Eleven years ago, they had Maddux Kaczor, named after former Atlanta Braves pitcher Greg Maddux. In a lot of ways, Maddux is my best friend. We stay up all night playing video games and talking about his road trips.
I like Maddux, not only because he’s my brother, but because he doesn’t expect anything from me. He doesn’t ask questions about school, work, or girls. Outside of calling me Biggie, which I said he could when I went through a Henry’s-a-stupid-old-man-name phase, he doesn’t make fun of my weight or ask me when I’m going to lose one hundred pounds. When we sneak off to Molly’s for chicken fingers, he keeps it to himself. I just wish he was around more. What really sucks is that he’s gone in the summer when I have little to do.
Maddux is road-schooled. I can’t say he’s home-schooled because he’s never home. Laser takes him everywhere: out east for minor league baseball, down south for winter ball. Maddux sleeps in his bed in October, November, Christmas, New Year’s, and the first few weeks of February. The rest of the year, he sleeps in hotel rooms with his dad.
The Kaczors are also filthy rich. Besides being baseball players, they have a knack for buying farmland cheap and selling it high. Laser doesn’t farm, so he sold his 2,400 acres of inheritance to his brothers and used the money to build my mom her 6,000-square-foot dream house and Maddux his own indoor baseball field. The indoor baseball diamond has green-and-white field turf, a dirt pitching mound, a batter’s box, bases, and a pitching machine.
Maddux can hit pitches that fly in at 75 miles per hour. He stands straight with his feet parallel to his shoulders, stiff as a miniature green plastic army man. The bat barely moves as he points it straight up at the thirty-foot ceiling. The machine fires the ball, and in one quick motion Maddux drops his back shoulder and smacks the ball off the padded wall just past third base. It’s poetry—the perfect swing.
“What’s up, Biggie?” Maddux shoves my door open.
“Welcome back,” I reply. “How was Victoria?”
“It sucked ass.” He jumps onto my bed. “Dad couldn’t get on the field, so he’s calling it a career.”
“What?”
“He retired.”
“No shit.” I’m shocked by the news. “He just quit, no more majors?”
Maddux shakes his head. “His brothers said he can help out on their farms, plus Coach Phillips offered him a coaching job.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s big news. Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s cool. He’s thirty-four now and coaches don’t play old guys. It’s all politics, he claims. What really sucked is that the coach played crappy young guys, so not only did Dad ride the bench, but the team lost all the time. It was the worst summer ever.”
“Yeah, I saw he wasn’t playing much. I kept asking Mom if he was hurt,” I say.
“Nah, he just had a crappy coach.” Maddux settles down in front of my PlayStation and turns on the TV.
“Dad’s pissed that you were skipping gym.” He sifts through video games, searching for right one. “I would hide out here too.”
“It’s cool,” I say. “I went to PE today and actually threw a perfect game.”
“What? You played baseball in gym?”
“Well, no, we played Wiffle ball, but no one reached base. I taught myself to throw this badass curveball that no one could hit.”
“I could hit it,” he claims.
Still feeling the rush of my perfect game, I talk with an ounce of cockiness in my voice, “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Game on,” he says, stretching his neck out to get his eyes within an inch of mine.
We walk to the indoor baseball diamond. Despite my smart-ass comments, I’m nervous to pitch to Maddux, afraid he’ll smack my perfect pitch all over the building. Facing Killer, Michelle, and Jet is one thing, but getting Maddux, who plays baseball six hours a day every day, to swing and miss is something completely different.
And then I remember we don’t have any Wiffle balls. I need to throw a baseball, which is firmer, heavier, and slimier than the Wiffle ball. And there are no holes for my fingertips.
I look at the ball and try to remember where my favorite holes were and put finger pressure in those same spots. The ball’s cold from sitting in a white bucket in a dark closet for months. Maddux stands there, motionless. Not even his eyes blink. He shares mannerisms with his dad, including confident shoulders, a straight posture, and a quick, I’m-running-late walk.
