It was just the cost of this one signed football.
When he told his mom and dad about it, they told him that if he was willing to save up, if it was the present he wanted the most, they would pay half. It would be a way of earning something off the field the way he always had on it. Or earning a good grade in school, which they always told him should mean even more to him, because they all knew school came harder to him.
And his parents had stayed with the promise even though things were different now in their house than they had been when he’d finished sixth grade.
Everything
was different now that his dad was working two jobs after losing the only one Nate had ever known him to have, at the big commercial real estate company he used to work for.
His mom had gone back to work, too.
“You don’t have to do this,” Nate had said to his dad one day. “I can wait and save up the whole five hundred myself, even if it does take longer.”
“Actually, I have to do this more than ever.”
“I don’t understand,” Nate said.
“A promise is a promise,” his dad had said, “even if it’s one you make only to yourself.”
For all Nate knew, his parents had been saving up for the Brady ball right along with him, waiting for the day when there was finally enough money in the top drawer of his desk to make the trip to SportStuff he’d been dreaming about for what seemed like forever.
SportStuff had become one of the biggest sporting goods chains in New England. They didn’t just sell the usual “stuff,” sneakers and spikes and jerseys and T-shirts, basketballs and hockey sticks and gloves and bats and balls. The thing that set SportStuff apart was a section of every store known as “The Hall”—as in Hall of Fame. That’s where the coolest stuff in the place really was.
The collectibles, all the signed balls and jerseys and memorabilia, all authentic. Signed sneakers, some of them looking as big as a bathtub to Nate. Baseball and football cards, some real old, some
real
valuable, perfectly preserved behind or under glass.
But nothing was more valuable, at least to Nate’s eyes, than the Brady ball.
Tom Brady had been Nate’s guy from the time Nate first started playing organized football in the fourth grade and started watching pro football games with his dad on Sunday afternoons. In fact, the first game Nate really remembered watching—or caring about—was Brady’s first Super Bowl against the St. Louis Rams. That was the day he’d driven the Patriots down the field at the end of the game even though he was basically a rookie. Brady had driven them down the field against a Rams team Nate knew from his dad was a two-touchdown favorite, got them close enough to the end zone that Adam Vinatieri could do something he would do again a few years later for the Patriots: kick a field goal to win the Super Bowl as time ran out.
Vinatieri got to make that end-of-game kick again because Brady drove the Patriots down the field
again
in Super Bowl XXXVIII, this time against the Carolina Panthers.
The first time, though, was the one Nate knew he would always remember best. He didn’t understand everything that was happening in the game, didn’t understand everything the announcers were saying, no matter how patient his dad had been explaining things. Nate just understood in his heart that there was magic in the room that night, not just because he was getting to stay up later than he ever had to watch the ending of a game, but because he was
sharing
this night and this ending and this one amazing football game with his dad.
Ever since there had been the same kind of magic for Nate every time he watched Brady play quarterback for the Patriots. There was that kind of magic even after Brady hurt his knee and lost that time from the prime of his career. The two of them had shared something important with that first Super Bowl, even if Tom Brady had never known it.
“Anybody can do it when the pressure’s not on,” his dad would say when Brady had turned into Two-Minute Tom again. “It’s when you’re
under
pressure, when the whole world’s looking at you and your teammates are looking
to
you, that’s the measure of a champion in sports.”
Now, that day in September at SportStuff, Nate was going to hand over his money and take home the Brady ball and put it in the case his mom had bought for him on his birthday, the one that was waiting for him back in his room on his desk.
He had called the store right before they made the drive over, just to make sure that he hadn’t miscalculated on the tax. His mom was carrying the envelope with the money in it in her purse. And there the ball was when they got to the store, right where it always was, directly behind the cash register in The Hall, high up on a shelf between a Kevin Garnett basketball and a bat signed by both David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez of the Red Sox.
“I’d like to buy the Brady ball, please,” Nate said, pointing up at it.
The man said, “Sorry, kid, not for sale.”
But he must’ve seen what happened to Nate then, Nate actually feeling his legs buckle, as if somebody had brought him down from behind in the open field. So right away the man said, “Sorry. Bad joke.”
Abby, standing next to Nate, said, “Just a
bad
joke? You’re being way too easy on yourself, Mister.”
The man laughed. “Who’s she, your bodyguard?”
And Nate had said, “Something like that. Just a lot tougher.”
It was when the ball was in Nate’s hands, a ball that Brady had to have handled if only long enough to sign it with a Sharpie, that Abby had noticed the entry forms.
The man was still counting out the money at the time. While he did, Abby got right up on top of the little poster on the counter and started reading out loud. That was how she and Nate found out that SportStuff was sponsoring a promotion called “The SportStuff Million-Dollar Throw.”
The winner of the contest was going to get the chance to make one throw—from thirty yards away, through a twenty-inch hole—at halftime of the Patriots’ Thanksgiving night game against the Colts.
Whoever made the throw would be handed a check for one million dollars.
The poster showed a picture of the Patriots’ home stadium, Gillette Stadium. At midfield, they’d set up a billboard with “SportStuff ” written in gigantic letters across it.
Only the place in the middle where the two words should have connected was empty. That’s where somebody would try to put the million-dollar throw on Thanksgiving night.
Abby was right on top of the poster now, squinting, somehow managing to read the contest rules.
Nate said, “What do you have to do, go through some kind of tournament like you do in Pass, Punt and Kick?”
“Nope,” she said.
Then to the man she said, “Borrow a pen, please?”
“What are you doing?” Nate said.
“Getting a pen for you to sign up with.”
“Right.”
Abby looked at him, smiling her best smile, and said, “You could make a throw like that with your eyes closed, Brady.”
