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To the Little Leaguers
ou gotta help me, TJ. I'm desperate!” “I don't think it's going to work.”
“It's gonna work!”
“I don't know …”
“The mumps are a sign, TJ. I just know Donald's mumps are a sign straight from heaven!”
“Sister Carmelita tell you that?”
“She don't have to tell me everything. I know a sign when I see one, and them mumps are a sign!”
“Okay, I'll see what I can do,” I said.
“And while you're seeing about it, just remember who it was saved Moondance from drowning in Lincoln Park, okay?”
“I told you I'd see about it,” I said. “I got to get home now. You be cool.”
“I can't be cool until I'm sprung from here and you know that, TJ.”
“Yeah. I know that,” I said.
I started walking down the Boulevard, away from the Dominican Academy, but I knew Mop was watching me. I could feel her eyes burning right into my back. When I reached Kensington, I turned around and she was still standing there outside the gates, just the way I knew she would be, staring at me.
I know how she felt. The Dominican Academy is part school and part a home for kids without parents to take care of them. I knew all about the Academy because me and my brother, the Moondance Kid, had spent most of our lives there. We were just adopted six months ago, but Mop hasn't been adopted yet.
Mom was making supper when I got home, and the Moondance Kid was doing his homework. It was May and it was getting hard to do your homework. The days were long and so warm that youjust wanted to get outside and do things.
“How did your day go?” Mom asked.
‘Tine,” I said. I sat on the couch next to where Moondance was sitting and started thinking about Mop some more.
“Is there anything wrong?” Mom asked.
“No,” I said. “I was just thinking about a friend.”
“Probably Mop,” Moondance said. “You're always thinking about her.”
“Why don't you dry up and blow away!” I said.
“Are you sure everything's all right, T.J.?” Mom asked.
“Sure,” I said, squeezing out a smile.
Sometimes I forget how easily Mom worries. I think when she and my new father first adopted me, she was more worried than we were. All you have to be is quiet around her for two minutes and she starts asking if everything is okay. I like it, though. I'm eleven and I spent eight years in the Dominican Academy, so I'm glad to be adopted. No, it was better than just glad, it was truly juicy.
Oh, also, I do always think about Mop. Mop is the kind of girl you have to think about because she's real nice and everything, but she'll get you into more trouble than you can ever imagine.
Take for instance how she saved Moondance from being drowned. She saved him, that's right. But guess who was the one who almost got him drowned? Sister Car-melita had taken us all down to Lincoln Park and everybody was playing volleyball except Mop and Moondance. The next thing I knew was that I heard screaming, and there were Moondance and Mop in the middle of the lake hanging on to a wooden plank. She'd told him they could use the plank like a raft and sail across the lake. That's why she had to save him.
Okay, there's this Little League baseball team called the Elks. The coach of the Elks is a guy named Jim Kennedy. I met him when I was at the Academy because he and his wife came around and looked at some kids. They didn't have any kids of their own and they were thinking of adopting one. What Mop wanted me to do was to tell Jim to go to the Dominican Academy and ask to have her on the team. The nuns are really cool about getting the kids involved in community things.
When I got out to the park the next day I told Jim all about Mop.
“And you say she's a catcher?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, she's real good too,” I answered.
“How big is she?” Jim was hitting fly balls to the fielders and he knocked one out toward Moondance. I watched as Moondance circled under the ball, almost caught it, and then chased it back toward the fence.
“She's not too tall,” I said. “But she's strong. She could beat just about every boy in Dominican at arm wrestling.”
“And you say she caught for the Dominican team?” He hit another long lazy fly to where four of the Elks were standing, they all called for it, and it hit Brian Fay on the foot.
“She caught for us and she was good,” I said.
“I didn't even know Dominican had a Little League team,” Jim said.
“It wasn't exactly Little League,” I said, “but it was a team.”
“Well, anyway, with Donald coming down with the mumps we need a catcher. I'll give her a try. What's her full name?”
That's how easy it was to get Mop on the Elks. Maybe Donald Wheeler's coming down with the mumps was a sign, like Mop said. To tell the truth, the Elks weren't the greatest team in the world. Nobody really wants to be on the Elks. Mike Nieto, our first baseman, said that Donald got the mumps on purpose just so he didn't have to play with us. But I didn't believe that.
The first day of practice with Mop went okay. Not great, mind you, but okay. She didn't hit the ball too good and Brian got on her case.
“How come we have to get another girl?” he asked. “We already got Jennifer who's slow and Chrissie who's terrible. Now we got three on our team.”
“How would you like me to break your face into nineteen little pieces?” Mop said, going right up to Brian.
“You and what army?” Brian said. But he didn't say it too strong because Mop was right in his face and she looked like she meant what she was saying.