He, like Laser, has blue eyes, a perfectly sloped nose, and a small chin that’s much thinner than his lips. Their faces start wide at the forehead and then, like a V, thin down to the chin. Unlike his father, Maddux is stocky with big shoulders, forearms, and calves, which he gets from his mother’s side of the family.
I wind up and fire the ball at the target behind the plate. Just like in gym class, the ball drops at the last minute. Maddux swings and hits a ground ball.
“Are you throwing knuckleballs?” he asks.
I just shrug my shoulders.
“Throw it again, but harder,” he says.
I go through my routine and, this time, throw it harder. Maddux swings and hits the ball off the back wall. Damn it, I think.
“Now throw it slower, but with the same windup,” he says.
How can I throw it slower but keep the same windup? What is he talking about? I step back, lift my leg, and push the ball to the plate instead of pitching it. The ball barely reaches the plate and Maddux slaps it back at me. The ball bounces off my shin. I hop twice but quickly lose my balance and drop to my back. How come every time I play sports, I fall down?
Maddux hovers over me as a pink balloon of gum swells from his mouth. After a loud pop he says something really dumb. “I know you were probably joking upstairs, but you’re going out for baseball this year.”
“No way,” I say, climbing to my feet. The pain is gone, but when I press on the welt below my sock, a sharp pain shoots up my leg.
“Why not? You could be a great pitcher with some help,” he says.
“Nah, I hate sports.”
“Why?”
“It’s all about failure,” I say. “I can’t handle that type of disappointment.” I head for the door, limping.
“What if you don’t suck?” Maddux shouts at my back.
“No,” I shout at the door.
“Just listen. What if you mastered this knuckleball and threw a perfect game?”
“I already threw a perfect game,” I say as I reach for the door handle.
“Wiffle ball doesn’t count. Biggie, no one in high school throws a knuckleball, at least not a good one. No one would know what to do when they see it. Plus, there would be no scouting reports on you because you’re just starting. The other players would be completely off balance.”
I resist turning the knob, choosing instead to turn and say, “I don’t care.”
Twenty feet away, Maddux continues his sales pitch. “If I can fix your windup, you could be a hell of a junkballer. We have nine months to tinker with a few things. Biggie, you could throw a perfect game. I know it. The first in school history. Just think how cool it would be to throw one for real, not just in gym.”
“My dad threw a perfect game, I’m sure,” I say. “He’s in the Iowa High School Baseball Hall of Fame.”
Maddux shakes his head. “Aaron never did. No one has. I’ve memorized the entire Finch record book.”
“My dad didn’t throw one?”
Maddux smiles. “No one. Stick with me and you’ll be the first.”
I ponder the thought. Throwing a perfect game, especially after finding out that my dad never did, is appealing. Plus, Annabelle did say she wanted to see me pitch. I am 99 percent sure she was kidding or making fun of me, but what if she wasn’t? What if she watches me throw a perfect game and falls in love with me?
“So what do you think, Biggie? Wann
a throw a perfect game?” Maddux asks, jumping up and down, giddy with excitement. The way he’s shaking, who would believe he hasn’t had a teaspoon of sugary pop in six months.
Although I know it’s a horrible idea, I don’t shake my head and nod instead. Why? Who knows? Maybe I just want to make Maddux happy. Maybe I just want to live in the glow of the perfect game a little longer and believe my ability to manipulate a ball isn’t a fluke, but a start of something bigger, something that can’t be predicted or prophesized. Maybe I think it’s a path toward kissing Annabelle.
No matter the reason, baseball season isn’t until the end of the school year, eight months from now, so I know I have nothing to lose by saying okay. I have plenty of time to quit. For now, I’ll make the kid jumping up and down in front of me happy.
