Gabe rolled up the sleeve of his Orioles T-shirt and demanded that Mickey examine his arm.

“There!” Gabe said. “See anything wrong with it? Anything at all? No, right? No swelling, no black-and-blue, no nothing! It feels fine! But that stupid doctor says I can’t pitch anymore!”

Mickey nodded, trying to appear sympathetic. But soon he returned his gaze to the walls of Gabe’s bedroom and winced.

Gabe and his mom lived in a big old house on the outskirts of town, and Mrs. Vasquez had basically ceded decorating rights to her son’s room the day they moved in. This turned out to be a bad move.

A really bad move.

The result was a crazy, jumbled montage of posters of big-league pitchers like Johnny Cueto, Félix Hernández, and Chris Tillman alongside young kick-butt rock guitarists like Jack White, Alexi Laiho, and Synyster Gates.

Every spare inch of wall and ceiling was covered with posters. Even the windows were plastered with them, lending the room a dark, gloomy air.

Gabe called it his “Gabe-Cave” and said it was his own personal haven of tranquillity and inspiration. But Mickey wondered how anyone could live in the place without having a perpetual migraine from all the wild colors assaulting the eyes.

“I could go out there and pitch today,” Gabe continued, his voice rising, “but the stupid doctor’s got my mom brainwashed. The whole thing is ridiculous!”

He grabbed his glove off the desk and walked over to the full-length mirror on the wall. After studying his reflection for a moment, he went into his windup, pretended to uncork a fastball—and promptly yelped in pain, grabbing his elbow.

“Yeah, you’re fine, all right,” Mickey said. “What’s the matter with that doctor? Where’d he get his medical degree from, anyway? Saying you have something wrong with your arm? What a quack that guy is!”

“Shut up,” Gabe growled. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

He slammed his glove on the floor and plopped morosely on his bed. He put his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

“A couple days of ice and rest and I’d be fine,” he muttered. “Instead, I have to miss the whole second half of the season. And the dumb doctor didn’t even X-ray the elbow! Shouldn’t you at least take X-rays before making a diagnosis that ruins a kid’s life forever?”

“Well, at least you’re not overreacting,” Mickey said, grinning. He ducked quickly as Gabe fired a pillow at his head.

It was the day after the Orioles practice and Mickey had stopped by to see if he could cheer up Gabe. His plan wasn’t working out too well so far.

Briefly, Mickey recounted the events of the previous day’s workout, including the surprise announcement that a new kid named Zach Winslow with a real live arm was now the O’s number one pitcher.

Looking at Gabe’s downcast expression, Mickey wasn’t sure what bothered his bud more: the fact that he was done for the year, or the fact that he had been replaced so easily with a hotshot who could blow batters away with an eighty-mile-per-hour heater.

“Oh,” Mickey said, “I should probably tell you this, too. The new guy calls himself Zoom.”

Gabe rolled on his side and cocked an eyebrow. “Zoo?”

“No, Zoom,” Mickey corrected. “Z-o-o-m.”

“And that would be because…?” Gabe said. “Go ahead. Explain the crazy name.”

Mickey shrugged and returned his gaze to the jumble of posters. He was alarmed to see that they were even sprouting in Gabe’s closet now.

“He said something about his fastball, the sound it makes when it blows past the batter,” Mickey replied with a shrug. “He also made a big point of telling us that he’d just come back from this fancy pitching camp. Elite Arms, I think it was.”

“Oh, great, GREAT!” Gabe said, jumping to his feet and throwing his hands in the air. “A pitching phenom who’s also had the finest instruction a kid could ask for! Well, I can see the team won’t be needing me anymore.”

He paced around the room, growing more and more agitated.

“Yeah,” he continued, “by next week, you guys’ll be like: ‘Remember that big wuss who used to pitch for us? The loser who hurt his elbow? Gabe Something, wasn’t it? Whatever happened to that big dork?’”

Mickey rolled his eyes.

“Seriously?” he said. “You really need to chill, dude.”

But Gabe was in no mood for chilling. Instead, he moved quickly to his desk, opened his laptop, and typed in a few words.

“What are you doing?” Mickey asked. “I know you’re not checking on your summer reading list. You do that about an hour before the first day of school, right?”

