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By the time practice ended, night had fallen.
The floodlights around the gridiron threw hard white light across the field until the turf looked almost unreal.
Coach Thomas slapped hands with each player as they came off.
"Go home, shower, and sleep," he said. "This workload stays in place until the Hawthorne game, the second-to-last game of the regular season."
Then his voice hardened again.
"No dates. No nights out. No joyrides. I don’t care how colorful your nightlife is. Until this game is over, you keep it boring. Get us into the playoffs, and I’ll give you a few days to remember what freedom feels like."
"You’ll have to put a tracker under my car," one player joked.
"Better add a vibration sensor," another said.
"Then it’ll tell me how many speed bumps I hit tonight," Thomas shot back.
The team broke into laughter.
When Thomas was angry, he could make grown boys stare at their shoes. When he was in a good mood, he could joke with them like one of the guys.
Then he turned and spotted a tall figure trying to leave with the crowd.
"No, no, no. Everyone else can go. You cannot. Nolan Callahan."
He looked toward his quarterback.
Adam, not far away, grimaced like a man who had missed his chance to escape.
Sure enough, Thomas called him over too. The two spoke quietly for a moment.
Then the coach left.
As Reese walked off, he gave Nolan a long look.
"At the dance last night," Reese said, hesitating. His acne looked even worse under the field lights. "Did we meet?"
’No. Absolutely not.’
Nolan recognized him, of course. Reese had been his final customer.
He smiled.
"Girls usually open with that line."
Reese frowned, picked up his helmet, and left.
Soon, only Nolan and Adam remained on the field.
"Coach wants me to work on your hands," Adam said, nudging several practice balls into a pile with his foot. "He wants you to fill Pierce’s spot as a backup wide receiver."
Wide receivers were among the offense’s primary scoring threats. Once the ball was snapped, their job was to attack space downfield and create a throwing window.
For a wide receiver, three things mattered most.
Hands.
Separation.
Speed.
"I thought you were going to teach me how to throw like a quarterback," Nolan said.
He had spent the afternoon watching practice. Naturally, he had noticed what made the quarterback special.
On offense, nearly every play flowed through the quarterback. The play call, the read, the target, and the choice between taking the short gain or attacking deep all passed through him in real time.
The quarterback controlled the tempo of the game and set the ceiling for the offense.
Put dramatically, he was less an athlete than a chess player forced to move his pieces while sprinting away from men trying to break him.
He had to throw accurately, absorb contact, read the whole field, adapt on the fly, process information at speed, and stay calm while everything collapsed around him.
Before any of that mattered, he also needed a body strong enough to survive.
Even the man who would one day become the standard had been criticized for a slow forty-yard dash. The position asked for everything, then punished whatever was missing.
In real life, the quarterback was the closest thing football had to a complete player.
And at BHHS, Adam Newman was well known.
He was modest, polite, and mild in a way that made parents and rich girls lower their guard. His face was not especially striking, but a surprising number of girls on campus called him cute.
Adam, however, was always alone.
Some said he was a devout Catholic who would only date with marriage in mind. Some said he had a serious girlfriend off campus. Some said he simply was not interested in girls at all.
As for why a high school quarterback attracted that much attention, that came down to the special status of athletes in American schools.
Sports were one of the ways American communities understood themselves. Parents put children into leagues early. Schools built identities around teams. College programs could spend staggering amounts on athletes, especially football players. Coaches often carried more social weight than ordinary teachers.
That was why Katherine had teased Nolan when she heard his AP plan.
In this ecosystem, a student who spent every spare hour studying risked becoming a nerd. A student who won games became visible.
Nolan wanted that visibility.
"If you want to be a quarterback," Adam said, lifting a football with his foot and catching it in his hands, "you have to be better than everyone. Otherwise, nobody follows you."
He took two steps back, set his feet, drew his body like a bow, and fired.
The ball cut a clean arc through the air and struck the upright thirty yards away with a bright metallic clang.
From that distance, Adam could hit it roughly six times out of ten.
Nolan had to admire it.
He could not do that yet.
"Back up and stand in the end zone," Adam said, picking up another ball. "Let’s see if we can get on the same page."
What followed was boring, necessary work.
Adam threw from different angles toward different spots around Nolan. Sometimes he placed the ball slightly away from Nolan’s body to test how well Nolan could track the ball and adjust.
Aside from the first few throws, Nolan caught almost everything.
Of course, there was no defender in his face, no safety coming downhill, no body contact at the catch point. A real game would be much messier.
They had seven or eight practice balls. After each cycle, Nolan had to send them back.
"Right," Adam called. "That’s it. For a wideout, catching the ball matters more than anything."
He stopped mid-sentence.
Nolan had copied his stance.
Using the same motion Adam had just demonstrated, Nolan threw the ball back.
He was learning how to pass while practicing how to catch.
"Speed and accuracy still need a lot of work," Nolan said, shaking his head.
Actually doing it was much harder than throwing trash into a dumpster.
It took more arm strength than he expected.
Adam looked down at the ball rolling to a stop near his feet.
His expression stiffened.
Earlier, Nolan had shown talent for catching, running, and adjusting in space.
Now Adam saw something bigger.
Something that could raise Nolan’s ceiling far beyond wide receiver.
If this guy learned proper mechanics and trained for a few days, who knew how far he could go?
Adam stared at him for a second longer.
’Was Nolan Callahan even human?’
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