Arthur’s mom is waiting to pick him up after practice for an orthodontist appointment, which is sort of good because it means I don’t have to talk to him about Jake’s showdown with Coach Gillis, but which is also sort of bad since there’s no one to ride home on the late bus with. Except that when I get on, I see Martha MacDowell sitting there in her baseball cap by herself.
I decide to just sort of accidentally sit next to her like it’s no big deal, like it’s the kind of thing that can just happen without a person especially meaning for it to happen. Except that somehow when the moment comes to actually sit down, I end up walking right past her. The only other seat left is next to Chrissy Russo. Which is sort of a drag since I know from her being my partner last semester in Biology lab that all she likes to do is talk about Kurt Cobain, which means that as soon as the bus gets to the first stop, I decide to get off and go hang out with Mr. D instead.
He shuffles over to the counter and throws me a pack of WarHeads as soon as I walk in. “How’s the Stargell?” he says.
We call the cards “the Clemente” or “the Parker,” like they’re things, which technically they are, but Mr. D and I also talk about them like they’re people, which, if you think about it, they are. The Stargell in particular.
To tell you the truth, I love the Stargell, the way my dad used to love the guys at the mill and the long-lost Lucky, the wonder dog. But I’m not exactly the kind of person who says that kind of thing out loud to another person.
“It’s awesome,” I say, which is lame, and doesn’t come anywhere close to saying how awesome it really is.
Mr. D smiles in a way that you can tell he knows exactly what I mean, then he goes back to talking online to a guy in Arkansas who has a Dino Rostelli rookie card for sale.
I wander over and stand behind him to see what the guy from Arkansas is asking for the Rostelli. I clear my throat.
“Why are grown-ups always telling kids to keep their noses clean?”
I figure Mr. D, who practically wrote the playbook on mysterious cornball sayings, will know what I’m talking about.
And unlike typical grown-ups who say they’re busy or don’t even hear you when you ask them something personal, Mr. D stops what he’s doing and turns around and looks at me.
“When someone says to keep your nose clean, they’re telling you to stay out of trouble,” he says, which is a surprisingly normal, non-Yodalike answer for him.
“Mr. D?” I don’t exactly know what I’m going to say, but Mr. D looks at me like he thinks it might be something important “What do you do if you’re worried about someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing?”
He doesn’t answer right away.
“Something that if they get caught might make other people upset,” I say.
He cocks his head to the side. “You’re worried about this person?”
“I guess.”
“Do you think that’ll help?” I don’t understand. “Worrying,” he says. “Does it help?”
I think the answer is yes, but I can tell from the way he’s asking it, the answer’s supposed to be no. I shrug.
“Toby,” he says, “worrying is a waste of time and energy. It doesn’t rob tomorrow of its sting. It only robs today of its strength.”
This is probably his Zen-Yoda way of telling me to chill, but, even though he doesn’t mean to, it makes me feel sort of like an idiot. Which I am a lot of times, but not usually when I’m with Mr. D. Which makes me feel like an even bigger idiot.
I also think, maybe for the first time in my life, that Mr. D might possibly be wrong. You’re supposed to worry about someone who’s doing something they’re not supposed to do. You’ve got to, otherwise something will happen and things won’t ever be the same. I don’t tell Mr. D this, though. I don’t say anything on account of feeling partly idiotic and partly bummed out about Mr. D not understanding about why a person needs to worry.
At which point he tosses me another pack of WarHeads. Which is at least something.
At dinner that night, while our mom is in the kitchen getting out the food—Food King crab cakes and fries—I kick Jake under the table.
“Thanks a lot,” I say.
He just looks at me.
“You told me Nurse Wesley was gonna put a condom on a banana,” I say.
“So?”
“So, she didn’t.”
“So?”
“So I told Arthur that she was, and he told other people and then when we had a ‘rap’session with Mr. Miller instead, I looked like a complete moron.”
