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  “Just seein’ what I need first. Got the kids with me.”

  “Office is through those double doors,” he said, pointing. “Hang a right. Mind the paint.”

  “Shouldn’t we ask for masks?” I wondered aloud. Painting releases all manner of volatile compounds into the air.

  But no one seemed to hear me. We entered a wide corridor where workers were installing a bank of vending machines. Beyond that was a sports shop. A woman was putting the finishing touches on a mannequin. I stopped to look at her handiwork, transfixed.

  There in front of me was the most complete set of protective gear I’d ever seen. Every muscle, every inch of skin seemed to be covered. A helmet with a cage over the face was connected to a chin guard that extended down to protect the neck and throat area. Wide plastic gloves like flippers traveled halfway up the arms. There was sufficient padding for the midsection and thighs and practically a knight’s shield to cover each lower leg.

  “Get a move on,” Sarah hissed. “I want to see the rink.”

  “It’s a goalie’s uniform, Franklin,” my mother said, gently taking hold of my shoulders and turning me toward the office.

  “It’s a thing of beauty,” I mumbled. “Do they have something like this for baseball?”

  But my mother didn’t hear me because I had my mouth up against the fabric of my shirt, trying to filter out the fumes from the new paint.

  We continued down the hall and through another set of double doors. The entire area was carpeted with the kind of rubber matting that seemed appropriate for all indoor office environments, if you ask me.

  “This is so you can walk in your skates,” my mother explained. “See, you change into your skates here,” she said, pointing to a row of benches with cubicles underneath. “You stick your shoes there. Then you don’t damage your blades getting to the rink.”

  “That’s real sensible,” Sarah answered, nodding. But she seemed a million miles away just then. I was watching her. Her eyes were fixed on another set of doors.

  “Is it there?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She started walking slowly toward the doors.

  “But it’s not an ice rink yet,” my mother warned her. “It’s just a big oval that …” Her voice trailed off. There was no use talking anymore. Sarah disappeared through the swinging doors.

  “Just give me a minute, Franklin. I need to see how they’ve wired the office so I can figure out how much cable I need.”

  She disappeared, too, and I was left alone in the hallway. My sinuses were throbbing from the fumes, but since I’m also allergic to dust and pollen, and those earth-moving machines were operating with decibel levels unsafe without proper ear protection, I wandered back down the hall to the goalie uniform.

  Who was the packaging expert that put this together? My eyes traveled the length of the player’s body, looking for openings in his armor. This would definitely have applications on the Pelican View playground.

  “Franklin.” My mother had poked her head through the door. “I think you should see this.”

  “That your kid?” a man in a paint-spattered coverall asked my mother as I came back into the room. He wasn’t referring to me. That was clear. He was pointing to the windows above the changing benches.

  “Yeah … well, I brought her.”

  “Seemed so excited I didn’t have the heart to tell her there wasn’t no ice yet,” he said.

  I stood up on one of the changing benches to get a clearer look at what the painter and my mother were staring at.

  “Then again, doesn’t seem to matter, does it?”

  There, in the middle of an immaculate, glassy oval, stood Sarah Kervick, her discarded shoes the only other spot of color on the clean white surface.

  Throwing her arms out to her sides, she began to twirl. Slowly, at first, and then faster and faster. If she kept it up, she was headed for a fall.

  “That looks like glass,” I said to the painter. “What kind of cushioning have they installed beneath the surface?”

  “Beats me, kid.” He shrugged, his eyes glued on Sarah.

  “For heaven’s sake, Franklin. I didn’t call you over here to assess the hazards of what she’s doing. Look at her face.”

  Only Sarah Kervick could find a way to look relaxed as she twirled dangerously over that slippery surface. Her eyes were closed like she was in a trance, and her body was all limp and fluid, not like the way she usually held herself, rigid as a flagpole.

  “She looks like a little angel out there,” the painter said, sighing. “A pretty little angel.”

