Excerpt from Too Shattered for Mending by Peter Brown Hoffmeister, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

JT was the best football player in the school that fall, a preseason All- State selection at strong safety, and that only made me more of a curiosity. The little brother of a hero. I was on varsity too that year, partly because of JT and partly because of my abnormal size. I didn't mind hitting people, and JT made me do some tough workouts in the summer to get ready for the season, but the playbook wasn't something I understood. The plays looked like a bunch of letters and lines scribbled all over the place, crossing each other everywhere, and in a bunch of different colors, and I couldn't memorize any of the offensive or defensive packages. I told the coach that the playbook made no sense to me, but he said, "You just need to buckle down and learn up then, son. Spend more time with it," so I took it home and studied it, even put my red plastic sheet over the pages, but nothing helped. There wasn't anything in the world that would make the playbook read like a story to me.

One night at practice, my positions coach said, "Jesus dammit, Little, if you go the wrong way one more time, then the whole fuckin' team's gonna run wind sprints after practice." I went the wrong way again two plays later be-cause I was trying to do what was in the playbook and not really trusting what I felt might be right, and everyone glared pretty hard at me as we started our line runs after the last drill.

But JT said real loud, "I don't give a shit about this extra running. These sprints are only making us faster as a team, right, so I'm fine with this," and he winked at me after he said it. So then the team was okay with the sprints, and no one gave me too hard of a time after practice. But football stayed rough after that, and the coaches kept yelling at me.


Rowan sat next to me those whole three weeks I was in the advanced math class. I thought she was beautiful with those cat's eyes, and I didn't care too much that I couldn't understand the math that was being taught in the class as long as I could keep sitting next to Rowan. She was good at math, always getting the right answer on the board when she was called up by the teacher, but the way she slumped her shoulders and rolled her eyes as she walked back to her seat, the whole class could tell that she hated it, or hated the teacher, and that only made people like her more. I hoped she'd be called up every day so I could watch her walk, watch her shift her hips in her big, loose clothes. She'd write her equations in a loopy handwriting, then walk back down my aisle like she was coming to get me.

I know it sounds dumb but I liked to imagine that she'd walk back to our seats and take my hand. Lean down and whisper, "Let's get out of here, right now, you and me, okay?"

And I'd say, "Yeah, okay," and we'd walk out of class, and the teacher would yell for us to come back, but we'd just laugh and run outside, keep running across the road, up Grasshopper Creek. Then my ideas would kind of get the better of me and I'd imagine Rowan asking me if I wanted to skinny- dip and I'd say okay. She'd take off her clothes in front of me and she'd be thin and tan, like she spent all her time naked in the sun, and she'd take off her bra last, and she'd cover her chest with her hands before she'd laugh and run into the water, throwing her bra over her shoulder, and I'd struggle with my clothes and want to catch up to her, hoping to get a glimpse of her nakedness underwater.

But then we'd be back in math class and the teacher would be calling my name for the third or fourth time and some of my classmates would have started to giggle and I'd say, "Oh, sorry. Wait, what?" and I'd look at Rowan and she'd be smiling too.

Excerpt copyright © 2017 by Peter Brown Hoffmeister. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.