Indigo Summer. Monica McKayhan

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      Curiosity had brought me there, as I sat on the bleachers on the football field and watched them practice. My mind went back to the days when football was my first love; my everything and then some. Nothing was more important to me back then. But it had soon become a long forgotten dream, and I remember the person who had shattered it: Mr. Forbes.

      I worked my behind off that year to make the team, had pumped weights all summer just trying to build up my muscle mass, had gone to football camp and everything, but the coach at my middle school didn’t think I had what it took to play quarterback anymore.

      “It’s a new day, Carter,” Mr. Forbes, the new blond-haired, pale-faced coach, had gripped his clipboard, said and frowned. “The days of you getting what you want because your daddy owns half of this town is over.”

      “But Coach, I played quarterback for the community center for five years straight.”

      “Well this is not the community center, and I’ve got a quarterback.” He smiled. “His name is Todd Richmond.”

      “Todd ain’t half as good as me.”

      “Ain’t?” He repeated my bad English. “Ain’t is not the proper word to use in that sentence. I swear to God I don’t know why I took this teaching job over here. Should’ve stayed in the suburbs where the students are both smart and talented. Over here, you people think that just because you can run a football down the field, that you don’t have to know anything else. You go through school with blinders on, thinking that sports will save you from your ignorance.”

      I stood there eyeballing him, my blood boiling as he pretty much called me and my entire race stupid to my face. I knew I had to prove him wrong. Knew that I had to prove that not every black kid who was good in sports was dumb in the classroom.

      “My grades are good,” I said in my defense.

      “You’re in the low Cs, kid. I’m struggling just to keep you on the team.”

      “But I’m bringing them up,” I said. “They dropped when my parents got divorced, because I was stressing over that.”

      “It’s always an excuse with you youngsters,” he said.

      “It’s true,” I told him. “I’m going to bring them back up. And when I graduate, I’m graduating with honors.”

      “You see Todd over there?” He pointed toward the redhead who’d stolen my position on the team. “When he leaves high school, he’ll not only have had four good years of football, but with his grade point average, he’s sure to get a scholarship to Yale or Princeton. And that’s a fact.”

      “I could get a scholarship to Yale or Princeton if I wanted to.”

      “Not likely,” he said, as if it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “But there’s no doubt you could get into either Morehouse or Clark-Atlanta University, one of the historically black colleges here in Atlanta. That is, if you bring that grade point average up, and keep it steady during your high school years. But you have to really be a special kid to get into an Ivy League school like Yale or Princeton, Marcus.”

      His words stuck with me, tore me up inside, and even stopped me from sleeping a few nights. I knew what I had to do. I had to come up with a Master Plan. I wanted to go to Yale or Princeton, simply to set a standard; to prove a point. Not that Morehouse or Clark-Atlanta weren’t good schools, because they were. In fact, Morehouse was known for its strong math and science programs. And I was a math scholar, could work problems out with my eyes closed. But I wanted to not only get accepted to a school where statistically blacks weren’t accepted, but I wanted to get a scholarship to one, too.

      Football was over for me that day, and I was determined to make straight As, graduate with honors, get a scholarship to Yale or Princeton and look for that Mr. Forbes one day and show him that he was wrong about Marcus Carter. I dreamed of that day.