“Come on.” Jim raised his voice as he stepped between them. “This is supposed to be a team. Anybody that can't play as a team can't play for the Elks!”
Mop sure could catch the ball. When she got behind the plate with the catcher's mask on you couldn't tell if she was a boy or a girl. You couldn't even tell when she talked, because she has a really deep voice for a girl. Kind of gravelly too.
“Listen up, guys!” Jim said as we put the bats and bases in the equipment bag after practice. “We have our first game Wednesday at four-thirty. I want everybody here by four o'clock so we can take infield practice. Evans, you'll be our regular catcher and Mop can be the backup.”
“I don't want to catch.” Evans's whole name was Jesse Evans but everybody just called him by his last name. I don't know why. He was always getting mad at somebody, but it was funny because he had this voice like the chipmunk you see on television on Saturday mornings. When he got really mad his voice went even higher. “She can catch if she wants.”
“See, that's what I told you,” Mop said. “Nobody wants to be a catcher because they're all afraid of the ball. That's why I knew I was going to make the team.”
“What's this plan you got?” Moondance asked.
‘Okay, it's real simple,” Mop said. “I'm going to be catching, see? Then the coach starts to think I'm terrific, mostly because I am. And who's the assistant coach?”
“Mrs. Kennedy.”
“Right. And who do you think was coming to the Academy and looking me over and thinking about adopting me?”
“You?”
“No, they talked to some boy, but once Mrs. Kennedy asked Sister Carmelita how old I was. I know that ‘cause Sister Carmelita tells me everything.”
“So big deal.”
“Anyway.” Mop took a deep breath the way she does sometimes when she's really talking fast. “I'll be behind the plate catching and throwing runners out at second base and everything and they'll be wondering how come I'm so good and everything. Then one day there's going to be a pop foul and I'll jump up and throw off the mask and catch the pop foul. When I catch it, I turn to Mr. Kennedy and give him a little smile. Not too big a smile because I don't want them to think I'm trying to butter them up or anything but a little smile so they know I'm friendly.
“Then …” She took another deep breath. “He's going to say to his wife, or maybe to himself if she don't come, ‘You know, that's the girl I've been thinking of adopting out of Dominican. Wow, she's a good catcher. I was wondering if I should adopt a boy, but she's just as good, maybe even better, so I'll run right down tomorrow and take out the papers!”
“How you know he's gonna say all that?” Moondance asked.
“Did I know I was going to be playing for the Elks?”
“Did you?” Moondance asked.
“Yeah, sure I did,” Mop answered.
“I think you got it made now,” I said. “All you got to do is not mess up in the games or anything.”
We had reached the big front door of Dominican. Mop opened it and stuck one leg inside.
“That's not the whole trouble,” Mop said. “Sister Marianne said that since not too many kids are going to the school now, they're going to close it down. They said it costs too much. She said they'll probably close down Dominican or maybe combine it with St. Aedan's. The rest of the kids will go out to Riverhead, which is about a trillion miles away.”
“You too?” I asked Mop.
“I will if I don't get this Kennedy dude to adopt me soon,” she said. “Sister Carmelita thinks he's interested, and she don't know what's holding him up.”
“What did Sister Marianne say?”
“Same thing she always says.” Mop folded her hands in front of her chest the way Sister Marianne always did. “The Good Lord moves in mysterious ways. …”
“His wonders to perform.” I finished the sentence.
“Wish He'd check me out pretty soon,” Mop said.
ost of the kids at the Academy are young. Mop and me were just about the oldest. When kids get to be eleven or twelve, they're usually sent out to another home. I would have been sent out to Riverhead except for Moondance. They like to keep brothers together. Me and Mop have known each other a long time, so that's how we got to be such good friends. That's how she got that name, Mop, too.
My real name is Tommy Jackson. When I was nine another kid came to the Academy with the same name. At first I thought it was pretty cool, but he didn't like it. And he was tough enough to do something about it too.
“You either change your name,” he said. “Or I'm going to break your nose.”
Did I tell you I'm not too tough? Well, I'm not. And when the new Tommy Jackson told me to change my name, I thought maybe I would do it. But then I found out you just can't go and change your name.
“You got to go to court and everything,” I told the new Tommy. I had to look up when I spoke to him.
“You got two problems,” he said, holding his fist about an inch from my nose. “Your name and my fist¡ You better come up with something quick!”
That's when I started calling myself TJ. TJ. stood for Tommy Jackson, but it sounded different. When I told Billy—that's Moondance's real name—that he should call me ‘TJ.,’ he wanted a new name too.
“We'll call you ‘BJ.,’ “ I said.
Only thing was, he didn't like it. So he started calling himself the Moondance Kid. He had seen a movie called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He liked “Sundance Kid,” but since that had already been used he started calling himself Moondance.
