CHAPTER 14
RISK AND REWARD
During the week I was home from school, Mom and Dad had talked with Mrs. Allegra about how I could do “restitution” (that had been one of my vocabulary words from Mom; it means to pay back). Mrs. Allegra thought I could reshelve library books or organize the lost-and-found. But Dad asked, “Is there any chance there’s something Mitch could do that’s sports-related?”
So Mrs. Allegra decided I could use seventh period, my study hall time, to clean up the locker rooms that the football teams used, both the middle school and high school. “The middle school locker room is a pigsty,” she said with a disgusted look. “And the high school locker room is just as bad.”
I thought she was exaggerating, but boy was I wrong. It was far, far worse than a pigsty. After sixth period, I headed down the stairs to the school’s athletic annex. I wasn’t even at the bottom before an awful smell washed over me. It was a mix of sweat and mildew and dirt and something else. Maybe a dead goat. Even Clint Grayson’s Dorito breath was ten times better than this.
I’m not sure why, but I had pictured the football team’s locker room to be a glamorous place. I imagined carpet on the floor and big-screen TVs mounted on the walls and whiteboards for the coaches to use when they diagrammed plays. Instead it was just like the locker room we used in gym class. Only it smelled worse.
The custodian was waiting for me. It sounds mean to say, but Mr. Eads looked a little bit like a troll. He was short with big ears and a big nose and wore flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up. There was a rumor that he lived in a secret apartment on school grounds.
“Follow me,” he said, staring at the floor.
Without exchanging any more words, Mr. Eads and I went to work sweeping up the locker-room floors. There were yards and yards of athletic tape stuck to it, empty bottles of Gatorade, used bandages, used Kleenexes. There were pennies, mouth guards caked with dust, dirty wristbands, hand towels, clumps of grass, and what was either a very large cornflake or a scab. It was gross.
When we finished, Mr. Eads motioned for me to follow him. We went down a back staircase where the largest washing machine and clothes dryer I had ever seen were waiting. Never mind clothes; you could wash and dry the entire team in them. Mr. Eads unloaded all the uniforms from the dryer, threw them on a table, and showed me how to fold the jerseys and the pants.
There was something a little bit humiliating about picking up the trash left by the football players and then folding their uniforms. But maybe that was part of the point of this. It was a punishment, right? I kept my mouth shut, anyway. Complaining about it might have been kind of annoying to Mr. Eads, since this wasn’t a punishment for him; it was his regular job.
And just like my suspension, it was getting boring really quickly. Mr. Eads sure didn’t seem like he was going to start up any small talk to pass the time. So, it was up to me.
“Wow, you really know what you’re doing,” I said, trying my hardest.
“Been at it for more than twenty years,” he replied. “I oughta know by now.”
And he stopped talking. Up to me again.
“My brother, Kevin, is a wide receiver on the high school team,” I said. “Did you see that great catch he made against Gas City? The one where they called holding and the touchdown didn’t count?”
“Not hardly.” He laughed. “My bowling league meets every Friday, so I can’t go to the football games even if I wanted to.”
I was running out of conversation topics.
“I know from my brother that these uniforms get pretty dirty every week,” I said.
“Team’s not good this year, huh?”
“No, they’re not so good,” I said. “You heard?”
“Not really. But you said your brother plays offense and his uniform gets dirty,” he said. “A lot of dirt on the uniforms means that the boys are spending a lot of time on the ground. Which is never a good sign when it’s your job to score touchdowns.”
Wow, I’d never thought of it that way. Other kids could make fun of Mr. Eads, but he was doing something that clever people in business do all the time—using what he could see to figure out what he couldn’t.
Jonasburg was a good example of this. When we moved to our new town, I was curious if the area would be growing and successful so Mom and Dad would have a better shot with their business. Were other people and businesses moving here? Or were we going to a place where everything was shrinking and businesses were moving away?
When we drove around, I noticed a lot of cranes and buildings under construction. That was a good sign that Mom and Dad had moved us to a place where they might have a chance. Even though I couldn’t see the town’s growing businesses directly, I knew they must be doing well or else I wouldn’t have seen all the new construction sites.
Mr. Eads and I continued folding in silence until he surprised me with a question. “Are you the boy who was doing the gambling on the football games?”
“I wasn’t exactly doing the gambling,” I answered. “I was organizing the… wait, how’d you hear about that?”
“One thing about this place,” Mr. Eads replied, “word travels fast.”
I waited for him to ask another question, but that seemed to be it for our small talk. Oh, well. We were going to be spending a lot of time together, Mr. Eads and I. We’d have time for more later.
