Saturday, December 27

SAMMIE

David Fischer is my best friend for a lot of reasons, including that when I text him and say, Can I come over?, because we’re finally back from skiing, David will text me right back and say, Sure.

Except today, when he texts, Later?

How much later? I ask. Because Dad is seeing patients all day, and the Peas are out shopping for expensive stuff they don’t need, and my wannabe-Pea mother is moping because they didn’t include her. Any minute she’s going to turn on me and want to pluck my eyebrows or take me shopping for stuff I don’t need.

IDK, David texts back. Have someone coming over.

Who? I text back, because I know every someone David does.

Luke

“Who?” I say out loud, because we don’t know anyone named Luke.

But before I can text and ask, David texts, New kid. And then there’s radio silence from him for an entire hour.

DAVID

I’m doing Shrinky Dinks with Allie when the doorbell rings.

Mom shouts from upstairs, “Answer that. It’s probably Luke.”

She’s the one who set up this Meet the New Kid thing when I was supposed to be hanging out with Sammie, who’s finally back from her family vacation. So couldn’t she just come downstairs, open the door, and do a Mom thing, with cookies and a “let me introduce you to my son, David, who’s in seventh grade too”? Nope. I push my colored pencils and Shrinky Dinks over to Allie’s side of the table, and turn on the TV to ESPN so it will look like I’ve been watching sports, not dorking out doing arts and crafts with my little sister.

I open the front door, and think: twelve minutes. Because that’s how long Luke Sullivan will be my friend.

He’s already started his growth spurt, and has hair on his upper lip, enough to maybe even shave. Me? My upper lip looks like a baby’s butt: smooth and soft. And freckled. I’m rocking the freckles.

The only person who would think that I have anything in common with Luke Sullivan is my mother.

“Thanks for inviting me over,” he says.

“Come on in,” I say. He steps through the door and walks past me, back toward the family room, where Allie is still sitting.

“Hey,” he says to Allie. He smiles, which activates a dimple.

Even Allie understands the coolness of Luke Sullivan, because she takes one look at him and his dimples, makes a strange kind of squeaking noise, and bolts upstairs to her bedroom.

“That’s my weird sister, Allie,” I say. “She’s in fourth grade, but she acts like a baby sometimes.”

Luke laughs. “My sister is a baby. She poops in a diaper. At least yours is toilet trained.”

“Yours is adopted, right?”

“Yep. From China.”

Mom knows Luke’s mom from when they went to law school together, and she gave me all the facts ahead of time: the adoption, his mom quitting her lawyer job, and the family needing to move to a new house, even though it was the middle of the school year. I felt sorry for him until I saw him.

Luke looks around at the family room: Shrinky Dinks sheets and colored pencils are spread all over the table, and the Knicks are on TV. There’s an awkward silence when I figure he’s calculating how long he has to stay to be polite, but then he says quietly, nodding at the table, “I used to love that stuff when I was a little kid. My babysitter, Bronia, was really into arts and crafts.”

“You should see Allie’s room,” I say. “It’s full of stuff she made, and all of it’s pink and glittery.”

Luke laughs. “Sounds like my little sister’s room, except my mom did the decorating. She painted flowers all along the bottom of the wall, if you can believe it.” He shakes his head. “She never did any of that stuff for me or Matt when we were little.”

There’s an awkward silence while I try to think of something to say. “How about a game of Ping-Pong? We have a table in the basement.”

“Sure,” Luke says. “I’m pretty good. I used to play all the time at my friend Ty’s house.”

My basement has everything, thanks to Pop, proud owner of L. H. Fischer Sporting Goods. We’ve got a Ping-Pong table, foosball, pogo sticks, a couple pairs of stilts, a magnetic dartboard, two Nerf basketball hoops, a real pinball machine, and a life-sized boxing dummy. There’s also an Xbox, but Pop keeps the controllers in his room and has a whole list of crazy rules about days I can play, and even though it’s winter vacation and a Saturday, today’s not one of them.

Luke walks to the Ping-Pong table, picks up a blue paddle, grabs a ball, bounces it a couple of times, and serves.

Of course, he isn’t “pretty good” at Ping-Pong; he kills it, beating me three games in a row.

