On Friday after school, Todd had soccer practice, to get ready for the first game of the season the next day. The team had played together, with almost all the same guys on it, since kindergarten, and last year they had had an undefeated season. It was wonderful to be outside, running up and down the field, under the clear, cloudless Colorado sky, looking forward to another win.
Damon’s dad was the coach. Todd thought he was a pretty good coach, even if sometimes he favored Damon over the other kids. Todd’s dad probably would have favored Todd if he had been the coach. But Todd’s dad had always been too busy with his job to have time to coach anything. Anyway, Damon was a great player. In Todd’s opinion, Damon was the second best player on the team.
After Todd.
It wasn’t bragging, Todd figured, to think something that was true.
Isaiah wasn’t on the team, luckily for the team, and for Isaiah, even for the ball. Although soccer balls were pretty hard to destroy, Todd had a feeling Isaiah could manage to do it somehow. But Todd wished that Isaiah were on the team, anyway.
Todd’s dad picked him up after practice and dropped him off at Isaiah’s on the way home. Todd still wasn’t used to having his dad drive him places, while his mom was at work.
After Todd and Isaiah defeated level six in Isaiah’s newest video game, they lay on the floor in the family room waiting for the pizza guy to show up. Isaiah’s family had pizza every Friday night.
“I wish I could make my own video game for my Mini-Society product,” Isaiah said. “It could be this sort of attack-of-the-aliens game, only kids from school would be the aliens. Like, Damon would be the Know-It-All Alien. And you’d get points when you zapped him and showed he was wrong about something. And Violet would be the Crying Alien, and you’d get zapped if she cried on you.”
“Who would we be?” Todd asked.
“I’d be the Klutz Alien, and people would get zapped if I tripped on them. And you’d be the Boy Genius Alien, who designed the best zapper.” Isaiah was starting to sound excited. “Do you think we really could? Make our own video game?”
“No,” Todd said. You didn’t have to be a Boy Genius to know that two fifth graders couldn’t make a real video game, with no help from any grownups.
Isaiah sighed heavily.
“What was the idea you had the other day?” Todd asked. “The one Ms. Ives didn’t want to hear?”
“Oh, that one. I decided it was stupid.”
“What was it? Maybe it wasn’t stupid.”
“Well, you know how I have, like, ten thousand broken crayons?”
No, Todd hadn’t known that, but he nodded.
“Janie keeps breaking them”—Isaiah had a four-year-old sister—“and I guess over the years I probably broke some, too.”
Todd swallowed a smile.
“So I thought I could melt them down and form these crayon lumps. You could use them for paperweights, or weapons, or decorations, and even color with them, too. They’d be a novelty item.”
“Crayon lumps.”
“I’d give them a different name. Like Crayon Creations. Maybe I could make them in different shapes, pour them into molds or something, if I could find some molds. Like duck-shaped molds. Or chickens! I think a lot of people would like a big crayon chicken. So what do you think? Hey, I don’t know why I thought this was stupid. It isn’t stupid! It’s great!”
Well, crayon chickens were probably better than crayon lumps.
“Where would you get the chicken molds?” Todd asked practically.
“At the crafts store where your mom works. They probably sell all kinds of molds. Chickens. Sheep. Cows. Pigs. I could make a whole crayon farm. Crayon Critters!”
Actually, the idea didn’t sound stupid. Todd wondered if
he should worry that for once one of Isaiah’s ideas didn’t sound stupid. It seemed a bad omen, somehow.
Todd woke up earlier than usual on Saturday morning, knowing there was something important he had to remember. To let Wiggy out so she wouldn’t pee on the living room carpet? The older Wiggy got, the more accidents she had. But he could hear his mother rattling dishes down in the kitchen, so she would have already taken care of Wigs.
The game!
Todd’s team wasn’t playing until ten, but Todd still sprang out of bed and hurried to the window. The sky in the east was a rosy pink, the kind of sunrise Amy was always writing poems about.
“You’re up early,” his mother greeted him as he came into the kitchen. Wiggy thumped her tail. Todd felt sorry for people who didn’t have a dog’s tail go wild with joy at the sight of them.
“Big game today,” Todd explained. Every game was a big game when you planned on having another undefeated season.
“Todd, I—” His mother stopped. Todd noticed that her eyes were red, as if she had been peeling onions—or crying? “I can’t go. To the game. I tried to switch my hours at the store, but Saturdays—I’m just too new there to take off a Saturday.”
“That’s okay.” His mom had come to all his games over the past five years. It didn’t matter if she missed one. At
least, it didn’t matter to him. It certainly seemed to matter to his mother.
“Do you know that I have never missed a single one of your games? Ever?”
Todd nodded.
