Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (9 page)

For a while there, you'd almost think I'd totally adjusted to my new life as a nonathlete whose childhood idol was slipping down the tubes. I mean, for a couple of weeks, life almost rocked: Angelika and I were bonding — and not just flirty-bonding, but really talking about life stuff. I was still clueless about how to make a move with her, but I figured if I just stood close enough to her, for long enough, eventually we'd accidentally stumble into an empty Hebrew school classroom or something. I talked with Grampa on the phone a couple of times, plus I stopped by his house one day unannounced, and each time, he seemed to be on topic and focused. Plus, I was even getting semi-popular at school.

With my new sports-photographer gig, whenever a new biweekly issue of the school newspaper came out, at least one person would always come up to
me and compliment me on my work. Then this one issue came out with two of my shots on the back page: one was AJ poised in the air for a slam dunk, and the other was the super-hot Linnie Vaughn arched halfway backward in the air, pushing off at the start of a backstroke race. I was sitting at lunch with AJ that day, and tons and tons of people came over to high-five him.

This one guy we knew from middle school walked up to our table and said, “AJ — that was such a cool picture of you in action. You are the
man
!”

AJ said, “Thanks, Tim. It was no big deal. I was just playing my game. Pete did all the work. I mean, he's the one that took the picture.”

Tim glanced over at me, clearly not impressed. “Uh, that's cool,” he muttered.

“AND he took that suh-mokin' picture of Linnie Vaughn,” AJ added.

Now I had Tim's attention. “Really? You took that picture, too? That one is awesome! I'm totally going to put it up in my locker!”

Some random kid walking past stopped and said,
“You're the guy who gave the world Linnie Vaughn in a bathing suit? In color? Dude. I'm in awe. Thank you!”

Well, that was awkward. Is it better to be ignored, or to be the hero of hormonally challenged geeks everywhere? Anyway, when it was just me and AJ again, he said, “By the way, thanks. I'm hoping the varsity coach might notice me, and he's gotta see that picture around, right? I know I still have to build up my stats, get more playing time, work on my D — but every little bit helps.”

He stopped to take a huge bite of his pizza, then gulped it down and said, “You know, hoops is cool and all. But what I really can't wait for is baseball. You and me, together again, showing everyone what we can do — it's gonna be sick. Sick! Hey, only a few more months, right? Then you can get in
front
of the camera for a while!”

I didn't say anything; I just kept chewing my extremely greasy pork barbecue sandwich. It was one of those times when I'm really glad AJ never notices whether I reply or not. He rambled on,
through another round of guys stopping by, some additional Linnie Vaughn innuendo, a thorough dissection of his basketball season to date, and finally … mercifully … the bell.

Speaking of dissection, it was a dissection lab in biology class that smacked me back to reality. My bio teacher was an ancient crone named Mrs. Singley, who knew a ton about the subject and was a pretty entertaining speaker. Unfortunately, she was also kind of blind and deaf, which meant that labs got a bit out of hand. Imagine a room full of nervous freshmen with scalpels, smelly dead animals soaking in formaldehyde, very little supervision, and thirty other freshmen to impress, and you kind of get the idea of how those sessions went.

This was a pretty major lab. We had already cut up worms, fish, and frogs, but today was Mammal Day. I walked in from my lunch with AJ, and found fifteen preserved fetal pigs in sealed plastic bags, one on each table in the room. My partner was a kid named Matt, who had the same kind of oblivious charm that made AJ so beloved by all. He was also
immensely hyper, which didn't bother me most days but wasn't so comforting when he had a razor-sharp scalpel in hand.

Mrs. Singley gave us some basic directions and handed out the packet we all had to fill out. Then she stepped aside and let us start slicing up our piggies. “Dude,” Matt said as he started using a bone scissors to split open the rib cage of our unfortunate new pet. “D'you think they purposely planned this for a day when we were having pork for lunch? Because, I mean, I could see getting really nauseated if you thought about that too hard. Not that I plan to think about it much. Oops, watch out for the bloody fluid there! Wow, who knew one pig could be so, um, drippy? Anyway, check out this stringy part here behind the ribs. I think that would have made one tasty sandwich niblet, don't you? Hey, hand me a pencil. I think we're supposed to draw this artery thing here. Ugh, I got some guts on the handout. Could you do me a favor and just wipe that off? Or maybe we should switch places for a while. You have to be neater than I am.”

