Screaming at the Ump (13 page)

“Turn that off,” I said, annoyed. We put on our helmets and started to ride back toward Dad and the fields.

I couldn't believe this. Would Dad really have made a decision like this without telling me? I couldn't move to Florida for five weeks and miss all that school. Or maybe I could! How cool would that be? But no, he'd never let me do that.

I wondered if it was already final: if he'd spoken to Mrs. Bob the Baker and now she was trying to get me used to her again so I could stay with her while Dad was in Florida.

But maybe it wasn't final.

And maybe if he never got the message, he'd never seal the deal.

“Let's just go downtown,” I said to Zeke, leading him into a wide U-turn and shoving the messages deep into my pocket.

***

We went to the library first. Zeke opened the door and said in a ridiculously loud voice, “Where do we put it, Case?”

I
shhhhhhhhhhhh
ed him. Had he never been in a library? Never, say, heard that you were supposed to lower your voice a little when entering the library? I walked over to the main desk, pulled one of the rolled-up flyers out of my backpack, and said, “Excuse me. I was wondering where I could post a sign about a community event?”

“Nice,” Zeke said. Loudly.

“What kind of community event?” the woman asked.

“It's at my dad's school, and it's free, and—”

“We only post events of cultural significance,” she said, pushing glasses up on her nose.

Without a second of hesitation, Zeke said, “It's kind of like theater. And there's limited seating. And we wanted to be sure library patrons were aware of this opportunity.”

Library patrons?

“May I see your sign?” the woman asked.

I reached into my backpack and handed it over.

“Behind the Plate?” she asked, a real question in her voice. I thought everyone in town had heard of our school.

“That's the production company,” Zeke said. “Do we put it on that board behind that rack?” he asked, taking it back before she could read
NO PRODUCE ALLOWED
. Or get to the word
suck
.

“That will be fine,” she said.

“You're good,” I said to him as we walked away.

“Tell me something I don't know.”

***

From there, we went to Crossroads Deli, Book Cove, Town Hardware, Clay Coves Cones, Cove Coffee, and Angelo's Pizza, hanging flyers all over town. In Angelo's, when I was reaching into my backpack, I came upon the ad sales folder for the school newspaper. I asked, “Has anyone tried to sell you an ad in the school paper, Angelo?”

He rubbed his white-flour hands together. “Not this year, I don't think. Unless—Maria?” He called into the back for his wife. “You buy some ad in the paper this year? Casey's here collecting.”

Zeke looked at me, like,
What the—?
and I said, “No, no, Angelo. I'm not collecting. I was wondering if you wanted to buy one. But never mind. Why should you buy one?”

“That,” Zeke said, “is your sales pitch?”

“I should buy one because then students will come here to eat their pizza instead of going to 4-C Pizza. What's it cost?”

I handed him the form. “Can I get a slice?” I asked.

“Me too,” Zeke said.

“Two slice,” Angelo said. I loved that. Two slice.

The door opened and in walked Ralphie-O, the guy who cut the grass at BTP. “Casey, Casey, Casey at the bat. What are you doing here?”

“Tearing my husband from his money,” Maria said, bringing tubs of pizza dough to the front counter and setting them down with a loud thump that sent flour puffing up in a small cloud.

“Robbing the joint, Casey?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, mortified by the whole stupid ad-selling thing. “I'll just take my pizza when it's ready.” I dragged my backpack to a booth and sat down. My legs were a crazy kind of tired—I couldn't imagine ever standing again.

“Casey's selling ads,” Angelo said. “For that newspaper at the school.”

“So you're a salesman now, huh? I always figured you'd be an umpire!”

All I wanted was to be a reporter, but for now, Ralphie-O was right: According to the rules, I could only be a salesman. And then, on cue, my brain started bumping up against the excitement of tomorrow and talking about my article with Mr. Donovan. How I'd found this amazing story that no one even realized was right here in our town. Wait. Everyone was looking at me. “Not really, no.” I said. “We came to ask Angelo if he'd let us hang this flyer for You Suck, Ump! Day
.”

