THE next morning on the bus, Zeke literally ran up the steps and to our seat. He sat next to me. In fact, he again sort of sat on top of me, but then shifted over. “I know I’ve said this before, but you won’t believe this. Really. You won’t.”
“Okay,” I said. I was barely holding in all my own news.
“Remember that contest?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Remember? Where you have to come up with your own reality TV show idea—Your Show Here?”
I started to get a really bad feeling. That near-catastrophe yesterday had kept me awake most of the night, so I was twitchy to begin with.
“You had to send in your idea by filling out this online form, and I did and then I forgot about it, mostly, while I was working on other things, but I got a response, an email this morning that mine was one of fifty ideas being considered.”
“You won?”
“No, not yet. They’re just considering it. But still!”
I asked slowly, because I was very, very scared. “What idea did you enter?”
“America’s Next Umpire!”
I pictured the headline: OVERWEIGHT CATS OF NJ BREATHE SIGH OF RELIEF.
But wait, what?! “What are you talking about?”
“A TV show about Umpire Academy, and America gets to vote on who becomes the next umpire. They get to choose who gets sent to Cocoa.”
I could think of so many reasons that was a bad idea. “What does America know about umpire training?” was the first to come out.
“The show will sort of educate them, right? Like they’ll learn along with the students what the right stance is, how to, I don’t know, crouch, all that stuff. Everything about timing, and knowing the rules, and positioning. You know how I filmed all that stuff for the before tapes? That’s how I got the idea.”
Part of me thought it was a bad idea, but who was I? Some punk kid who was maybe too close to umpire school. Some real live national contest-judging person obviously thought it was a good idea. Maybe Zeke had found his reality-TV claim to fame.
Zeke said, “I couldn’t decide if it was okay to do this without checking with Ibbit. I figured if he said no, we’d just can it. But when you told me about Florida, I thought about how maybe if more people knew about the school, Ibbit wouldn’t have to move Academy to Florida. Right? And I know if I ask, Ibbit will say no. But I know you don’t want to stay with your mother, and who would even sit with me on the bus if—”
“I get it,” I said. Who knows? Maybe Zeke’s idea could somehow help the school. If more people heard about Academy, more people would enroll, and maybe if we got more people, like we used to have, it could always stay in New Jersey. Even if Zeke’s idea didn’t go the whole way through, maybe it could be featured on a finalist show, and people who never knew about Behind the Plate would hear about us. “Didn’t you need my dad’s permission or signature or something?”
“You don’t need to sign any release forms until the next level,” Zeke said as the bus pulled into the lot. “I have to send a video by next week, so I want to film on You Suck, Ump! Day. Which I planned to do anyway. Now I just have a better reason.”
He stood to get off the bus and I blurted out, “You know that MacSophal dude?”
He nodded.
I whispered. “It’s really him! I wrote an article about it, and I’m hoping they’ll print it in the school paper.”
Zeke’s mouth was wide open. I had left him speechless.
I know!