“Best four out of seven?” I say. I manage to win games four and five, but then Luke comes back and wins game six, and it’s over.

He sets the paddle down on the table and turns to check out the rest of the rec room. He turns the boxing dummy on and takes a swing at its chest. “You’re so lucky, having a dad who owns a sports store. Getting first dibs on the coolest stuff.”

“Most of the time I get the stuff that doesn’t sell. Or returns that can’t go back out on the shelf.”

“Do you ever get to hang out there? At the store?”

“I work there sometimes,” I say. “Free labor, when the paid employees don’t show.”

Right then, Luke spots the framed, autographed Carmelo Anthony jersey. “Wow,” he says.

“That was a twelfth birthday present from my parents.” The truth is, I wanted a vintage Percy the Penguin doll, from the Northern Province comic series, which is my favorite. It was even autographed by the cartoonist, Melvin Marbury. I found it on eBay, and showed Mom and Pop, but they got the jersey instead. I know every other guy my age thinks that jersey’s the coolest thing in the world, but I really wanted Percy.

Luke wanders over to the wall of my Little League team photos, Pop’s shrine to the father-son bonding experience of baseball. There’s a bookcase below the shrine, where I keep part of my comic book collection and some of my own drawings and paintings, including two displayed in picture frames on the top of the bookcase, but Luke doesn’t notice any of that. He’s focused on the Little League photos. He reaches out and touches the team picture from last spring. “You play baseball?”

“Spring Little League. Yeah.”

“What position?”

The position that I like to play—every year—is benchwarmer, with a little bit of Powerade distributor and Dorito bag finisher thrown in, but I say, “Outfield, mostly. I can throw.”

“Cool,” Luke says. He takes the photo off the wall to look more closely at it. “I play catcher. Three seasons. I was on the Diamondbacks in the fall.” He mentions the name of his team casually, but I know exactly what it means: the Diamondbacks were the county champs.

“Who’s the girl?” he asks, pointing right at Sammie in the photo. She’s in the back row, and even though we’re all wearing caps and her dark hair is pulled into a ponytail, she stands out.

I grab on to the photo frame because I kind of want to take it away from Luke. I don’t. I just hold on to the bottom left corner while he holds on to the bottom right corner.

“Her name’s Sammie.” I try to sound kind of bored.

“What’s a girl doing on a boys’ team anyway?”

“She likes to play baseball. And she’s really good.”

“Hey,” Luke says, still holding the photo. “I think I might have played against her. Does she play fall ball? I remember a girl catcher. She was hot.”

I pull the photo away from him.

Upstairs, the doorbell rings. I hear Mom clomp down from the second floor and open the door.

“David,” she hollers. “Sammie’s here.”

“The hot girl?” Luke says. “She’s here? Right now? No way.”

“Sammie,” I say. “Her name is Sammie.”

SAMMIE

I wait an hour, then text David Coming over now okay? and walk to his house along the Greenway.

But when Mrs. Fischer answers the door, she looks surprised to see me. “Hello, Sammie,” she says. “I didn’t know you were coming over. David has a new friend here.”

“Luke,” I say, like I know all about him.

“They’re in the basement.”

“Great,” I say, taking off my boots and coat and heading for the basement door. When I open it, the two of them are standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up. The Luke kid has at least four inches on David. He looks kind of familiar.

“Hey, David,” I say, walking down the stairs.

“I know you,” Luke says.

“Really?” I say. “I don’t know you.”

He holds out his hand like he wants to shake. “Luke Sullivan. Nice to meet you.”

I curl mine into a fist and wait for him to do the same. We bump knuckles. “Sammie Goldstein.”

“We played each other,” he says. “Last fall. I was on the Diamondbacks.”

“Oh,” I say. “You beat us.”

He grins. “We beat everybody. County champs.”

“What’ve you guys been doing?” I ask David, wandering over to the bookcase, where there are a couple of his drawings, framed. I pick up the one that’s a copy of the cover of his favorite Northern Province comic book, Oliver Shoots a Biscuit in the Basket.

“We played Ping-Pong,” David says, watching me and starting to blush. “Luke won.”

