Game Changer

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  KT remembered the hissed comments she’d heard at school: Show-off! Was that true? Was she just a show-off?

  Nobody criticized me for trying to do my best on the softball field, she thought. At Max’s mathletics game yesterday, nobody criticized Max for getting the answers before everyone else. They cheered!

  KT dropped her arms.

  “I’m just kidding,” she said, though she kind of wasn’t. She squinted, trying to recapture the trail of a thought she’d been working on before. “What I don’t get is, it’s kind of like you and me switched places coming to this world, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Max said.

  “But in the real world, you liked video games and I liked softball,” KT said. “So why didn’t video games and sports switch? How’d all the school stuff get involved? Why didn’t it become video-game tournaments that Mom and Dad care about so much, video games that you have club teams for, video games that you practice constantly after school?”

  “Now, that would be sweet,” Max said. He grinned. Then the grin faded. “But you’re right . . .” A troubled look came over his face. He reached back into the wagon and pulled out two of the softballs, one that was a grayish white and one that was a battered pink. He put them both on the ground in front of him, pointing to first one and then the other, muttering, “Real-world Max forced to go to KT’s games. Alt-world KT forced to go to Max’s.”

  He kept switching the balls back and forth, muttering about the differences between the two worlds. KT heard, “ . . . football players are the coolest kids in sixth grade; Ben Bashkov is the coolest kid in sixth grade . . . . Mom and Dad want Max to do sports; Mom and Dad want KT to do acs . . . .”

  KT realized she was watching Max do the equivalent of finally showing his work. He was trying to figure out a solution that was harder than sixth-grade math.

  He reached back into the wagon and pulled out an icy water bottle. He put it an equal distance from each of the two softballs. Then he began switching all three items around, muttering, “Sports . . . school . . . video games . . . KT . . . Max . . . and . . .”

  He stopped with the water bottle and the two softballs in a triangular formation on the ground.

  “Here’s the answer,” Max announced.

  “What?” KT asked.

  “It’s not just you and me who got flipped around,” Max said. “There’s someone else involved. Someone else whose problems got mixed up with ours, who cares a lot more about school than either of us do. Because there’s that extra variable. And that other person probably remembers the real world too.”

  “So, you think,” KT began, “to get back to the real world . . .”

  Max pointed at the sweaty water bottle tilting in the grass.

  “We’ve got to find that third person,” he said.

  Chαpter Ninetεen

  “So who is it?” KT asked.

  “How should I know?” Max asked. “I thought I was doing pretty well, figuring out this much.”

  He waved his hand toward the softballs and the water bottle.

  “How do you know it’s not, like, two other people? Or more? Like . . . a whole softball team?” KT asked hopefully.

  “Occam’s razor,” Max said.

  “Huh?” KT asked.

  “It’s a scientific principle,” Max said. “Try the simplest explanation first. Having it be just one more person is easiest, so that’s the possibility we should consider—and rule out, if we have to—before thinking about anything else.”

  “How do you know stuff like that?” KT asked. “Oscar’s razor—”

  “Occam’s,” Max corrected.

  “And that thing about the hammer and the nails—”

  “Hey, I’ve been hanging out with Ben Bashkov since I was five,” Max said. “He thinks you need to haul out scientific principles and philosophical debate just to decide how to eat an Oreo.”

  KT rolled her eyes. Then she caught herself.

  “Wait—what if Ben is the third person?” she said. “That’s got to be it! He’s really smart. He gets good grades. People think he’s a nerd in the real world, but he’s cool here. This world is made for Ben Bashkov! Er—I’m sorry—‘Ebenezer.’ Right? Aren’t I right?”

  Max shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “The real Ben is a nice guy. In this world he’s a total jerk. He’s stringing along four different girls who all think he’s their boyfriend, and he loves it that they’re all jealous of one another.”

  It’s people like that who give jocks a bad image, KT thought. I mean . . . mathletes.

  She bit her lip.

  “Well, no offense,” she began. “But what if that’s what Ben really wants to be like in the real world, but he’s not cool enough to have any girl like him, let alone four? What if this world is just bringing out his real personality?”

  “No,” Max said stubbornly, shaking his head even harder. “That’s not Ben. Anyhow, even if he wanted to be like that, the real Ben couldn’t do it. Ever since we started sixth grade, he’s been terrified of talking to any girl. He couldn’t just switch that off. He’s not the real Ben here.”

  KT had kind of forgotten how freaky sixth-grade boys could be. She pictured the goofy, awkward, gangly Ben she knew in the real world, and put that image beside the obnoxious, overconfident kid she’d seen at the mathletics game last night.

  Max was right. The bony knees might be the same, but it wasn’t the same kid.

  “What about your other friends?” KT said. “Do you think it could be any of them?”

  “Um,” Max said, suddenly acting incredibly interested in the beads of water dripping down the bottle. “I don’t actually have any other friends besides Ben. Not in the real world.”

  He seemed to be trying very hard to act like that was no big deal, like he was just making an ordinary statement: “The sky is blue.” “The grass is green.” “I don’t have any other friends.” But KT felt another deep pang. She wanted to go beat up all those stupid sixth graders who wouldn’t be friends with Max: What’s wrong with you? Huh? Huh? Don’t you know you’re missing out, not being friends with my brother?