He laughs. “You believed that?”
I did. I believed him. “Not really,” I say.
“What’s a condom?” says Eli.
We ignore him.
“Did Miller tell you about the ‘60s and him being full of raging hormones?” Jake says.
“Yeah.”
“Did he tell you about sex being a beautiful thing?”
“Sex!” Eli says. “You said sex!”
I smile. I can’t help it. Just like the other day—I mean to be mad at Jake but somehow I’m not. “Yeah,” I say, “when it’s in a relationship like the one he has with Mrs. Miller.”
We’re both laughing now. Jake’s slapping his hand on his thigh like he did when the Pissing-Off-the-World kid was covered with red dots. Eli keeps asking what’s so funny, and our mom comes in with the food, not looking like she has a terminal headache, smiling that cornball smile moms smile when their kids are getting along and not throwing sofa pillows at each other.
And it’s sort of like the old days, which makes me wonder if Mr. D might possibly be right about not worrying so much.
About halfway through dinner, my mom, as usual, asks how school was. And, as usual, I answer with some little factoid, on account of her bursting into tears one night right after our dad left, when she asked how school was and nobody said anything. So I tell her about the math teacher having a new baby, which happened a while ago but which I was saving for when I needed it. Eli tells her that his class is having a Save the Pandas bake sale. Jake doesn’t say anything.
“How’s baseball going?” She addresses this question to me and Jake but Jake’s not looking at her.
“Coach Gillis is trying me out for backup catcher.” I sound sort of loud, even to myself.
Jake looks up. And all of a sudden I feel sort of embarrassed. Embarrassed about how totally psyched I am about something he’s obviously now too cool for. And also sort of embarrassed for him, for not already knowing about me possibly being backup catcher, and finding out at dinner in front of our mom and Eli instead of on the field like he normally would have.
“How about you, Jake?” she says. “Are you playing shortstop or whatever it was you were last year?”
Jake sort of grunts, then he grabs a bunch of fries.
“You’re awfully hungry,” she says.
He shovels the fries in his mouth.
“Coach Gillis must be working you pretty hard.”
Jake sort of half nods. Our mom scrunches her eyebrows together.
So I jump in. “Badowski caught an amazing pop fly today,” I announce. “Off Arthur’s last at-bat.”
She just looks at me.
“And the coach taught us some new signals today. This—” I tap out a bunch of bogus signs Jake and I made up back in our Little League days. “This means bunt, and this"—I pull on my ear and tug on an imaginary hat—"means sacrifice.”
You can tell she doesn’t know quite how to deal with suddenly having Bob Costas at the dinner table. “That’s nice,” she says finally. She sounds small, the way she does whenever we talk about sports, and I feel sort of bad.
When she gets up to get dessert, Jake looks over my way and winks. I’m pretty sure it’s his way of saying thanks for not busting him on not going out for baseball. Which means I’m finally doing something he considers cool, which normally would’ve made me feel’good, but actually makes me feel surprisingly rotten.
S
o I get up, give Eli my dessert, and go upstairs and stare at the Stargell for a while.
After dinner, when I come downstairs to ask my mom about getting new cleats, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, counting the money from her tip jar. Little towers of quarters and dimes and nickels are stacked up in front of a bunch of wrinkled bills and she’s counting the money over and over, like if she counts it one more time, it’ll add up to more. She gets up and feels around in her bathrobe pocket for her new herbal stop-smoking gum, and I slink back up the steps.
Later, after everyone else is in bed, I can’t sleep so I go downstairs to get a bowl of Lucky Charms. I pick up the mail and sift through it for any personal stuff, like a letter or a postcard from California. But there’s nothing but bills and junk mail. I set aside two envelopes, though: an American Express bill marked “Second Notice” and an envelope stamped with the words “You may have already won!” I slip the bill in my back pocket, pour out the Lucky Charms, and sit down and rip open the you-may-have-already-won envelope.
