Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

Genres: YA Family

Synopsis

Arlo Brodie loves being on the football field, getting hit hard and hitting back harder. That’s where he belongs, leading his team to championships, becoming “Starlo” on his way to the top. Arlo’s dad cheers him on, but his mother quotes head-injury statistics and refuses to watch. Arlo’s girlfriend tries to make him see how dangerously he’s playing; when that doesn’t work, she calls time-out on their relationship. Even Arlo’s coaches begin to track his hit count, ready to pull him off the field when he nears the limit. But Arlo’s not worried about tallying collisions. The cheering crowds and the adrenaline rush convince him that everything is OK—in spite of the pain, the pounding, the dizziness, and the confusion.

In Hit Count, Chris Lynch explores the American love affair with contact sports and our attempts to come to terms with clear evidence of real danger.

PRAISE FOR HIT COUNT:

“Lynch offers a powerful, provocative look at the dark side of popular sports and their potential cost, using Arlo as a cautionary, even tragic tale. Arlo’s rise and fall is handled skillfully, allowing readers into the self-destructive, self-deceiving mindset of an addict without condemning him.” —Publishers Weekly

“This unflinching examination of the price of athletic power, with plenty of bone-crunching play-by-play action, is both thought-provoking and formidable.” —The Horn Book Magazine
 
“The strength of this hard-hitting novel is how well award-winning author Chris Lynch portrays the drive and hunger of young football players . . . This intense timely story provides incredible insight as to why knowledge of football's potential danger is not enough to keep young players from taking the field.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“An important work that raises troubling questions about the culture of violence in American high school sports.” —School Library Journal
 
“Lynch offers a powerful, provocative look at the dark side of popular sports and their potential cost, using Arlo as a cautionary, even tragic tale. Arlo’s rise and fall is handled skillfully, allowing readers into the self-destructive, self-deceiving mindset of an addict without condemning him.” —Publishers Weekly
 
A Booklist 2015 Top Ten Sports Books for Youth
A Junior Library Guild Selection

Release date: May 24, 2016

Publisher: Workman Publishing Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

The Drill

“All I ever wanted to do was hit people, is that so bad? Does that make me a bad guy?”

That would have been funny if Lloyd was trying to be funny but he wasn’t.

“That’s not so bad, Lloyd,” I told him, “And you are not a bad guy. I think you should stop that, though.”

We were walking home from football practice. Early days, my freshman year, Lloyd’s senior. It was that ships-­passing-­in-­the-­night moment Lloyd and me were floating through, at least as far as football was concerned. See, he had made the junior varsity as a sophomore and had every reason to expect to move up from there. But he plateaued, physically and developmentally, and even if no one else was, he was shocked to find himself on the jayvee again as a junior, and flat-­out humiliated about being a junior varsity senior student.

He was already giving off sparks when my making that very same jayvee team pissed gasoline all over him. Me, his baby brother. Who he pounded regularly in our backyard.

And then that day’s mess.

Lloyd had been sticking guys pretty good all afternoon, like usual. His area, across the middle of the field in dink-­and-­dunk territory just beyond the linebackers, was becoming a place only the stupidest and bravest receivers ventured. Lloyd’s maniacal style of play was disrupting everything, causing nervous players to drop passes without him even having to hit them. And then of course he’d hit them anyway.

He wasn’t making friends anywhere, but that’s not the kind of thing he cared about. He wouldn’t pause to consider that he was an unimportant player on a team he should have outgrown by then, and he was running around breaking the wills and bruising the bones of offensive players who were ultimately going to be on the same side once the games started.

You could sense that something was going to be done about it, something by design.

I had a fleeting moment when I thought I was going to try and talk to him about it. I decided not to, though. Because if he knew, he’d have laughed, and started acting even worse. And probably gone after me, too, if he could.

It may not have mattered anyway. As the play rolled out, it looked like a lot of other plays had. Small slot receiver darted from the right side, across the middle, but the quarterback dumped him the ball almost immediately. Seeing the ballcarrier coming into his zone from so far away, you could sense Lloyd’s excitement as he gathered himself into his compact, low-­down torpedo approach. Then, just as he was about to lay the mother of all annihilations on the guy, the massive tight end beat him to it.