  Even though, back in the real world, she hadn’t exactly paid attention to him either.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t really think I have any friends in this world either,” Max said, very carefully. “Not real ones. I don’t think people count as friends if they’re just hanging around me because I’m a mathlete and that makes them look popular.”

  “You’re right,” KT said fiercely. “Fake friends don’t count! Better one real friend than a million, uh . . .”

  Max shrugged helplessly, and KT had to say something.

  “Well, you see all my friends in this world,” she said, gesturing at the empty softball diamond. “Two hundred girls just made it very clear that they aren’t my friends here. I don’t even have a Ben!”

  She’d meant to sound too sarcastic to let any pain through, but her throat caught a little, closing over the words “aren’t my friends” . . .

  “KT—,” Max began.

  “And I know none of them are the mysterious third person we’re looking for, because I put these, like, codes in my messages about this softball game, referring to things in the real world,” KT said. “And no one picked up on them. No one. No one even asked, ‘What are you talking about?’”

  “Well, that’s—,” Max tried again.

  KT grabbed Max’s arm.

  “Wait—do you think that means none of them actually got my messages?” KT asked excitedly. “I was sending out eight or ten messages a day some days, and nobody answered any of them after that first day. Of course! It all makes sense now! I just need to figure out how to fix my Facebook account, and then—”

  “KT,” Max interrupted. “Listen to yourself. You were sending out eight or ten messages a day to total strangers. Yeah, you think of them as friends, but they don’t remember you. People didn’t answer because . . . because .
. .” He swallowed hard, and then almost whispered, “You sounded like a crazy stalker.”

  Now Max sounded embarrassed on her behalf.

  KT felt her face go red. Was Max right? She tried to imagine getting eight or ten messages a day from a total stranger in the real world.

  Yeah, crazy stalker, she thought. That’s what I’d think.

  Her face flamed even more. Suddenly it seemed as hard to catch her breath as it had been that time a softball slammed into her gut. She could just picture two hundred girls at once deleting her messages, blocking her new messages, hitting ignore in response to her Facebook friend requests. She could even imagine some of them copying her messages over and forwarding them to their actual friends with sarcastic comments: Can you believe what this whack job’s been sending me? Vanessa would do that. Maybe Molly, too. And . . .

  “I’m sorry,” Max muttered. “If it makes you feel any better, those messages wouldn’t have seemed weird to anybody who knew you. It’s just . . .”

  It’s just you’re the only one who knows the real me in this world, KT thought, aching all over again. You and maybe some mystery person who definitely isn’t one of my friends.

  But she’d kept sending out those messages, kept telling herself the softball game was going to happen, no matter what. Because that was the kind of thing she did in the real world. No matter how high the odds were stacked against you, no matter how much evidence there was that you were going to lose, you still tried and tried and tried; you played your guts out; you believed you were going to win. And, in KT’s experience, usually you did. Working hard and believing in yourself could win out over odds and evidence.

  But now she was almost hoping that her former friends had just deleted the messages without reading them, or had blocked her messages completely. Except . . .

  “Wait a minute,” she said, looking back at Max. “How do you know what my messages sounded like? Did you read them?”

  “Um . . . ,” Max said, looking uncomfortable again. Then he gulped once more and said, almost defiantly, “How do you think I knew to look for you here?”

  KT hadn’t even thought to wonder about that.

  “You hacked into my Facebook account?” she asked incredulously.

  “I didn’t pull any pranks on you or anything, honest!” Max said. “I just had to know . . . I kind of thought Monday night that you were the real you, and you remembered the real world. Because you called Dad out, and told him he was an accountant, not someone doing hard physical labor every day.”

  “Hold on,” KT said, actually putting her hands up like a traffic cop. “You’re telling me that you’ve known since Monday that you and I are on the same team, and that neither one of us has to be alone in all this, and you waited until now—Saturday, five days later—to tell me?”

  “I didn’t know Monday that we were on the same team,” Max said softly. “I was pretty sure you remembered the real world, but . . . how was I supposed to know that would make us teammates? You still acted like you hated me.”

  It was funny—Max hadn’t been on a single sports team since kindergarten, and he could still nail KT on the definition of “team.”

  “I never hated you,” KT said defensively. “I was just avoiding you because I promised Mom I wouldn’t say anything bad to you about mathletics. And I didn’t want to think about anything but softball.”

  “Just like in the real world,” Max muttered.

  KT felt oddly ashamed.

  “I didn’t hate you there, either,” KT said. “I just . . . get annoyed. You’re my kid brother and . . .” And when was the last time in the real world that she’d looked at him with anything but contempt and disgust? Loathing, even?

  There was nothing else she could say except, “I’m sorry.”

  Max shrugged.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he said.

  KT couldn’t tell if he was forgiving her or not.

  “Hey,” she said. “How’d you know how to hack into Facebook, anyhow? Are you secretly a computer genius too?”