I carried the uniforms for the middle school team upstairs, and Mr. Eads followed with the high school’s. As I turned the corner, I heard voices coming from the locker room, which meant that the players were starting to file in. If I had listened more closely, I would have recognized one particular voice and turned the other way.
It was Clint Grayson. He was holding a Gatorade bottle, and he saw me immediately.
“Is that who I think it is? Little Mitchy? Shouldn’t you be suspended or something?” He laughed.
As usual, the kids around him joined in even though he said nothing that was especially funny. It was almost like they were hoping he would continue picking on me and not pick on them instead. And the laughing only made him try harder, like cheers from the crowd at a football game.
“What are you doing here? I know it’s not for football, because you weren’t good enough to make the team.” He grinned widely.
It seemed like anything I could say would just make things worse. The truth is, I didn’t want to have to talk to him at all. Could I just walk by with my pile of uniforms? No, he was blocking my way.
“Maybe you got deaf during your suspension,” he said more seriously. “I asked you a question: What are you doing here?”
This is something else I hate about bullies: They tongue-tie you. Later, you think of a good comeback. What am I doing here, Clint? I asked a GPS to help me locate the dumbest seventh grader in the entire state of Indiana. And it sent me to your locker. But when they’re in your face, you can’t think of a snappy comeback.
“I’m cleaning up the locker room,” I said flatly.
“Guess you’re sorry now that you didn’t give me that free bet, huh?”
Wait a minute. What did Clint just say?
Boy, did I feel like an idiot. I was supposed to be the smart one, and I’d missed all the clues.
Clint had told me I’d be sorry for not letting him bet for free.
Mrs. Allegra had said “a concerned student” had found Jamie’s notebook and given it to her.
Concerned. Yeah, right. Concerned about getting back at me!
“You gave that notebook to Mrs. Allegra!” I exploded. “You—you—” All my words got jammed up in my throat. There were plenty of things I wanted to call Clint Grayson. But yelling them in the locker room was likely to get me an even longer suspension.
And he grinned at me like he knew exactly what I wanted to call him, and he didn’t care. “Cleaning up the locker room, huh?” he said. “Clean this up, then!”
He opened the cap of his Gatorade and poured out the contents. Sticky yellow liquid splattered all over the floor. Of course, it was met with a chorus of laughs, and my face turned even redder.
In less than a minute, Clint had managed to ruin what had otherwise been a pretty good first day back at school.
The next day after sixth period, I walked down to the locker room again. When I didn’t see Mr. Eads, I went down to the laundry and started to fold the uniforms by myself.
I had only done a few when a voice called, “Eads, is that you?”
“No, it’s Sloan,” I responded. I figured it was a locker room thing, calling everyone by their last name.
“Kevin?” came the voice again, sounding puzzled.
“No, Mitch.”
The footsteps got louder down the stairs, and then I saw that it was Coach Williams.
“Oh, hey, Coach,” I said, “I’m—”
“I remember you. Kevin’s kid brother. You’re the kid who had those suggestions for me during football tryouts. If you could play football half as well as you think football, you would’ve made the team, easy.”
I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment or an insult, but I thanked him anyway.
“How’s the punishment working for you?” Coach Williams asked.
“You heard?”
“Yeah, not many secrets around this place,” he said. “You were running some kind of gambling ring, right? Got suspended, and now you’re like a prisoner on work release, cleaning up this dump. You have my sympathy.” He paused for a second. “Then again, at least you’re not about to get fired.”
There really weren’t many secrets.
“Been a rough fall for both of us,” I said.
“You can say that again,” said Coach Williams, his voice dropping an octave. “Let me ask you something: You been to many of our games?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What do you think of the job the head coach has been doing?”
I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to say something nice or to give him an honest answer.
“Well,” I said, “I know my brother and his friends on the team love playing for you.”
“But that’s not what I asked,” he said, smiling. “I remember from the tryouts how smart you are. Shoot straight with me: How do you think I’ve been doing?”
Okay, he’d asked for honesty. “Some of your decisions don’t always make a lot of sense to me.”
“Give me an example,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
I paused, trying to think of an easy one. “Remember the game against Ikeville, when they were leading 13–0, we scored to make it 13–6, and you decided to go for a two-point conversion instead of kicking an extra point?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Well, to me—and my friend Jamie, too—that didn’t make much sense.”
“I just felt in my gut that we could catch them off guard. And two points is better than one, right?”
