Safe at Home (6 page)

“Like who?” Nick said.

“Well, when I was a boy,” his dad said, “my absolute favorite books were the ones about King Arthur and Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table.”

“That’s the one about the sword in the stone, right?” Nick said.

He could see the excitement on Paul Crandall’s face. “You know it?”

“My friend Jack says it was his favorite cartoon movie when he was little.”

“You never watched it?”

“No,” Nick said, wishing in that moment that he had.

Paul Crandall smiled to himself, nodding. “Anyway…Lancelot was my favorite,” he said. “And I was thinking you might find him to be kind of…cool. Because even though his parents were royalty—the king and queen of Benwick—he was raised by somebody else, the Lady of the Lake.”

“Sort of like an orphan,” Nick said.

“Sort of.”

“Did he go up against any bad guys?”

“The baddest, as you and your friends might
say,” Paul Crandall said. “Sir Turquine. He turned evil and imprisoned over sixty of King Arthur’s knights.” He was smiling broadly now. “And he did
very
well when he had to go up against giants. And I don’t mean the San Francisco Giants.” He was still smiling as he said, “The stories about those knights are as good as there are in the history of stories. You should read them sometime.”

“Maybe I will,” Nick said, knowing there was
no
chance of that happening anytime soon. He was far enough behind with the books he was supposed to be reading.

There was a silence between them then, a big one, as if neither one knew how to end this. Finally Paul Crandall said, “Nick, you were awfully quiet at dinner tonight.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

Nick knew that what had happened at practice was probably something a boy was supposed to talk about with his dad. But he wasn’t in the mood. He hadn’t even wanted to talk about baseball with Gracie tonight.

If his dad didn’t get it with comic books, which
were at least books, even if they did have cool pictures in them, how was he possibly going to understand what had happened on that field today?

“You’re sure.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. Then: “I’ll do my homework now. Promise this time.”

Paul Crandall said he’d look in on Nick when it was time to say good night, then closed the door behind him. Nick went over and sat down at his desk and opened his math book to where his assignment page was.

In that moment he couldn’t decide what he wanted more, for his math problems to disappear or his baseball problems.

Without even realizing he was doing it, Nick brought his hand to the bump on the top of his head.

Shazam, Nick thought.

Shazam, shazam, shazam.

Usually during free period Nick would play Wiffle ball. Because once they got to spring at Hayworth and the weather started to get nice and turn into baseball weather, Wiffle ball was about the biggest thing going with seventh-grade boys.

They’d go down to the huge lawn by the new upper-school building, called the Randolph building, and every day was like a brand-new World Series of Wiffle. The teams changed every day, but the fun of being out here, playing ball for an hour during school, trying as hard as you could to hit a home run every time up, to hit one farther than anybody else that day, never changed.

One time, in the middle of a game, Ollie Brown looked at Nick and said, “This is more fun than fun.”

If you asked the guys playing what their favorite class was at Hayworth, Nick knew just about every one of them would say the same thing: Wiffle.

On their way out of English class today, during which Nick had been called out by Mr. Dodds for not having done his required reading the night before, Nick announced to Zach and Ollie and Jeff, all of whom were in Mr. Dodds’s class with him, that he was skipping Wiffle just this once.

“What’s the matter, you’re too cool for us now that you’re on
varsity
?” Zach said.

Nick didn’t really think Zach was serious. As far as they could tell, Zach was never too serious about anything, except maybe the Boston Red Sox. He was still taking a little bit of a shot, though.

Nick thought, If he thinks
I
think I’m cool because of varsity, he has
no
clue, zero and zip, about what happened yesterday.

“You’ve got enough guys,” Nick said. “There’s always enough guys.”

“C’mon, dude,” Ollie said. “Now that you’re a big star on varsity, Wiffle is the only ballin’ we’re gonna get to do with you.”

Jeff Kantor grinned. “You can tell us what it’s like to make the Show.”

Jeff put air quotes with his fingers around “the Show.” They were all huge baseball fans; it was the main reason they hung around together, and so they all knew the Show was another way of saying the big leagues.