Lloyd took the blindside hit with the tight end’s shoulder pad crashing right into his jaw. At the same instant, the blocking back—who had been following the tight end like they were two cars of the same train—slammed into Lloyd before he could even finish falling. He nailed Lloyd at just the right angle to snap Lloyd’s torso grotesquely backward before planting his spine in the turf.

They might as well have pistol-­whipped him. Not the tight end. Not the blocking back. Not even the coach but an assistant coach who, I would bet, never got above the jayvee level himself. The guy was giving Lloyd the usual rigmarole of do-­you-­know-­where-­you-­are-­and-­what-­day-­it-­is questions to test his mental function, and flicking the flashlight back and forth to check for any delay in eye movement in order to gauge the severity of the impact of Lloyd’s last collision.

Which was stupid, and the reason the assistant nobody coach would always be that and nothing more, because all you had to do to assess that hit was to watch the damn thing.

Anyway, it wasn’t even that that finished off Lloyd once and for all.

“A career jayvee might want to consider whether this is even worth it.” Those were the words that did it. “Career jayvee.”

Suddenly Lloyd’s instincts and reactions were as sharp as they have ever been.

“Career?” he yelled, snatching the flashlight out of the guy’s hand. He got up off the bench carrying his helmet in one hand and the flashlight in the other. The assistant went silent, backing up until Lloyd jammed his helmet on top of the guy’s head. The force caused the assistant to tumble backward and land on his back. Lloyd dropped to his knees, straddling the guy, and flashing the light in his eyes. “Career’s all yours, pal. Except for all the fear I’m seein’ in those eyes, I’m sure you’ll do great,” he said as a couple of players wrestled him away. “Cause I quit!”

***

“Shut up and take a sip, I don’t like the way you’re looking at me,” Lloyd said as we shuffled down the sidewalk toward home, in the evening cool.

“Thanks, no, Lloyd,” I said, trying to grab the squat flat whiskey bottle. He slapped my hand away.

“Fine,” he said, tipping the bottle way back.

“You heard the trainer,” I said.

“No, I did not hear the trainer.”

“Yes, you did. I heard him myself. You might have a concussion, and glugging a whole pint of whiskey down within minutes of getting clocked is a terrible idea.”

He stared deadeye at me. Then he drained the bottle, let it drop from his hand while his head was still thrown back. The glass shattered on the pavement.

“For your snot-­faced information, I only drank half a pint just there, little boy. I drank the other half before practice.”

The thought made me gag, as if I had drunk the stuff down myself. How could anybody do that to themselves?

“Well, I guess that’s telling me, huh? Proud of yourself? Proud, Lloyd?”

He didn’t even look when he snapped out a big backhand right across my nose bridge and forehead, with his big tennis racket hand and his gnarly knuckles.

He’d given me worse. The backhand barely even registered with either of us.

“What do they want from me? Huh? What do they want? I play the damn safety position the way it is supposed to be played, the way they showed me, and then when people start paying too close attention it’s like, oh no, we cannot have that dangerous barbarian soiling our lovely field and our lovely boys with their lovely squishy brains all tucked nice in their lovely eggshell skulls.”

“I don’t have a concussion anyway,” he went on. “That’s just stupid.”

“How would you know?”

“How would I not know?” he said, pointing at his own skull. “I’m the one who’s in here. I’m the one who knows what it’s like. Concussion, hell. I got my bell rung. Every defensive back knows the drill. Every single back on that field has had his bell rung plenty of times. It’s part of the job and we understand that, we like it. That’s why we’re defensive backs. Especially safeties. Safeties have their ears ringing all the time. At this point I’d get lonely without it. Just like big giant tight ends have to get used to twisted and mangled ankles because how else are we supposed to stop them once they get up a head of steam. Right, get their ankles, and work ’em all day long. Chop ’em and twist ’em till they’re flopping around like fish. Wrench the foot right off ’em if you can. Then who cares how big they are, right? Just like they taught us.”

There were whole weeks when Lloyd didn’t say this many words to me. Maybe the bash in the head was spilling them all out.

“Coaches never taught you that, Lloyd, c’mon.”

He stopped, so I stopped. He grabbed his forehead with one big hand and started massaging out the rapidly rising tension. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Absolutely not.” I watched the hand carefully to make sure it stayed on his head.

“What do you mean, then? What exactly, possibly could you mean?” He continued the massaging, limbering up the hand as much as soothing the head.