“But what's this here?” Ralphie-O took the ad folder from Angelo and looked it over. “I'm going to take an ad, Casey. For my landscape service.”

“Cool,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Me too,” Angelo said. “Let me get the checkbook.”

W
E
left Angelo's with two full stomachs and two ads sold, but we were both too tired to start riding back home. We crossed the street to the park where some kids in Clay Coves Fall Ball shirts were practicing. They were probably nine or ten. I liked the way they had major-league attitude and moves, kind of like they were swaggering, even if their actual skills weren't all that great yet. One of them did a perfect imitation of Jackson Alter's stance, the way he held up his hand to the ump to indicate he wasn't ready yet, a kind of wiggle in his hips as he took short practice swings.

It reminded me of my Little League days. Tee ball was supposed to be fun, but it made me crazy how wrong the rules were. Like everyone batted each inning, no matter how many outs there were. And there were, like, fifteen people playing the field. What sport is that? Still, it was fun to be on a team, to wear a uniform, to go out for ice cream after the game.

But by the time I was in third grade, playing baseball was already . . . I don't even know what to call it. Lots of fathers cared way too much about having good players on their teams, and coaches always let their kids play better positions than anyone else, and parents even argued with the umpires. It was about the least fun thing in the world. The year Mrs. Bob the Baker left, I quit playing baseball and started writing about it. A lot of my friends quit around the same time. Charley Haddon's the only kid I know who still plays. His dad coaches.

I reached into my pocket and felt those crumpled messages shoved down deep. That led me back to J-Mac's conversations with my dad and the growing seed of knowledge that my dad was moving BTP's Umpire Academy to Florida. Which left no place for me. Except maybe with Mrs. Bob the Baker, and really, it might not have sounded like it, but that was the end of the world, right there. So I shoved the thought away.

“You're a little green, Casey. You okay?”

I had not lived a life full of secrets. I was a pretty honest guy. I wanted to tell Zeke about the article, but I wasn't sure I could trust him with the confirmation that J-Mac was right here, a student at BTP. He'd find some way to turn it into a reality-TV something or other, or sell a photo to one of those celebrity newspapers. I also wanted to tell him how worried I was that my dad was going to move. That one was easier, so I started talking. I meant to tell him everything, but I spent so long on the I-can't-let-my-dad-take-Umpire-Academy-to-Florida-every-year part that we never really got to J-Mac. I would, though.

But now I had made him upset. “What makes you think Ibbit won't find a way to take you with him?”

“Why else would he suddenly be so interested in how often I talk to my mother, and why would she suddenly decide that we need to get back to scheduled visits and all that? The plan's already in motion. They only forgot one part—telling me.”

“But your mom lives almost an hour away, right? How would you get to school?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe she'd drive me? Or send me with her loser husband? Or maybe I'd have to go to the school near her for those weeks? I have no idea.”

“But it would be awful if they didn't do Academy here. I love the before-and-after videos. It was my idea, and I wanted to always be the one who does them, and—”

“And also you want your best friend to be nearby? Do you realize I'd have to stay with my mother the whole time Dad's gone, which is bad enough—no, worse than that—but also means not near you?”

“We have to stop this,” he said.

“I know. But I have no idea how.”

Zeke was silent an unusually long time (silence not being his strong suit), and then we both stood up and started riding toward home.

Until we saw a little girl. A little girl with long black hair. Sitting alone on the steps in front of St. Luke's and wiping her eyes.

I ditched my bike by the curb and walked over. “You okay?”

Sly nodded. “Hi, Casey. Oh, and you too. Hello, you,” she said to Zeke.

“What's going on?” I asked.

She looked out to the street, then said, “Nothing. Just sitting.”

“By yourself?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” Zeke said, still on his skateboard. “Have a good one.”

I shot him a look. “Did you miss your bus or something?” I asked.

“I had Brownies,” she said, like that answered everything.

“So where are the other Brownies?” I sat next to her.