“Sounds fun,” I say, setting the drawing back down. David relaxes. He hides his artistic side from his guy friends. They know he can draw cars and spaceships and guns with flames shooting out of them. They ask him to draw that stuff, like it’s a party trick.

I’m the only one who knows about his Northern Province comic book obsession. And that he’d rather draw a cross-eyed moose or a chubby dog than cars and spaceships and flaming guns. And that he can draw all of those things. I don’t understand why he doesn’t want the other guys to know, but I keep his secret. That’s what best friends do: keep each other’s secrets.

“Who would you rather play against?” I ask. “Luke? Or me?”

David picks up the little white ball and bounces it on the Ping-Pong table. It makes a pock-pock-pocking sound. “Here’s a better question,” he says. “Would you rather play Ping-Pong against a zombie or an alien?”

“Wait,” Luke says. “You didn’t answer her question.”

“How many arms does the alien have?” I ask, holding out my hands so David will throw me the ball.

“Two,” he says, tossing it right to me.

I catch it with my left hand and ask, “Eyes?”

“Yep. And ears.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Luke says. “Aliens don’t exist.”

“How tall is it?” I ask David, sending the ball up in a high arc and catching it with my right hand. “If it’s a little alien who can’t see over the top of the table—”

“Six feet tall. But no more questions. It’s an alien that looks kind of human and is six feet tall, with the same number of eyes and arms and legs as us, but we don’t know if it has X-ray vision or super-fast reflexes or a killer headache from the change in air pressure on Earth or what.”

“Does it want to eat me?”

“Unknown.”

“Hmm,” I say, thinking. I lob the ball back to David and he catches it. “An alien with unspecified strengths and weaknesses. And we don’t even know why it’s here in your basement, right? It could be the Ping-Pong champion of the universe.”

“Could be,” David agrees, bouncing the Ping-Pong ball on the table.

“Or it could be like E.T.—”

“But six feet tall,” David reminds me.

“Right. A six-foot-tall alien who got lost and is scared of everything.”

“Could be.”

I sigh. “I gotta go with the zombie.”

“That’s stupid,” Luke says. “It’s a zombie.”

“It’s not stupid. I know the zombie wants to eat my brains, right? Which gives me a huge advantage. He’ll be all distracted, thinking ‘Brains! Brains!’ so I just have to keep my focus on the game. I can totally win against a zombie.”

“And then he’ll eat you!” Luke says.

“I’m confident I can avoid being eaten by the zombie,” I say, “after I whoop him in Ping-Pong.”

“Do you guys always do this?” Luke asks. “Talk about made-up stuff?”

“Not always,” David says.

“Yep,” I say at the same time.

“I like talking about real things,” Luke says. “Like the Knicks. Or Little League.” He turns toward me. “Or you.”

He stares right at me, his eyes open too wide, like he’s daring me to blink.

“That’s weird,” I say, trying to look right at him, into his wide-open eyes. I feel exposed, and hold my paddle up in front of my body like it’s a shield. “I’m right here. We can’t talk about me.”

“We did before,” Luke says.

“We did not,” David says, dropping the Ping-Pong ball onto the table. It bounces once, then rolls off the side.

“When you weren’t here,” Luke says to me.

“We talked about baseball,” David protests, looking down at the ball as it rolls away from the table.

Luke smiles at me, a wide, toothy grin. “We talked about you playing baseball.”

I don’t like his smile.

“I’m going out for our school team,” I say. “David too.”

“Me three,” Luke says.

“What school do you go to?”

“Yours,” Luke says. “Starting after break.” He grins, showing his white teeth.

For a moment I’m sure he’s going to start laughing and say, ‘Gotcha!’ Or maybe I hope that’s what he’ll do. But he doesn’t. Instead he ducks down beneath the Ping-Pong table, then pops back up holding the ball. He tosses it to David and says, “Maybe I’ll be in some of your classes.”

David catches the ball and tosses it to me.

“It’s a pretty big grade,” I say. “Unless you’re in honors—”

“Duh,” Luke says. “Of course I’m in honors.”

“Of course,” I say.

David and Luke both hold out their hands for me to toss the ball to them. I look back and forth, then set the ball on the table and turn away from them. “C’mon, let’s do something else. What can we all play together?”