The Rookie Bookie

by L. Jon Wertheim

  Oh. Right. Just what I wanted to talk about. “A bunch of reasons,” I said. “My mom grew up around here. My dad kept complaining that there were too many other artists trying to sell their stuff in San Francisco. Too much competition, you know? And stuff. So we moved. Might as well live where the houses are cheaper and you don’t have to pay tons of money in tolls every time you need to cross a stupid bridge.”

  She nodded like that wasn’t the lamest explanation she’d ever heard, and I was hoping the subject would die. “So whattaya think? How do you like it here?”

  “Well,” I said, stalling, “the kids here are basically the same as they were at home. Some are taller and some are shorter. Some are shy and some talk a lot.”

  “It has to be a little different here,” she said skeptically.

  “Sure. Nobody talks about surfing and no one rides a skateboard to school. They’re more into sports here, which is fine by me. And before, the middle school wasn’t attached to the high school, so I didn’t go to school in the same building as my brother. Now I do.”

  “So is that good different or bad different?”

  “Neither, really. Just different.”

  “It’s kind of cool that you have a brother.” She threw the football a little harder. “I sometimes wish there were other kids around here. To take some of my parents’ attention off me, you know?”

  “Yeah.” I sent her back a pretty good spiral. “But I have to say the kids are nicer here. And smarter, too.”

  Jamie whooped. “If you think we’re smarter, you haven’t been here long,” she said. “Trust me, some of the kids here are not the sharpest Crayolas in the box.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “There are kids here so dumb they would wait for a stop sign to turn green. They would bring a big spoon to a Super Bowl party. They would—”

  “I get it,” I said, cutting her off. “But you know what? None of the kids at Jonasburg have stuffed my head into a toilet. So, overall, I like it.”

  She stopped throwing the ball and stared at me.

  “That happened to you?”

  “Back in California, yeah,” I said. “Hey, let me ask you a question. What’s with the notebook you’re always carrying around?”

  “I have four words for you, not necessarily in the right order: Your. Business. None. Of.”

  She said it with a smile, though.

  It didn’t take long before I figured out what Jamie was talking about when she said “not the sharpest Crayolas in the box.” During Mrs. Henry’s class the next week, I tried to jump into a conversation with two kids at my table. Clint Grayson, a big eighth grader whose muscular arms popped out of the overalls he was wearing and whose breath smelled like Cool Ranch Doritos, was telling everyone about an R-rated movie his uncle let him see.

  “It was so awesome,” he said. “People were crushed under a gigantic tidal wave and there was a huge flood, so they had to evaporate the whole city!”

  I started laughing. No one else did. Clint fixed his gaze on me.

  Before I could say evacuate, not evaporate, I stopped myself. The new kid telling an eighth grader how to talk? Not the way to make friends.

  Maybe the way to make myself kind of annoying.

  And it turned out to be a good thing I didn’t correct Clint Grayson’s vocabulary. Because when I showed up for football practice, there he was.

  Like I said, I like watching football more than I like playing football. That’s how it is with me and most sports. But I thought I’d try out for the football team after watching Kevin.

  Before we moved to Jonasburg, Kevin had never played on a football team in his life. He showed up for practice in August before high school had even started. By the end of the week, he was the starting wide receiver on the team, and an assistant coach told him that if he kept improving, he could be in line for a college scholarship.

  Of course, this got him instant friends. Instant respect. Instant cred with any girl he wanted to ask out. Sports make Kevin’s life so much easier. So I figured I would at least go through tryouts for the Jonasburg Middle School team. Maybe the kids here wouldn’t be faster and stronger and just plain better than me, the way they always were in California. That was my thinking, anyway. My wishful thinking.

  Because when I got to the field after school, I instantly saw that it wasn’t going to be like throwing the ball around a little after lunch. The other kids were older. And tons bigger.

  And there was Clint Grayson, the eighth grader. He looked like a football player. He brought his own helmet and came with eye black already streaked on his upper cheeks. When I walked by him and nodded, he either didn’t recognize me or just pretended not to. Instead, he spit on the grass and kept walking.