  “I’ve never seen her so at home,” my mother said softly.

  The paint fumes in that place must have been very bad, because my mother started rubbing her eyes.

  You could hardly stand there for long without your eyes watering.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sarah Kervick’s Show-Stopping Hit

  If you experience something every day, it gets to be normal, even when it’s not. In Pelican View, few things are considered normal, which might lead you to believe it’s kind of a crazy place. That’s not it at all. The goal seemed to be to push everyone and everything into that narrow band of what was considered normal. People figured if they worked on it long enough, just about everyone would either fit or pick up and move away.

  By now, it should be pretty clear that I was not normal. And neither was Sarah Kervick.

  She was especially not normal on the baseball diamond.

  I don’t care how many girls have been the prime minister of England. In Pelican View, girls did not play baseball.

  But that’s what I mean about force of habit. After a couple of weeks of practice, having Sarah on the team did become normal, even to Coach Jablonski. She came to every practice. She consistently hit over the infielders’ heads. It was no surprise to me to read on our first game roster that Sarah Kervick was batting cleanup.

  Marvin Howerton could not let this pass, however. He scuffed at the ground and whined, “You got a girl batting cleanup?”

  “I got our best batter at cleanup,” Coach Jablonski said, putting his hands on Marvin’s shoulders. “You get on base and let her boot you in.”

  I had to turn the batting roster over to find my name, which gave me some hope that I might not see active duty in this game. I would have appreciated at least one game to get used to wearing the team uniform. My skin is very sensitive and, as a result, I have a strict policy about natural fibers. But our baseball uniforms, purchased by Modern Hardware, our team sponsor, came only in a polyester blend. I had on a long-sleeved 100 percent organic cotton T-shirt, but this did nothing for my thighs.

  Of course, my mother had to use up three rolls of film snapping pictures of me in my uniform, as well as crouched in my batting stance.

  “Grimace a little,” she’d said. “This could be our Christmas card.”

  The other team was from Brownfield Elementary. They were sponsored by Z’s Bar and Grille. Not particularly talented, the team had a couple of solid hitters. They weren’t fast and they weren’t polite. That’s what I’d picked up from watching them practice.

  We were up first. Graham popped up and Leonard grounded out, so we were already two down by the time Marvin got up to bat. He hit a nice double between short and second base.

  I guess there really are some good things about being on a team. I bet Marvin Howerton never thought one nice thing about Sarah up until that moment. But as he sat there on second base, the desire to be the first to score in the very first game of the season for Pelican View Elementary’s Modern Hardware Team had him thinking positive thoughts about her.

  Come to think of it, maybe that’s what jinxed her.

  “You got a girl? Batting cleanup?” the pitcher asked to no one in particular.

  “You got a problem with that?” Sarah asked, advancing toward the mound.

  He held up his glove and tiptoed backward, pretending to be afraid of her. “No problem there. I just hope I
don’t hit you anywhere sensitive, is all.”

  Sarah would have clocked him, but my mother was on the field by this time, talking her down. I felt pretty confident that she would not clock my mother, who at this moment, I would just bet, was telling Sarah that famous Franklin Delano Roosevelt line “If you treat people right, they will treat you right.”

  Of course, she might have left off the last part. FDR was an optimist, not a dummy. The last part of that quote was “ninety percent of the time.”

  When Sarah got back in her stance, I knew something was wrong.

  The thing about Sarah Kervick is she’s so flexible and wiry. Like her punch that seems to come from nowhere, she doesn’t have to hold a bat just right to knock the ball out of the park. It’s just instinct.

  But now she was in position with her bat cocked just so. All of a sudden, she cared. I knew that was dangerous.

  On the first swing, her timing was off. On the second, she swung like a girl, in a high arc that looked more like a dance step than a batter’s move. On the third, she’d already accepted defeat. She slouched back to the bench and didn’t even turn around when the pitcher said some rotten thing about girls being good at cleaning up, he just wasn’t sure that meant baseball.

