I called Vince the minute I walked in the door.

“Guess who paid me a visit today?” I said.

“Joe Blanton’s mom?”

“Come on, Vince, I’m being serious.”

“Me, too! I mean, I would pay you a visit, too, if you mailed me a bunch of snake skins stapled to a picture of my son.”

I laughed in spite of myself. Of course I hadn’t mailed Joe Blanton’s mom anything, especially not a bunch of snake skins stapled to a picture of Joe Blanton. Last week I’d made a Joe Blanton joke so harsh that Vince had been joking about it ever since, about how I’d basically just desecrated the Blanton family name or something.

“Whatever, Vince. I’m kind of over Joe Blanton.”

“How could you?” he nearly screeched. Joe Blanton was this pitcher we’d been cracking jokes about for the past year.

“Well, he only used to drive me crazy because he would dominate the Cubs even though he stinks, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that pretty much all pitchers dominate the Cubs. Even triple-A pitchers look like aces against them. I bet even Bobby Lovelace would no-hit them. It’s not a Joe Blanton thing; it’s a Cubs thing.”

Bobby Lovelace was this kid who had pitched on our Little League team three years ago. He was epically bad. He’s the only pitcher in history (at any level of baseball) never to record a single out in six starts. Why our coach ran him out there to start six games that season will forever be a mystery. Even Bobby himself didn’t want to start any games after that first one, in which he allowed an unbelievable fourteen earned runs before finally getting the hook. All totaled he gave up sixty-three earned runs in six starts without getting an out. And, seriously, right now even he could probably dominate the Cubs’ lineup.

Vince was quiet on the other end. It had been a particularly rough season for us this year. The Cubs were 57–81 so far, pretty much the laughingstock of the league, being that they had one of the top five highest payrolls. And just when we thought the curse couldn’t get much worse, too.

“Yeah,” Vince finally said, and left it at that.

“So, want to guess who it really was who asked me for help today?” I asked.

“Well, if I asked my grandma, she’d probably say it was Don Pablo, the little pirate monkey who likes to throw fish heads at birds down at the pier.”

I gave him a moment to laugh at this (it was pretty funny) and then I dropped it on him.

“Staples.”

There was a long silence. Vince usually processed information quickly, but I guessed this had really surprised him.

“That Staples?” he said after a while.

“How many kids named Staples do you know?”

“What did he want? How are you even still alive?”

I went over the exchange I’d had with Staples just thirty minutes before.

“Maybe you should have at least found out what specifically he wanted,” Vince said at the end.

“I know, but if I got that far into it, then the next thing you know, we’d have found ourselves in the middle of another mess involving rabid wolves, zombie classmates, and a nuclear bomb with a faulty fuse. Right?”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Vince said. “When exactly did this business get so dangerous? I mean, remember the days when the hardest part was figuring out how to get kids answer keys to quizzes?”

“Right, I know,” I said. “That’s what has kept me so motivated to stay out, even with kids harassing me daily for help.”

“Well, either way, I guess I’m glad you’re still alive after running into Staples . . . even though it’s so weird that he let it all go so easily. But at least now I get to stump you and crown myself champion of the Cubs universe once and for all.”

“Bring it on,” I said. Sometimes, a Cubs trivia challenge is the only thing that can take our minds off things like Staples returning to town.

“In honor of their miserable season this year, what are the most games the Cubs have ever lost in one season in franchise history?”

“Why would I want to sit around thinking about the worst seasons they’ve ever had? There are too many to count!”

“Exactly,” Vince said smugly.

“But asking this means you’ve been thinking about it.”

“Well, yeah,” he said, sounding like he was starting to realize how depressing it was.

“The truth is,” I said, “I’ve been wondering that, too, since they might beat that record this year. The answer is one hundred three losses, and they did it twice in the sixties.”

“They suck,” Vince said.

Then we both laughed. Of course we acted negatively and said stuff like that, but we both also knew that, come Spring Training next season, we’d naively believe, like we did every year, that they had a real shot to finally end the curse that season.

“You still coming over later to play video games?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, and then we hung up.