Nick wondered how he could get it from both directions now, his new varsity teammates and his old JV teammates.

The only difference was, he knew these guys actually cared what happened to him, unlike the guys who were supposed to be his teammates now.

“No kidding,” Nick said. “
Horror
show is more like it. The way I played yesterday with those guys, we’re probably gonna be together again real soon, and not just on the Wiffle ball field.”

They all tried to change his mind one more time. When they realized it wasn’t going to happen, that Nick was really going to take a day off, they ran down toward the lawn next to Randolph and Nick walked by himself toward the smaller lawn in the middle of the circular driveway in front of the main
administration building. That was where the kids who just wanted to chill went to hang out during free period if it was a nice day, like today.

That’s where he found Gracie.

She was sitting alone on a bench reading. Not a schoolbook. Just the latest book she was reading for fun, one with a funny picture of a fish on the front, with a toilet seat around his neck, called
Flush.
No surprise there. Gracie was always reading. Sometimes they’d be either in her mom’s car or Mrs. Crandall’s car for a ride across town, and Gracie would whip out a book in the backseat and start reading if Nick was listening to a ballgame on the radio.

“Hey,” Nick said.

She looked up, immediately marked her page and closed the book. Smiled at him, “Hey, Captain,” she said.

Then right away she said, “Are you sick?”

“No,” Nick said. “Why’d you ask me that?”

“I just figured you had to be sick if you’re not down there with your boys trying to be the Wiffle king of Hayworth.”

Nick sat down next to her. “I’d probably stink at that, too,” he said, then told her as fast as he could about everything that had happened at practice.

“I was wondering why you didn’t call last night or instant message me,” she said.

“I didn’t feel like talking about it,” he said. “Or typing about it.”

“I already knew, anyway,” Gracie said.

“How?”

“Jack told me last night.
He
IM-ed me.”

“Well, I hope he didn’t tell the whole school,” Nick said.

He had been with Gracie when she was IM-ing people. Sometimes it would look as if she had about six conversations going at once. Nick would get worn out just watching her—it was like she was using her keyboard the way a juggler would.

“Just me,” Gracie said. “And you know I don’t talk, no matter what.”

Nick leaned his head back as far as he could, staring straight into the sun the way he had trying to catch that foul ball.

“I gotta find a way to get out of this,” he said.

“Well, at least you’ve got a good attitude about everything,” Gracie said, giving him one of her elbows to the ribs.

“Is that supposed to be sarcastic?”

As if he didn’t know.

“It’s not supposed to be anything except me telling you to stop acting like a baby,” Gracie said. “You have one bad day and you’re ready to quit?”

“What I’m not ready for is varsity.”

“Stop being such a whiner,” she said. “I mean it. You know how much I hate it when you turn into a mopey mope.”

Nick still had his head back, remembering how practice had ended. “You didn’t hear the way they all laughed when I got plunked right on top of my head.”

Gracie said, “You have to admit, if it had happened to somebody else, you would have thought it was pretty funny, too.”

“Thanks. But you wouldn’t think everything was so funny if you heard some of the little comments they made when they thought the coach couldn’t hear.”

“Boo hoo,” Gracie Wright said.

“You weren’t there, is all I’m saying.”

“Wouldn’t have made any difference if I had been,” she said. “Because I know something they don’t know on the dopey varsity.”

“What?”

“You’re tougher than they are.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I
am
right. The only problem sometimes is that you don’t know how tough you are.”

Before Nick could come up with an answer for that, he heard a cheer from down the hill, sat up straight and looked down there and saw Ollie circling the bases, saw Zach retrieving the ball past the tree line at the end of the lawn, which in their game meant only one thing:

Home run.

“At least somebody’s having fun at baseball today,” Nick said.

“You can, too,” Gracie said. “It’s like something my mom says when she’s telling me I can do something I don’t think I can.”

As if that ever happened, Nick thought. She thought she could do anything except fly.

And maybe even that.

