WHEN I got on the bus, all I was thinking about was handing my article in after school. It was a lot better than thinking about Dad shipping me off to Mrs. Bob the Baker, and if I’d learned anything in the past few years, it was how not to think about her.
I was so excited about this article. I had worked really hard on it. I kind of couldn’t wait to see everyone’s reaction. I, Casey Snowden, was going to be the one who solved the mystery of baseball’s great disappearance, the accused steroid user who fell off the face of the earth. Uncovered. By me!
I wouldn’t be able to stay for the newspaper meeting after school today—I had to figure out how to get ready for You Suck, Ump! Day, how to get in touch with Steamboat—so I was planning to give the article to Mr. Donovan in English. I wondered if he’d be annoyed with me for not accepting the unwritten rule about sixth-graders, or if he’d maybe think it was cool that I was challenging it.
I had a hard time staying focused all day, even during English. At the end of the class, I took my time packing up my stuff, and I said, “Mr. Donovan?”
“Will I see you at the meeting later?”
“I can’t,” I said, standing up from my desk. “It’s a really busy week at home, at the school, at Behind the Plate. You Suck, Ump! Day is coming up, and this year I’m kind of running the whole thing myself, so I need a ton of time to get ready.”
He nodded.
“And I know this is weird, and that it’s sort of a little against the rules, or the unwritten rules, but I don’t agree with the rules, so I figured, well, I wrote an article, and I was hoping you could look it over. I won’t be there to hand it in myself, so—”
“You really can’t be there or you don’t want to be there?” Mr. Donovan asked.
“I really can’t. I mean, you’re right that I don’t exactly want to see Chris Sykes’s face when I say I wrote an article, or listen to him, or whatever, but I really can’t be there today.” I almost said, “You could call my father if you don’t believe me,” but then I remembered I was twelve. Not six.
“I’ll read it,” he said.
***
At home, Zeke and I sat down with pretzels and milk, a disgusting combination that he ate and drank all the time and which, to my own horror, I was starting to like too. As soon as we were done, I went to ask Mrs. G. if she had any other contact info for Steamboat.
She didn’t.
“Okay, so his first name was Kelly. I know that. Do you at least know his last name?”
She didn’t even go to a file drawer or anything. She just said, “Um,” and looked at me. “Kelly? Really? I only knew him as Steamboat. And because his family was in Rhode Island, he didn’t have a local bank account. So, Rhode Island, that’s something, right? Or wait. It might have been Vermont. Or possibly Maine.”
“Really? All I have to go on is the name Kelly, in the Northeast?” Perfect.
So Zeke and I went back to the kitchen, got more pretzels and more milk, and tried to think of everything we could having to do with You Suck, Ump! Day, from the flyers we needed to put up all over town, to letting people know when it was, to what time we needed to start, to what we needed to do to get the fields, stands, and public areas ready. It was a lot. I was pretty sure we could do it.
***
Zeke had to go home right away to “get some important stuff out in the mail.” I wished him good luck with that, because his room was an organized person’s nightmare—DVDs, addressed envelopes, stamps, postcards, reality TV contest entries—everything everywhere. I had no idea if half his ideas or entries or whatever were ever even submitted or if they were still in various layers on his bedroom floor, maybe to be discovered by some research scientists years from now, who would try to understand the deep meaning behind the video cards and entry forms addressed to So You Think You’re the Biggest Idiot?
***
I went outside and made my way to the batting cages. I stopped in the space between two cages to watch Jorge Washington run through his calls. Bobbybo was there too, shaking his head (he didn’t hide his disgust very well). “Look at your feet,” he said to Jorge. It was bad news if you had to be told to look at your feet this late in the game.
“Right, right,” Jorge said. I stepped a bit farther into the cage and watched as he separated his feet more, shifted one a little ahead of the other. He got down into the crouch. His balance looked wobbly, and he flinched each time the pitching machine sent a ball into the catcher’s glove. He was good at the rest of it, though: coming up to standing position, moving his right arm at a 90-degree angle with a single knocking motion, and calling a big, loud “Strike!” Then he got back into the crouch with his feet in the wrong position again.
I pushed tarp after tarp back, walking past the other cages until I spotted Dad and J-Mac talking outside, near the door and thought, Wow, look at that—I don’t even call him MacSophal anymore. He’s J-Mac. And at that very moment, I tripped over an Ibbit stick. I fell straight to the ground and looked around, relieved no one had seen. From the dark inside the cages, Dad and J-Mac looked like they were in a movie or onstage in a play—two big well-lit actors. I scooted closer and tried to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t make out a word. Until they were done, when J-Mac, walking away, turned back to yell, “Yeah, give him a call. Maybe you could start this January.”
Start what in January?
January was when the Florida schools held their sessions.
What was with this guy, working so hard to get my dad to move BTP’s Academy to Florida? I had to figure out how to stop this. Which would be doubly hard since I wasn’t even supposed to know about it.