Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3 The next few hours were a blur. The guys swarming around him, Coach B. helping him off the field, the long wait at the emergency room, Mom's and Dad's worried faces. But in the end, Lucas was fine. He just had a concussion. Sure, it was worse than the concussion he'd gotten during play-offs last season, and the one before that, during the summer after fourth grade. But he knew he would get better if he took it easy, just like the other times. That night, Dad came into Lucas's room to check on him. "Feeling okay?" he asked.

"I'm good, Dad," Lucas said. He really was feeling much better. What killed him was knowing he'd be off the field for twelve days. He already missed the guys. Looking up at Dad, Lucas saw a face almost exactly like his own — they even had the same specks of green in their brown eyes. "You need anything?" Dad asked. "I'm good," Lucas said again. Lucas stayed very still, hoping Dad would stick around and talk. But Dad stood up. He leaned over and kissed Lucas on the forehead. And he was gone. Lucas's heart sank a little. There had been a time when Dad would have plopped himself down on Lucas's bed and announced his plan for their next adventure. Some nights back then, they'd wait for Mom to fall asleep so they could sneak down to the basement to work on the Seagrave. Dad and Lucas had been a team — a team of two. But then came the warehouse fire.

Two years had passed since it happened, but the memories were still sharp — the doorbell ringing in the middle of the night, the Chief and Uncle Benny standing in the doorway, still stinking of smoke. Mom's tears. And later, the sight of Dad wrapped in bandages, his face white with pain. Lucas had always known that his dad's job was dangerous. Sometimes Dad would bring Lucas to the firehouse on his days off. Lucas would help with the chores — washing the truck, cooking lunch, checking the hoses. But what he loved most was sitting around the big, round kitchen table, listening to the guys talk about the fires they'd fought. To Lucas, they were superheroes. They ran into buildings filled with blazing orange flames and choking black smoke. They used metal spears to smash windows, rip out walls, and bash through doors. They carried people down oven-hot stairwells and dangled from ropes hundreds of feet in the air. The fires they tamed were more evil and ferocious than any video-game villain or movie monster. But it wasn't until the warehouse fire that Lucas understood what a fire could do to a real man, a

man like his dad. Dad had never talked about what happened to him inside that warehouse. All Lucas knew was that four firemen died, and Dad was badly burned in an explosion. Even after all this time, the scars on Dad's arms were bright red and lumpy, like raw hamburger. But the burns weren't the worst of what that fire did to Dad. It took away his easy smile and booming laugh. It turned him quiet. Some days Dad barely talked at all. He'd get this look in his eyes, like his mind was somewhere else — probably sifting through the ashes in that warehouse. Lucas stopped asking when they'd get back to that model of the Seagrave, which was halff- inished and covered with dust in the basement. And when the memories of that night came back, or he started worrying that Dad would never be himself again, he'd close his eyes and imagine himself on the football field, surrounded by the guys, their voices calling out his name as he made one of his famous catches.