Gracie said, “My mom just tells me to get out of my own way.”

“I couldn’t even get out of my own way trying to catch one ridonkulously easy foul pop,” Nick said.

“So today will be better,” Gracie said, and said it so convincingly that she almost started to convince Nick.

Today there was no team meeting before the start of practice, which was just fine with Nick, since he didn’t feel like part of this team any more than he had the day before.

They did some stretching drills first, Coach Williams saying they were going to start doing them every day, that you were never too young to stretch before sports. Then he announced it was going to be a very busy day for the Hayworth Tigers, infield first and then batting practice and then baserunning and then some scrimmaging, if they had time.

“We’ve only got ten games in our season,” Coach Williams said. “And as most of you probably know, there’s no play-offs in our league, for the simple reason that we don’t have enough time to get them in before the end of the school year.

“Anyway,” he continued, “our first game is next Tuesday, so we’ve all got to think of our first week of practice as being like the last week of spring training for teams in the majors. Which means we’ve got a lot of work to do in a real short amount of time.”

Tell me about it, Nick thought.

“One more thing,” Coach Williams said. “Everybody who goes to this school knows that we’ve only got one huge rival, and that’s King. Who has beaten us the last five years running. In addition to them going undefeated the last three. This year they’re our fourth game, so circle that date on your calendar. And, gentlemen? We are going to be ready.”

Early in practice there wasn’t a lot for Nick to do. While Coach hit grounders to the infielders, Nick just stood next to him, catching the ball when the guys lobbed it back in.

Even doing something as simple as that, he felt everybody watching him, same as yesterday.

It made him remember the first day he’d played T-ball in Riverdale, way before that day at Shea Stadium had turned baseball into something he lived and breathed. They were called the Riverdale
Redbirds, even had the bird that looked like the St. Louis Cardinals bird on the front of their red caps.

Nick didn’t remember the caps as well as the feeling he had when he got to the field and looked around and realized there wasn’t a single kid on the field he knew.

That day, standing at the edge of the parking lot right behind the backstop, holding on as hard as he could to Mr. Boyd’s hand, he’d said, “I want to go home now, please.”

They had gotten there late, so all the other kids had their red caps and red T-shirts already, and were lined up getting ready to swing away at the ball on the tee.

“C’mon,” Mr. Boyd had said, half walking Nick and half tugging him toward the field. “You don’t know it today, but someday fields like this are gonna feel like home to you.”

“I don’t know anybody,” Nick had said, still holding on to his hand.

“Those boys out there, they’re the same as you. All they care about is hitting that little ball.”

Afterward, long afterward, one night when Mr. Boyd and Nick were watching a Mets game on television,
they were talking about that first day and Mr. Boyd had said, “We did the right thing. If we’d gone home that day, you might never have gone back.”

“I was just a little afraid.”

And Mr. Boyd had said, “Everybody’s afraid of something in sports. Of failing, mostly. The best ones are just best at getting past it.”

I have to find a way to do that now, Nick thought. Today.

Even though there was a part of him that felt like a Riverdale Redbird again, wanting to leave this field and go straight home.

In batting practice, Nick was at least hitting the ball today, getting some good line drives off the coach—one to left, one to center, one to right.

“Way to use the whole ballpark there, Nick!” Coach Williams said.

Nick thought, He makes it sound like I just won the game with a grand-slam home run.

“See?” Jack Elmore said when Nick’s turn at bat was over and Jack’s was about to start. “I
knew
you’d remember which end of the bat you’re supposed to use!”

Nick said, “Just so you know? You’re not helping, as funny as you think you are.”

Jack grinned. “Dude. I’m not good enough to help.”

They both knew it was true. Maybe if his best friend on his team was also the best player on the team, he could have helped out with the other guys. But Jack wasn’t close to being the best player, which meant that Nick was pretty much on his own with the other guys. None of whom had said anything to him today. Nick couldn’t decide which was worse, the kind of stuff he’d heard from Gary yesterday, or the silent treatment he was getting now.