So we switched places. I was a pretty good pig eviscerator, too. I cut out the heart with no problems. The lungs followed. The liver? Check. The stomach. The intestines. The undeveloped reproductive system. Check, check, check. But then Mrs. Singley stopped everybody.

“Excuse me, class, but I seem to have left a page out of the packet. The last thing you need to do is dissect one forelimb of your pig and draw a detailed diagram of the elbow joint….”

Suddenly, I felt light-headed. I staggered a couple of steps sideways, and somehow managed to stop gagging long enough to ask Matt to take over for me. He stepped in, grabbed up the tools, and started cutting. Which I might have been OK with, but of course the operation came with narration:

“Hey, hi! Wave to our friends, piggie! Good job, piggie!”

“Uh, Matt,” I said, trying not to retch, “do you think we could just, like, get the work done? There's not much time left in the period, and —”

“Don't worry, Pete. I can bond with our piglet and
work at the same time. Hey, Pigster, I like the way your joint articulates when you wave! Look how nicely your ulna and radius pivot together! Pete, check this out! If I pull his arm back, it's almost like he's getting ready to throw a ball or something. Just … gotta … get it back a little … farther —” I heard a sickening wet snap. “Oopsie! Guess Porky here is out for the season!”

I felt a lurch in my gut, and instantly, my mouth was full of half-digested pig parts.

I almost made it to the door.

By the time the mess was cleaned up, I was in the nurse's office. I kind of felt better — at least physically — after my massive projectile hurling spasm, but I played it up like I was dying so I wouldn't have to go back to class and see people. So the nurse called my mom, but my mom couldn't come to get me. Naturally, my dad was away on business, which left only one relative in town: Grampa. The nurse called him, and he said he would keep me at his house until my parents got home from work.

I climbed into Grampa's huge Goldberg Photo SUV, which he had always needed for hauling around his cameras, lights, tripods, backdrops, and assorted other tools of the trade. Now, with nothing in the back, it felt cavernously hollow inside. I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to blank out, swerve off the road, and smash me into a tree. Grampa had always been a fairly impatient driver, so I could only imagine how scary he would be if his mind was going. He was in total control, though. In fact, he was alert enough to grill me about what had happened.

I told him the whole lab story, and then he said, “So, forget about your stomach troubles. What I really want to know is, how are things going with your new girlfriend, whatshername?”

“She's not my girlfriend, Grampa,” I said, gritting my teeth as he slowed down at the last minute for a red light. “Her name is Angelika. But she's just my partner in photography class.”

“Partner, huh? Promising.”

“No, we didn't even choose each other.”

“But she modeled for you. Photographers and models: I've seen it a million times. I could tell you stories from my younger days….”

Between Grampa's famously heavy accelerator foot, my pig experience, and now the thought of my grandparent having a love life, I was about to roll down my window and heave. But when I actually turned to look out the window, I noticed that we had completely driven past Grampa's house. “Uh, Grampa? Where are we going?”

He looked almost scared for a second, but then recovered so fast you almost could have missed the whole thing. “Oh, I just wanted to stop by the drugstore and get you some Pepto-Bismol. Why?”

Pretty smooth cover-up, Grampa
, I thought.

When we got to his house, he set me up on the couch with a pillow, a blanket, and a remote control, and told me I could nap or watch TV — whatever I wanted. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“Out. Now get some rest,” he said. I tried to press him for details, but he just shrugged me off and walked out of the house. I flicked on the TV,
and channel surfed for as long as I could stand it. I was incredibly thirsty and had the world's single worst pig-barf-and-formaldehyde aftertaste in my mouth, so eventually I was forced to get out from my couch-nest and make my way down the hall to the bathroom. I splashed some water in my face, brushed my teeth with a finger, and then noticed something I hadn't seen before. There were Post-it notes all over the place. Next to the toothbrush holder, a yellow note said, in shaky block letters, “BRUSH AM + PM.” On the top of the toilet tank, there was a hot-pink one: “FLUSH!”