“Home. Not my home. Their homes. They all went home.”

“And . . . no one noticed you were sitting here by yourself?”

She started to squirm a little. And then she said, “They said if my mother forgot to pick me up one more time, I couldn't come to more meetings, so I told them she was here. And I hid behind that bush to wait for her. And then everyone left. And she hasn't got here yet.”

“Come on, Casey. Let's go,” Zeke said.

“Why don't you come with us? We'll take you home,” I said.

“No, I better wait here,” Sly said, not moving.

“Well, me and Zeke were going to come look for you, so this would just save us some time. We were saying how we wanted to try again to shoot some video of you and Tiny, if you think that would be okay. Maybe we could all go to your house and—”

“We were not—” Zeke started, until I gave him a look. Then he hung his head like a bad dog.

Sly stood up. “I guess that would be okay.”

***

We headed to her house, with Zeke on his skateboard and me pushing my bike. Once we got there, Sly entered a code that opened the garage. Before long, she came out with the same box. She walked over to Zeke and said, “I hope you're in a better mood today.”

“This won't take long,” Zeke said, a not-answer if I ever heard one.

Down the street, we could hear someone mowing a lawn.

“So what are we doing today?” she asked.

“I'm not sure,” Zeke said, “but it won't take long. Let's see what happens when we put the cat on the board. Maybe he got used to it last time.”

I brought the skateboard to the top of the driveway. Sly carried the box over and pulled out Tiny. She put him on the skateboard, and he walked right off with that sort of snotty attitude cats sometimes have.

“All right, then,” Zeke said, after Sly had tried it a few more times, “let's just pick up where we left off last time. Sly, you're going to sit with the cat on your lap until we can get him used to the feel of the board. But instead of your lap, why don't you let part of him touch the board itself, like sitting between your legs or something.”

“I can hold the board,” I said.

“No, that's okay,” Sly said, sitting on it with her legs holding her in position. “I've got it.”

“So what do I do?”

Zeke shrugged.

I walked to the bottom of the driveway, where it met the street, and examined my shoelaces. They were filthy. And tearing. But I was grateful to have a chance to sit down and rest my worn-out-from-going-all-over-Clay-Coves muscles.

Zeke and Sly were bickering about who was supposed to say what, and I was trying to tune them out when finally, that noise, that lawn-mower noise, stopped. I looked down the block and saw a bunch of guys putting some equipment in the back of a truck and recognized it as Ralphie-O's truck. Ralphie-O himself rolled one of those big riding lawn mowers onto the back.

I shifted my focus back to my shoelace, then watched Zeke and the cat and Sly for a while as they tried to figure out what they were doing. That was when a lot of things happened at once. Ralphie-O started driving down the street. I looked up to wave and out of the corner of my eye, saw a fast, furious skateboard, with at least one girl, and possibly a cat, heading into the street, right into the path of the truck. I must have jumped up and sort of thrown my body on top of the skateboard to stop it, to turn it, to keep it from rolling directly in front of the truck. And somehow, I don't know if it was with my hands or my body, my feet, or what, but nothing bad happened.

Well, no one got badly hurt. The truck braked, an awful, loud
screeeeeeeeeech
, another car pulled over to the side of the road, stopped suddenly, and the driver jumped out, and there I was in the street, near the curb, with a girl with two bloody knees, a skateboard, and a cat racing back toward the house, its stomach skimming the ground, swaying back and forth.

It was hard to not explode during all of this. My heart was beating too fast, and I kept looking at where the truck had stopped, where the skateboard had stopped, and thinking how it could have . . . how Sly could have . . .

Sly didn't even cry. She stood right up, watched the cat safely reach the garage, then bent over and looked at her knees, just curious, though. Not freaking out.

I couldn't even think thoughts in the right order. It was just this big jumble of my racing heart and my guilt about being the whole reason we were here, putting her on a skateboard, and I wanted to disappear right that minute, or go back in time and think of another way to talk Sly off the front steps of St. Luke's.