War and Watermelon

I watch game shows and old comedies all morning. I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, Concentration. I eat two bowls of cereal, a grape ice pop, and a peanut butter sandwich.

Does she really think I’d answer that even if I had? “Tony’s pretty special.”

She puts her hand on top of my head and strokes my hair. “You’ll learn. This is a big year for you, Brody. Junior high school can be intimidating, but you’ll do fine. Just be yourself.”

“Oh,” she says with a laugh, “kids your age try to be all kinds of people. You’ll see.”

“I have some good news,” she says. “I found out who your teacher is.”

“You did?” We’re not supposed to know until the first day of school.

“Oh.” I figure Mom found that out at the library meeting the other night. There are teachers on the board with her.

She’s also very old, and according to Ryan she wasn’t nice at all. We’ll see. I’ve had some teachers before who’d had Ryan first. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it isn’t, depending on how much of a pain he was at the time.

Football’s got me worried. It’s been a while since I carried the ball, but those fumbles are haunting me. What’ll it be like out there under the lights, with everybody watching, in an actual game with everything on the line? I’m scared to death I’ll screw up, miss a tackle on a kickoff, and be responsible for a big runback.

Game time is thirty-two hours away, and there’s no way I can stand this kind of pressure until then. So I grab a basketball and head out to the driveway to shoot.

I’m thinking about trying out for the Franklin basketball team, but that’ll be mostly eighth graders and I’ll be at a size disadvantage. But I’m always at a disadvantage, so that’s nothing new.

I can shoot. At least here in the driveway. Ryan says our basket is probably three or four inches too low, but we’ve never measured it.

I take a long shot and it swishes through the net. I sprint in and follow it with a layup, then dribble out to the foul line and hit another.

I’m wondering what it must have felt like for Tony when he kissed Janet last night. However good it must have felt, it was probably overcome by that punch to the face he got afterward. I imagine his lip is puffy today.

Guess that could have been me, since Tony’s original plan had him winding up with Patty. Then again, maybe that’s what Patty wanted. Maybe she would have kissed him, too. And instead of just a nasty reply from Patty, I would have been the one getting belted by Janet.

But either way, I definitely had the whole thing wrong in my head. That summer-long crush I hoped Patty had on me turned out to be anything but. I felt about seven years old when she called us jerks.

I don’t feel any different than I did a year ago, when I was heading into sixth grade. I have no idea what goes on inside girls’ heads. I don’t have any idea what goes on inside guys’ heads, either, at least not the cool ones.

What’s inside my head right now is nervousness and embarrassment. Good combination.