Always the eyes with her. Her favorite expression, one she used all the time, was about the eyes being the window to the soul. Nate wasn’t sure he totally got that one, but he tried to act like he did, even used it himself sometimes, never wanting Abby to think he was a step slow keeping up with her in what he called “the smart world.”
“I’m not signing up,” he said.
“Yeah, Brady, you are,” she said. “It says right here that all you have to do to qualify is make a purchase of more than five hundred dollars, which I believe you’ve just done. And be thirteen or older. There it is, game, set, match.”
The man behind the counter said, “But if you’re under the age of eighteen, you need a signature from a parent.”
Nate’s mom said, “He’s got one of those right here.”
She signed. Nate signed. The man told them that at the end of the month the winning number would be drawn on the CBS football pregame show, the one hosted by James Brown. It would be like one of those jackpot lottery drawings you saw all the time on television.
“You’ve got about the same odds as winning a lottery,” the man said. “But good luck anyway.”
Nate had taken his ticket home and put it in the trophy case with the Brady ball and hadn’t taken it out until the day of the drawing, watching with his parents and Abby as James Brown called out the winning numbers, one after another.
Every one of them the numbers on Nate’s ticket.
They stopped dancing around and hugging and screaming only when Nate’s mom told them to hush so they could hear the representative from SportStuff say that the winning numbers belonged to a thirteen-year-old from western Massachusetts by the name of Nate Brodie, that a boy who was now the most famous thirteen-year-old in America would get a chance on Thanksgiving night to make the throw of a lifetime.
The man from SportStuff said, “A million-dollar throw from a one-in-a-million kid.”
James Brown had said, “Hope he’s a quarterback.”
And Nate said to the television, “I am.”
CHAPTER 3
S
uddenly Nate was famous, at least as famous as a thirteen-year-old from Valley, Massachusetts, could be.
Now, in Nate’s living room, they had just watched a story about him on SportsCenter with some clips from the Hollins Hills game, including the throw he’d made down the sideline to Pete.
“SportsCenter,” Pete said as they watched the show in Nate’s living room. “That is as fresh as it gets.”
“Fresh to death,” Malcolm Burnley said.
LaDell, the Patriots’ tailback, said, “Look at you, throwing a ball to Mullaney on national
TV
.” He shook his head and said, “That’s what I call putting your
man
suit on.”
Abby, sitting between Malcom and LaDell on the couch, just sighed. “You guys talk about SportsCenter like it’s church.”
“Church with highlights,” Nate said.
“How did I end up being the lucky girl included in this boys club?” Abby said.
“You’re not just in the club,” Pete said, “you’re practically a member of the team. Except you never have to get hit.”
“Or end up at the bottom of the pile and the guy on top of you has breath that smells like feet,” Malcolm said.
“Okay,” Abby said, “that’s a little more information than I need.”
For all the other things that had happened since Nate won the lottery—the big feature about Nate in the
Valley Dispatch,
the one in the
Boston Globe,
another on the NVC station out of Spring-field, Massachusetts—the SportsCenter they’d just watched was the best of it.
By far.
It didn’t matter what age you were or what sport you played, being on SportsCenter was like having every sports fan in America going to your Facebook page. It was why Nate had invited Abby and some of the guys to come over and watch with him after practice on Monday.
Now the guys were getting ready to leave. Valley was a small enough town that Pete and Malcolm and LaDell would all be riding their bikes home. Abby wasn’t going anywhere, she would be staying for dinner, even though Nate hadn’t made any big announcement about that. Even if he had, none of the guys would have said anything about it. They were all cool with the fact that Abby wasn’t just a part of their crew, she was Nate’s best bud.
“A dude who happens to be a girl,” Malcolm had said one time. “An almost-perfect combination.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Abby had pinched him, because that was her signature move when she thought one of them had stepped out of line. “What do you mean by
almost
a perfect combination, big boy?”
They didn’t have TiVo anymore because things like that were too expensive in the Brodie house these days, now that just about everything—with the exception of the Brady ball—seemed too expensive. But they still had their old-fashioned VCR that had “4-head” written over the place where you inserted the tape. So Sue Brodie had taped SportsCenter, and when the guys were gone, Nate and Abby and his mom watched it one more time.
When they finished, his mom got up and rewound the tape so it would be cued up to the exact right place when Nate’s dad came home from work later. Then she said she needed to finish getting dinner ready.
Nate thought her eyes looked watery, as if she was getting ready to cry about something.
“You okay, Mom?”
“Better than okay, actually.”
“You sure?”
She put a finger to one of her eyes and said, “You mean these? Happy tears.”
“I never get that one,” Nate said. “How can you be happy and sad at the same time?”
“You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” Nate said.
“I just want you to enjoy every single moment of this,” his mom said.
“I just wish it was Thanksgiving night already,” Nate said.
“It will be here soon enough,” she said. “You just promise me you’re going to enjoy the journey.”
“Promise.”
Then his mom said, “And in this house a promise is a promise,” and headed off to the kitchen.
Abby had moved over to a chair next to the window and was drawing in her sketchbook, even though she knew she only had a few minutes before they were going to sit down and eat.
Abby McCall was good at just about everything. She was the smartest kid and the prettiest girl in the eighth grade in Valley—not that Nate would ever say the pretty part out loud, to her or to anyone else. But she was best at drawing—it didn’t matter whether she was working with a pencil in the sketchbook she always seemed to have with her, or working with colors, color combinations that only she seemed to be able to see, on one of the canvases back in her room.
Because more than anything, Abby McCall thought of herself as an artist.
And these days she was painting even more than ever. Nate watched her now, not saying anything, seeing the concentration on her face, as if she were the one taking a team down the field with less than two minutes to go.