Chapter 5
Annarocks
Annabelle drops two Kit Kats and a Lo-Carb Monster Energy drink on the counter with a small smile and hands me a ten-dollar bill. We don’t talk about last Friday or yesterday’s perfect game. As I scan the junk food, I want to tell her that I’m going to do everything I can to make her dream of seeing me pitch come true. When I take a quick look at her, I go blank. Instead I say, “I don’t care.”
“What?”
“The Kit Kats,” I mutter. “You can just have them.”
“Just give me my change, Biggie.”
She walks out and I’m back to doing one of my favorite things: staring out the window at Highway 3. I watch guys drive by with a girl in the passenger seat. One night, I saw twenty-seven straight cars with a guy and girl in the front. Like most workdays, I begin to dream about the day when I take Annabelle on the perfect date, and she sits next to me in my black 2006 Chevy Silverado, which I bought from my uncle when he got a new work truck. I know she loves Chevy trucks. We will drive down to Cedar Falls and eat at McKellen’s Steak House. I know she loves their chicken salad and popovers. Finally, we’ll drive down the hidden highways and gravel roads of northeastern Iowa, drinking Honey Weiss beer and listening to Def Leppard, a band she saw with her cousin three years ago at the state fair. It was her first concert.
How do I know what Annabelle wants to do on a date? Well, it isn’t from social media or overheard conversations after school. What the rest of the school knows about Annabelle is superficial garbage: tweets about getting coffee or being exhausted after a big test. She tweets about current bands and current movies as her favorites, but it’s all lies, small concessions she makes in order to fit in the clique of kids who care about Finch High School. She wants to make sure that when friends see her feed, they notice she loves the same stupid things they enjoy. It’s all lies.
If people found out what I know about Annabelle they would know that she loves everything old: bands like Def Leppard and Poison, TV shows like Friends, Married with Children, and Golden Girls—which was actually really funny when I gave it a chance.
When teachers ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she always says real estate agent like her mother and two aunts. Rivers Realty sells most of the homes in Finch. While her mom counts down the days until her only daughter becomes another member of the Rivers Realty family, Annabelle dreams of being a writer. She loves poetry and shares her work with her cousin, who returns friendly compliments, even on the pieces that I feel aren’t very good.
Annabelle lives two lives. She tells her Finch friends lies but she tells her cousin, her best friend since age three, her true thoughts, passions, and fears in rants sent with an email account that she started back in seventh grade.
For the past five years, I have known her screen name and password. Her screen name is abrivers, easy to read if you walk by her desk at the perfect time. Figuring out the password took listening skills, patience, a keen eye, and an obsession that wouldn’t go away.
I was twelve years old and I had no idea that I loved Annabelle. I knew that her developing chest made me stare uncontrollably. Every day I would watch her whirl strands of her curly hair with a cheap plastic blue pen. If I looked close enough, I could see smudges of lip gloss smeared on the top half of the pen. When she walked by me in the hallway, I tried hard to look her in the eyes, but my gaze always fell to her boobs. I had to blink and turn away before I got busted as the pervert I feared I was becoming. I looked at other girls, but gawked and dreamed of only one: Annabelle Rivers.
At the start of the seventh-grade second semester, everyone got a new schedule. Annabelle and I had life science together. I could see on the top of her desk a grocery-bag-wrapped science book. On the cover, surrounded by pink hearts, green stars, and blue dots, were nine letters: annarocks.
In my room that night, I started scribbling annarocks on a notebook page, and I couldn’t stop. I just wrote it over and over again: annarocks, annarocks, annarocks, annarocks—in different fonts and sizes. I would write one with a big A and then one with all small letters. The page must have had a hundred different versions. Finally, with the tiny bit of remaining white space, I scribbled, Anna rocks me hard all night long.
I didn’t know what it meant, but it caused my heart to skip a beat and made me drop the pad of paper on the floor. As I rolled over on my bed to pick it up, I saw my reflection in my computer monitor. I just stared at it for one minute, then two, then five, until finally a big smile reflected on the black, dusty fourteen-inch screen.
