Perplexed, I picked up the box and opened it. Inside, on a thin square of cotton, was a silver chain with a medal of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. I turned over the silver disc. Even without the dome light, I could read what Mickie had inscribed.
To keep you safe.
M
7
In the spring of my sophomore year, I made the junior varsity baseball team. Despite my initial incompetence at three flies up, my mother’s willingness to spend her Saturdays hitting me ground balls and pitching to me had helped me develop into a decent singles hitter and fair defender. But by midseason, I’d suddenly begun to strike out frequently.
“What do you think it could be?” my father asked over dinner one evening.
Frustrated, I said, “I don’t know. It’s like I’m not seeing the ball.”
My mother had me in Dr. Pridemore’s office the very next day.
After an eye exam, Dr. Pridemore delivered his clinical diagnosis. “You’re not seeing the ball. Frankly, I can’t figure out how you’re seeing the chalkboard in class. Have you been experiencing headaches?”
I had, but I’d compensated by moving up a row in all my classes.
“Your vision is slipping,” he said, which caused my mother to slip—into full panic.
“How bad is it?” she asked. “Could he go blind?”
Dr. Pridemore assured her I was not going blind. “But you do need glasses.”
I picked out sturdy black frames, like Clark Kent. They didn’t do any wonders to improve my looks, which were average at best. My hair had darkened to a deeper shade of brown, my jaw had become squarer, and my forehead was broader. People said I looked like my father, and I saw the resemblance in pictures of him as a young man. As I wore the glasses, however, I noticed something I had not expected. The glasses seemed to soften my most obvious feature. Mickie, who was waiting at my house after my eye appointment, was gentle in her assessment. She called my new specs “sexy in a nerdy way.”
Ernie was more honest the next day at school. “You look like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor,” he said.
8
Junior year, I’d survived the first round of roster cuts for the varsity basketball team, a heartless practice in which Coach Moran pinned the names of players still on the team to a corkboard outside his office. My name was second from the bottom, but I suspected my time on that list was growing short. Thirteen players remained for twelve spots. Coach had said he’d tell the final cut personally. When a student entered my fourth-period precalculus class carrying a pink slip, and my teacher looked in my direction, I wasn’t completely caught off guard.
“Hell,” he said, using my nickname, which had become common even among the teachers. “Coach Moran wants to see you in his office after class.”
Coach Moran didn’t send pink slips to be chummy. I was about to become one of the nerds, and possibly one of the dorks. I would no longer be one of the jocks.
To say that the Saint Joseph’s locker room badly needed renovating was like saying the Watergate scandal had been a minor breaking and entering. Untouched since the school opened in the 1940s, the room had cement walls, narrow, mesh-covered windows, and the lighting, ventilation, and ambience of a Turkish prison. The metal lockers smelled like rotting fruit. Coach Moran’s cramped office was in the corner of this mess, and I wondered whether the sour atmosphere contributed to his seemingly perpetual sour demeanor.
I pushed my glasses onto the bridge of my nose and knocked. Coach Moran yelled, “Enter,” and I pushed the door open.
“You wanted to see me, Coach?”
Coach put a hand over the telephone receiver, which he was holding to his ear. “Come in and sit down, Hell,” he said in a hushed tone. I sat in a folding chair beside several desks, one of which doubled as the trainer’s table. I assumed Coach Moran was talking to his wife, since he sounded politer than I’d ever heard him and didn’t drop a single swear word during the two-minute conversation.