Cody's Varsity Rush (2 page)

Cody nodded. “Just like always.”

Pork Chop forced a smile. “Well that's enough of that subject. Time to go throw some iron around. Yet one more reason to get all swole now.”

“You already look pretty swole to me,” Bart said, his voice full of admiration. “I mean, you get bigger every time I see you. What's your secret?”

Pork Chop eyed his teammate suspiciously, then snorted. “No secret. Just hard work.”

“Yeah,” Cody said. “Nobody puts in the work like Chop. He'll work all day helping his dad on the farm and
then
go hit the weight room.”

Bart whistled through his teeth. “Well, Chop, it's workin'—big time!”

Chop smiled broadly. “What can I say? I'm a man of steel and sex appeal. But don't worry, Co, I won't try to steal Ms. Hart from you.”

Cody shook his head. “Great. First Bart and now you bustin' my chops about that. I can see some things aren't gonna change from eighth grade. Can you both repeat after me: ‘Cody Martin and Robyn Hart are NOT boyfriend/girlfriend. Period.'”

Pork Chop frowned. “Could you run through that one more time, dawg? I think I missed part of it.”

“Yeah, me too,” Bart chimed in.

Cody tried to load his voice with as much disgust as he could muster. “Whatever. Come on. Let's go throw some weights around. The first official practice is only three days away.”

Cody swallowed hard and whispered, “Know how those sportscasters are always talking about somebody being ‘a man among boys?' I feel like one of those boys right now. You know how hard we worked this summer, but my arms look like garter snakes—in a room full of pythons!”

“Yeah,” said Pork Chop, without turning around. “Some of these dudes make
me
look small. I'm not used to that.”

Cody surveyed the scene. It was the first day of football practice, and the locker room buzzed with activity. The older players, seniors and juniors, already had their equipment and were dressing out in front of their freshly painted deep-blue lockers.

Cody drew in a deep breath and let it escape as a low whistle. Several of the hulking linemen had tattoos. His dad would be freaking out if he were here. He put tattoos and body piercing in the same category: senseless self-mutilation.

Cody wondered what Brendan Clark would say about that characterization. The all-state middle linebacker sported a double-strand barbed wire design around the bulge of his right bicep. On his left shoulder was the full-color trademark
S
of Superman.

A coiled cobra, fangs bared and dripping droplets of venom, stared menacingly from the midback of senior Jeff “Truck” Tucker, a six two, 230-pound defensive end who had amassed eighty-five tackles, nineteen sacks, and ten knocked-down passes the previous season. Pork Chop knew all of the key Grant High defensive stats. He could recite them to Cody as easily as he could recite the multiplication table up to twelve.

“ATV!” Cody heard Clark bellow. He turned his attention to the linebacker again. Clark was exchanging fist pounds with Gordon Daniels, nicknamed ATV, for all-terrain vehicle. Daniels had the powerful, compact build of a pit bull. He would start at fullback now that Doug Porter, Pork Chop's all-world brother, had graduated. If not for Doug, ATV would have probably been a starter since his freshman year. Every football player at Grant Middle School had known about ATV. Only five ten, but 210 solid pounds. He could bench-press 340 pounds, squat 525, and run the forty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds.

“Dude,” Cody said, “ATV's beard stubble is almost as thick as my dad's.”

Pork Chop, still not turning around, offered, “Yeah, it's almost as thick as my Aunt Wanda's.”

Cody chuckled softly, not wanting to risk some senior asking, “Hey, freshman, what's so funny, stick-figure boy?” Cody looked down at his arms and shoulders. He knew he should have hit the weights harder over the summer, but baseball had gobbled up too much time. Then there were the morning runs with Drew Phelps, helping his friend prepare for cross-country season.
I
'
m in decent shape
, he thought,
but
looking at these guys, I have a feeling that
“
decent
”
isn
'
t going to cut it in high school football
.
I wish I
could have made it to preseason football camp, but I
couldn
'
t leave the guys on the baseball team hangin
'
.

At least
, he reassured himself,
I don
'
t have to play
against these bigger, older guys. I
'
m not like Chop.
I
'
m not gonna make varsity. And that
'
s a good thing.
These monsters would kill me. All I want to do is
play freshman ball—maybe get called up to JV by the
end of the season.

Cody trained his eyes on the bronze back of his best friend. His shoulders were thicker and broader than ever. Chop was getting taller all the time too. “Growing faster than the national debt,” as Mr. Porter said.

Everyone would know just how tall Chop was in a few moments, when the two of them got to the front of the line where Mr. Curtis, an assistant coach, and Larry Vance, the team manager were busy weighing and measuring.

Bart Evans, who had quarterbacked the Grant Middle School teams, was on the scale now. Curtis adjusted a thin metal arm that was attached to the scale, sliding it up, then unfolding a foot-long piece that jutted out from the arm at a ninety-degree angle, and resting it atop Bart's closely shorn brown hair. Cody had seen the same kind of scale in the doctor's office.

“Evans, Bart,” Curtis called out in a nasal monotone voice. “Height: Five feet eleven inches. Weight: A buck sixty.”

Vance, who reminded Cody of the singer Steven Curtis Chapman, sat in a metal folding chair next to the scale, a computer not much bigger than Cody's Bible perched on his lap. The manager's fingers danced across the keyboard logging Bart's information.

It was Chop's turn now. He waited for Curtis to nod, then hopped on the scale with both feet.

“Easy there, young Mr. Porter,” Curtis warned, but his voice was still as flat as the voice that announced the time and temperature on the phone. “This is sensitive equipment here.”

Cody noted that many of the upperclass players had stopped joking and swapping stories to study Chop. Even Clark was watching carefully.
Guess this is what
it
'
s like when you
'
re the little brother of a legend
, Cody reasoned.

