CARTERSVILLE, Ga. – It's 8 a.m. and already there's a butt on every stool.

Granted, only nine stools fit inside tiny Capri restaurant, plus three booths, where Trevor Lawrence prefers to sit with a plate of pancakes. But in a building even smaller than Cartersville High's concession stand across the street, a full house at the local breakfast favorite means a breakneck pace for owner Darrell Givens.

Through a window opening to the rear kitchen barely big enough to do so, Givens hands heavily loaded plates to the server -- the Capri Special of two eggs, bacon, hash browns, grits and a house-made biscuit runs just $5.95. At one end of the counter, a couple dozen coffee liners prepped with the necessary morning grinds await their date with the caffeine machine. Givens had hoped to break away long enough to discuss Lawrence, Clemson's star quarterback, but with the drive-thru window beginning to back up, he defers to a next-day phone call.

Then, he can't.

He pops out the backdoor to the rear parking lot and raises a finger to offer at least a quick exchange, because one point, if none other, should be made in person.

"When Trevor interacts with children," Givens says, "he will get on one knee or sit in a chair so he's on the same eye level with them."

That's what Givens wants to get across, before anything about Lawrence leading the Cartersville Purple Hurricanes to back-to-back state championships, or the 13,902 passing yards that knocked Deshaun Watson off the top of the Georgia high school record book.

For NFL general managers evaluating a first-round draft talent, things like Lawrence's passing accuracy, mobility and arm strength define what he can do. But for Givens, Lawrence leveling his 6-foot-6 frame to engage with a child defines who he is. In full disclosure, Givens readily acknowledges personally benefitting from The Lawrence Factor. Before the quarterback prodigy entered CHS as a ninth-grader, Givens might have cracked nine or 10 dozen eggs on a normal Friday. On home-game Fridays during the Lawrence era?

Sixteen dozen, with extended hours.

His business spiked so much, he gave some thought to changing the paint on the building from barn red to CHS's purple, but the landlord discouraged it for fear it might turn away fans of rival high schools.

Lawrence hasn't lived here for three years since moving on to Clemson and becoming college football's best quarterback and the presumptive No. 1 overall pick of the 2021 NFL Draft. But his impact on it is still felt -- from the residual popularity it left on Capri to the kids who play behind the bleachers at CHS games wearing No. 16 jerseys. And this small town, in turn, offers Lawrence a quiet respite from the burden of celebrity. He's revered here, to be sure, but there's a modicum of respect for his time and space that he might never again enjoy anywhere else.

Garrett Geros wasn't sure it would ever come down. The soaring spiral seemed suspended, majestically spinning under the sky, like slow-motion B-roll from HBO's Hard Knocks, before finally hitting him squarely in the chest. He also wasn't sure what it meant, until his father explained it to him in no uncertain terms. But for one football practice at least, he brushed it off with an unyielding determination to quarterback the 2007 Cartersville Bulldogs youth team.

He was an early arrival that day at Dellinger Park, a public recreation facility in Cartersville, because kids of coaches have no choice but to be early. Tossing a football with teammate Trevor Lawrence, he'd just thrown one over his partner's head, and the first bounce jumped away from Lawrence like a lucky punt, hopping, tumbling and finally rolling to a gentle stop. It doubled the distance between the young boys, by the estimate of the only adult witness, to about 35 yards. Lawrence picked up the ball and tested himself from where he stood rather than running it back to where he'd been. He dipped his right shoulder, summoned all he had, and launched a 35-yard missile.

At age 7.

"Oh, my God," thought Dave Geros, Garrett's father and coach.

To that point, Dave had been grooming his son to compete for the team's quarterback job. But based on one throw from Lawrence, he confronted Garrett with a reality too harsh for his age:

You'll never play quarterback in this town as long as that kid's living here.

"That throw told me that for Garrett, quarterback was out," Dave Geros said.

Nestled amid Atlanta's northwestern suburbs, Cartersville has a few hallmarks of suburbia -- four-lane access to plenty of national retail -- but a walk down Main Street in this town of 22,000 makes it clear this is no cookie-cutter community.

You can bet the hunting here is good -- over at Findley's Butcher Shop, the sign alerting residents to its deer processing service stands out more than the sign for Findley's itself. The Grand Theatre, with a traditional marquee and balcony seating, opened 110 years ago. Some of the older brick storefronts are topped by second-story lofts, and several distinctly southern homes in the downtown area feature big porches and white picket fencing. Established in 1850, long before Atlanta's booming population begat residential sprawl in every direction, Cartersville was flanked by farming and home to historical Native American mounds.

Football, of course, binds it.

People used to drive from all over the state to watch Lawrence light up the scoreboard, but it was no easy ticket. Beyond crowds that sold out the bleachers, the standing-room-only throng was said to ring the perimeter fence around the field, two or three deep.

At another local staple adjacent to the high school, Scott's Walk-Up Bar-B-Q, Cartersville's mayor, Matt Santini, is glad to see brisket on the menu. He doubles as the play-by-play voice of the Purple Hurricanes at WBHF 100.3 FM on the local radio dial, and by the time he normally gets to Scott's before Purple Hurricanes games, the brisket is usually sold out.