“What I meant, ah, was they really haven’t taught me anything yet. Coaches not talking much to the freshmen yet at all, actually, was what I meant. So just wondering, when are they gonna start teaching me stuff.”

He broke right back into stride. I could see he was glad he was in on a secret I didn’t know about.

“You won’t hear that kind of thing from the coaches. Not in so many words anyway. You’ll hear it from the upperclassmen. You’ll hear it on the field, not on the sideline, not in the locker room. You’ll hear it and you’ll feel it. Then one day, you’ll just have”—he pointed at his temple—“without even totally realizing or remembering where and when you got it.

“Like it came outta nowhere.”

“Right,” I said, “kind of like a secret s—”

The air blew out of me as he stopped short and landed a sharp elbow perfectly in my solar plexus.

“Kind of like that,” he said, walking along as I hunched over, struggling for breath.

***

“Good,” Ma said, with uncommon force.

Lloyd had just stormed through the front door, with me in his slipstream, announcing his retirement from football. Ma thinking this was good was not a shock.

“No, not good,” Lloyd answered, as if it wasn’t even his idea, as if Ma was the one who’d removed him from the team.

“Yes, yes. This is good,” she said. She liked things to be good. And quite some time ago she had decided football wasn’t good at all. “Very good. Great, even.”

“Ah, go to hell, Ma,” he said.

“Lloyd!” I barked.

“It’s okay, Arlo,” she said serenely, knowing things were going her way. “I will go to hell, Lloyd, if that is what you wish. Happily to hell, as long as you’re not going to football. Let’s shake on it.”

“No!” he said, actually shrinking from her offered hand. He looked almost like a kid, hiding the hand behind his back. Somehow she could still make him like this. She was the only one who could.

“What am I hearing?” Dad said, coming in from the kitchen. He had his apron on. Which meant we were having steak. It was the only thing he could cook. If you could call the curious things he did to meat cooking.

“I don’t know what you’re hearing there, master chef, but here’s what I’m hearing: NO MORE FOOTBALL. Lloyd left the team.”

Dad did not share Ma’s distaste for the finest of all sports.

“You quit? You actually just quit?” he said with a combination of bafflement and disgust pinching his features. “Are you joking?”

“Do I ever joke with you, Dad?” Lloyd snapped. “Anyway, I didn’t quit. I retired.”

Dad turned away, muttering to himself, as if Lloyd wasn’t even worth addressing. “Fine. No football, no steak.”

Lloyd just let his snort follow Dad back out.

Ma had walked up close enough to get a whiff of the snort. “You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Yes, Mother, of course I’ve been drinking. Wouldn’t you be drinking if you were thrown off the football team?”

“No, I wouldn’t. And neither should you—I don’t care what excuse you have. Anyway, I thought you said you quit the team?” she asked, hands now on her hips.

If it were me caught drinking—though it never would be me—I’d be pretty humble at this point. But Lloyd just made a big show of not caring. He toggled his head around, rolled his eyes, and made a blah-­blah-­blah gesture, his hand opening and closing like a quacking duck’s beak.

I loathed it when he did that to me. But when he did it to Ma, my blood boiled.

“And you started drinking before you even got to practice, so that doesn’t really make sense,” I blurted, because I just had to say something to knock him off his horse.

The room emptied of anything—people, furniture, air—that was not me and him. I had never seen him angrier than this. I had seen him precisely this angry a couple of thousand times before, however. He was seething, his face purple, his teeth grinding, and his eyes were pumping like they were desperate to launch and get first shot at me.

I braced.

“Lloyd!” Ma screamed, running toward us.

Luckily, he passed out cold before he could manage to drop me.

***

“Knock it off, I’m fine.”

“You were unconscious, Lloyd,” Ma said, holding a cold facecloth to his forehead as he sat slumped against an ottoman.

“I was never unconscious. I was aware of everything, I just couldn’t move. Must have been a stress thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, because what could he do to me now? “The stress of a pint of whiskey and a concussion.”

“Concussion?” Ma gasped.

He glared up at me as best he could. “Kicking me while I’m down? Hooray for you, big man. You think I won’t remember this, Arlo?”

Still feeling fairly secure and upper handy, I said, “Under the circumstances, I think there’s a pretty good chance of that.”

