Kid Owner (11 page)

“Man, she really is pretty.” Jackson's eyes followed her as she disappeared around the corner, his bearlike shoulders hunched and wrapped in a fluffy towel.

“You should go out with her,” I mumbled. I couldn't help being annoyed. I was annoyed with everyone and everything, but the look Jackson gave me after I suggested he ask her out took me down a couple pegs. I felt bad.

“Man, I wish.” Even the thought of it seemed to hurt him. “She's crazy about you.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes now.”

The look of admiration on the face of a giant kid creates a discomfort hard to explain. “Maybe you could ask
her
to that victory bonfire they're talking about having after the game?”

“No one likes someone who's going down the drain,” I said. “That sucking sound is pretty embarrassing.”

Jackson rolled his lower lip beneath his teeth and nodded. “Yeah, but she's not like that. She sat with us that second day of school when she could have sat
anywhere.
She sat with us because there's something about you she likes. Then you dissed her and she
still
came back. And you weren't even second QB on our team either. Izzy was there because she likes
you.
It's like that book she had you read. She's all about what's on the inside.”

This embarrassed, shocked, and scared me all at the same time. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't process it in my brain, so I tucked it into a dark corner and gave Jackson a final shake of my head, signaling an end of the discussion about Izzy.

Jackson let out a heavy sigh, but I ignored it. I returned to my phone to study more remote facts about Cowboys players, no matter how deep they were on the depth chart, not that it mattered. If Jasmine got her way, or I lost whatever crazy contest Mr. Dietrich had in mind, I wouldn't have to worry about making any decisions for anything.

I checked myself. I hated feeling this way. Negative thinking had no place if I was going to be the son of Thomas Peebles, which I now had every intention of being. And that meant fighting—for the Cowboys
and
for making bigger plays on the Ben Sauer team. And now that I was a QB—even the second QB—I was going to make things happen. One thing I knew was that regular people do all kinds of things for people who are famous; they just can't help it.

I was no fool. I knew I wasn't, like, one of the president's kids, or a pop star, but I knew there were degrees of being famous in
that upper stratosphere. And as owner—part or whole—of the Dallas Cowboy, I was in it. What's the stratosphere? The part of the Earth's atmosphere that is seven to thirty-one miles above the surface. That's what our science teacher told us. You're way up there. Everyone can see you, and most of them want to be where you are, even if it's for a moment.

That's what I was counting on. Coach Hubbard wouldn't be able to resist my ideas.

I sat back, took a deep breath. I wanted to
do
something. I got up and headed for the house.

“Hey, Little Man, don't be mad,” Jackson said. “I was just saying . . .”

“I'm fine,” I said. “Be right back.”

I returned with a book written by Bill Walsh, the famous 49ers Super Bowl coach.

Jackson looked at it. “
Finding the Winning Edge
? What's that?”

“Bill Walsh coached two of the greatest quarterbacks ever, three if you count Jeff Garcia.” I sat down on the lounge chair and opened a notebook I'd also brought with me. “Neither of them had a strong arm, at least by NFL standards. They ran an offense that capitalized on their quickness—not just their physical quickness but their mental quickness.”

“Nobody's more mentally quick than you.” Jackson leaned toward the book. “Except maybe me.”

I looked at him and laughed, because he was right about that. Already, Jackson had proven his smarts in school. He knew everything and I'd seen him helping the other players on the team with their assignments, even if we'd only run the play
one time and even if it was for another position other than his. “Yeah, so let's do this together.”

“What exactly are we doing?” Jackson flipped open the pages to chapter eleven. “‘Preparing to Win'?”

“Yeah, that's
exactly
what we're doing,” I said. “Preparing to win, on the field and off. Not only do I plan to win whatever Dietrich throws at me, but I'm gonna hit Coach Hubbard so hard and so fast with this stuff that he's never gonna see me coming.”

Jasmine Peebles had some PR firm of her own do a press release about her legal challenge to my father's will. When I asked my mom about
my
press conference, she frowned and asked if I wanted to be like Jasmine Peebles. That hit home and I trusted my mom when she said a press conference would have to wait until things were final.