“You, my friend, are hysterical,” Gabe said, without looking up.

He tapped a few more keys and let out a low moan.

“Found it. Here’s the camp’s Web site,” he said, reading from the screen. “‘Elite Arms: When you’re ready to take your game to the next level—and beyond!’ Oh, great, it’s only the top freaking pitching camp on the East Coast! Look at this ad: ‘We guarantee to add ten miles per hour to your fastball in one week!’

“That’s it—I can’t take any more,” he said, lurching back to his bed and burying his face in his pillow.

Mickey took Gabe’s place in front of the computer.

“I wonder if…” he began. It didn’t take him long, just a few clicks of the mouse, to find what he was looking for.

There it was: a big photo of Zoom, rearing back and firing to a batter who couldn’t have appeared more terrified if they were throwing him into a shark tank.

In another photo, Zoom was calmly fielding what looked to be a bouncer back to the mound. And yet another shot showed him punching the air in triumph, presumably after racking up yet another strikeout.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” Gabe whispered.

He had materialized over Mickey’s shoulder and was staring at the screen with a mixture of dread and fascination.

“Don’t tell me he was named the camp’s MVP, too,” Gabe went on. “Please don’t tell me that. I’m begging you. I can’t take that kind of psychological pain.”

“No,” Mickey said, continuing to search the site, “there’s no mention of him winning an award…oops, sorry. Spoke too soon.”

He clicked on a fourth photo; this one showed Zoom holding a gleaming silver trophy on which was engraved MOST PROMISING CAMPER.

At this, Gabe let out a strangled cry and flopped on his bed again.

“Let me guess: he’s a straight-A student, bound for Harvard, and he dates Kate Upton, too, right?” he wailed.

“Doesn’t say anything about Kate Upton,” Mickey said. “Think he just got tired of supermodels. You know how that gets old. Oh, wait, no wonder! It says he’s dating Jennifer Lawrence now.”

“You’re killing me,” Gabe said, his eyes closed. “Just freakin’ killing me.”

A few minutes later, he sat up again. He rubbed his face and shook his head vigorously, as if shaking off a bad dream.

“Okay, major attitude change needed here,” he said. “Sorry for the whine-fest. My season’s over, and I just have to deal with it. But if this new guy can help us win, then he’s a great get for the team. And I’m glad we have him. No, really.”

Mickey chuckled to himself. The old Gabe was back, the selfless teammate who cared about winning more than anything else. His rant of self-pity had been totally uncharacteristic, and apparently it was behind him now.

This was another reason Mickey admired his bud so much. If a doctor told me my season was over, he thought, I’d be moping and sulking for weeks—if I didn’t throw myself in front of a train first.

As Gabe puttered around the room, putting his glove and Orioles uniform away, Mickey continued to study the Elite Arms site.

There was no question that Zoom had been a superstar during his stay at the camp—how else to explain his four prominent photos on the site? A kid with a rag arm didn’t get marquee treatment like that at a prestigious pitching camp.

Still, there was something about the photos that seemed strange to Mickey…

For a moment or two, he couldn’t put his finger on it. Then it came to him: not once, in any of the four shots, was Zoom smiling.

Even in the photo of him holding his trophy, he wore a serious expression. There were two other people in the shot—an older man wearing a red Elite Arms polo shirt and khaki pants, who looked to be a camp official, and a kid on crutches. And both of them were beaming.

How weird was it, Mickey thought, that both the geezer and the kid with the broken leg or whatever looked like they were having a better time than Zoom?

Wasn’t baseball supposed to be fun?

If you went to a top-flight pitching camp and threw lights-out to the point where everybody was talking about how great you were and how much potential you had, and then they handed you a big silver cup with your name on it, and everyone was clapping and cheering and treating you like you were a major celebrity or something, wouldn’t that be the greatest feeling in the whole world?

Wouldn’t you be smiling like it was Christmas morning? Maybe Christmas morning times one hundred?

And wouldn’t that smile be plastered to your big fat face for days and days afterward? Sure it would.

So what was up with this kid?

Mickey didn’t know. But he had a feeling he’d find out soon enough.