Undercover Tailback (6 page)

Then there were the other times.

He’d move too fast on a handoff and start to run before he had the ball.

Or he couldn’t remember the signal.

Instead of keeping his mind on practice, he kept thinking about someone stealing plays.

Who?

Why?

And would it happen again?

P
arker also found his mind wandering in school. One day, he got so wound up in his thoughts, he almost walked by his own locker.
History class was over, and that was one heavy book. He decided to put it away.

It didn’t take much concentration to dial his combination — nineteen, seven, two — the year the Gators had won their last
conference title.

As he dumped the history book on the top shelf, a heavy chunk of green metal fell down and nearly hit him.

He picked it up.

It was a gator! A green metal gator!

In fact, it was the same one he’d seen on top
of the coach’s playbook the practice before the Leopards game.

How did it get there? He was the only person in the whole school who knew the combination to his locker. He had set it himself.

And he never, absolutely never, left his locker open.

The only other way to get into student lockers was with the master key in the principal’s office. The principal always made
a big thing out of it when he had to use it in an emergency. Parker would have known if that had happened.

No, it had to be someone who knew how to crack a combination lock. But who? And why would he have chosen to put the gator
in Parker’s locker?

One thing was for sure: he had to return the gator replica. And he had to tell the coach where he’d found it.

Parker hurried down to the coach’s office.

The door was open. Coach Isaac was sitting behind his desk with one hand on the telephone.

Parker walked in and handed him the gator.

“Coach!” said Parker, all excited. “Look what I just found in my locker!”

“You
found
it
where?
” asked Coach Isaac.

“In my locker,” said Parker. “I was just putting my history book away and —”

“Parker, that’s the second time I’ve seen you holding my paperweight. What on earth was it doing in your locker?” asked the
coach angrily. “I thought it had been stolen. As a matter of fact, I was just about to report it to the principal’s office.”

“I don’t know how it got there, Coach,” Parker said. “I always keep my locker locked. No one has the combination. But someone
put it there, I swear.”

“Well, I’m sure that if you had stolen it, you wouldn’t be bringing it back,” said Coach Isaac. “It’s probably some stupid
prank. You must have left your locker open. While you weren’t looking, someone put it in. But whoever it was had no right
to take it from here. Was this some kind of a dare you guys were up to?”

“No, Coach, I swear —,” Parker insisted.

“You don’t have to swear, Parker,” the coach replied. “I believe you … this time. You may, well,
stretch the truth
once in a while, but you’re no thief. Say, shouldn’t you be in class now?”

Parker was late. He left the coach’s office and ran off to his math class.

When he got there, they had already finished going over the previous day’s homework.

“Nice of you to join us, Parker,” said Ms. Cobertson as he quietly took his seat. “May I have your homework, please?”

Parker reached for his notebook to find the assignment. But his notebook wasn’t there. Had he lost it?

Or had it been stolen?

As he fumbled to come up with an explanation, he saw everyone staring at him.

Staring — and laughing.

Did he have his shirt on backward or something?

Parker felt something nudge him at the elbow.

Cris Muldoon was standing there, waving a
brown leather three-ring binder with
P.N.
in big gold letters on it.

“Uh, where was it?” he whispered to Cris.

“You left it on your seat back in homeroom, dummy,” said Cris. “I figured I’d give it to you before class, but you weren’t
around.”

“Thanks,” said Parker. He handed in his paper.

“Now perhaps we can get on with today’s lesson,” said Ms. Cobertson. “Let’s all take a look at page forty-three. …”

Parker had been a whiz in math class that year. For the first time, everything about it had made sense. He didn’t even need
a pencil and paper or a calculator. He could do most of it in his head.

But lately, even the simplest problem was beyond him. His hand used to shoot up into the air whenever Ms. Cobertson asked
the class a question. Now he almost never lifted it off his desk.

In fact, he just couldn’t seem to concentrate on any of his schoolwork these days. Instead,
he’d take out a sheet of paper and draw elaborate doodles — zigzags and scribbles and all sorts of things that popped into
his wandering mind.

As Ms. Cobertson put down a series of math problems on the blackboard, he took out a piece of paper and started to doodle
on top.

He did it automatically, without thinking. In fact, that’s what he’d been doing earlier in homeroom. No wonder he forgot his
binder. Too busy scribbling and drawing doodads. And stopping off at his locker to dump his history book.

As Parker’s attention wandered, one of the doodles started to look like a locker. He drew numbers blasting off from it, like
in a comic book.

Suddenly, Parker sat up. He remembered drawing a similar picture in homeroom. Maybe that’s how someone got my combination!
he thought. Anyone could have been looking over my shoulder. So that’s how someone got into my locker. Someone who knows I’m
a big Gators fan, too! Gosh, everyone knew about that.

But who would do that — set me up with a stolen gator?

Cris?

Too obvious. Why would Cris have made such a big show of giving him the lost notebook? No, it had to be someone else. Someone
who also snagged the gator from the coach’s office.

Joni? She certainly knew how much he liked gators. Wait a minute. That was ridiculous. She hadn’t even known about the guy
with the camera until he told her about it.

The more he thought about it, the more an ugly picture took shape in his mind.

It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.

T
hat afternoon, Parker was more distracted than ever during practice. He kept looking around as if he might see something.
Maybe someone wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt would simply walk up to him, point a camera at him, and shout, “Surprise!”
What if it was all some kind of joke, like one of those weird hidden video TV shows?