  “All I had to do was figure out your password,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess ‘Olympics2024’ is pretty obvious,” KT said.

  “No, your password in this world is ‘StraightAs,” Max said. He made a face, scrunching up his nose. “Real original of you. That’s Ben’s password in the real world.”

  KT stared at Max in dismay. She always left herself logged in to Facebook—it saved time she’d rather use on softball. Or, it’d be time for schoolwork, here in this world, she thought, grimacing. Either way, she hadn’t seen the different password.

  “You mean to tell me there was some weirdo-world version of me making up stupid passwords like that before I woke up here Monday morning?” KT asked. “Is that how this works?”

  “I guess,” Max said, though he looked dubious. “There had to have been some version of both of us here before, or else Mom and Dad would have screamed when we showed up in their house. Everyone at school would have looked at us like we were strangers. Someone named KT Sutton and someone named Max Sutton were here before we arrived.”

  “So did we all just trade places?” KT asked. “Is there a weirdo-world me—and a weirdo-world you—running around in the real world?”

  “That’s one possible scenario,” Max said.

  Weirdo-world KT better not have messed up the end of the Rysdale Invitational, KT thought.

  She felt a little bit like she had the first time she’d played in a softball league where players were allowed to steal bases. Suddenly pitching wasn’t just about making great throws; it was also about seeing everything around her at once, knowing who was thinking of running when—and knowing how to stop them.

  “I know, I know—thinking about that is like going from playing a 2-D video game to a 3-D one,” Max said.

  Why do you have to compare everything to a video game? KT wanted to ask. But then what would she say if he asked, Why do you have to compare everything to softball?

  Something was bugging her, tickling the back of her mind. It was like having a runner behind her on second who was acting all sweet-as-pie and What? Me? You think I’d actually try to steal third? When KT knew she couldn’t trust the runner for an instant. Some detail didn’t seem right . . .

  Suddenly KT remembered what it was.

  “Oh, Max,” she said. “Max, Max, Max. I think I just figured this out! I know who the third person is!”

  “Who?” Max said.

  “I think, I think . . .” KT hadn’t actually worked out all the details. She was still putting things together. “It’s Dad.”

  Max did a double take.

  “Mr. ‘I Live for Math’?” he asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “No, no, it makes sense,” KT said. “He’s an accountant in the real world, right? So he actually is good at math. And he likes it. Or—I guess he does.” She’d never actually thought to wonder whether her dad liked his job. She’d certainly never asked him. “I don’t know why he hasn’t admitted the truth to us yet. Maybe he’s trying to teach us a lesson or something. But here’s my proof. Have you tried opening our garage door since Monday? Even if my Facebook password changed, the code for our garage door is still 2024—the year I’m going to the Olympics. Dad’s the one who programmed that, so he still remembers the real world. He’s got to!”

  It would be great having Dad on their team. She kind of felt like a little girl again, knowing Daddy would take care of her.

  He’ll get us back to the real world, KT thought. He wants me to get that University of Arizona scholarship and play in the Olympics as much as I do!

  But Max was shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “The garage code is 2024 in this world because that’s when Mom and Dad think I’m going to play in the International Mathlympics. Dad only mentioned it seven times this morning when he was helping me practice math.”

  “Oh,” KT said. She slumped over, as deflated as a balloon that had lost all its
air.

  “But you’re on the right track,” Max said, and this was even more demoralizing, that he was trying so hard to cheer her up. “I think we should be looking for things that are a little off, details that are out of place in this world—hints that somebody brought some piece of the real world with them. Like you trying to set up a softball tournament or talking about Dad being an accountant, and me—”

  “What did you do?” KT asked curiously. “Did something happen that I should have noticed?”

  “Well, I was terrible at mathletics on Monday,” Max said. “I froze up completely because—do you know how much pressure even a middle-school mathlete is under?”

  “Try being a middle-school pitcher,” KT muttered.

  “How do you stand it?” Max asked, and it seemed like he really wanted to know.

  “I like it,” KT said. This was and wasn’t true, all at once. “It makes me play better. Because . . . it makes me feel important.”

  Max was shaking his head.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “It just made me want to throw up.”

  KT laughed.

  “But you played pretty well yesterday,” she said.

  “Yeah, because I’d decided this whole world was fake, and nothing I did here mattered,” Max said.

  “Do you still think that?” KT asked. “Do you think we could rob banks or—I don’t know, kill people—and it wouldn’t be any big deal?”

  “I think we probably shouldn’t test out anything that extreme until we’re sure,” Max said.

  KT laughed again. She was actually enjoying hanging out with Max. That was maybe the weirdest part of this weird world.

  “You want to know the worst thing I did, when I first got to this world?” Max said. “On Monday I was so bad at running on the treadmill that I actually shot out the back. Flew halfway across the room and slammed into the wall. It was like something out of a cartoon!”

  “Did you get in trouble?” KT asked.

  “No, Ben told the teacher I was just nervous about the mathletics game, and she let me set my treadmill on a really slow speed,” Max said. He looked a little wistful. “It is kind of nice having the teachers give me special treatment. Because I’m a jock now—er, a Spock.”