  I can’t tell you how I felt right then, but “pure lousy,” as Sarah would say, comes pretty close. The things you knew about Sarah Kervick were that, yes, she had a dad swinging at her and she lived in a dirty old trailer. She didn’t have two dimes to rub together, but that girl was going to end up okay. She had this way of persuading people. Okay, so maybe it was a little prehistoric, but knowing that last thing about the girl made you feel better about the first things.

  “Girls can’t take the pressure,” Marvin said to Leonard as they got their gloves.

  I thought she was going to clean his clock. I thought she was going to make his lungs exchange places. But Sarah just shrugged and sat on the bench. I handed over her glove.

  “I’m not goin’,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “You gotta go out there. You’re the mighty vacuum of the left field. You’re the black hole. Every ball that will be hit this season will be magnetically attracted to your glove,” I said.

  “Forget it, Franklin. I said I’m tired.” She said that a little mean, pressing her lips into a frown. Even I wasn’t afraid of her.

  “You’re gonna let that lousy pitcher get the best of you? Come on, you’re more than that.”

  She shifted away from me and started pulling splinters off the bench. I knew it was time to say something right. I knew it was time to give that important speech that they give in movies, the one that turns everything around. But I’m good only at a couple of things and making speeches isn’t one of them.

  “Are we a team?” I asked, thumping my chest just like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I had to resist the urge to look under my shirt to see if I’d produced a bruise.

  Instead I blurted out, “Happiness lies in the joy of achievement,” which was the only FDR quote I could think of at the moment.

  Except for a little spittle on her hair, I was having no effect on Sarah Kervick.

  “We’re the greatest, remember? Kervick and Donuthead. Your arms and my eyes. Our secret weapon.”

  “Yeah, they’re gonna write about it in the newspaper,” she mumbled.

  “You’re the greatest vacuum in the history of Pelican View Elementary, and I’m going to show you where the dirt is!”

  I was hopping up and down at this point.

  Sarah Kervick gave me a long, slow look. She wiped a little spit off her face and said, “Are you okay, Franklin? Maybe you better sit down.”

  Coach Jablonski came sweeping along the bench. “Get out there, Kervick,” he shouted from close range. “Shake it off.”

  “Get out there, Kervick,” I shouted for effect. “And keep your eyes on me.”

  So Sarah took the field and I stood along the third base line.

  And by some miracle she did decide to keep her eyes on me.

  On the first play I waved her in, right behind the second baseman. She caught the lazy fly easily.

  The second play was going to right field. Bryce Jordan was playing too far back, but I had no way of telling him that. The ball dribbled into the outfield between first and second. I consoled myself with the knowledge that Bryce didn’t have the arm to make the play anyway.

  Luis got wild on the mound and walked the third guy, which wasn’t a bad decision because he was a switch-hitter and those were hard for me to judge.

  What do you know? The pitcher was batting cleanup. In the pros, the pitcher never bats cleanup. Pitchers are notoriously bad at the plate.

  Never say never, Franklin. I sent Sarah Kervick to the horizon before he’d even cocked his elbow. This guy could hit. She was at the fence, twirling a piece of her long blond hair, when she took the catch.

  The guy on first base made the mistake of thinking that Sarah Kervick threw like a girl. He almost lost an ear as she fired it back to second. Three down.

  “I don’t know how she does it,” Coach Jablonski said, rubbing his stomach in admiration. “That girl always knows where the ball’s gonna be.”

  “It’s practice, Hank,” my mother said. “Hours and hours of fine-tuning in practice.”

  The bottom of the order had to come sometime. Top of the third. Pelican View leading, 1–0. The only good thing about going up to bat was knowing that Sarah Kervick would soon follow. Now that she’d loosened up a bit, she was going to show them what for, she was going to show them what little girls are made of, I thought, practicing in my mind the inspirational speech I was going to send her to the plate with.