“Then, if you get the team,” my mother said, “the time will be right. If you don't, there's no reason for a press conference, is there?”

Word quickly spread that my stepmother had suddenly put the fate of the Cowboys into question again. It was in the newspapers, on the sports channels. People, I learned, love controversy. The only thing better than a kid who suddenly inherits the Dallas Cowboys is the same kid who might lose it all. I kept my head up and played it off like it was no big
deal—just a typical day in the life of Ryan Zinna.

Not much changed in the lunchroom. I still had a celebrity status that made a lot of kids sneak glances at me, and the popular group still snubbed their noses. I wasn't really concerned with what went on in school, though. It was football practice I was thinking of, and all the diagrams and plays in the back of my notebook that Jackson and I had created and that I'd perfected while my teachers droned on about long division, adverbs, and the postwar recovery of Europe.

The school day finally ended and I scrambled out of my last class, nearly skipping to my locker before heading directly to Coach Hubbard's office. I hadn't had gym that day, so this was my first time around him since he'd seen me with John Torres and the Cowboys' GM. I marched right into his office and he looked up from the desk he was writing at. He whipped off a pair of wire glasses I hadn't known about. His face actually turned red. He was embarrassed! To see me! I don't think it was the glasses either.

“Hey, Coach.”

“Ryan . . .” Coach Hubbard rose and began tucking his enormous collared shirt into a pair of navy-blue coaching shorts that were ridiculously tight. “Good to see you.”

Coach stuck out his hand like it was the first time we'd met. I was a new person to Coach Hubbard, no longer a half-pint scrapper who was an annoyance. I was the
kid owner
. I shook his hand and plopped my notebook down onto his gray metal desk, flipping it open to the back pages.

“I'm worried, Coach.” I studied his face to see how high my stock had climbed. Before he knew I owned the Cowboys and
before he'd seen John Torres in real life, I don't think Coach Hubbard could have cared less about Ryan Zinna being worried.

“Well,” he said, “maybe I can help.”

Coach tucked the last remnants of his circus-tent shirt into the back of his pants, briefly exposing a butt crack I could no more ignore than I could the Grand Canyon. He turned a deeper shade of red and sat back down. The metal chair creaked beneath the burden.

I sat down, too. “Coach, I know I'm not the starting quarterback.”

I let that hang out there. Coach Hubbard blinked at me and shifted in his seat, sending up a flock of squeaks and rattles from the hardware below. “Okay.”

“But I'm thinking that—you know—if Estevan Marin were to get hurt, I'd have to go
in
.”

He nodded. “That's part of the game.”

“Right, but if I have to go in, the offense we run . . .” Again, I let my words float out there between us, hoping he'd pick up the slack.

He didn't.

“So, I was thinking about Bill Walsh's book about the West Coast Offense, you know,
Finding the Winning Edge?
Kind of old school, right?”

Coach Hubbard let loose a blustery chuckle. “Bill Walsh was a genius, for sure. Joe Montana, Jerry Rice . . .
that
was a team.”

Coach sighed in honor of the good old days.

“So, if I do have to go into the game, I just thought we should be ready with some plays that I
can
do, instead of trying
to do things I
can't.
Bill Walsh said that's one of the keys to a winning team.”

“Did he say that?” Coach Hubbard's forehead rumpled like a gorilla studying a banana before I cleared my throat and his eyebrows shot up. “Yes. Sounds like him.”

“Look, I know I'm short, but so was Jeff Garcia. So Walsh put in a bunch of plays that let him roll outside the pocket.”

“Of course,” Coach Hubbard said.

I got excited. “So I was looking at these plays of his. I copied them down. Three or four people in the pattern, and you've always got a check down . . . a safety valve if all else fails. All rollouts.”

I flipped through the pages, pointing to plays I'd drawn.

Coach Hubbard's brow rumpled again as he studied the plays. He hummed and nodded as if this was all old news to him, but really, the most complicated play he'd ever drawn up was a crossing pattern under a go route, which looked like an upside-down four.

