0062120085. (C) by Chris Rylander

the pad. It barely even moved.
    “Pathetic!” Tall Jensen shouted. “Next!”
    He blew his whistle again, and the next kid tried. When he hit the pad, instead of the pad moving back on its springs, the kid bounced off it and fell back onto his butt like the pad was made of bouncy-ball rubber.
    Tall Jensen shook his head in defeat. “That’s it, ladies, give me three laps around the goalposts, end to end.” The players groaned in unison and started jogging toward the nearest goalpost.
    I approached Tall Jensen, still not entirely sure what I was going to say.
    “Can I help you?” he asked.
    “Oh, I just wanted to check out practice,” I said. “See what it’s like. I might try out next year.”
    Tall Jensen nodded and turned his head to watch theseven players he’d been yelling at run the first lap. Some of the other players, who were in several groups with a few other coaches, pointed and laughed at their teammates as they ran by.
    “Yeah, well, I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said.
    I shrugged.
    “What position?”
    “Huh?” I said.
    “If you played, what position do you think you’d like?” Tall Jensen looked at me from head to toe.
    I’d never really thought about that before. I wasn’t really into sports that much. I mean, I used to play pretty much all of them when I was little because that’s what all little kids do around here, but none of them quite stuck once I got older. Spending my free time planning pranks was always more fun and exciting to me than winning some pointless game that tens of millions of other kids were also winning or losing all across the country. In fact, I only knew the names of a few positions in football.
    “Uh, quarterback, I guess,” I said.
    Tall Jensen laughed and shook his head.
    “That’s what they all say. Which is funny since only one kid can play that position. You don’t look like a quarterback, though—I’ll say that much. Maybe a cornerback.”
    I didn’t really know what a cornerback was, but I suddenly had this image of me wearing football equipment and huddling in a corner somewhere.
    “Well, people don’t always look like what they actually are,” I said. “Like, say, teachers. Sometimes teachers actually look like teachers, and other times they look like secret agents or spies only posing as teachers. Or vice versa. You know what I mean?”
    Tall Jensen squinted at me and then picked something out of his ear, before obnoxiously hawking up a loogie and spitting it into the grass near his feet.
    Gross.
    “What are you talking about, kid?” he said.
    The way he’d been looking at me had changed. Instead of looking at me as a potential cornerback, now he was looking at me like he might want to refer me to the state mental institution in Jamestown.
    “I just meant that sometimes people aren’t what they seem,” I said.
    “Yeah,” he said slowly.
    Then we just looked at each other for a moment. A sort of uncomfortable silence passed, during which I debated how to bring up the package specifically.
    “Yeah,” he said again. “Maybe you are more of a widereceiver type. Can you catch?”
    I nodded.
    He walked over to a mesh bag with some footballs in it and took one out. He gave me a single head nod and then threw it at me. I caught it pretty easily. Just because I wasn’t into sports didn’t mean I wasn’t coordinated enough to catch a ball.
    He held up his hands for me to throw it back.
    I hesitated. Throwing a football was another matter entirely. It was something I hadn’t really done much outside of gym class. I gripped it like I remembered and threw. It came out of my hand like a duck missing both a wing and a brain. Still, it floated its way close enough to Tall Jensen for him to jog a few steps and make the catch.
    “You want to be a quarterback?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
    “Yeah, well, I guess I just like to deliver stuff. You know, footballs, pizzas, secret packages with sensitive information, whatever,” I said.