With the purchase of just three magazine subscriptions, the people from the you-may-have-already-won contest say we’ll be entered in a drawing, where the grand prize is one million dollars. There’s no obligation; the subscriptions can be canceled at any time.
So I order a subscription to Cooking Lite for my mom, Sports Illustrated for me and Jake, and National Geographic Kids for Eli. Then I check off the “Bill Me Later” box, sign my name right above where it says “Open to contestants over age 21,” and make a note to myself to cancel the magazines if we don’t win.
The next afternoon, as soon as the last bell rings, Arthur and I meet up to walk down to the locker room to see if by some miracle our names are on the list of people who made it for the team. We walk slow at first, then faster, then slow again, speeding up and slowing down depending on how hopeful or hopeless we are as we try to figure out our chances.
When we get there, I’m too nervous to look. Which is okay because Arthur, who never gets nervous about anything, says he’ll look for both of us.
A bunch of guys are crowded around the locker-room door. Arthur pushes his way to the front, then starts jumping up and down so he can see the list, his flaming red hair appearing and disappearing in between all the shoulders of the guys who are older and taller. Then I hear him whoop. Then he hollers. Then he bursts out of the crowd and does a backflip, which he knows how to do from fourth grade when his mom made him take gymnastics. Which, of course, is highly embarrassing, but which means we made it.
But which I won’t actually believe until I see the list, too.
I inch my way through the crowd, which is now actually two crowds: the guys who are thumping each other on the head because they made it, and the guys who are watching guys thump each other on the head because they didn’t make it. They step aside so I can see the list.
And my name is right on it. Which makes it official that I’m on the team.
And which also makes it official that Jake’s not. “We made it!” Arthur says. His face is almost as red as his hair. “We made it.”
“Yeah,” I say. I mean to sound happy, which I am, but I end up sounding bummed out, which I also am. “Yeah,” I say again.
At which point, a bunch of girls go by, including Martha MacDowell.
“We made the team,” Arthur yells out “Me and Toby.”
The girls look at Arthur the way girls usually look at Arthur—like he’s entertaining as long as he’s at a safe distance.
Then Martha MacDowell looks at me and smiles. It’s an actual, no-doubt-about-it smile that isn’t pitying or kindhearted or anything except normal.
“Congratulations,” she says. “What position do you play?”
I don’t say anything. Sometimes around girls I act like I have the IQ of a paramecium. This is one of those times.
Arthur elbows me in the rib. “Catcher,” he says. “He plays catcher.”
“Me too,” she says.
I nod. Then I swallow. Then I clear my throat, like I have something to say. Which I don’t.
Then Martha MacDowell does give me a pitying look, the kind you give someone who’s suddenly been hit with an acute case of mental retardation.
Badowski comes over and thumps me on the head—so hard that if I didn’t have an acute case of mental retardation before, I definitely do now.
Then Martha MacDowell and the other girls are walking away, and Arthur and Badowski are talking about what a great team it’s gonna be. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide what’s the matter with a person who can get a Stargell rookie card, make the baseball team, and have a good-smelling girl smile at him, and still not feel like thumping people on the head or getting thumped on the head.
I’m a couple blocks away from school when a white car drives past, slams on the brakes, and backs up till it’s right next to me. Andy Timmons and his goatee are in the driver’s seat and the rest of the car is full of kids I sort of recognize from school, including the Pissing-Off-the-World kid, and a girl with spiky black hair, who’s in one of my study halls but who always sleeps through it.
Andy Timmons sticks his head out the window and asks if I want a ride.
“No, thanks.” I sound like Miss Manners.
“Hey, Toby!” I hear Jake’s voice from somewhere in the backseat. Then he leans across the seat in front of a blond-haired girl and sticks his head out the window. “C’mon. Get in.”
“That’s okay.”
The door opens and a couple of empty beer cans fall out.
“Get in,” says Andy Timmons.
