Chapter 4: The Tree

The next morning, I was scheduled to referee an under-eight boy's game. All during the preparations for the game, I kept on thinking of my morning with Kayla. It wasn't until kickoff that I was able to even begin to get my mind on the game. During the game, I felt a little disconnected from things, and afterward I almost went over to the two coaches and apologized. The game had ended in a 2-2 tie, so both coaches and all the players were happy. I opted to leave well enough alone, and ended up not saying anything to them. Right after the game, I had to hustle over to the high school for team tryouts. I had played on the junior varsity soccer team my freshman year, and I had dreams of moving up to play varsity. It was a long shot, because our head coach usually only chose one freshman and a couple of sophomores for the varsity team, but I was determined to give it my best shot.

It seemed like there were about a hundred guys milling about on the practice field when I got there. I walked over to join a group of my fellow JV players, who were congregated near one post of the goal on the field, waiting for tryouts to begin.

The coaches and the seniors on the varsity team divided everybody up into groups of five. There were circles of cones set up all around the field, and we had to work crossing passes in a star pattern among our circle of five. At the same time, we were to move counter-clockwise around the cones. The coaches were watching to see how we used our feet, both to move laterally and to trap and pass the ball. It was a fairly easy exercise for my buddies and me, but there were some kids who struggled. I could see, out of the corner of my eye, the coaches marking down comments on their clipboards. I concentrated on the ball, making sure it settled against my instep before I passed it off. I really wanted to make a good impression.

After that, the coaches put us through some conditioning tests, making us run the width of the field and back while dribbling a ball. Speed was a great advantage on the field, but speed without control was no good. We were being judged on our ball-handling skills as well as our speed and conditioning.

The last test they put us through was a shooting skill drill. Using both goals, they lined us up about twenty meters out from the nets. We were to make a crossing pass, leading the guy opposite us in line. That player, in turn, was to pass it back to us as we advanced toward the goal, using either a one-touch or a two-touch pass. Once we received the ball back, we were to take a shot on goal. We then rotated to the end of the other line, and waited our turn to go again.

I had three more days of tryouts before the first cut. We wouldn't find out the coaches' decisions concerning team makeup for a couple of days after that. By the time I was walking back to my bike after that first day, I was feeling confident I had done the best I could.

As I was bicycling home from the tryouts, I decided to ride by Jake and Kayla's house to see if anybody was home. Jake was bouncing a tennis ball against his garage door, playing an imaginary baseball game.

"Hey," I said as I rode up his driveway.

"Hey," he replied as he whipped through a double-play, shortstop to second to first, against the garage door. "How was the soccer game?"

"Two-two tie," I said. I caught his liner off the panel of the door and spun it back toward him off the same panel. "How's Kay feeling?"

"Leg's pretty good, I guess. Better now than when she got up this morning. I think she's downstairs now, anyway, watching TV with Jaimie."

He threw the ball back at the garage door for me to catch. "Want to do something?" he asked.

"I guess," I answered. "What did you have in mind?"

"Come on, I'll show you something," he said. He reached for the ball, and put the ball and his baseball mitt into the basket on his bike, then climbed on. "Follow me. I found out something that I think you'll really like."

It sounded mysterious enough that he got my interest, so we pedaled off into the field behind his house, into the woods on the other side. We dropped our bikes down onto the ground, and he led the way along one of the many paths that kids of a dozen generations have made through the small patch of woods. He branched off the path and headed off toward the edge of the woods on the other side. Moving slowly through the woods, he came to a tree that had slats of wood nailed to it to make a crude ladder. Warning me to be quiet, he climbed easily up the tree trunk, and then used branches to climb a little further up. He motioned me up, so I clambered up until I was on a branch opposite the trunk from the one he was perched upon. He pointed in the direction of a house about thirty yards away, and leaned toward me around the trunk of the tree.

"What do you see?" he whispered.

I looked, trying to figure out what it was he was showing me, but I was stumped.
"Ummm... a house?" I asked.

"Yeah, idiot, a house. Whose house?"

"The O'Toole house," I said. Why is he asking me whose house this is? He knows as well as I do whose house it was.

He looked at me as if I was the village dunce. "And who lives in the O'Toole house?" he asked, speaking slowly as if to a very dim child.