I went into the kitchen for a glass of juice and found the same scenario there. Grampa had notes to remind him to turn off the oven, the stove, and the coffee-maker. There was even a note posted behind the toaster oven with directions for making toast. This scared me. My grandfather had been cooking his own meals for as long as I could remember — and now he needed step-by-step instructions for heating bread?

I heard the rattly click of Grampa's key in the front door, and scrambled back to the couch. I covered
myself all up with the blanket and pretended to sleep. Really, I thought there was no way I could take a nap while I was so freaked out by the dissection and worried about my grandfather and his newly annotated existence. But somehow I dozed off, because the next thing I knew, my mother was bent over me with her hand on my forehead.

“Mom, I'm fine,” I said. “I just got a little sick before, but I'm all better now.”

Mom gave me her special don't-question-the-doctor look — not that she's actually a doctor, but she definitely picked up the look from somewhere. “Peter, the school nurse said you looked awful. I believe the exact phrase was, ‘Your son's face is the color of oatmeal.' I was worried all afternoon, and now you say you're fine? I don't know: I think you'd better stay home tomorrow.”

“Whatever. But I'm telling you, I don't have some funky virus or anything. I just ate a really disgusting lunch and then … well, there was this pig … and … can I just tell you the whole thing later?”

She nodded.

“And besides,” I added, “who says that being the color of oatmeal is a bad thing? Maybe the nurse meant it in a flattering way. I mean, oatmeal is a delicious, low-fat food, rich in fiber. In fact, I've heard that eating oatmeal actually lowers your bad cholesterol.”

She rolled her eyes and prodded me off the couch. “OK, Mr. Handsome Oatmeal Face. Go say thank you to your grandfather.”

I found Grampa in the bathroom, just standing there. At first, I thought he must have been in one of his spaced-out trances, but then I noticed what he was holding in one hand: a bunch of Post-its. I realized then why I hadn't seen any little notes around his house before: He must have been in the habit of taking them down every time we were supposed to come over. We almost never showed up unannounced there, and the one time I had recently — when he had fallen down — I hadn't exactly been conducting a home inspection.

Anyway, Grampa noticed me looking at his handful of little papers, and held the pointer finger of his other hand to his lips. “Shhh,” he said, and winked. I
gulped and nodded. What else was I supposed to do? He gave me a brief, fierce hug, and pushed me toward the door.

On the way home, Mom asked, “Hey, did everything go all right with your grandfather today? I know you've been worried about him lately, but he seemed fine to me just now.”

Well, at least I could tell the complete truth in response to that. “He sure did, Mom!” I said, forcing myself to smile. “So, what's for dinner?”

“Ham,” she replied.

That night, after I had (barely) survived my third dead-pig encounter of the day, done all my homework, and fielded the obligatory phone calls from Angelika (“Ooh, Peter, are you all right? Because Linnie Vaughn is going to be really bummed if you, like, die….”) and AJ (“Dude, did you really hurl all over the classroom door? I heard it was pretty graphic!”), I sat up in bed for hours.

Have you ever looked around your room and suddenly noticed something about your decorations that's never hit you before? Because it happened to me that night: I realized that almost everything that mattered to me in there had come from my grandfather. He had painted the walls in Yankee pinstripes as a surprise for my seventh birthday. Then he had
taken me to a game, and brought along a gigantic telephoto lens and his super-professional wide-angle one, too. That's why I had huge blowup prints of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada on one wall, and an even bigger one of the view from the upper deck on another. As if that weren't enough, he had also taken the family portrait on my dresser and bought me the airplane models that lined the top of my bookcase.

Plus, half of the books were from him. And a bunch of old rhythm and blues CDs that he had probably made me listen to a million times in his truck, and then finally given to me when I happened to mention one day that one of them had a couple of catchy songs on it. Believe it or not, although I wouldn't have admitted it to friends or anything, I had actually copied every single track of those CDs onto my hard drive.