You don't have to be sitting in Weinman Stadium to know the Purple Hurricanes have scored. Just walk within a quarter mile of Cartersville High on a Friday night in the fall, and the sound of a hurricane siren will blister the eardrum after each touchdown, serving notice that the high-flying passing attack the program installed the same season Lawrence arrived in 2014 remains in capable hands.

One doesn't even have to be in the stadium to see the show, because video replays, rolling on a large jumbotron befitting a small college, are visible from East Church Street outside the south end zone.

It was installed in 2015, just in time for Lawrence's sophomore season.

On this night, the siren gets its usual workout -- the Purple Hurricanes are airing it out again, using a timeout with one second left in the first half, already up 28-0, so senior quarterback Carlos Del Rio-Wilson can get off a long touchdown pass for a 35-0 halftime lead. A running clock in the second half offers a more merciful exit for Woodland High, certainly more merciful than when Lawrence led the Purple Hurricanes. He was 52-2 as a starter, with a 41-game win streak that spanned two state championships. He completed 846 passes in four years here, and one out of every five went for touchdowns.

The thrills came often enough to overload the senses -- and memories -- of Cartersville fans. But one, which some refer to simply as "the throw," endures. For those who saw it in person, it needs no further description. In a 2016 home playoff game against Mary Persons High, Lawrence rolled right, pump-faked Malik Herring, now a Georgia Bulldog, off his feet, then hit WR E.J. Turner in stride, in the opposite corner of the end zone. It was a blatant violation of a cardinal rule for quarterbacks -- don't throw across the field -- but not even his head coach could complain.

A few months after Lawrence left Cartersville to enroll at Clemson a semester early, in the spring of 2018, King and CHS defensive coordinator Conor Foster drove to Clemson to visit him. But until they arrived and experienced a day with Lawrence on Clemson's campus, they didn't fully understand what a magnet for attention he'd already become.

"He's 18 (and) hadn't even thrown a college pass yet, and we couldn't eat lunch," Foster said. "Literally, from the time we walked in until we asked for to-go boxes, it never stopped. Everyone in the restaurant wants autographs, pictures, all that."

Lawrence's is a popularity that, in some ways, transcends football; he's arguably the most recognizable amateur athlete on Earth. Everything about him, except his demeanor, draws attention. And he's had to get used to it all from a very young age.

His immense talent and Clemson's status as an elite program have given him prime placement on college football's biggest stage for three years. But the wave of notoriety began building long before that; in eighth grade, people were already asking for his autograph. The deluge of recruiting attention he garnered at CHS generated national exposure that, in turn, generated widespread recognition.

"He can't hide," Foster said. "With that hair, he doesn't have a chance."

Yes, the hair.

On June 13, at the very moment Lawrence quoted Bible scripture while speaking at a rally for social justice that he helped organize with other Clemson players, church bells began clanging loudly behind him. A fitting coincidence, as people in Lawrence's hometown believe his faith -- he grew up attending Cartersville's Tabernacle Baptist Church -- has much to do with his newfound voice for change.

Roughly three weeks after George Floyd was killed while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, Lawrence stood beneath a Black Lives Matter banner and took the podium for a few minutes. His choice at the microphone: 1 Peter 4:8. "Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins."

At the heart of his brief speech was an acknowledgement that his life experience and the Black life experience are unrelatable, and therefore not to be compared. And that because of that, listening must precede understanding.

It was a stepping out for a kid who'd always been able let his play on the field do all of his talking. He'd been the face of college football for a couple years -- since the night he shredded Alabama's defense, as a freshman, for the 2018 national title. That sort of platform meant anything he said made headlines, but he had previously curated his public image with little more than football-related comments until Floyd's death compelled him to find his voice for matters far more important than sport. He was perfectly comfortable performing in front of home crowds of 81,000 at Memorial Stadium, but in front of an estimated 3,000 peaceful protesters at Clemson's Bowman Field, he foraged into what he described as "the uncomfortable."

Nearly 20 years after he left Cartersville High for Auburn, and eventually became the No. 2 overall pick in the 2005 NFL Draft, running back Ronnie Brown's picture still hangs on the wall at Capri Restaurant. In another 20 years, Lawrence's place on the wall at the 56-year-old establishment, right next to Brown's, will be just as secure.

As the one place Lawrence can go to unplug from football, without the cloak of a hoodie or sunglasses, Cartersville has its place for him, too. He still draws plenty of attention there, to be sure, but it's not the same as being hounded by strangers.

"In Cartersville, it's a little bit different," he said. "Usually the people who come up to me, they're people I know."

When Clemson won the 2018 national championship, Cartersville congratulated its hometown hero with a billboard display along Joe Frank Harris Parkway, one of the town's main traffic arteries. But when Mayor Santini was deluged with suggestions for a parade in Lawrence's honor, he got a familiar answer from the Lawrence family: thanks, but let's not.