Chapter 105: Faster, Higher, Stronger

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“Damn it!”

Flea strained forward, face red, body angled hard against the rope around his waist.

The other end was tied to a discarded truck tire nearly a foot thick. The tire weighed more than a hundred pounds, and on rough grass the friction made it feel heavier. Several teammates had already crossed the fifty-yard line.

Flea had barely moved.

“This is not fair,” he gasped when Nolan walked over. “I am built for speed. Why am I fighting a tire?”

“The world is not fair,” Nolan said. “Imagine the tire is a cornerback trying to drag you down.”

Flea cursed again and leaned forward until his body looked almost parallel to the ground. Inch by inch, the tire began to scrape through the grass. Once he broke the dead weight, momentum helped. The tire gouged a long line behind him until he finally crossed the finish and dropped to the ground, chest heaving.

“Good,” Nolan said. “First set done. Four more.”

Several players turned pale.

They were learning that Nolan could be worse than Thomas. The day before, a backup had openly refused the program. Nolan cut him from the team without hesitation.

“This team is being built around me,” Nolan had told them. “I carry the responsibility for winning. In return, I will not allow anyone to drag everyone else down.”

Thomas had stood beside him and said nothing.

That silence was permission.

…

Leo DiCaprio watched from the edge of the training field.

Five sets.

That meant they repeated this nightmare five times.

And this was only one station. A full training day had nearly fifteen of them, with only a day and a half of rest each week. High school football, from the outside, had sounded dramatic and nostalgic.

Up close, it looked like a labor camp with whistles.

Nolan noticed the camp mood sagging. When a body suffered all day without seeing an immediate reward, enthusiasm evaporated fast. Sometimes a leader had to give the group a target that was smaller than a championship and more entertaining than pain.

“Leo,” Nolan called. “You are not here to stand and watch. Join.”

“Me?”

“You.”

Leo pointed at the tire. “I cannot drag that.”

“For fairness, no tire. Six shuttle runs. Three hundred yards total.”

“Against who?”

Nolan looked around the field.

The players started smiling. Football collected the school’s physical outliers. They were not all faster than track athletes, taller than basketball players, or more precise than baseball pitchers, but across strength, speed, contact, and stamina, they were the most balanced monsters on campus.

Nolan pointed at himself.

“Me.”

Leo had spent the morning in camp without seeing Nolan truly work. To him, Nolan looked more like an assistant coach than an active participant.

“If it is you,” Leo said, “I might actually win.”

“Then win.”

They lined up. Nolan chose the largest tire and tied the rope around his own waist.

Ford served as starter.

At the signal, Leo shot forward. For the first few steps, he opened a gap.

Then Nolan began closing.

By the second turn, the gap vanished. By the fourth, Nolan led. On the final fifty yards, he pulled away so clearly that the field fell silent.

Leo stopped, bent over, and shook his head.

“You are the fastest one too?”

“No,” Nolan said, untying the rope. “I am still behind NCAA and NFL athletes in plenty of areas. That is reality. You need to understand how weak we still are.”

He picked up a clod of dirt and crushed it between his fingers.

“That is how the weak get treated.”

The demonstration worked.

The players saw the gap with their own eyes. Flea especially looked as if a switch had been hit somewhere behind his ribs.

…

Later, Nolan and Leo sat in the grass.

Nolan discovered that the Oscar-nominated young actor did not carry much arrogance. Leo understood luck too well for that.

“There are ten thousand actors working hard,” Leo said. “Maybe one breaks through. Only an arrogant person says effort explains everything. I am not that arrogant. Some of it is luck.”

He shaded his eyes and watched the students across the field.

“I do envy this, though. School life.”

Leo was three years older than Nolan. In a normal path, he would have been a college sophomore. Instead, he had left school early and chased acting.

“If you could play football,” Nolan said, “and play it well, I could turn you back into a high schooler.”

“Then I should start practicing.”

They talked for a long time, mostly because Leo kept asking questions. Nolan had the campus life Leo wanted to understand, and they shared Lisa as a connection. It gave the relationship a strange senior-junior feeling even though neither of them would have used the phrase aloud.

“I think we will get along,” Leo said.

“Then answer something important.”

“What?”

“How many girlfriends?”

Leo stared at him. “Why are you asking?”

“Come on. You look like that. Girls notice.”

“Football players are more popular at school. You first.”

Nolan raised one finger.

Leo made a V with two fingers.

“I win by a narrow margin,” Leo said.

“Details.”

Once two young men started talking about girls, the conversation needed no push.

“First was Cecilia Garcia,” Leo said. “Middle school. Black curls, fluent Spanish, laughed at everything.”

“Second?”

“Heather Graham. We were around Growing Pains at the same time. Nothing dramatic. Once the work ended, it faded.”

For a future heartbreaker, the current history sounded almost ordinary.

“You will miss those two one day,” Nolan said.

“Why?”

“Because I think we are going to be good friends.”

Leo laughed. “That did not answer anything.”

“It answered enough.”

Leo leaned back. “Sets can be lonely. Not many people my age, unless it is the lead actress.”

“Then I will take you to a high school party sometime. If you can tolerate teenagers.”

“Cheerleaders?”

“Maybe.”

“Then I will invite you to industry parties.”

They bumped fists in the sun and formed what Nolan privately considered a historic agreement.

…

The camp neared its end.

Back in the gym, Thomas weighed the players again. This time the numbers looked almost absurd. Everyone had grown: some in muscle, some in water, some in sheer camp-fed bulk, but all of them heavier and harder than before.

“Flea, one eighty-five,” Thomas said, squeezing his shoulder. “Up thirty pounds. Congratulations.”

Flea looked too exhausted to celebrate properly.

“Robin Rice, one ninety. That is a real change.”

Rice looked rougher than before. His skin was darker from outdoor work. His face had lost some of its glossy softness. His neck and arms showed scrapes from training, and his hands had new calluses.

He looked less like a spoiled backup and more like someone who had survived something.

Nolan deserved some credit for that. Rice had tried to quit more than once. He had called his mother crying in the middle of the night, complained about blisters, invented academic emergencies, and dragged every excuse he could find into the light.

Nolan had kept him in camp.

Thomas might have let him escape.

The linemen showed the biggest group change. Several had gained more than thirty pounds of total mass. A few crossed forty, though no one with sense pretended that was all clean muscle.

Alberto and Monster changed least because they had already been on medical support before camp, but even they added more than ten pounds.

Then Cooper stepped on the scale.

“Two ten,” Thomas said. “Heavier than Nolan’s old mark. Very good.”

Cooper raised a fist as he stepped down. At his size, adding quality mass was harder than it was for Flea. He had trained relentlessly, leaned into the team’s gray-zone support, and chased Nolan with visible obsession.

Now everyone turned toward the last player left.

Nolan.

When he stripped down for the measurement, several players made involuntary sounds.

His arms were clearly bigger.

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