I got up, ignored the pad of paper at my feet, and sat down at my desk. I pushed the on button and the computer started to breathe, welcoming me with its familiar chime. I went to the Gmail homepage, typing in the letters: abrivers in the ID box. With my pinkie, I tabbed my cursor to the password box. Slowly, with rising excitement creating goose bumps on my arms and pulsing static energy on my cheeks, I pressed the keys methodically with the precision of a brain surgeon: a-n-n-a-r-o-c-k-s.
After one long, deep, lung-filling, relaxing breath, I hit Enter.
Chapter 6
Comfortable Conversations
I have friends. Tons, actually. Over the past four years, I have accumulated a massive number of online friends. I’m not lonely, far from it. Tonight, I’m looking at pictures from my online friend Lucy’s seventeenth birthday party.
Lucy lives to have fun. She loves guys and girls who party. She smokes Marlboro Lights and weed, drinks, and stays out late, even on school nights. The only reason she gets online at all is because she’s so frenzied after a night of partying that she can’t calm down.
In real life, a girl like her and me would never coexist. I would be way too boring with my hatred of face-to-face conversations. She parties. I hate parties. Or at least I assume I’ll hate them. Yet we’re good friends and I think she likes me. In fact, she likes me so much that she sent me birthday party pictures, one with her eyes closed and lips puckered to offer me a birthday kiss. Technically, she should do that when it’s my birthday, but I still think it’s cute. I love—let me repeat—I love the online world.
It’s perfect. I write something out, and before I send the message, I look at every word, syllable, and letter. If I find something I don’t like, I can move the cursor, erase, and replace. Online, I can have comfortable conversations without all the sweat, worry, or jitters of face-to-face confrontations.
Too bad the real world doesn’t work that way. If it did, I could walk down the hallways at school, see Annabelle, and say, “You look nice in that shirt,” which I often think because of her love for cool, colorful, and tight attire. If the world were a chat room, the compliment would hover in the air and allow me time to tinker, correct, and improve my sentence. I could replace nice with a powerful word like great. I could erase in that shirt, which brings to her attention what my eyes are focused on and replace it with something simple, friendly, and to the point, like today. If I could turn Finch High School into a chat room, I would talk to Annabelle every day and say things like, “You look great today.”
Even with the possibility of ponde
ring words, I still need the necessary information to make a girl fall for me. I don’t lie about being overweight. If a girl asks for a picture, I send one, so I can’t get by on my looks like Killer or Kyle. I have to be the nice guy, the thoughtful one, and the good listener.
I realize that my mind can’t hold statistics on more than a hundred girls, so I have a black three-ring binder that I fill with notes to keep track. It’s my personal black book, like all the suave men have in old black-and-white movies. When someone tells me that her dad is being an asshole, I look up notes in her section and find a page titled Previous father rants. All girls have daddy issues. I’ll reply, “Reminds me of when he took your car without asking a couple weeks ago.” She loves that. The more information I know about a person, the better. If I wanted to, I bet I could write autobiographies for fifty people that I’ve met online.
While I have notes on more than one hundred girls, I can probably toss out most of the notes as girls come and go. They get bored with online dating or get a boyfriend. In some cases, I have to ignore them because of what I like to call “a desire to get too close to me.” Online dating is about distance and not making real eye contact. If I wanted to talk and see a girl close up, I would just talk to the girls at my school. When a girl starts talking about meeting or moving here, I ignore them. Their notes stay in the binder though. Why? I guess I just like knowing some girls would stalk me if I gave them the opportunity.
Of the one hundred girls, only a handful really interest me. There’s Jamie, a girl from Indiana. She loves movies and wants to be a critic. She probably sees two hundred films a year. I live in a small town with no movie theater, so I don’t get to see many new releases, but I don’t tell her that. For all she knows, I see two or three movies a week. To keep up this ruse, I have three movie review sites up when we chat. She mentions a movie and I quickly pull up information on the film so we can discuss it. I’m prepared.
Biggie Page 3
