He sighed and stared at me as if I’d just arrived from Pluto. Around me, I could hear kids snickering. Mr. Growler pointed at my head. “Would you like a guard for your glasses?”

“Oh…” I realized a manly battle like football could be hard on glasses, though, in truth, I had the world’s most unbreakable pair. My uncle was an optometrist, and he gave our family free glasses. While that was great for my parents’ budget, it meant I ended up with the ugliest, thickest, most unwanted frames on the planet. I could have clubbed an ogre with my glasses. Or hammered together a house. “Yeah, sure, thanks,” I mumbled.

And so I started my first game with a padded head guard and no clue whatsoever. Someone on our team kicked the ball. Everyone else ran down the field shouting. I ran down the field shouting. Everyone stopped running. I wasn’t sure why, but I was more than happy to stop, too. We lined up. The other team snapped the ball. (At the time, I had no idea it was called a “snap,” but if I limited myself to the sports vocabulary I had back then, this would be a really ugly little passage.) I noticed people all around me were bumping into each other with their arms crossed. A guy from the other team ran toward me. I crossed my arms and ran into him as hard as I could.

He was way bigger than I was. I bounced off to the side. He kept running. But I figured I’d done well. As my moment of sports heroism played through my mind, it occurred to me that this guy was different