“Yeah, but here’s the problem,” I said. “The chances of getting the one point are better than the chances of getting the two points. And even if you had gotten the two points, that would only have made the score 13–8. If you’d kicked the extra point it would have been 13–7. So either way, Jonasburg would have needed another touchdown to win. Going for the two points was more risk, but it didn’t get you any more reward.”
He nodded his head slowly. “I get it now.”
Behind him, the players were starting to file in. I could tell immediately that he didn’t want them overhearing their coach getting advice from a middle schooler.
“I got a practice to run, but I appreciate this,” he said. “If you think of any more examples, lay ’em on me. I got thick skin. You have to, in this job.”
“You got it, Coach,” I said.
“Oh, one more thing, Little Sloan,” he said. “Thanks for being honest with me.”
“Mitch, phone’s for you.”
Huh? Wha? I was fast asleep on Saturday when Dad came bursting into my room. In one motion, he woke me up and handed me the phone. “It’s for you. And it’s time to get up.”
“Hello?” I said into the phone, my first word of the day.
It was Ben Barnes. And he was inviting me to go to the mall in Louisville with him.
“Um, maybe,” I said. “What do you need to buy?”
He started laughing and explained that he didn’t need to buy anything. Going to the mall was just something to do in Indiana. You walk around. You see if anyone else is there from your school. You look at the kids from other schools. You go to the arcade. You get an Icee drink or a slice of pizza from the food court. You go to Sports King and get ideas for your holiday wish list.
Honestly, it sounded kind of boring. Why would you want to go to a mall and just walk around? We never did that in San Francisco. On the other hand, I was happy Ben thought to invite me. “Let me ask my parents, but I think I can go,” I told him. “Yeah, it’ll be fun.”
And it actually was. Mrs. Barnes drove us. When she picked me up, she insisted on coming inside the house to meet “the extraordinary artist” who also happened to be my mom.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you. I can’t tell you how much I admire your work,” she said, sounding like a fan meeting a rock star she worshipped. “Your painting looks lovely in my living room. Already I’ve had three friends ask where I got it. With any luck, I’ll be sending some business your way.”
“Well, thanks,” Dad said, covering for Mom, who seemed embarrassed. “Mitch always said that word of mouth is important for a small business like ours—it can make you or break you.”
“Oh, and Mitch—he was a great salesman!” Mrs. Barnes went on. Now I was getting embarrassed. “Speaking of word of mouth,” she went on, “I organize a benefit for the Jonasburg schools every year. You don’t have to give me an answer right now, but we would love it if you wanted to donate a painting or a piece of pottery for the auction.”
With Mom and Dad left to think about that, we said our good-byes and headed down Route 26. As we pulled into the huge parking lot of the Galaxy Mall, I realized that ever since I got busted for running the gambling pool, my supply of cash had really dwindled. Between donating my “ill-gotten gains,” giving money to Kevin, and paying for school lunches, I didn’t have a whole lot left to spend.
Ben seemed to have plenty, though, so we made a plan to meet Mrs. Barnes at the Electronics Hothouse in three hours.
We wandered all over and eventually ended up at Sports King, the biggest sporting-goods store I had ever been to. There were posters of famous athletes on the walls, and at least a dozen TV monitors showing different sports programs. Ben went to the section that sold baseball bats, and he took some practice swings. I stayed closer to the front of the store, looking at all the running shoes. Most of the clothes I wore were Kevin’s hand-me-downs, but at least I could get my own shoes.
As I stared at a pair of black high-tops with white stripes and a secret zipper under the tongue, I heard a girl arguing with her mother in the aisle behind me.
“Can we get out of this store already and get you something more appropriate?” the mom said.
“Wait—let me just see if they’ve got the new Atlanta Braves caps,” the girl said.
“You have nice hair and you’re mashing it under a baseball hat,” the mom said. “I think it’s time for the sports phase to pass. Time to start dressing more like a teenage girl and less like a tomboy.”
“I like the way I dress,” the girl said. “And the skirt you just showed me was hideous. It was so ugly it hurt my eyes.”
I peered around the corner, and, yes, it was Jamie Spielberger, arguing with her mother. I saw her right away and she saw me. Then she turned away so fast she could have gotten whiplash. “Whatever, Mom,” she said. “Fine. Let’s just get out of here. This store has gotten totally lame.”
What had been a fun afternoon had just gotten less fun. And I didn’t feel like telling Ben the whole story. I just saw Jamie. I got this weird feeling. We saw each other, but she turned and walked out of the store. Yes, I know she’s still mad at me. No, I don’t like her. Well, I like her, but not that way. Yes, you’re right that I probably shouldn’t care.
So I kept it to myself.