“I didn't know if you were thinking the same kind of thing.” I spoke fast. Coach Hubbard might lend me his ear because of my new status, but he was still in charge. “I just thought if I drew up some plays, it'd save you some time. I hope you don't mind, Coach.”

It was a bold move, me showing up in the coach's office with plays already drawn up, but if I was going to get my chance, I just couldn't let it slip by without doing everything possible to help myself succeed. If we ran the same old offense, I'd be doomed. But if Coach Hubbard even put in a couple of my plays so that I could run them if I had to, I'd stand a chance.

Coach Hubbard's small dark eyes narrowed.

I gulped. “Maybe we could try out a couple of these plays? Just an idea, Coach. Some teams do it. I know Marin's got more experience than me and I'm not saying make me the starter, but if it looks good? Boy, what a one-two combination. Like a fighter. One-two pow!”

I stopped talking and lowered my fists and waited.

Coach Hubbard scowled and wormed his pinkie into one of the tiny ears plastered to the side of his big dome. “That's a lot to learn, Ryan. Guys have been practicing these plays for weeks. Putting all these new things in would be tough to learn in a few days. I know
you
could do it, but the linemen . . .”

“I know, see?” I flipped the pages, excited. “I've got it so the line calls are all the same, color-coded like the offense we run now so everyone knows who to block. When we roll out
to pass, it's really the same blocking as the zone sweep play we run right now, and all the linemen know how to block it. That's part of the beauty!”

Coach Hubbard went after his other ear now. “You've got receivers and running backs, too. They'd have to learn—”

I nodded. “I could work with those guys. Also, I was thinking about the run game out of spread formation. See, 'cause if you look, these plays all call for the quarterback to be taking a shotgun snap, and with four receivers spread wide, there's just one running back, but Bill Walsh has some awesome running plays.”

“Run game?” Coach stopped drilling his ear. “West Coast is a passing offense.”

“But fifty percent of the time—if you do it right—you run the ball. A lot of people think this kind of offense is all passing, but it's not. Here, look at these one back running plays.” I flipped the pages again to show him. “And that's another thing I was thinking about, Coach. I mean, you probably thought of this, too, as soon as we started talking about a spread offense. We've got the
perfect
guy to be that single back.”

“Griffin Engle?”

“Aw, Coach.” I reached out to pat his shoulder but pulled back and tapped the desktop, not wanting to go too far. “You're testing me, aren't you?”

Before he could speak, I continued, “Jackson is so obvious. It's amazing, isn't it? A guy his size who can run like that?”

“He is amazing, but . . .”

“In a conventional offense, of course, he's a lineman, but in a spread? Wow. Who's gonna tackle him when the box is empty
with the defense out covering all our wide receivers? Coach, it's really a great idea. Ha! You almost had me with Engle, and sure, he could do it, but with his speed he'll be the best of our four wideouts, a big-time weapon.” I flipped a few more pages, to some running plays that used a single back. It was simple stuff: an inside trap, a cutback, the zone runs we already had only without a fullback, a simple counter, and a draw. It was stuff a barnyard animal could learn.

Coach Hubbard just blinked. Then he looked at his watch. “Mind if I keep these papers?”

“Yeah, sure. They're yours, Coach.” I popped up. “I figured I'd just save you the time of copying them down from Coach Walsh's book and matching up the line protections with the ones we already have.”

“I kind of like it,” Coach Hubbard said as I reached for the door. “No reason we can't try a couple out and see how it goes.”

“Great, Coach. Thanks!” I started through the door, heading for the locker room to change.

“Ryan.”

I stopped and looked back.

“How was it? I mean, the Cowboys and John Torres and everything?”

I took a breath and shook my head, staring into space. “Dream come true, Coach. A dream come true.”

Coach Hubbard had stars in his eyes, too, and he looked not at me but possibly at some kind of magical halo that he imagined over my head. “Yeah . . . I bet.”

“And even if my stepmother does end up controlling the
team, I'm still going to own a pretty big hunk of it, which is kinda cool,” I said.

Coach Hubbard's eyes widened and his head nodded on its own.

“See you out there, Coach.” I turned and headed into the locker room, and didn't bother to look back.