Now Mop heard everybody calling me TJ. and my brother the Moondance Kid, and she asked how come they were calling us that. I didn't want to say that I was scared of the new Tommy, so I told her that it was really cool to have a name like TJ. or Moondance. So she wanted a new name too.
“We can call you ‘O.P.,’ “ Moondance said.
Olivia Parrish made this face like she just bit down on a bad pistachio nut. “That's stupid!”
“Why's it stupid?” I asked.
“‘Cause!”
“How about the Starlight Girl?” I asked.
She liked that a lot and almost decided to use it when Snotty-nosed Eddie Hurly asked her what she was going to use when she grew up and wasn't a girl anymore.
“I think we ought to go back to O.P.,” I said.
“Then it's got to be Miss O.P.,” she said.
It wasn't long until we got from Miss O.P. to Mop, which was the first letters of Miss Olivia Parrish.
Mop is really okay. I like girls just as much as I like boys, anyway. Mop knows things about people, too. If you're sad, she'll know it before anybody else. Or if you're thinking about something secret, she can usually figure it out. She says it's because she's smart. Maybe. I think she just guesses lucky. But she did figure out when I was going to get adopted.
We had been playing volleyball last March and Mop was mad because she lost. She always gets mad if she loses. That's the way she is.
“You stink!” she said to Snotty Eddie.
“You stink worse than me.” Snotty Eddie wiped off his face with the palm of his hand. I hated it when he did that. “You stink and you're a double stink!”
Now, I know that normally Mop wouldn't let Snotty Eddie get away with that, even if he was only nine and she was eleven. She would give him a knuckle sandwich right in the lip. But she just gave him a bad look instead and waved a hand at him.
“You get lost, you triple-stink boogie burger!” she said. “I got some business to talk with TJ.”
Snotty Eddie stuck his tongue out at Mop and took off for the boys’ dorm.
“He's probably going to tell Sister Marianne you called him a boogie burger!” I said.
“She knows he's a boogie burger,” Mop said, chewing on her gum. “Nuns ain't dumb!”
“What did you want to talk about?”
“You see that guy and the woman talking to Moon-dance before?” she asked. “You want some gum?”
“Yeah.”
“So what you think?”
“I think I want some gum,” I said.
“I mean about them talking to Moondance?” she asked. She was fishing around her pocket for the gum.
“I don't know,” I said, watching as she found a Chiclet, brushed it off, and handed it to me.
“How long you had this gum in your pocket, Mop?”
“Kiss it up to God,” she said. “That's the third time I seen them here. Twice they were in the office talking to Sister Marianne. I thought they were going to be cottage parents or something. But they were talking to Moon-dance today and that's got to mean something. I bet they're going to talk to you next.”
“Could be,” I said, kissing the gum up to God so He could clean it up or something before I put it in my mouth.
“Go ask him what they was talking about,” she said.
I went to look for Moondance in the boys’ dorm. On th
e way I took the gum out and took a fuzzball off it. God was only good for germs, not fuzzballs.
Moondance wasn't in the dorm. I asked Anthony Tindal if he had seen him.
“Yeah, he's talking to some people in the gym,” he said. “I think he's been talking to them for about a year!”
That's the way Anthony talked. If something was bigger than him, he would say it was bigger than a house. If it lasted more than a few minutes, he would say it was a year. Things like that.
“You going to go in and see what they talking about?” Anthony asked when he saw me lie down on my cot.
“I don't care what they're talking about.”
That was a lie. Not a real lie, but not exactly the truth either. I mean, I didn't have to cross my fingers or anything, but I did care a little about what they were talking about. I mean, if they were talking about adopting somebody, then I cared. If they were just talking about the Academy, I didn't care. Sometimes people came and asked how we liked being at the Academy and stuff like that.
The only thing was that if they were talking about adopting somebody, I wondered if they were thinking of adopting Moondance. And if they were thinking about adopting him, were they thinking about adopting me too.
Sometimes me and Moondance used to look in the mirror and try to figure out what our regular parents looked like. He was too young to remember them. I wasn't too young, only I didn't remember them anyway. In fact, the only thing I can really remember is thinking about them after the police came to my old school and said that they had been in an accident. They must have been pretty good-looking because I'm pretty good-looking. Moondance isn't ugly, but his eyes are too big. Makes him look a little like a seal. You ever see a seal with them big eyes looking right at you?
The people that adopted us looked okay too. Their last name was Williams.
I asked, “What we supposed to call you” —
“—Whatever you want to.” Mrs. Williams said it so fast that Moondance jumped a little.
“How about you?” I asked Mr. Williams.
He looked at me, then he looked at his wife, and hunched his shoulders.
“How come we just don't call you Mom and Dad?” Moondance asked.
Me, Mop, and the Moondance Kid Page 1