If only it were that simple, he thought as he missed a lateral.

“Parker, are you playing football or searching for UFOs?” called the coach from the bench. “Let’s see some heads-up ball!”

“Better get with it, Parker, or you’ll be warming the bench,” said Cris.

“Okay, okay! Spike, let me try Thirty-two Grind for a change. Haven’t done much with it since the Leopards game.”

“Aw, Parker, you don’t want to get hurt, do you?” asked Spike. “This is just a scrimmage. Save it for the real game.”

“C’mon, Spike,” Parker pressed. “I want to keep in shape. Give me the ball.”

“All right,” Spike agreed.

This time the play worked like clockwork. Parker broke through the small hole in the line. He wove his way through the secondary
defense into the clear. Since it was just a practice session, he didn’t run all the way down to the goal line, but awfully
close.

It felt good to get something right that day.

After practice, he stopped by Joni’s house on his way home. He told her about the gator in his locker and his visit to the
coach’s office. He showed her the doodle in his three-ring binder.

He was about to tell her his latest theory when
she suddenly blurted out, “It has to be someone on the team!”

“The perpetrator?”

“Exactly! The perp!”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,” he admitted reluctantly. “But I just can’t believe it.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Well, for one thing,” he said, “we all know the plays. We don’t have to steal them from the coach’s playbook.”

“All of them?”

“Sure, and we go over and over and over each one,” he explained. “Any one of us could draw those plays from memory.”

“You really think so?”

She paused, as if an idea were forming in her mind.

“Okay,” she said. “Prove it.”

“Prove what?” he asked.

“Prove you can draw the plays from memory. Draw one.”

“Joni, this is silly,” he protested.

“I’m serious,” she insisted. “Go ahead and draw one, any one.”

He took out a fresh piece of loose-leaf paper from the back of his binder and started to draw.

First he marked all the positions at the line of scrimmage with the starting team’s numbers. Then he drew a dotted line to
indicate where he would move when the signal was given.

“See?” he asked.

“Mmmmmm,” she said. “That’s one where you get the ball and carry it. Draw one where you don’t have anything to do.”

“I
always
have something to do,” he said. “But I know what you mean. I’ll draw a pass play where I don’t get the ball.”

He started out fine, but when it came to marking what Spike did and where the receiver moved, he couldn’t quite remember.

He tried another, and it was worse. He couldn’t recall much of what anyone else did, where they hit a mark — anything that
didn’t directly involve him.

“See?” she said. “You can’t be sure what everyone else has to do. No one on the team can. So making copies of what you know
would be only part of the picture.”

“Those Leopards knew every move to all our plays,” he said. “They had to have copies of them.”

“What could be more natural than one of the players dropping by the coach’s office before practice? It would be easy enough
for him to snap the pictures and then get lost in the after-school crowd.”

“All right, all right,” he admitted. “It could have been one of the guys on the team. But why? And which one?”

T
hat evening, Parker decided to take a scientific approach to his investigation. On a piece of paper, he jotted down a team
roster. Every member was a suspect.

Then, along the top of another page, he made some column headings — possible motives:

“Was bribed”

“Hates the coach”

“Hates school”

“Hates the rest of the team”

“Is just plain stupid”

Then he made a column titled “Has acted suspicious.”

There was plenty of space under each column
for the names of suspects to be penciled in. He left room for additional bits of information, too. He’d keep his eyes and
ears open and ask Joni and Melissa to do the same.

To start off, there weren’t any names in any of the columns. Then, day by day, the spaces started to fill up.

“Darren Shultz was late for practice,” Parker wrote in the “Has acted suspicious” column. He added, “Could have been in the
coach’s office while we were all out on the field.”

Then Joni found out that Darren had been taking a makeup history test.

The next item went under the “Hates the rest of team” column: “Fabian deRosa complained he never gets any help.”

But that was soon followed by: “Fabian scored three times in practice, then announced, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you
guys.’ ”

Most of the offense and a large part of the defense came in for comments, one after the other. But then explanations followed,
and the comments were crossed out.

At the same time, a lot of comments were being made about Parker — by his teachers.

“Haven’t finished the assignment, Parker?”

“Lost your homework?”

“Don’t know the answer?”

“Can’t find the place? Will someone please show Parker where we’re reading!”

The grades on his papers went from A’s to B’s to C’s, one after another.

But Parker hardly noticed. His mind was definitely elsewhere.

Then Parker decided to take another approach to his investigation.

“Mom,” he asked one morning, “remember how you said I could use the computer in your office for homework? Can I come by after
practice?”

“That won’t give you much time before I have to come home,” said Mrs. Nolan. “Can’t you use one of the computers in school?”

“This is kind of private stuff,” he explained. “It won’t take much time.”

“Well, it
is
the best time,” she said. “The office is pretty quiet late in the day. All right — I’ll see you later.”

That afternoon, Parker entered all his information into a program on his mom’s computer. He added a new list next to each
player’s name — his best guess for what the chances were that that person was the perpetrator.

Cris Muldoon: 50–50

Spike Newton: 50–50

Fabian deRosa: 50–50

Morris Comer: 50–50

Parker hoped that this program would sort all the information and spit out the name of the most likely suspect. But when he
tried to make the program work, nothing much happened. The computer just alphabetized the list of player’s names.