  The coach, Mr. Bob Williams, was also the coach of the high school team. The schools used to have different coaches, but to save money, the town put Coach Williams in charge of both teams last year. He wore a whistle around his neck and these shiny shorts that looked like they were made from the same material as my mom’s swimsuit. He had a T-shirt that was two colors: gray where he wasn’t sweaty and black where he was soaked through.

  Kevin had told us that Coach Williams had been a great high school player for Jonasburg before he hurt his knee or something. I searched “Bob Williams” online and, sure enough, he was a star who “led his team to the Indiana state championship” and was “heavily recruited.” Then, during college, he “suffered a torn ACL”, which I think is something in your knee. I’ve heard of pro players tearing this and they are usually out for the season and sometimes their careers. As far as I could tell, he never played football again.

  He was older now, but Coach Williams still looked like a real athlete. He had broad bulges for muscles, almost like a suit of armor, and cables of veins covered his arms. Walking around the field, he looked at home, the way Kevin does. You know those adults you want to impress? He was one of them.

  At the start of practice, he brought us to midfield and had us circle around him. “Boys, take a knee,” he said slowly as we shifted into position. “Glad you had the courage to come today. This season, we’re gonna play hard. We’re gonna play as a team. But most of all, we’re gonna play brave. And just by being here you’re showing you’re brave.”

  We passed around a clipboard and wrote our names and our grades. Then he read the names. “Herman. Smith. Jeffrey. Kumar…” Hands went up.

  “Grayson.” Clint’s hand shot up.

  “Excellent,” said Coach Williams. “I heard you can kick the ball a mile.”

  “Yessir,” said Clint.

  Finally, he got to me. “Sloan.”

  My hand shot up like I had a jet pack on my elbow.

  “Wait a second,” said Coach Williams. “You’re Kevin Sloan’s brother?”

  I nodded.

  He grinned.

  “Think we might have ourselves a ringer,” he said to no one in particular.

  Luckily we weren’t practicing in helmets and pads and no one was getting tackled today. Because otherwise I might have gone right from the football field of Jonasburg Regional High School to the emergency room of Jonasburg Regional Hospital. The other kids weren’t just bigger. They were faster and stronger and way more coordinated.

  We had a footrace. I came in last out of forty-five. We had a contest to see who could do the most push-ups in sixty seconds. I was last out of forty-five again. Clint Grayson came in first both times. And Coach Williams was right. He could kick the ball a mile.

  For one drill, Coach Williams threw us passes, zinging the ball at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. I didn’t catch a pass, not one single time. “Gotta hustle, little Sloan dude,” Coach Williams barked at me. I didn’t know what was worse: that he was scolding me, that he didn’t know my name was Mitch, or that he was already calling me “little.”

  For the last half hour, we split into four teams to play two scrimmages of flag football. There were eleven kids on each team. With forty-five k
ids, that left an odd man out. Or an odd kid out.

  Me.

  “Stand by my side,” Coach Williams told me. “Help me observe, little man.”

  I stood next to him, watching. On one play that started at midfield, a quarterback—a kid with long hair I recognized from Lunch A—ran backward, then to his right, then backward some more. Just as he was about to be caught, he dumped a short pass to a teammate. As soon as the receiver caught the pass, he was slapped on the back and pushed almost to the goal line.

  Coach Williams made a face that looked like he had just smelled a dirty diaper. Or Clint Grayson’s Dorito breath. He blew his whistle and walked onto the field. “What happened there, fellas?”

  No one answered. So he turned to me. “Little man,” he said, his voice piercing the air, “what happened?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. So I paused and then blurted out the first thing that popped into my head. “The receiver should have dropped the pass.”

  “Unlike you, some of us actually try to catch the ball,” said Clint. The other players started to laugh.

  But Coach Williams spun around and looked at them. “Exactly!” he said. “The receiver should have dropped the ball.” The laughter stopped. “Tell us why, Little Sloan.”