He kept his head down, to keep his strength up.

“Pray for it, my brother. You better pray for it.”

Weak, pathetic, on his ass, nursed by his mommy, and still scary as all holy hell.

The File

And so, I inherited The File.

“Oh, Ma,” I said, “is that what I think it is?”

She had caught me mid-­sit-­up on the floor of my bedroom. I stopped right there, and held the very tough half-­up position as I stared at The File in her hands.

“If what you think it is is valuable information and good common sense, then yes, you are correct.”

“Ah,” I said, falling back flat on the floor. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

The File was something my loving mother had been compiling for quite some time. From about the time the brain injury center at Boston University started popping up in the news almost as often as the weather forecast. It was like a little bomb went off in her own head, blowing out most of the regular motherly stuff like buying me shirts I would never wear and deciding whether raisins really belong in meatballs. Those things were replaced by an obsession with the subject of head injuries. In that File was one graphic horror story after another, clipped from newspapers and magazines, downloaded from seriously unhelpful do-­gooder websites, possibly even whipped up with her own desktop publishing skills for all I knew, all on the subject of brain trauma. Most of them about sports-­related brain trauma.

“I don’t want to interrupt your sit-­ups,” she said, taking a seat at my desk. “So why don’t I just read to you while you work out. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s been so long since I read to you, and you used to love that, remember? Shall I just start at the beginning?”

I was, of course, already well familiar with the contents of The File, which was generally in Lloyd’s room collecting dust unless he and I were ridiculing it. I should have realized that with Lloyd now out of the game, she was free to turn her powers on me. The weak stray, isolated from the herd.

“That’s okay, Ma. I’ll have a look at it later. You can just leave it there on the desk.”

“Here’s a fascinating thing,” she said, emphatically not leaving it there on the desk. “It’s from that wonderful woman who runs the Center.” The Center. Officially, it’s the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, but they’re on a first-­name basis. “She says, ‘The biggest problem isn’t concussions, actually. It’s the subconcussive hits that mount up every single time these guys line up.’ Huh. That’s something, isn’t it?”

My extra grunty sit-­ups weren’t fooling her and weren’t deterring her.

“I say, that’s something, Arlo, isn’t it?”

With one last operatic grunt I sat straight up and addressed her more like the polite son I actually was most of the time.

“Well, Ma, I’m not sure it is something, actually. It sounds like it’s exactly not something because what is a subconcussive hit? Sounds like it’s everything that isn’t a concussion, which is practically everything. I mean, there, I just got another subconcussive. There’s another one. Oops, you just got one, too.”

She nodded graciously, smiled generously. It was good for us that it was never a struggle locating each other’s humor zone.

“Clever boy,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

Then she busily shuffled through The File. “Here, let me show you a picture of a brain slice from another clever boy. Well, former clever boy, obviously . . .”

Arrgghh.

“Tell you what, Ma, if I lop off a slice of my brain for you to examine, will you go look at it in another room?”

“If I did have a slice of your beautiful brain, I’d show it to every­one I met. Like people do with grandchildren photos. Which I also want to show off someday, by the way, so if you can’t take care of yourself for yourself or for myself, could you at least do it for them?”

“I’ll look at The File, Ma. If you just let me finish what I’m doing here in peace, I promise I’ll have a look.”

“Well then,” she said all huffy mock-­offended. In reality, she was kind of elated with this small progression. “I can tell when I’m not wanted. Should I just leave it here on the desk, then?”

I was already back in mid-­sit-­up when she laid that on me, and I fell back flat again with the laughing. “Yeah, Ma, that sounds like an excellent idea.”

I was hard at work again as she floated out of the room, dropping last words on me like a post TD spike. “You promised, Arlo.”

Ah, hell. I did not lie to my mother. And when she snapped my name on the end there in just that way she had, it was like signing a pact in blood.

I was sweaty and winded sometime later when I finally could not outwork, outrun, outsmart my promise.

The File was patiently, smugly lying there when I dropped into the chair at my desk.

I opened it.

I said I would, and I did. There.

I closed it again with a thwap.

What the hell was that? What happened there? Okay, it was brain slices, as promised, so what?

What was I, a coward all of a sudden? This was moronic.

