Say It Ain't So (2 page)

You give till it hurts.

Then you give some more.

By the end of the holiday break I was pretty bummed and (gasp!) feeling ready to go back to school. It was awful hanging around the house, thinking about everyone else's presents. Pennsylvania winters are cold and wet and icy. All of December had been mostly just slush—not even a snowfall decent enough to chuck snowballs or bust out the sled.

Too wet to go out, and too cold to play ball. That's me quoting Dr. Seuss. Shut up, I know it's a baby book, but it's stuck in my head because Dad used to read it to me nine million times. I still have my copy with a homemade bookplate reading
LENNY'S FAVORITE BOOK
pasted inside. Only,
favorite
is spelled wrong. Come to think of it, so is
book
. And let's be honest, the odds are beyond pretty
good that I put five extra
N
s in
Lenny's
and made the
E
backward.
LƎNNNNNNNY'S FAVRETE BOK
. Whatever. I was, like, four.

Also, every year around the first of January I start to get jittery from not having baseball to watch. This year was especially rough since the Phillies flamed out in the first round of the play-offs. The off-season was long and cold and as black as a starless night.

I will say that seventh grade at Schwenkfelder Middle School was shaping up to be quite a bit nicer than sixth. Me and my best friends (Mike and Other Mike) were sort of legends of the seventh grade. I mean, not everyone cared, but we did get somewhat famous the previous summer. How? Oh, only by solving the biggest crime in Philadelphia Phillies history. Part of the chase for a murderer (which eventually led us into the line of fire and also the Phillies dugout) introduced to us our favorite player, catcher Ramon Famosa. Of course, that turned out not to be his real name. And when I say “our favorite player,” I mainly mean me and Mike. Other Mike has no interest in baseball. He's mainly into books about wizards—sorry, warlocks. There is an important distinction that escapes me,
but Other Mike would be really happy to tell you all about it and probably make a presentation that would last a few hours.

The point is that something kinda major happened when we met Ramon Famosa, something besides almost getting killed in a shopping mall. Famosa saw Mike grab a video camera out of the air and block a sprinting little person from stealing it. It was a pretty awesome move by Mike, I thought. Famosa agreed. He told Mike that he should be a catcher. Now, when a big-league catcher tells you that you have the right stuff to be a catcher yourself, you're going to think about it. Ramon Famosa telling you that you could be a catcher is like Leonardo da Vinci telling you to go pick up a paintbrush. Which would be really impressive on account of da Vinci being dead. But I can't think of any painter who is alive, so just go with me here. The only problem with that whole idea is that there's a reason Mike quit baseball. His arm. Mike was a pretty good pitcher when we were about nine. That was the same year that I quit due to a highly embarrassing reason that I don't want to mention again if I don't have to. But Mike quit due to his arm injury.

Mike is sort of a stubborn personality, so he
didn't listen to any of the repeated warnings from his coaches about resting his arm. He'd pitch the maximum number of pitches allowed in Little League and then go home and throw a million more fast ones into the pitching screen in the backyard. His shoulder got pretty bad and he had to take a break from pitching. He could have played a different position and stayed on the team, but like I said, Mike is pretty stubborn. He had it in his mind that he'd be a pitcher or nothing, and so nothing it was.

Let me say that part of me thought that maybe he was also quitting baseball to be a good friend to me. My career was
definitely
over, so maybe he was quitting out of solidarity? Yeah, right.

On New Year's Day, as I left our house and rode my bike to Mike's house, it had (finally!) just started to snow. Not enough to stick to the ground and extend winter vacation, which would have ruled, but enough to dust the grass and stick in everyone's hair. The flakes landed like dandruff in my black hair as I finished the short ride, parked my bike in the driveway, and rang the doorbell at Mike's house.

Mike's mom answered the door. She was carrying a basket of laundry on her hip. “How many times have I told you that you don't have to ring the doorbell?” she asked. “You're like family.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I always forget. The cardiologists trained me to be polite, I guess.”

“It's weird that you call your parents ‘the cardiologists,' ” she said as I came in the front door and took off my boots. I just shrugged.

“Mike around?” I asked. It was a dumb question because I knew that he was.

“Garage,” she said. “It's freezing, but he's been out there all morning hitting off the tee.” I heard a
thwack
of bat against ball as if to prove her point.

“I guess now he wants to work on his defense,” I said.

“Don't tell me that you're here to help him test out his cup,” she said.

“Ha-ha,” I said. “Yeah. How did you know?”

“He asked me to kick him in the crotch this morning. I told him there are just some limits to a mother's love. His sister volunteered, but I thought that wasn't the best idea.”

“Yeah, there's a pretty good chance that would have ended badly,” I agreed.

The
thwack
sounds from the garage stopped, and a second later Mike walked into the foyer. It might have been an optical illusion, but he seemed bigger than the last time I saw him, which was just the other day. He was filling up almost the whole doorway. He was sweating despite the cold and breathing a little heavily.

“Hey, Len,” he said. “You might want to look into using that bottle of Head & Shoulders I gave you for Hanukkah.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Your hair.” He pointed with the batter's glove on his left hand. “Snow makes it look like you got dandruff.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking that.” I took off my coat and hung it on the rack by the door. Mike's house always had a great smell and a lot of snacks. It was hard not to be in a good mood when you walked in the door, no matter how bizarre a mission you were on.

