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When I was in grade nine, two friends and I tried out for the high school football team. If I had known how my life would change because of that, and not just my life, but the lives of my brother and our parents, I would never have touched a football, but of course there was no way of knowing. The first day at practice all the players spread out across the field and slowly walked through the scrubby grass from one end zone to the other, our eyes on the ground before our feet. Every time we spotted a rock, we picked it up and heaved it off the field. After that there were calisthenics and drills, then blocking and tackling. When I was the only grade nine who made the team, I was ecstatic. I liked to think my success was because I was faster than any other kid when we drilled at running backwards, a perfect skill for a defensive back, but there might have been more to it than that. What I always remember was Todd Branton, one of the hotshot grade twelves, saying, “ookie, you are such a lucksack. You made the team because your brother” the quarterback. And that” the only reason.?His voice low and sarcastic in the murmur of the locker room, exhausted players on the bench beside him raising their heads to stare at me, wondering what I” do. And oh no, I couldn” keep my mouth shut. ?ure, Branton, and you made the team because every time the coaches want to take a dump they know you—e there to wipe their butt.?The other players still stared at me, a few of them grinning, though you could see they didn” want to. ?p yours, dirtbag,?said Branton. “ou smile and I—l rub it off with my jockstrap,?but he was too tired to act. Or so I thought. There” something about this Branton “I don” know exactly, but if a fart had a face it” look just like him. The next day, getting ready for practice, I had stripped down to my jockey shorts when they came for me, a bunch of them grabbing me at once, lifting me off the bench, pinning me into a metal chair, my brother standing by, grinning “nervously, I thought. He didn” make a move to help me. The screech of duct tape unrolling, and they were tying me to the chair, binding my legs to the chairlegs, wrapping tape around and around my arms, securing me to the metal frame. Behind me I heard my brother say, “his must be a new one. Makes one hundred and ninety-two uses for duct tape.”