I opened The File again, held my stare on the slices for a full eight-­count. One sample had what looked like diarrhea seeping out from between brain folds, while another had large crusty black patches like from frostbite. Still another one was covered all over with scars, growths, as if the lucky owner of that brain got to walk around with mushrooms and maggots filling up his head. Then the next page showing brains, some like shriveled apples, some like old milky pumpkins, some of them like they’d had a whole party of cigarettes stubbed out in them. Others looking like—

I slapped it shut again. I had not lied to my mother; I had not folded to the fear.

And I was not one of those guys in the pictures. Never would be. No disrespect, but you had to be a certain type of athlete to wind up in that state, a certain type of person. Fine, maybe Lloyd’s brain did look like that, a little. In spots. Because he played like a maniac, like he wanted to be hurt. But I was not that type of person. I played hard, but I played controlled, and I played smart. Football is a hard game that rewards smart. A guy does not get a brain like that if he uses it correctly in the first place.

“Hey!” was the shout right in my ear, with the slap across the back of my head. “There it is. What are you doing with my file, ass?”

Lloyd grabbed The File off my desk like the big winnings off a poker table and glared at me as he walked out of the room.

Lloyd wanting The File? Well. That certainly was an occurrence on the WTF side of unexpected.

I had wondered if he might get a little freaky without football. But already he was showing enough unrecognizable weird to be worrisome.

The Good Life

I had been aware of Sandy for some time before we got to high school. We didn’t go to the same junior high, but hers wasn’t far from mine and our circles were not far off from each other’s and she was deadly cute and I was big. So we knew each other, like “Hey” when we passed on the street. Just like that, “Hey” with the smiles, and at some point she added a little sort of military salute wave and that did it, gaffed me with a giant fishhook.

So when we got to high school, there was more of that, and more often and in the same hallways, so we were getting there.

But there wasn’t there until football took us all the way there.

I was on the team already, the jayvee as a freshman, which brings some cachet with it, and we were on the field for preseason practice.

And she was there for cheerleader tryouts.

Not as an applicant. As a protester.

Like everybody else on the field, I was paying at least as much attention to cheerleader tryouts as I was to the business of football. Guys were missing tackles, missing blocks, dropping passes or throwing them to places miles away from where they could be caught. If it weren’t so dangerous, it would have been funny. It was funny anyway.

After a while I saw her, there in the stands close to where the head cheerleader was screaming at the new recruits, holding up a sign that said: YOU MUST BE JOKING, GIRLS.

I was torn big time now. Concentrate on the football. Pay attention to the jumping, cartwheeling, lovely go-­teamers flying around in my peripheral vision. Or laugh at the adorable little radical trying to mess up the wholesome sideline tradition that had been in place for generations and was quite possibly the key to America’s uniquely successful breeding program for producing better and better athletes.

I managed to do all three, because I was always a gifted multitasker.

But when the cheerleaders started yelling things at Sandy, and Sandy started yelling things back, my laughter won out over both football and legs.

It was the kind of thing that made Sandy stand out. She could have easily been mistaken for another good-­looking girl going out for the squad, while she was just determined to tell the squad where to jump.

“Why would somebody do that kind of thing?” I said as I trailed her home that afternoon.

“I don’t know,” she said, walking on without looking at me. “Why would a girl with even a scattering of brain fragments allow herself to be thrown high in the air by other girls and let the whole football team gawp at her little panties under her little skirt?”

I was closing the distance between us on the sidewalk.

“Nobody gawped,” I said.

“Everybody gawped. That’s what the spectacle is all about. You gawped.”

“I never gawped.”

“You gawped.”

“How would you know if I gawped? Unless you were gawping at me.”

“I never gawped at you.”

“Maybe you should. Would you like to?”

Like a receiver with great footwork losing a defensive back, she took a quick cut down a side street I was almost certain was not hers. I stood there on the corner watching her walk away.

“Go home and gawp yourself,” she said without turning her head.

“Oh-­ho,” I said, laughing, admiring her work, then quickly looking around to see if anybody had witnessed it.

***

“So what have you got against football?” I said to her the next time I saw her, by which time I had had a lot of practice pretending she was already my girlfriend.

“I love football,” she said, staring at the large café mocha I had placed on the spot right next to her, on the low wall that ran along the front of the school grounds. She looked at the coffee for a fairly long time, contemplating it, an. . .