  Now I had a little more confidence. “Because everyone was so far behind the line of scrimmage and the defense was so nearby, it made no sense to catch the pass. Drop it and it’s incomplete and you’re back on the thirty-yard line. Catch it and you need to run halfway to Illinois just to get back to the line of scrimmage.”

  Again, there were some chuckles led by Clint Grayson. By now I had become a pro at distinguishing laughs. These weren’t the Hey, Mitch is a smart guy! laughs. They were the Mitch is annoying laughs.

  I just didn’t get it. I was right. I knew I was right. What’s so annoying about that?

  But thankfully, Coach Williams had my back. “Exactly! Right on, Little Sloan! There’s no reason to catch that pass! It sounds funny, but you’re better off taking the incompletion. Gotta use your heads, guys!”

  A few minutes later, Gene Beech—a skinny seventh grader who played trumpet with me in band class—had to leave practice to get to a Boy Scout meeting. Coach Williams turned to me. “Get in there, Little Sloan,” he said. “Let’s see you put your football smarts to some good use!”

  Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. Clint Grayson was playing quarterback. He dropped back and, after realizing that no one else was open, threw me a pass. It was like my hands were made of cement. Doink. The ball brushed against my fingertips and slid away, falling to the ground.

  “Come on!” yelled Clint, stomping his foot. “You gotta catch that, kid!”

  I hoped Coach Williams hadn’t been looking, but then I heard his booming voice. “Sloan!” he yelled. “Catch the ball with your hands, not just your eyes!”

  Defense was even worse. On the very first play, I was supposed to cover David Chu, one of the few Asian kids at Jonasburg Middle School. I lined up next to him, and when the center hiked the ball to the quarterback, David jogged about five yards and I stayed with him every step. Whew, I thought, finally someone I can keep up with.

  That thought was still swirling in my brain when David suddenly sped up and sprinted down the field. If you had been watching, you might have thought that he was running with a tailwind and I was running against a headwind. I turned back in time to see the ball make a perfect arc over my head and land in David’s hands.

  With everyone else on the field yelling, I took off after David. But he was gone. Around the time he crossed the goal line, I started to stumble. I don’t know if I tripped over a patch of crabgrass or my shoelaces, or if I was just being clumsy. But I broke my fall with my wrists and my knees. Even the landing was awkward. Lying there on the ground, I practically could hear Jamie’s smack talk. You’re so slow, you’d come in third in a two-man race. You could lose a race against a parked car. You’re so short, you could play handball against a curb.…

  I looked over and saw Coach Williams on the sidelines wearing a slight smile. I could read his mind, too. Guess the big brother got all the athletic genes.

  I stood up, covered in dirt and grass, and heard Clint’s voice. “Now you look like crap and play like it.” He snickered and spit on the grass.

  Luckily, a few minutes later, practice was over. Dad picked me up. He could probably tell I was bummed, because he kept cracking these corny jokes on the way home.

  “Let me guess: You wanted to play quarterback because you thought it was a refund.”

  “Very funny,” I grumbled.

  “Hey, maybe this’ll cheer you up,” he said. “I tried your idea yesterday. A man bought three of those flowerpots I had in the back of the store. I put a price of fifty dollars on one, and a price of a hundred dollars on another that was only slightly bigger. I overheard the guy whispering to his wife, ‘Wow, Denise, it’s like getting two for the price of one!’ ”

  Okay, so on the one hand, it looked like I wasn’t going to play football at Jonasburg Middle School and I’d just looked like an idiot in front of forty-four kids I was trying to impress and the coach had kept calling me “little”… but on the other hand, I’d helped my dad make some money.

  Maybe the day wasn’t a total loss.

