One weekend Nolan’s dad got football tickets. The state’s favorite college team was playing the number one team in the country that weekend and it seemed like an important game. It didn’t turn out to be that important though. They watched in the cold, pouring rain as their team got trampled into the floor. It may as well have been a million to zero. It was Nolan’s first real football game to attend and it was a miserable experience.
Nolan was always having miserable experiences and many of them included the weather. His dad tried to take him camping once. They went to the store, bought a tent and headed to the lake. That night a tornado blew through and their tent was blowing towards the lake with them in it. The tornado didn’t hit them directly but it was close enough and the storm was crazy. They ended up moving the tent into a cinder block bathroom just to stay safe. Now Nolan knew, live football games were the same level of fun as camping, none. You just get blown out and rained on, why did people think these things were so fun?
No-one talked about football the next week. Nolan’s big experience won him zero social points with the other kids at school or church. It didn’t matter that much, at least he wasn’t asleep. That week he had horrible nightmares. He would walk out into the woods alone only to find vampires surrounding him. He ran and he ran but when he thought he would get away his legs would stop working. He would fall down and scream out for help. Of course, his mouth wouldn’t work, nothing came out as he tried to scream. There they were surrounding him and Nolan couldn’t do a thing to protect himself. He would wake up as they began to chomp down on his flesh.
He was trying not to sleep but he couldn’t stay up forever. Nolan was tired at school and he didn’t want to be around people. They all seemed to hate him and he couldn’t do anything about it. They just picked on him and picked on him endlessly. He couldn’t wait for his alone time after school, he needed to be alone. Being alone was the best part of life.
At church that week, Nolan began to hear about some plans the leaders were making. They would be going in together with a bunch of other churches to rent out that same stadium where Nolan had just watched his team lose in the rain. Someone was coming to town, someone big in the church world and people were getting excited. Nolan wondered what they could need a whole football stadium for. He had never seen a church service big enough to need a stadium.
Practice Outlaw 