Bears Know Best

Chapter 1: New Beginnings

I LOOKED AT my backpack sitting in the seat beside me, and wondered for the thousandth time if I was making the right choice... Eight years ago, just before my sixth birthday, my parents had their final fight as a married couple and my mom decided she'd had enough and left. Dad stayed in touch with her, but she gave custody of me over to him without question... she knew he would have more money to raise me. In the meantime, Mom went back to school, finished her degrees, and then moved north to a town in the middle of nowhere Ohio. It was a place I despised, having nearly frozen to death on many visits. The small town was about as far towards the eastern border of Ohio as you could go without hitting Pennsylvania. That meant even Cleveland was over an hour away by car.

I sighed as Dad navigated the BMW X5 through Atlanta's busy traffic. I was tired of feeling like I was supposed to follow his footsteps as a linebacker for even the junior high and high school teams, let alone at the professional level he played at. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't a dad that made me live and breathe football... but the expectation was still there. My problem was that the coaches all assumed that his goal would be to make me play ball as well as him, so they pushed me to do it more than he ever did. Unfortunately, all anyone accomplished was to get me injured, crying, or just generally unhappy.

If I took after my dad it wouldn't have been a problem, I'm sure! At six-foot, five inches tall he towered over most people. He weighed two hundred and fifty-six pounds, all of which was muscle. I could easily see why mom, and later Rachel, had fallen for him. He was a relatively successful player that even had the looks women drooled after. Most people would have assumed I would take after him, but as I grew up, I had a feeling that I didn't pick up much in the way of genes on that Y chromosome he gave me.

Instead, I was every bit my mother's son in appearance. She didn't even manage to break five feet in height, being one-inch shy of that mark, and I was on track to maybe gaining an inch or two over her according to the doctors. As a thirteen-year-old boy being only four-feet, seven inches tall, and sixty-five pounds soaking wet with clothes on, well... you can imagine how I fared as a football player. Thanks to my dad I was in good shape for my size, and at least I could run well. My flexibility was my strength every time we took a physical fitness test that measured for fitness goals. I was able to stretch farther than any of the other boys, and most of the girls when we took those!

All of that led me to having a tough life at school. My classmates were always in awe of my dad's fame. Sure, Atlanta wasn't a shoe-in for getting to the Superbowl like some of the other teams, but my dad was one of the best players in the league. Kids had trading cards with his face on them, and often he would get ambushed to autograph items when he would pick me up from school. So, on that page, kids wanted to be my friend since I had a rich and famous dad.

The flip side though, was that I was the scrawniest boy at my middle school and the easiest target for bullying. It made for a fairly miserable life, not knowing whom you could trust as friends, and not knowing where the next ambush was going to happen.

I could almost deal with all of this on its own, but Rachel was beginning to get on my nerves. Dad was pretty good about accepting me for who I was... I mean he even let me grow my hair out to below my shoulders without getting upset about it. He encouraged me to play football mainly so he would have a connection to me, but he wasn't stupid enough to think I was likely to be able to follow his footsteps. I figured I'd be lucky to even play as a fourth string high school waterboy! He had taught me how to hit and throw, and helped me to run and stay in shape. My technique was good enough that if I was playing against third graders I would probably have done pretty well!

Rachel though seemed to think he should be pushing me to do better things. She'd even tried to convince him to get the doctors to prescribe growth hormones to me in the hope that I might hit a more convincing stature. He'd been firmly against that, but I worried that she was eventually going to do other things to try and make her step-son 'man up' as she was prone to say. I always felt like I was in the way though with the two of them, and that led to my decision to try living with Mom.