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All right let it be on your head, Ma.
    Fine. Whatever. I’m sorry, I’m being bratty. I shouldn’t be raining on your summer. How are those World Cup games going anyway? Pretty ripping, huh? Was that you the paper showed sitting in the party tent with Placido Domingo after Italy-Spain in Foxboro? He was looking down your dress, you know. Did I not tell you to avoid the European men while I’m away?
    No Longer Your Concern,
    Mr. Bishop

Chapter 2: Oh my god. Football.
    W HAT TO DO WITH the fat guys? They don’t know what to do with the fat guys. The fat guys don’t fit the Plan, the Philosophy, the shorts. Red shorts. Everybody’s got to wear them. The Plan is that all the fine young men here can succeed if they are properly guided to the right sports activity for them. The raw material is in there, in each and every one of us, and it can be molded with the proper instruction at the earliest levels—before we get too screwed up.
    I tried to tell them. I tried earnestly to tell them that my insides were every bit as flabby as my outsides. They wouldn’t hear of it. None of the people in charge here—and they were all in charge, except for the kids—could conceive of this. They’d call up their directory of everything they knew about young men’s insides, and that profile would not show up. The soft kid, the kid who could not play anything and who did not even care about it. They were sorry, but that kid did not exist.
    “We’ll find what you’re hidin’ inside there,” said Thor, my Cluster Leader. He grabbed two fistfuls of fat at my beltline and yanked me around as he said it, like a hundred people had done before him.
    Why do people think that’s funny?
    Football, of course. Their response to a fat kid is always football. They don’t know what else to do. They figure they’re going to melt away my outside and find a football-player-shaped monster lurking on the inside.
    They just wouldn’t listen.
    “Don’t cry, goddammit,” the coach screamed. It was my third play from scrimmage, eight minutes and three head slaps into my football career. “It’s a head slap. It’s illegal, but it happens all the time. You can’t cry about it. Jesus.” He turned his back on me and stalked away, personally offended by my behavior. Then he paced, as violent people will do when they’re trying to get it under control.
    I wasn’t crying, anyhow. Yes, I was upset, and yes, there were tears splashing down my face, but I was not crying. They were just those pain tears, the kind that come out when your mind says “no way, not now, cannot cry here” but your body knows better and goes ahead unauthorized.
    I could feel around me that I was getting looks from the four score and seven other gridiron monkeys who stood in temporary grunt-free silence all over the field. Hell, half of them had cried already, but they channeled their pain in a much more acceptable way: They went on and maimed somebody else.
    Composed, Coach came back as I lined up again. He screamed right into the little one-inch earhole on the right side of my helmet, so it sounded like he had a bullhorn pressed to the side of my head. “Do not let him get by you again! Your quarterback was a dead man on that last play! Protect the passer! Don’t cry! Don’t cry!”
    “I was not crying,” I yelled, because it seemed pretty important to establish that. It didn’t matter; the coach was already back to pacing, walking me off his mind.
    The snap, my man rushed me. Pushed me, two hands flat on my chest. Bam . Pushed me again, blasting me back a couple more steps. I tried to dig in. Useless. Crowded me. Clack , his helmet banged into mine. One punch in the stomach. My wind gone. I was practically running backward. “Jesus Christ,” I heard the desperate-sounding quarterback behind me say. I was just trying to fend my man off now with stiff arms, waving hands. Bang ! Left-side head slap nearly knocked me over until Bang ! right-side head slap rocked me