“Until today.” Her eyes filled with tears. So she had been crying! Because she had to miss the game? Todd couldn’t believe it. But then Todd himself never cried. It was as if he couldn’t. He and Violet LaFarge were opposites that way: the girl who always cried, the boy who never cried.
“Everybody’s parents miss a game now and then,” Todd told her. His father had missed most of them.
“Not me,” his mother said, turning away from him toward the sink.
Suddenly Todd got it. Just the way his team wanted a perfect, undefeated season of playing soccer, his mother wanted a perfect, undefeated season of being a mom. A perfect, undefeated lifetime of being a mom.
“It’s okay,” Todd said. “It’s really okay. Dad can come, right?”
“I guess so.” Her voice was tight. “It isn’t as if he has anything else to do. Though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have someone run a vacuum around here one of these days.”
One of these days, maybe, but not on a soccer-game day.
“And Amy’s coming,” Todd pointed out.
“I think Kelsey and Julia are coming with her,” his mother said, turning back toward him and forcing a smile.
“Then just about everyone will be there.” Todd tried to
make his tone reassuring, but as soon as the words came out, he realized he had said the wrong thing.
“Yes,” his mother said stiffly. “Everyone but me.”
Next time, Todd decided, he wasn’t going to ride to a game with Amy and Kelsey and Julia all giggling together in the backseat. It was hard to get his mind focused on soccer when every two seconds all three girls started shrieking with laughter.
“I wrote a song about Frizzy Fred,” Julia said.
Shrieks of laughter. Todd didn’t know who Frizzy Fred was, but he wasn’t about to ask. There was no one in their class at school named Fred. And no boy whose hair was frizzy.
“Sing it,” Kelsey urged.
More shrieks.
“I can’t!”
“Oh, come on, sing it!”
Shrieks, shrieks, shrieks. Then Julia started singing, in her high-pitched, slightly off-key voice, “I love you, Fre-e-d, oh, yes I do. I don’t love anyone like I love you. When you’re not near to me, I’m blue. Oh, Frizzy Fred, I love you!”
As the girls exploded into laughter this time, it struck Todd that he didn’t hear Amy. He didn’t think she had been laughing before, either. He gave a quick glance over his shoulder: Amy was smiling, but even the smile seemed to be an effort. Kelsey and Julia were laughing too hard to notice.
“Okay,” his dad said, “you got me. Who, or what, is Frizzy Fred?”
“He’s very handsome,” Julia said.
“And very talented,” Kelsey said.
“And very thin!”
“And you can buy him at our first Mini-Society selling session!”
Okay. So now Todd knew who—what—Frizzy Fred was: some dumb thing to sell at Mini-Society. But what he didn’t know was why Julia and Kelsey would go on and on about their Mini-Society idea when it was clear to Todd, and should have been clear to them, that it was making Amy feel bad. Todd wasn’t going to buy a Frizzy Fred from them, that was for sure, whatever Frizzy Fred turned out to be.
The game was a tough one, against the only team in the league that had almost beaten Todd’s team the year before. The score was 2—1 at the half, with Todd’s team behind.
He saw his dad standing alone on the sidelines, not talking to any of the other dads. His dad probably didn’t know what to talk to them about. His mom was the one who knew all the other parents, and every detail about their children’s after-school activities, and which teacher each child had at school this year, and which new fund-raiser the PTO was thinking of trying. Todd doubted that his dad even knew his own kids’ teacher’s name. Or what the letters PTO stood for.
As Todd chugged down some water, he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was his dad.
“Good job,” his dad said awkwardly.
“I missed that one pass.” The score might have been tied 2—2 if he had made it.
“I think you did a good job,” his dad repeated.
Todd felt a small surge of gratitude toward his dad for saying so little. His mom would have said, “Good job, honey. Too bad about that one pass. You must feel terrible. But Damon should have been watching more closely before he sent the ball your way. It really wasn’t your fault. I hope his dad knows it wasn’t your fault. Just do your best in the second half. Try to pay a little more attention, that’s all …”
He remembered last year, when his dad had helped him on his project for the science fair. Todd had built a race car powered by a mousetrap—you’d spring the mousetrap, and the car would speed forward—and his dad had been really great to work with, letting Todd come up with all his own ideas, listening to his ideas without saying too much, asking a few questions but letting Todd find his own answers. It had been a lot of fun, being two engineers together, tinkering with that little mousetrap car and getting it to run as fast and as far as possible. But now his dad wasn’t an engineer anymore. Maybe he’d never be an engineer again.
His dad gave Todd’s shoulder another pat and went back to the sidelines, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the unexpectedly chilly wind that had just come up.
Todd’s team won the game, 3—2.