CHAPTER 3
LIARS CAN FIGURE AND FIGURES CAN LIE
After a couple of weeks, Kevin was catching rides to and from school with his new teammates and friends. It sometimes seemed like he was born with… well, you know those instruction manuals that come with DVD players or video games? You never read them, but you keep them anyway? It seemed like Kevin was born with one of those instruction manuals for life. Sports, girls, video games… everything (except school) always came easy to him. As if he just knew what to do.
Since Kevin had all his new friends to ride with, on the days that Mom and Dad drove me to school, I had them to myself. Which was kind of nice—I’ll admit it—but also had its downside. Sometimes I felt like a witness in one of those courtroom TV shows, getting attacked by lawyers asking a million questions. On Monday, they attacked from both sides.
“What are you going to do in school today?” Mom asked.
“I dunno,” I said.
“What subjects are you digging?” my dad asked, trying to sound cool.
Mom jumped in. “Are the other kids nice? Do you want to invite someone over?”
“Mitch,” my dad said, raising his eyebrows at me in the rearview mirror. “How’s the seventh-grade talent?”
I could barely get a word in if I wanted to, so I looked out the window and pretended I wasn’t listening. I was hoping they would lose interest if I ignored them.
“Mitch? Talent? Are there any foxes?”
“Girls, Mitch,” my father said. “Any cute girls?”
Is there anything more annoying than parents trying to find out if you have a girlfriend? Oh, wait. I forgot. There is. A parent who tries to find out if you have a girlfriend and uses a lame-o, old-fashioned word like “foxes.”
The truth is that, while she wasn’t my girlfriend (Remember? I. Do. Not. Have. A. Crush. On. Her.), Jamie was becoming my best friend. She was in three of my classes, and even though I would never sit at her table at lunch, sometimes we sat next to each other on the bus ride home.
She was so not like the other girls. She wasn’t picky about food, she didn’t get grossed out by blood or mud or guys spitting loogeys, and she sure didn’t seem to care about clothes or shoes or who had a crush on who. She only had strong opinions—the strongest opinions—when it came to sports.
“You actually like Johnson?!” she said to me after school on the bus. “You’re joking, right? He stinks worse than Clint Grayson’s laundry basket! You’d be better off with Mr. Johnson.” Mr. Johnson was the music teacher, and his thick glasses and wooden cane made him look like he was about ninety years old.
“What?” I said, feeling like I had to defend myself. “He’s good. He ran for nearly a thousand yards last season.”
“Yeah, against lousy teams and when the game was out of reach,” she said. “Liars can figure and figures can lie.”
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“You know those statistics that announcers are always mentioning?” she said in the same tone of voice I use when I explain things to Kevin.
“Sure.”
“Well, sometimes those numbers are helpful. Other times they don’t say much at all. Like, you know how announcers talk about a team, and say, ‘They’ve won three of their last four games!’ ”
“Yeah.”
“You know that means they’ve only won three of their last five games.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because if the team had won more than that, the announcers would have told you,” she said. “Think about it. If they had won four games out of their last five, that would’ve sounded even more impressive. But they clearly didn’t. That’s why the announcer said three out of four. A team wins three of the last four games and you think, Oh, they’re doing really well. But a team wins three of the last five games and you think, So what? That’s barely half.”
I had never thought of it that way. As usual, she was right. I tried to change the subject so I wouldn’t have to admit it. “What’s your least favorite sport?” I asked her.
“I would say golf,” she responded. “But anything you do while wearing checkered pants and a belt can’t even be considered a sport. And have you seen some of these golfers? They’re so fat, they sweat gravy. They’re not athletes!”
O-kay. Changing the topic to football, I asked her: “You think Baltimore has a chance to beat Pittsburgh on Sunday?”
“Yeah,” she shot back.
“Think they’ll win by more than four points?”
“Wanna put your money where your mouth is?”
“How much?” she said suspiciously. But I could tell that she was considering it.
“Let’s say five bucks.”
“That’s half my weekly allowance!” she said. “But…” She hesitated. “Okay, sure.”
I put out my hand to shake.
“Wait,” she said.
“What?”
“Isn’t betting, like, illegal?” Jamie asked, sounding uncertain.
“You said your uncle Gary likes to bet on NFL games every Sunday.”
“Yeah, but Uncle Gary lives in Las Vegas.”
“Jamie,” I said, “who’s going to find out?”
“Maybe it’s against school rules,” she said haltingly.
“I don’t remember hearing anything about that,” I said. “And we’re not in school; we’re on the bus. Besides, when you lose, you can pay me outside of school if it makes you feel better,” I added with a grin.
Jamie narrowed her eyes and looked at me, and then smiled. “Baltimore to win by more than four points? Deal.”
We shook on it. (But not before she pretended to spit on her hand before shaking.) As our palms brushed together, I couldn’t help noticing that her hands were bigger, dirtier, and rougher than mine. I also couldn’t help noticing that she was carrying her leather notebook again.