  CHAPTER 3

  LIARS CAN FIGURE AND FIGURES CAN LIE

  After a couple of weeks, Kevin was catching rides to and from school with his new teammates and friends. It sometimes seemed like he was born with… well, you know those instruction manuals that come with DVD players or video games? You never read them, but you keep them anyway? It seemed like Kevin was born with one of those instruction manuals for life. Sports, girls, video games… everything (except school) always came easy to him. As if he just knew what to do.

  Since Kevin had all his new friends to ride with, on the days that Mom and Dad drove me to school, I had them to myself. Which was kind of nice—I’ll admit it—but also had its downside. Sometimes I felt like a witness in one of those courtroom TV shows, getting attacked by lawyers asking a million questions. On Monday, they attacked from both sides.

  “What are you going to do in school today?” Mom asked.

  “I dunno,” I said.

  “What subjects are you digging?” my dad asked, trying to sound cool.

  Mom jumped in. “Are the other kids nice? Do you want to invite someone over?”

  “Mitch,” my dad said, raising his eyebrows at me in the rearview mirror. “How’s the seventh-grade talent?”

  I could barely get a word in if I wanted to, so I looked out the window and pretended I wasn’t listening. I was hoping they would lose interest if I ignored them.

  “Mitch? Talent? Are there any foxes?”

  “Foxes?”

  “Girls, Mitch,” my father said. “Any cute girls?”

  Is there anything more annoying than parents trying to find out if you have a girlfriend? Oh, wait. I forgot. There is. A parent who tries to find out if you have a girlfriend and uses a lame-o, old-fashioned word like “foxes.”

  The truth is that, while she wasn’t my girlfriend (Remember? I. Do. Not. Have. A. Crush. On. Her.), Jamie was becoming my best friend. She was in three of my classes, and even though I would never sit at her table at lunch, sometimes we sat next to each other on the bus ride home.

  She was so not like the other girls. She wasn’t picky about food, she didn’t get grossed out by blood or mud or guys spitting loogeys, and she sure didn’t seem to care about clothes or shoes or who had a crush on who. She only had strong opinions—the strongest opinions—when it came to sports.

  “You actually like Johnson?!” she said to me after school on the bus. “You’re joking, right? He stinks worse than Clint Grayson’s laundry basket! You’d be better off with Mr. Johnson.” Mr. Johnson was the music teacher, and his thick glasses and wooden cane made him look like he was about ninety years old.

  “What?” I said, feeling like I had to defend myse
lf. “He’s good. He ran for nearly a thousand yards last season.”

  “Yeah, against lousy teams and when the game was out of reach,” she said. “Liars can figure and figures can lie.”

  “What’s that mean?” I said.

  “You know those statistics that announcers are always mentioning?” she said in the same tone of voice I use when I explain things to Kevin.

  “Sure.”

  “Well, sometimes those numbers are helpful. Other times they don’t say much at all. Like, you know how announcers talk about a team, and say, ‘They’ve won three of their last four games!’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know that means they’ve only won three of their last five games.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because if the team had won more than that, the announcers would have told you,” she said. “Think about it. If they had won four games out of their last five, that would’ve sounded even more impressive. But they clearly didn’t. That’s why the announcer said three out of four. A team wins three of the last four games and you think, Oh, they’re doing really well. But a team wins three of the last five games and you think, So what? That’s barely half.”

  I had never thought of it that way. As usual, she was right. I tried to change the subject so I wouldn’t have to admit it. “What’s your least favorite sport?” I asked her.

  “I would say golf,” she responded. “But anything you do while wearing checkered pants and a belt can’t even be considered a sport. And have you seen some of these golfers? They’re so fat, they sweat gravy. They’re not athletes!”

  O-kay. Changing the topic to football, I asked her: “You think Baltimore has a chance to beat Pittsburgh on Sunday?”

  “Yeah,” she shot back.

  “Think they’ll win by more than four points?”

  “Yup.”

  “Wanna put your money where your mouth is?”

  “How much?” she said suspiciously. But I could tell that she was considering it.

  “Let’s say five bucks.”

  “That’s half my weekly allowance!” she said. “But…” She hesitated. “Okay, sure.”