“If she doesn’t know about this friend you have here at school, why is she angry?”

Justin slouched down in the desk seat and mumbled, “Moms are a trip.”

Jake hid his smile. “Talk to me, son.”

Justin looked up at Jake, his expression unreadable but his thought clear: I wish...

“So what did you do, beat up a girl and take her lunch money?”

“Ha! No, Coach!”

“Push her down on the playground and look under her dress?”

Justin laughed. “No!”

Jake laughed as well, easing the tension of the moment. “Of course you don’t have to tell me, but I am curious.”

Justin squirmed in his chair, picked up his pencil, and tapped on the desk. When he answered his voice was barely above a whisper. “I looked at some pictures.”

Jake leaned back in his chair. “Some pictures, huh?”

Justin nodded. “My aunt caught me and my cousin looking at naked women and told Mama. I’m in all kinds of trouble, Coach Mac, and I don’t understand why looking at those pictures was so bad.”

“What kind of pictures were they?”

Again, Justin’s voice was low, soft. “Nasty ones.”

“Why were they nasty?”

“’Cause Mama said so. The girls were naked, and Mama said I was looking at filth and being disrespectful to women. But all we was doing was looking at them!” Justin’s head was bowed but he sneaked peeks at the man he idolized to gauge his reaction. “Was I wrong, Coach?”

Jake toyed with the papers on his desk, thinking through his answer. On one hand, he didn’t want to counter what Dominique had told her son but on the other, he didn’t want the young man thinking it wrong to do something that in Jake’s mind was a male rite of passage. What red-blooded young man hadn’t looked at a girly mag at least once in his lifetime?

“Look here, Justin. I understand why your mom is upset. To her, you’re still a little boy, her baby.”

“I’m almost twelve,” Justin sulkily replied. “That’s almost a teenager!”

“True, but you’re not a teenager yet. And your mom probably thinks eleven is a little too young to look at the type of pictures your cousin showed you.”

Justin’s shoulders slouched. The last thing he wanted to do was disappoint his coach. “So you’re mad at me, too?” After asking this question, Justin looked Jake straight in the eye.