“Weird thing is, I
wish
I would have gotten a bottle of dandruff shampoo for Hanukkah,” I said. “Better than nothing.”

“Better than having to
give away
stuff,” he said. “I still can't believe that.”

“Yeah, but, you know, it's making me a better person and all that.”

“Do you
feel
like a better person?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I feel like the greatest person in the world. I feel like if Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa had a baby.”

“But you'd trade it all to get your video games back?”

“Ha-ha, yeah. Trade it in a heartbeat.”

“Mother Teresa would be proud,” he said. “Listen,
I have to go get the cup. You head into the garage. I'll meet you in there in a sec.”

I headed into the garage. It was packed to the gills with empty boxes that had held the toys Mike and his little sister, Arianna, had gotten for Christmas. I tried not to be jealous. There was also a spot in the garage where Mike had cleared away the boxes, garbage cans, old shoes, and other random junk that always fills everyone's garages. He had turned this area into his little catcher-training gym. He apparently was taking it very seriously. There was a catcher's mitt, of course, and some balls, as well as dumbbells and even a book from the library on how to be a catcher.

It was a really old book. Maybe it was the only book they had in at the time, or maybe Mike's dad was remembering it from his childhood and checked it out. Johnny Bench was on the cover, and the title was
Hey, You! Be a Better Ballplayer! Become a Star Catcher!
Apparently,
Be a Better Ballplayer!
was a whole series. Also, apparently, the author really! liked! exclamation! points! The 1970s were a pretty exciting time, I guess. Sideburns!

Mike was taking a long time getting his cup on. I suppose it's a pretty delicate procedure. I've never
worn one myself and don't fancy that I ever will, thank you very much. I skimmed most of
Hey, You! Be a Better Ballplayer! Become a Star Catcher!
and it was not really worthy of such exciting punctuation, I can tell you that. It had lots of the basics about how to crouch and call pitches. A riveting chapter on footwork. A bunch about how to throw. We can only assume that Mike skipped over the throwing sections and just hoped somehow that wouldn't be a major part of his game. I guess he could throw out a runner if he had to—it was the repetitive stress of pitching that was messing up his shoulder.

There were also lots of old-school tips on “getting tough.” This was apparently a big part of being a catcher. You were supposed to spend a lot of time punching your catching hand with your other hand. I guess the idea was that it would numb the nerves or build up calluses or something. I tried it, but felt silly. It looked like I was itching to start a fight with someone.

Finally Mike came back into the garage. I knew he was wearing a cup but I tried not to look down there. This was getting weird.

“Um, ready?” I asked.

“As I'll ever be,” he said. “If I'm going to make
the team, I'm going to have to get used to this. You know, Davis Gannett has no fear of the fastball.”

“Davis Gannett has no fear of anything,” I said. Davis was an eighth grader and the current starting catcher on the Schwenkfelder Middle School baseball team. He was as big as a high school senior and it wouldn't have surprised me to find out that he was actually twenty-five. The kind of kid who might have flunked a few grades—say, ten or fifteen. He had a little mustache and a shaved head. Most of the kids at Schwenkfelder had this blow-dried side-combed haircut like a certain pop star made popular. Not Davis Gannett. He had a head shaved so close it must have been done with a straight razor. What hair he did have was very light, blond to the point of being almost white. It made him look like an old man. It made him look like a serial killer.

Mike took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and said, “Let 'er rip.”

I brought back my right foot and did as I was told. I kicked Mike in the crotch. Hard.

He didn't even blink. “Is that all you got?” he said. He yawned and cracked his knuckles.

“Just warming up,” I said. I took a step back and really let him have it. Again, not even a blink. It
was then that I knew he was going to make the team. He was going to be a star. It was also then that Mike's little sister, Arianna, walked into the garage. She had grown a lot in the past year. She was, much to my annoyance, like, almost as tall as me. She was terrifying as a tiny person, so now she was, well, whatever is beyond terrifying. She always hated me for some reason, and the feeling was beginning to be mutual.

“My turn! My turn!” she said.

“No way,” Mike said. “Get out of here. I don't want you anywhere near me, Arianna.”

“I don't want to kick
you
,” she said. “I want to kick Lenny.”

“I'm not even wearing a cup!” I said.

“I know,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “That's my point.”

Mike and I looked at each other. He started to laugh. I did not.

“Uh, can we go do something else?” I asked.

“You go ahead inside,” he said. “I have a few more drills I need to practice. You can check out my new toys.” Then he paused for a second and hastily added, “Sorry.”

“No need to apologize to me,” I said. “You didn't invent Discardia.”

“Oooh,” he said. “Actually, I did. I'm also behind National Mustard Day. And Have a Bad Day Day.”

I should have laughed. It
was
a pretty good one. But I was feeling so glum. It wasn't just the toys. It wasn't just that Mike was obviously going to make the team while I sat on the sidelines. It was more than that. He had this … this thing he was so excited to do. Little League is big around here, yeah, but the middle school baseball team is what's really huge. Mainly because the high school baseball team is always great. It's a pretty small school, but they had an amazing history of success.