“What’s in that thing, anyway?” I asked.
She sighed. “Promise not to tell anyone?”
“Promise.”
“You know how some people love to play violin or run or draw?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking to myself, Or love to make money.
“Well, I love to write,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like work, the way math or science does. Ideas and different ways to describe things come into my head, like, sort of naturally. So I try to write them down. It’s hard to explain.”
“Cool,” I said. “You should try to write a book one day.”
That Friday at school, we had something called a “pep rally.” I’d never seen anything like it. It was crazy. But it seemed totally normal for everyone else. The Jonasburg Regional High School football team was opening its season that night, and it was all anyone could talk about. A lot of store windows had “Go Jo” signs in them.
I knew that Indiana was a big basketball state. Before we moved, Kevin and I saw the movie Hoosiers and watched basketball games of Indiana University (who my Mom grew up rooting for). We made Mom and Dad promise to take us to an Indiana basketball game, hopefully against Purdue—their rivals. Kevin already hated Purdue, and Mom and Dad had even been known to make a gently sarcastic comment about them (that was about as mean as they ever actually got).
But the people here clearly liked their football, too. As we entered the gym for the pep rally, I realized I was the only person not wearing the school’s maroon and gold colors.
“Where’s your school spirit?” Clint Grayson barked as he bumped my shoulder, sneering and looking genuinely upset. “This ain’t wherever the heck you came from, you know.”
“No one told me—” I started to say, but Clint cut me off.
“Do you know what we do around here with traitors?” he asked, laughing and looking at the kids next to him. Then he punched his left fist into his right palm, making a noise that sounded like an egg being cracked. Clint’s buddies laughed, and they all pushed past me.
When everyone settled into their seats on the bleachers, Mr. Pearlman, the principal of the high school and the middle school, stood up. He looked like a duck as he walked in a waddling kind of way to the microphone.
Mr. Pearlman looked even more nervous than usual. All the middle school and high school was there, and pretty much all their parents, too. And even though I was the new kid in town, I already knew that nobody really liked Mr. Pearlman, not even the teachers. Behind me, I overheard Mrs. Liu, the health teacher, whispering to one of the other teachers that he was a “bad communicator” and was “going to chase the good teachers off.”
As Mr. Pearlman spoke in a serious voice, the speakers crackled and the sound echoed off the walls. He talked about “our proud tradition” and “our expectation of excellence.” It took me a second to realize that he wasn’t talking about the school itself—kids getting top grades or teachers doing a good job in the classroom or the library having enough books. He was talking about the football team. Boy, they take their sports seriously around here. And I could see what Mrs. Liu was talking about. He wasn’t very inspiring.
As he went on about “a return to glory” and how “we all hope for a show of dramatic improvement,” I remembered what Jamie had said on the bus, about what sports announcers say and what they really mean.
What Mr. Pearlman really meant was: The team stunk last year, and if we don’t get better, it will mean trouble.
Coach Williams was next to speak, and he seemed a little nervous at first, nodding over at Mr. Pearlman. But then he started talking about the team and the season, and it was like a general from one of those army movies, talking passionately to the soldiers. “I can only put eleven guys on the field at once!” he said. “But there’s no limit to how many of you can support us from the bleachers! I want you to be our twelfth man!” I found myself nodding in agreement. Then, as I looked around, I saw that everyone else was nodding, too.
Next, Coach Williams turned to his players. “I can’t promise we’ll win every game, but I can promise you this, guys,” he said, his face now turning red. “I’m gonna give you everything I got as a coach.”
“Everything I got”? He meant “everything I have.” But I kept that to myself. The anti-annoyance pledge and all.
“In exchange, I need you to give me everything you got as players. I’m gonna give one hundred and ten percent to make you better players. But you have to give each other one hundred and ten percent, too!”
I wondered how anyone could give more than 100 percent. It’s not like there’s extra credit. I mean, 100 percent is the most you can possibly give, right? I kept this thought to myself, too.
Coach Williams wasn’t through. “Iron sharpens iron! And you are going to sharpen each other!”
Everyone cheered like crazy.
Coach Williams then announced the players, and they stood one by one. Meanwhile the cheerleaders did these weird kicks. When Coach Williams got to Kevin, he called him a “California import.” I thought that made him sound like an avocado or something. But it still must have felt good to Kevin to get noticed like that. He stood up from his folding chair and raised his hand.
“K-Dog!” someone yelled.
How had he already gotten a nickname? Typical. People were still learning my real name.
When Coach Williams was done, the band played the Jonasburg fight song. Everyone stood and the mood turned serious. I had no idea what the words were, so I faked it, trying to fit in. (If you mouth the word “watermelon” over and over, you can pretty much look like you know the words to any song.) But Clint, just a few seats down from me, saw what I was doing.
“Remember what I said about traitors,” he hissed.