He had fallen in love with her soft blond hair done up in pig tails and her bright blue eyes in the second grade. She had been taller than he had been back then. He was smaller than most of his classmates and not remotely athletic. Another girl had actually beaten the crap out him early the following school year. He was often teased and picked on in elementary school but never by her. She'd always been kind to him. She'd endured his clumsiness during dancing class, even asking him to dance when he was too fearful to ask anyone to dance.
Their parents knew each other; perhaps that was why she had been kind. His parents worked for a living; hers did not. Her parents were divorced and she spent most summers with her mother in some upscale site on the Riviera. He spent most of his in a primitive log cabin in the back woods of Maine.
His parents were "wannabees", desperate to cling to even the lowest rung of the social ladder. Hers were descendants of the earliest settlers in the New World; in the history books, her great grandfather had a paragraph devoted to his exploits as did her grandfather. Her father's exploits graced the tabloid gossip pages; the articles focused on his womanizing and his penchant for marrying the wrong women time and time again.
His father killed himself one day and the family's grip on the social ladder slipped. No more private school or dancing classes. They moved. His mother remarried and they moved several more times in the next few years. They ultimately ended up on a small farm in a desolate region of what was commonly known as Appalachia.
His parents drank and his step-father abused him. That marriage---his mother's fourth---ultimately ended in divorce after she got beaten badly enough to leave permanent scars. He had stopped the beating by confronting his step-father with a .270 Remington deer rifle. Something in the scared young boy's eyes had told the cruel man that he would not dissuade the boy from killing him.
The awful man had denigrated the young boy at every opportunity. His favorite expression had been an old rural colloquialism: "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." He had beaten the frail youth often and viciously.
The step-father's departure coupled with a growth spurt quickly served to reshape the boy's potential future. In the summer that followed the bastard's permanent exit from his life, he constructed a crude set of weights from old pipe, cement blocks and cast off farm implement parts.
His mother had been told that he was quite bright but didn't apply himself. He hung out with the losers and was viewed as a loser by other classmates. He often got in trouble in school, more acting out than anything else and nothing criminally serious. Still he had endured too many visits to the principal's office, coupled with a hard paddling which was always followed by a severe beating when he got home.
When he showed up in late August prior to his sophomore year in high school for football tryouts, he expected to be ridiculed, certainly not accepted. Everyone in the small community knew what had happened to him and to his mother. To his amazement, he was met with kindness in a rural society that could not comprehend the cruelty of his step-father.
There were barely enough kids in the small community to adequately field a football team so he was awarded a uniform. His physical training regimen over the summer had been relentless...almost obsessive. While lacking previous sports exposure and athletic prowess, he impressed both the coaches and established players alike with his tenacity, toughness and fitness. He was a faster runner than he realized, having never had the chance to compete with others. The countless runs along the mile and a half long dirt road up and down the small mountain which separated his home from neighbors had given him stamina and endurance as good or better than anyone on the team.
He couldn't yet throw a football very well; he had the strength but not the technique or the repetitions. He was only just getting over his ingrained blink response to an object coming toward his head at high speed and often failed to catch the ball; again he was learning and his coaches saw promise. He seemed to bounce up quickly after being tackled; he paid attention and never complained. As his foot work improved during the pre-season practices, he also became adept at judging a runner's impending moves. Having done so, he always delivered a bone crushing tackle which immediately ended the opposing player's progress.
Still a bit too light to be a linebacker, he was the perfect size for the secondary. His instincts had developed far quicker than anyone expected. After impressing the coaches in the pre-season scrimmages with his toughness he was awarded the starting job at free safety in the first game of the season, beating out a senior who had irritated the coaches with a poor work ethic. In his memory, it was the first time in his young life that he had won anything at all. He was determined not to relinquish his role as a starter and return to the far end of the bench.
He was nervous and terribly unsure of himself through the first couple of plays; fortunately the plays were away from him. On the third play of the game, the other team's star running back stormed through a massive hole in the line, slipped past the linebackers and accelerated into a full speed dash toward the end zone. The runner in question easily outweighed the novice defensive back by fifty pounds. The coaches turned their heads away when they realized that the untested sophomore was the only person left who could prevent the easy six points.
The tackle was perfectly executed; an all-pro would have been proud. More importantly, it was, while completely within the rules, as vicious a hit as the young opposing running back had ever received. Defensive backs were little; he on the other hand was a bruiser and he intimidated them. His reputation preceded him and he had fully expected the young safety whom he had never heard of to wimp out and attempt a half-hearted stop. He had in fact barreled directly toward him certain that his will would falter. He had misjudged. The sharp sound of the collision startled everyone in the small stadium; the force and pain startled the running back so much that he made an uncharacteristic mistake: he lost control of the football.
Much to the young safety's surprise he saw the football sitting on the ground within arms reach. He scooped it under his body and held on to it for dear life. The referees had to pry it out of his hands. The young man came back to his senses and bounded to his feet unfazed. The home crowd cheered deliriously. He reached down and took the hand of the running back and helped him to his feet, much to everyone's surprise.
"Nice fucking hit!" the larger boy said with a slap on the back.
He was greeted at the sidelines by more praise from coaches and other players and more slaps on the back. He enjoyed the feeling; in a matter of barely a week, he had won a competition to become a starter and done something highly worthy of praise on the field. It represented more positive reinforcement than he had experienced in his entire miserable short life. He felt more self-worth than he had ever known. It was an addictive feeling. Maybe he wasn't a fuck-up or a loser.