  But first, I had to make the long, lonely walk to the on-deck circle myself.

  I decided to spend my time choosing a bat rather than practicing my swing. I didn’t want to give the other team a preview of what I could do.

  It’s all mental, I told myself to quiet the shivering. Let ‘em think I’m the Pelican View Elementary secret weapon.

  It’s true, I have a pretty active imagination, and if people can go into a trance and walk over beds of burning coals, I should, theoretically, be able to convince myself to get a single for Modern Hardware and my teammates on the Pelican View Baseball Team.

  Unfortunately, imagination can work two ways.

  As I stood facing the pitcher, I realized that this was not my mother, not Sarah Kervick, not even Coach Jablonski. This was the enemy about to fire a missile at me. And I, Franklin Delano Donuthead, was giving him a clear shot.

  I froze.

  The pitcher zinged in a strike at the rate of a speeding bullet. Some part of my brain told me to swing, but it must have been that part that nobody listens to. My feet grew roots.

  Another strike fired by. The breeze gave me a chill.

  I could hear my mother’s distant voice screaming, “Swing, Franklin!”

  “Snap out of it, kid,” Sarah yelled to me. Even in my disordered state, I could tell it was more of a threat than a plea.

  “Whatsa matter?” the pitcher asked, laughing. “He turn into a statue or somethin’?”

  “Maybe I need to wind him up,” the catcher said, and they laughed so hard the catcher started wheezing and the ump called time out so he could take a shot on his inhaler.

  “Play ball,” Coach Jablonski yelled from the sidelines.

  The pitcher threw a crooked lob that bounced in the dirt. “Maybe his batteries ran down,” the catcher snickered as he scrambled for the ball.

  Ha. Ha. Ha. Another wild pitch, this one blissfully wide. Ball two.

  To make a long story mercifully short, I got on base because the pitcher couldn’t stop laughing long enough to throw a third strike.

  “Let’s see if he moves,” the catcher said, coming up behind me and giving me a shove.

  As any orthopedic surgeon could tell you, my center of gravity is severely affected by the differing lengths of my legs, so it will come as no surprise that I stumbled
and almost fell to the ground.

  “Lay off, catcher,” I heard Sarah Kervick threaten. I’d heard that tone of voice before.

  Dazed, I trotted down the first base line, trying to console myself. After all, whether I got a hit or not was immaterial. Even FDR understood that. “I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat,” he told the American people as he was trying to rebuild the country after the Great Depression. “What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself, but for my team.”

  So there, Mr. Fancy-Pants Pitcher. I bet he didn’t even know what the letters FDR stood for.

  Upon reaching first base, I tried to tag up, but the gorilla who was guarding it kept shoving me away.

  Sarah had followed me down the baseline. She stood, just a few feet away, watching this.

  “Don’t mess with him,” she said, both hands clenched into fists at her sides.

  “Whaddryou? His bodyguard?”

  We were at the top of the order, and Milton Summers was up. But the focus of the game seemed to have shifted to first base.

  “If I could be allowed to make a point here,” I said, tapping the dough-colored bag at our feet. “The rules of the game stipulate that runners on base have one foot in contact with the base at all times—”

  “But my rules say that when nobody’s watching, I mess with runts like you.”

  “I’m watching,” Sarah said quietly.

  “Oh yeah? Then watch this.” And he gave me a shove between my shoulder blades that sent me to the ground.

  I believe I lost consciousness for a moment, because the next thing I knew the first baseman screamed, “I’m bleeding!”

  “Fight!” someone called out. Then bodies piled on top of me and we were all squirming in the dirt.

  “I’m hyperventilating,” I screamed in agony. “I need oxygen!”

  “Shut up and hit somebody, Franklin,” Sarah Kervick growled. “It’s a fight.”

  I threw up my arms to protect my face, and my fist came in contact with soft flesh.

  “Ouch,” came a muffled voice by my ear. “The runt gave me a shiner!”