The whole thing feels like one of Mr. Fontaine’s peer pressure videos, where the low self-esteem kid goes along with the cool kids and ruins his life because he can’t say no. So I shake my head. Then the blond-haired girl, who I recognize from the lunchroom from wearing really short skirts and having teeth like a movie star and who I secretly think looks like Britney Spears, maybe even prettier, leans out the back window.
“Is that your little brother?” she says to Jake. “He’s so cute” She makes it sound like I’m a pet gerbil or something. “What grade are you in?” she says to me.
I have another attack of sudden retardation.
When I don’t say anything, she turns to Jake. “What grade is he in?”
“Freshman,” Jake says. “He’s only thirteen, though. He’s a brainiac. He skipped a grade when he was little.”
Andy Timmons guns the motor. “Get in, brainiac.”
Then the blond-haired girl pats the spot on the seat next to her, and the next thing I know I’m sitting in the back of Andy Timmons’s car, practically touching her.
I try to think of something to say, but the only thing that comes to mind is how the chicken a la king school lunch that day looked exactly like Mr. Furry’s Fancy Feast Chicken Dinner. But even in my suddenly retarded condition, I know that’s not exactly a suave and sophisticated conversation starter. The only other thing that occurs to me is to tell her that she’s got the best teeth of anyone I’ve ever had the privilege of sitting near in my entire life. Instead, I say absolutely nothing and sit there like a box of frozen Food King appetizers.
I can see, even from the backseat, that Andy Timmons is driving fifty-seven miles an hour, which is twenty-two miles an hour faster than the speed limit, but I don’t say anything. I don’t even say anything when he drives right past the turnoff for the highway, or when he turns onto Creekside Road, this windy road in the complete opposite direction of our house.
I’m just sitting like a frozen mini-quiche when Andy Timmons starts jerking the steering wheel from side to side. The car swerves into the other lane, then swerves back into the lane we were supposed to be in. One minute I’m practically sitting on the blond girl’s lap, the next minute I’m being bashed into the door. I jam the lock down with my elbow and pray for him to stop. Or at least for everyone else in the car to stop laughing.
The blond girl smiles a future-movie-star smile at me. “Don’t worry, Jake
’s little brother,” she says. “We do this all the time,”
I nod like I do this kind of thing all the time, too. Then I yell “Look out!” right in Andy Timmons’s ear. Since he’s busy flipping through his CD case, he doesn’t see the Wonder Bread truck coming straight at us. He yanks the wheel to the right. Which means we don’t die in a tragic head-on collision with a bread truck, but which means we end up on the side of the road in the grass.
Which is when everybody stops laughing.
“Nice going, brainiac.” This comes from Vince, the Pissing-Off-the-World kid, who isn’t exactly a member of the National Honor Society, if you know what I mean.
Jake grabs the brim of my baseball cap and jams it down over my eyes. I can feel the blond girl shift around in her seat so she isn’t touching me anymore.
I yank my hat off and see that Andy Timmons is pulling something out of his jacket pocket.
I’ve never seen a joint in real life before, only laminated pictures like the ones Mr. Fontaine passed around during Freedom From Chemical Dependency Week. It’s surprisingly small.
Jake’s friends each take turns smoking it and passing it around, including the blond girl, who inhales like she’s kissing. Then she holds the joint out in my direction, her mouth still all kissy holding in the smoke.
“That’s okay,” I say, waving my hands through the air in front of me.
She keeps holding it out toward me. Vince and the spiky-haired girl are looking at me.
I morph into Miss Manners again. “No, thank you,” I say.
Finally, she exhales. “Pass it, will you?”
I realize they’re all waiting for me—not to succumb to peer pressure and ruin my entire life—just to pass it along so they can keep smoking. So even though I keep expecting a helicopter full of FBI agents in navy blue windbreakers to parachute onto the hood, point their semiautomatic machine guns at me, and haul me off to prison, I take the thing from her.