I had to be the only teenager in America who owned the complete recordings of Ray Charles AND B. B. King. In a strange mood just then, I found the Ray Charles collection on the MP3 player next
to my bed (yet another Grampa gift), and pressed
PLAY
. Even at low, midnight volume, Ray's gravelly voice filled every inch of the room:

Which goes to show you how incredibly depressing it is to listen to music when you have insomnia. I mean, pretty much by definition, if you're under the age of seventy, and you're listening to a fifty-year-old recording in the middle of the night, you are obviously not curled up with the one you love. Unless the one you love happens to be either as geeky as you, or deaf. Of course, AJ always says there's no such thing as love anyway. In his poetic words, “It's all just hormones, my friend. You might as well just say you're in testosterone with somebody. And if you're really lucky, she might be in estrogen with you.”

But anyway, my thoughts shifted from worrying about my grandfather to wondering what Angelika was up to. Sleeping, probably. But maybe not. Maybe
she was sitting in her own room, in front of her computer screen, looking at pictures of me. Maybe she was, at that very moment, hoping I'd get over my stomach problem and come back to school in the morning. Possibly, she was even thinking about what I'd be wearing, what we would talk about, whether we would get to work together in class.

Because I was wondering all those things about her. I even found myself wondering whether she would have her hair down in front of her glasses, or tucked behind one ear. I liked it both ways.

It hit me, at 1:23
A.M
.:
I am in testosterone with Angelika
.

Yeah, I know. Duh. But it really, really hit me. This wasn't just flirting, or playing around, or wanting a girlfriend. This was Peter Friedman wanting Angelika Stone. In pretty much every sense of the word. I wanted to know her. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to tell her everything about me, and still have her want to hear more. I wanted to introduce her to Ray Charles and hope she liked him.

My second-to-last thought before I finally nodded off was
I need to find a way to be alone with Angelika
. That was immediately followed by
But how? There's never a good bar mitzvah around when you need one
.

 

As you might expect, I got teased for days about the bio lab fiasco, until finally I was saved when some other kid slipped in the lunch line and dumped a tray of chicken pot pie all over a cafeteria lady. But things got back to normal, and life was swimming along again until the day we started our next photography project. Mr. Marsh got so pumped up by San's Henri Cartier-Bresson project that he decided the whole class's next assignment would be to walk around the school taking candids for the yearbook — with no flash, no zoom, and nothing but a 50mm lens.

A couple of the seniors squawked about this, because apparently, the usual method of getting the so-called candids was for the upperclassmen to run around shooting posed pictures of huge groups of their friends. But Mr. Marsh stood firm: Each of us had exactly one week to take ten really good unposed
pictures, and as he put it, “They bettuh not be pick-chuhs a' yer friends. 'Cause ya better believe I'm gonna know.”

Angelika and I were cruising down the hall to class the next day, with our school-issued cameras around our necks — because there was no way I would expose Grampa's equipment to the war zone of my school's hallways — when it happened. I stopped to snap a shot of a teacher yelling at some couple that had just been displaying what our student handbook refers to as “undue physical affection.” Just as we started walking again, Linnie Vaughn came up to me.

Linnie Vaughn! Came up to me!

Ahem. Anyway, she came up to me and said, “Hey, you're the kid who took the picture of me for the paper.”

I didn't trust myself to speak, so I just swallowed and nodded.

She reached out and punched me in the right shoulder. Apparently, swimmers are strong, because it hurt: I was just lucky she hadn't nailed my bad arm. Then she said, “Great job!”

I swallowed and nodded some more. Linnie turned to Angelika and said, “He's so cute! Does he talk?”

Angelika said, “Uh, once in a while. But a lot of times he just stands in one place and drools like this.”

Linnie Vaughn chuckled. “Well,” she said, “when he recovers, can you ask if he's going to take pictures at regionals this Saturday night? There's going to be a victory party afterward at my house, and it would be so cool to have a photographer there!”

I stood in one place. And probably drooled a little.

Angelika said, “What if you don't win?”

“Funny girl,” Linnie replied. “We'll win.”

“Great!” Angelika said. “Can I come, too? Usually we don't let this kid go out in public without a mute-to-English translator.”

Linnie said, “Sure. Just make sure he makes me look good, OK?”

I think I managed a nod and a squeak. Linnie turned sharply and walked away, as Angelika bumped me with her hip. I didn't know exactly what had hap
pened, but it felt kind of like I had just witnessed two lionesses marking their territory. “Pete, are you going to say something? Ever again?”