“Porter, Deke,” Curtis was saying, raising his voice for the benefit of the intrigued onlookers. “Six feet even, 215 pounds.”

That brought a few hoots and whistles. Two-hundred- plus-pound freshmen didn't come along every day, especially when the weight was mostly muscle.

“Chop's almost as thick as his bro,” ATV called out.

“Yeah, but can he play like DP?” someone asked.

Cody half expected Chop to turn and flex his thick arms for his teammates, but his friend stepped off the scale softly, nodded at Cody, and went to get fitted for pads and a helmet.

Cody stared at the digital readout at the bottom of the scale, which flashed only a series of dashes after Curtis reset it. He hoped he'd put on at least some muscle since last football season, when he'd weighed in at 120. He remembered Chop's words as they'd bench-pressed in the high school weight room a few days previously—“Dawg, you gotta get more junk in your trunk if you wanna play ball with the big boys. A buck twenty ain't gonna cut it. I bet some of the high school cheerleaders weigh more than that!”

“Martin, Cody.” The words snapped Cody back to the present. “Let's see what we got here,” Curtis said. “Five feet ten, 140 pounds.”

Cody sighed hopefully.
Well
, he thought,
at least
my trunk
'
s a
little
junkier. And maybe I can put on a
few more pounds during the season. It would be nice
to get up to a buck fifty.

From the locker room, Cody and the other first-year players filed like cattle to the gym, where stations were set up to fit them with pads and helmets.

Brett Evans, Bart's wide receiver brother, caught up to Cody at the helmet station. “Code,” he said, “do you think this is how the knights of old did things? Move from station to station, getting their coats of mail, helmets, armor, swords, and shields?”

Cody chuckled. “I don't know, Brett. I guess I never thought of that. But, hey, we are kind of like knights. The equipment is kinda the same, and Chop always says that high school football is a battle.”

Brett swallowed. “Yeah, a battle against bigger, stronger, faster guys than we ever faced back in middle school.”

“Meaner, too. Don't forget meaner. Chop says that a couple of teams have these ‘pain pools,' where you get money if you put somebody out of a game.”

“For real? I don't think that kind of thing would be allowed.”

Cody shook his head in disbelief. “I didn't say it was legal. I'm just saying that Chop says it happens.”

“If that's true,” said Bart, joining the duo, “I hope I
never
play varsity.”

Brett rolled his eyes. “Aw, c'mon, bro. This is the big time. This is high school football. We've waited for this for a long time. Besides, I'm sure that pain pool stuff is just urban legend. Right, Cody?”

“I hope so,” Cody answered solemnly. “If that kinda stuff goes on, I'm joining the choir.”

“I don't know about that,” Brett said. “I've heard you sing!”

Cody chuckled and pulled on a helmet. A high school helmet. He thought of all the Grant High games he'd seen from the stands as a grade-schooler, then a middle-schooler. During the early-season contests you could work on your tan while you enjoyed the action on the field.

When late October rolled around and the Colorado temperatures nose-dived, Cody, his mom, and Pork Chop had sat in puffy down coats, hunched together for warmth. Cody's mom always brought a thermos the size of a cheese log, filled with homemade hot chocolate that was typically gone before halftime. Cody's dad rarely came to the games, and when he did, he complained about the “blistering sun” or the “arctic temperatures,” depending on the weather. And he complained about the “rock-hard bleachers”
all
the time.

When Cody and Pork Chop entered middle school, they began to count down the years until they would wear the blue and silver of the Grant High Eagles. While watching their first game as sixth graders, Pork Chop shook half a box of Hot Tamales into his mouth and told Mrs. Martin, “You better enjoy our company while you can, Mrs. M, because in just a coupla years Co and I won't be able to sit with you anymore. We'll be out there on the field, tearing it up!”

“I'll be here regardless.” She smiled. “Screaming my fool head off for you both. And when it gets cold, I guess I'll be drinking all the hot chocolate myself. Unless Luke starts coming with me.”

Pork Chop frowned. “Well, maybe you can smuggle me a cup of cocoa down to the bench, you know. I can tell the coaches it's Gatorade. I mean, I don't know what you do to your cocoa, but it is
sick
!”

Cody's mom looked hurt for a moment. Cody put his hand on her shoulder. “It's okay, Mom, sick is a good thing.”

She arched her eyebrows. “Sick? A good thing?”

Cody and Pork Chop nodded in unison.

Cody's mom sniffed. “I weep for today's youth,” she said, winking at them.

Cody and Pork Chop's sixth-grade year was the same season that Doug Porter began writing his legend as Grant's most celebrated athlete. “DP,” as Chop called him, showed up at preseason football camp with a shaved head, 220 pounds of muscle, and a sub-five-second forty-yard-dash time, placing him among the fastest gridders in the freshman class. Most important, DP brought a work ethic that put many of the junior and senior players to shame.

He won the starting fullback job early in the season and spent Friday nights and Saturday afternoons running over—and, once in a while, around—Eagle opponents. Midway in the season, teammates began calling him Rhino, for his angry, hard-charging style.

On defense, Rhino Porter played middle guard. By late season, he was known as one of the fiercest hitters in the state. Many opposing teams turned to a steady diet of end runs and out patterns to avoid the middle of the field, which was Rhino's turf.

Whenever the elder Porter charged up the middle for a long touchdown run, or body slammed a quarterback to the ground, Pork Chop would stand and bow to the crowd, boasting, “That's my big bro—taught him everything he knows!”

Pork Chop's proclamations would draw curious looks from newcomers to Eagle football, who would stare at Chop's caramel skin, then turn their eyes to the sidelines, as Rhino removed his helmet and steam rose like smoke from the ghostly white skin of his shaved head.