Now she looked into Nosy’s cage, but he wasn’t running on his Ferris wheel or sniffing at his wood chips. He was just sitting there breathing. So she looked at Jason. “Are you doing your homework?”
“Nah, sending e-mail to my friend who lives in New York. I’m good on the computer. See, I’ll show you.”
Jason sounded like he was bragging, but she looked anyway. E-mail looked boring, not like the games they played on the computer at school, but when Jason said you could write things and send them and they got there in seconds, she changed her mind. It was neat how you could send stuff to your friends.
“See, this is the address line. It looks weird but it works. Want to try it?”
So Crystal tapped out the address and pushed the buttons that Jason told her to and then she pushed Send and Jason said in a second his message would be in New York.
“Hey, hey, hey! We’re playing football. Come on, Squirt.” Ryan was standing in the doorway with Tommy, and Tommy pushed him into the side of the door, but Ryan only laughed and punched him in the stomach. Squirt was what they called Jason.
Jason jumped up and bumped Crystal’s chin real hard and didn’t even say he was sorry. Crystal said, “You hurt me.”
“Oh. Sorry.” For a second, he looked as if he’d forgotten she was there.
“Come on. We need another body to crush.” That was Ryan, who was bigger and had blonder hair than Tommy, and a bigger nose, and that was how you could tell them apart. Because other than that, they acted the same. Two big boys who were always pushing each other.
“I’ll whip your butts,” Jason said, bragging again.
“Oh, did we say we were going to let you on a team?” Ryan laughed. “We’re going to let you be the football, Squirt.”
Jason said, “Cut the crap.” Crap was a bad word, but nobody paid attention.
Jason grabbed his sweatshirt. When he pulled it over his head, it was like he noticed Crystal again. “Hey, guys. Remember what Dad said. We gotta be nice to our cousin.” Then Jason looked at her and said, “Do you want to play? We’ll go easy on you.”
Crystal couldn’t believe that. Nobody wanted to play with her here, not even Jason. Her chest kind of pounded. They wanted her to play. But they were all so big and football was rough. She said, “I don’t know how to.”
“We’ll do touch. No tackling. We’ll go easy and then when you get tired and quit we’ll do tackle.”
“But I’ll get knocked down.”
“She’ll get knocked do…wn,” Ryan said in this voice that made fun of the way she talked, and then he and Tommy laughed.
All of a sudden, Crystal couldn’t stand it. She said, “Cut the crap.” Her face went hot but it felt good because Ryan and Tommy stopped wiggling and they all stared at her. She knew her momma would be mad that she’d said a bad word, and Miss Jenny wouldn’t like it, either. But her momma was in heaven, and Miss Jenny was in Hilton Head, and Crystal was in Ohio, and even the judge said she had to live here.
It seemed like a long time that they stared at her, and Crystal felt so funny with them looking at her that she almost took it back. But she didn’t.
Tommy finally said, “Well, okay, you can be on Squirt’s team.”
They went downstairs, and Jason said stuff like it’s not fair to have the big kids against the little kids, but it didn’t seem to really bother him a lot. When they got out in the yard, Jason said, “Tommy, you’re on Crystal’s team.” Tommy came right over to Crystal. She couldn’t believe it.
Tommy stood behind her and held her arms and showed her how to hold the football. The football was big and hard. Then Tommy showed her how to pass the football. He stepped away and Crystal tried it. The football went up sorta high and then it squiggled and fell down not very far from her. The boys laughed. Crystal thought about saying cut the crap again, but decided once a day was enough.
They told her the rules, which didn’t make sense. But that almost didn’t matter—now they weren’t laughing at her any more and they were playing with her. She felt better than she had since she came here. The sun was shining even though it was cold, and the sunshine felt good, making the top of her head warm.
Ryan and Jason went into what they called a huddle, and then Ryan came running. Before Crystal could blink her eyes, Tommy had touched him, which was a tackle when you played touch football. Well, Tommy did more than touch—he grabbed Ryan on the arm and twirled him around.
Football was rough.
They played some more. Once Crystal got the football and she held it to her stomach even though it was covered in mud, and ran as fast as she could. It took a long time until Jason touched her and she had to stop. That felt good, especially when Tommy said, “All right, kid. You gained us some yards.”
Then the football was up in the air, and it was spinning, spinning down toward her. Tommy yelled, “Catch it,” and Crystal held up her arms.
Wham!
Something hit her hard in the shoulder. She fell and went skidding along the stiff, frozen grass. She finally stopped and was lying on her side, her cheek in the grass, staring across the yard.
All these feet were coming toward her. Big feet, running.
“Are you okay?”
“Are you all right?”
“Hey, kid, are you hurt?”
She sat up, though she felt weird, like shaky inside.
Tommy was looking down at her. “Ryan hit you.”
“Well, I was trying to get the ball, you dork. Not hit the kid.”
Jason got down by her. “Are you hurt?”
She looked where he was looking, and saw that the sleeve of her sweatshirt had come up and her arm was all full of cuts. When she touched them, they hurt.
“Oh, man, Dad’s gonna be pissed this time.” Ryan stood there, and he was shaking his head at Tommy. “You knew she was too little to play football. How could you have been such an idiot?”
“Well, you wanted to play, too.” They went on arguing, and Jason said what Ryan said, that his dad would maybe get mad. Crystal just sat there on that horrible rough grass in the cold. All she wanted in the world was to be back home.
“She’s not hurt that bad,” Jason said, pushing at her arm and making it hurt more. “See? She can bend her elbow.” He bent it back and forth.
They all looked at her, all those big boys, and she thought of saying cut the crap again, but she didn’t feel as though she could right now because it was so hard not to cry.
“I want my momma,” she said instead, and her voice didn’t sound like it had when she’d said cut the crap. Now it sounded tiny.
“Listen.” Jason got down beside her. “You aren’t hurt that bad. We were only playing. The thing is, we might get in trouble if you tell Dad.” He stopped for a second. “You don’t want us to get in trouble, do you?”
She didn’t care. She wanted her momma. She wanted Miss Jenny!
Tommy got down by Jason, and he had this kind of frown on his face. “Jason’s right, kid. There are things Dad doesn’t have to know, and we don’t rat on each other. We just get even when we can. If you live here, you’ve got to learn the rules.”
That was a bad rule. “He’ll find out. My sweatshirt is