I don’t know how many brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins Bryan and Jason have in total, but there were at least two dozen people standing there wearing the Ben Sauer blue-and-white colors. The younger girls held pom-poms and the fathers had PYFL coaching caps on just to make sure everyone knew their importance in the hierarchy of Highland football. They didn’t glare at me all at once. It was more like when you set off a firecracker string: pop—a glance—pop—a glare—bang—a hateful sneer—pop—spitting a green gob in my general direction. It wasn’t that I knew they despised me for putting myself in a position to challenge whether or not Jason Simpkin would return as the starting quarterback, it was that I knew they had gathered their forces and would do all they could to try and ruin me. My mom and I marched right past them without giving them a second glance. It wasn’t until we were safely rumbling down the street high up in our pickup that she frowned and said, “I hate those people, although ‘hate’ isn’t a word I should be using.”
