My dad also played high school football. He was counting on a college scholarship but never got one. Instead he went to work for my uncle, managing auto parts distribution. He walked it off. Between that and what Mom earned as a nutritionist, we scraped by okay. Thank God for fast food; it drove people to my mom like a cattle chute.

That’s how things were. It’s what doctors call “baseline.” The reading by which everything else is measured. It was the normal before everything went to some place way past hell.

There are choices we make, choices that are made for us, and things we ignore long enough until all choices have fallen away. I’ve been plenty guilty of ignoring stuff I don’t want to deal with until it doesn’t matter anymore, or it’s too screwed up to bother fixing. Like the time I put off registering for the PSAT until it was too late. My mom was furious, but I didn’t care. She was enrolling me in an SAT prep class, so what was the point of wasting a perfectly good Saturday on a practice test I’d be taking half a dozen times anyway? Besides, I was hoping for the scholarship Dad never got.

“That’s what Jay next door thought,” my mom had pointed out. “He hung everything on a scholarship he never got, and didn’t get in anywhere.”

“There’s always community college,” my father chimed in, always taking whatever side my mother didn’t. “It’s less expensive, and he can transfer to a university in two years that won’t bankrupt us.”

It made me think of my friend Leo Johnson, who was already being courted by major schools. I was happy for him, and it would bring recruiters to our games, but I knew none of them would be looking at me. I can’t deny that I envied the options Leo would have—but I had to trust that I’d have choices, too.

So where was my choice, then, that took me down the path to the tweaked places I ended up? It couldn’t have been the choice to play ball that day. I mean, who in their right mind chooses not to play their sport without a good reason—such as death or dismemberment. Few things would keep me away from the field. I had an obligation to my team. There wasn’t even a premonition that first day. There was nothing to indicate that something was beginning that couldn’t be undone.