Million-Dollar Throw by Mike Lupica

fact, I think I’ll go get on the computer and sort of start doing it right now.”
    “That sounds a little mysterious.”
    “Just trying to get smarter,” Nate said.
    “Always a good thing,” she said.
    Or maybe even a great thing.
    Abby was always telling Nate that knowledge was power, and Nate hadn’t been feeling powerful at all lately, on the football field or anywhere else.
    He went upstairs and turned on his computer and got on the Internet and started looking for his own good news.

    He stayed on the computer for a couple of hours, chasing one false lead after another, ending up feeling as if he were a dog chasing his own tail. But, he told himself, at least he was doing something, wasn’t just sitting back. He was trying to make something happen the way he once did in games.
    Even if it was just throwing one of those Hail Mary passes.
    When he was finished, after he’d made his room look the way it used to when they still had a cleaning lady, he called Abby and asked if she’d changed her mind about going to the movies.
    “I get a lot of things about you, Brady,” she said. “ Most things, actually. But the whole dark crusader thing you and the boys have got going for you, that I most definitely do not get.”
    “ Caped crusader,” he said. “ Dark knight.”
    “Him too,” Abby said.
    Then she said that after he spent two and a half depressing hours with the dark caped guy, she’d meet him at Joe’s for pizza and cheer him up.
    Which is where they were now, Joe’s, in their favorite booth in the front, having an early dinner. Between them was their usual, half pepperoni, half plain, and Abby was giving him a major pep talk about tomorrow’s game against Ridgefield.
    “You talk a much better game than I play right now,” he said.
    “Speaking of talking,” she said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
    Nate saw that she had her serious eyes on. “What?” he said.
    “I might be going away to school,” Abby said.
    Nate stopped eating then, felt a little bit as if he’d stopped breathing at the same time.
    “Excuse me?”
    “You heard me,” she said. “I might, possibly, nothing final yet, still in what my folks say is the discussion stage, be going away for school second semester.”
    He was hearing her just fine, of course. Just didn’t want to be.
    “Where?” Nate said.
    “This place where I’d feel a little less different,” Abby said. “Where everybody can’t see.”

CHAPTER 16
    T he Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, was the most famous school of its kind in the world, according to Abby.
    Nate just sat there in the booth like he was in the front row at school, listening to one of his teachers, listening to all these facts about Perkins, not touching the slice of pizza on the plate in front of him. He wasn’t hungry all of a sudden, just trying to take it all in like it was some kind of class and if he missed something it might really, really cost him down the road.
    “Helen Keller even went there for a while in the late eighteen hundreds,” Abby said.
    “Who’s Helen Keller?”
    “You know,” Abby said. “Helen Keller from The Miracle Worker .”
    Nate put his hands out, shook his head, as if telling her: no clue, none.
    Abby said, “She wasn’t just the first famous blind person, she was deaf, too. She had this great teacher named Annie Sullivan, way before she went to Perkins. Helen Keller, I mean. Annie Sullivan was actually the one they called the miracle worker, for getting through to Helen Keller and finding out how brilliant she was even if nobody knew it back then. And ”—Abby took a deep breath, the way his mom did sometimes in the middle of a speech about something—“to make a really long, interesting story short, Helen Keller ended up at Perkins and later on became a writer and speechmaker and political leader and had pretty much become one of the most admired women on the entire planet by the time she