I thought,
Be cool. Be cool! What would AJ say in this situation?
“Uh,” I blurted in what I hoped was a slightly suave manner. “Do you have a date for Linnie's party?”

“Nope,” she said. “Why? Are you asking me?”

I nodded. After its brief interlude of functionality, my throat had locked up again.

Angelika smiled, put her hand on my elbow, and started guiding me toward the photo lab. “Absolutely, Pete,” she said. “I'd love to be your date!”

We turned a corner into a much noisier hallway, which cut off the conversation for a moment. But I could have sworn I heard Angelika mutter, “Like I was going to let you go alone …”

 

I walked home with AJ that day, and he was bouncing around the sidewalk like a man possessed. “Buddy boy,” he said, “this party is going to be the sickest party ever.”

As he ran across a street against the red light, I muttered, “You said ‘party' twice in that sentence.”

Somehow he heard, because when he got to the far side of the street, he said, “Party! Party! Party! It bears repeating, my friend. Think upon this: Linnie Vaughn invited you to a party, a fest, a fiesta, a soiree. Wait, a soiree is a kind of party, right? I, uh, just kind of threw that one in. But I'm getting a sixty-eight in French, so …”

“Yeah, AJ, it's a kind of party. But —”

“Soiree! Soiree! Soiree! So, are you going to, like, get all busy with Angelika? Because she's your date and all … but then again, Linnie Vaughn is Linnie Vaughn.”

“Which means?”

“She's the Queen of Hotness. And she invited you to her party specifically. AND she has a thing for younger guys.”

“What are you talking about? Who in the world told you that?”

“Dude, it's known.”

Him and his
It's known
. “Well, it doesn't matter. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I definitely think I like Angelika.”

AJ punched me in the shoulder, exactly where Linnie Vaughn had. It occurred to me that maybe he should go after her if she really liked younger guys. I mean, they shared the same taste in punching bags, anyway. That had to be worth something. “That's what I'm talkin' about!” he yelled in my ear as he jumped over a garbage can in the middle of the sidewalk. “Go get her, little tiger! Rrrawr! Oh, this is going to be sick, sick, sick! And don't worry if you get nervous at the party about, uh, seduction procedures. Fortunately for you, my friend, I have also been invited to this shindig.”

Whoa. It was strange enough that one of us had been invited to Linnie's party, but what were the chances that
both
of us had been? Admittedly, AJ was a popular jock, but this was
Linnie Vaughn's
party — the pinnacle of cool happening-ness. I looked at AJ blankly.

“What?” he said. “Isn't ‘shindig' another word for
party? Because if not, my eighth-birthday invitations made no sense whatsoever.”

I sighed. AJ could just be so tiring. It was like having a puppy that followed you to school. A huge, overly friendly, hyper puppy that could talk. And talk. And talk. “Yes, a shindig is a party. I'm just trying to figure out how you got yourself invited.”

“Well, the whole team is going to be there.”

“What whole team?”

“The JV basketball team. This is going to be an excellent networking opportunity for you. I mean, four of those guys are baseball players, too. I've been telling them how cool you are and everything, but they really need to hang out with you so the team can start to gel before the season gets going. There's Ray, the shortstop; DJ, the right fielder; Tommy — you remember Tommy? From two years ago in All-Star Baseball Academy? Hey, are you even listening? Here I am, trying to get you back on the path to awesomeness, and you're staring into space like I'm not even making any sense.”

“AJ, tryouts are still three months away.”

“Ah, but it's never too early to work on team chemistry. Speaking of chemistry, I can't wait to hang out with Angelika and you at the same time. I need to observe your interactions in detail.”

“Why?”

“Duh. Because, as your wingman and personal hormonal advisor, I have to analyze your moves, her countermoves, your counter-countermoves, her counter-counter-countermoves…. Wow, this is really complicated stuff. Maybe we should stop by Staples on the way home so I can buy a clipboard and some graph paper.”

“AJ, I appreciate all of this,” I said. “But isn't there a chance I might actually have things under control on my own?”

He looked at me for a second, and then busted out laughing. I took that as a “NO!”