Home of the Braves

by David Klass

  The War Zone came into view. It’s a place deep in the swamps, a bare circular clearing where for some reason marsh plants never grow. As we neared it, I looked around and saw that we were no longer just ten guys. Somehow word must have circulated through Lawndale High at lightning speed. Slade and I were being trailed to the War Zone by several dozen of the toughest Banksiders and Lawndale kids.

  There was no sign that the police knew anything was amiss, or that Tobias or Coyle had a clue that the opening battle in a war was about to take place. Tensions had reached this boiling point, and more than thirty kids had heard about the fight and slipped out of school to watch, without any of Red Flag’s sensors going off.

  I looked around at the faces of my classmates, and I saw how eager they were for me to fight. Guys were calling out to me, “You’ll take him, Brickman. You’ll spill his blood. You’ll kill him.” Oddly, they reminded me of the faces that the lightning had flashed on the walls of Lawndale High when I had taken my walk in the thunderstorm. They seemed to have the same hungry, ghastly, gaping mouths, the same flashing, furious eyes. The faces and voices swirled around me, and it was plain for me to see that Lawndale High was indeed haunted.

  Twenty years ago my father and Kevin Hutchings had taken this same slow march to the War Zone. Now I was only thirty yards from the barren circle of sand. My hands were away from my body, my fingers clenching and unclenching into fists, the coppery taste of fury and blood thick on my tongue. I could kill in this state. I wanted to kill.

  “You’ll break his face, Brickman. You’ll rip his heart out.”

  “Tear his head off his shoulders, Slade. And then we’ll get the rest of these Lawndale scum.”

  “We’ll see who gets who.”

  “Yeah, you’ll see. You’ll see.”

  I slowed and then stopped walking. Slade had already entered the sandy circle and peeled off his shirt. He stood there, feet spread apart and enormous arms out wide, waiting for me. “Come on, Brickman. Let’s go.”

  But I didn’t go. I just stood there, looking at him. Time froze up for me—froze up with my whole childhood behind me, and my whole future in front of me—into one diamond-hard crystalline instant.

  If we fought, it could not be hidden, just the way my father’s fight with Kevin Hutchings had become a local legend. I would be tossed out of school the way he had been expelled years ago. There would be no graduation day, no chance of moving forward to something new and different and maybe better. If we fought, I would be giving way to the same anger my father had given way to, and I would have to live with that for years. My fists were still clenched—I could feel the hatred bubbling up inside of me. If we fought, there would be a war, faction versus faction, town against town, punched out in school hallways and clawed over in locker rooms.

  No metal detectors or police could stop it. No adult supervision could stop it. Those security measures were only superficial—they couldn’t reach into the hearts and minds of the students involved. But I could stop it. That was the truth I came to in that long and frozen moment. This was my life. Not the life of any of the people around me, clamoring for blood, but mine. I had to make the decision, and I had to make it now, or it would be made for me. I very slowly unclenched my fists. “I’m not going to fight you,” I said to Slade.

  “You can’t back out now,” he growled.

  “I can,” I said. “And I am.”

  “YOU ALL HEARD HIM!” he shouted, as if he was being robbed of something precious. “ARE YOU GONNA LET HIM CHICKEN OUT?”

  Someone reached out and tried to push me forward, but I knocked the hand away. “Where are you going?” a voice demanded.

  “Back to school,” I said.

  Slade stepped toward me and roared, “IF YOU WANNA BACK OUT, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU GOTTA DO, BRICKMAN.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I whispered. But I didn’t know if I could do it. Looking Slade right in the eye, I very slowly began to dip my shoulders toward him. My body froze for a moment in rebellion—as if my very bones and sinew were fearful that if I bowed to him now, I would never be able to straighten up fully, ever again. But with an effort of will I forced my shoulders down, forced my head to dip. It wasn’t exactly a low and humble bow, but it was still the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life.

  There were gasps from guys standing near us, and I heard shouts: “Don’t do it, Brickman!” “Remember your father! Remember where you’re from!” “What a coward. There goes the fight!”

  Then I straightened up. “There’s your respect,” I told Slade. “But that’s it. The next time you start with me, or anybody from the soccer team, or any of my friends, I’m going straight to the police and I’ll tell them everything. I’m gonna name names and not hold anything back, and the only way you can stop me is to kill me. It’s over.”

  I don’t remember much about walking back through that marsh. I have some memory of guys from Lawndale and Bankside hurling insults at me, and even spitting at me, trying desperately to goad me into fighting. But most of all I remember thinking, as Lawndale High swam into view above the reeds and cattails, that when I had walked through the thunderstorm I had been saying goodbye to my childhood, and now I was walking toward my future.

  32

  The first word of the disappearance of the Phenom blew into our school on a Thursday with a November sleet storm.

  “He’s gone,” Charley the Fish told a few of us as we changed into our soccer uniforms for an indoor practice.

  “Gone where?” Harlan asked.

  “No one knows. But he’s disappeared,” Charley said.

  I finished tying a lace on my indoor soccer shoes, and asked, as if I really didn’t care too much, “Why did he leave?”

  Zigzag Zigler supplied an answer. “He felt this school was getting too dangerous. At least, that’s what I heard from somebody who heard it from Andy Powell.”

  Antonio Silva was gone all right. Coach Collins didn’t mention it when we started practicing, but he didn’t look very happy either. When we finished running wind sprints, Canoe Feet Cavanaugh came right out and asked, “Is it true the Phenom’s gone?”

  Coach Collins looked like he had just chewed and swallowed a lemon. “Yeah. So what?” he said. “We’ve got a second-round tournament game to win this Saturday. He’s just one player. Hell, we’ve won with him, and we’ve won without him. And we’ll win this Saturday, if you guys work hard and do what I tell you.”

  There was a long, grim silence, as if the team had suddenly gone into collective mourning. “Coach,” Charley the Fish finally said, “the truth is we didn’t win much without him.”

  “The truth,” Maniac Murray added sadly, “is that we kinda sucked without him.”

  “That’s five extra wind sprints!” Coach Collins shouted. “Let’s go. Brickman, aren’t you the captain of this team? Show some leadership!”

  When practice was over, I showered and changed back into my street clothes, and I was ready to head home with the rest of the guys. But then something occurred to me, and I broke away from them and headed for the band room.

  The lights were off in the main room, but I could see they were on in a practice room. I didn’t hear any flute music. Instead, I heard someone crying softly.

  Now, I know this is gonna sound awful, but I did tell you right at the beginning that I’m not the best person in the world, and that you could find a better one without looking too hard. I confess that when I heard that soft crying, I felt a certain satisfaction. On some level I even took pleasure in it.

  I switched on the bright overhead lights above the band shell, to signal my presence, and the crying stopped. I gave her a few seconds and then knocked on the door of the practice room, and pushed it open a crack. “Hey, K,” I said, “where’s your flute?”

  She dried her eyes and managed to whisper, “I didn’t feel like playing. You heard the news?”

  “Yeah, at soccer practice. You okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. And then Kris
shivered, and the tears started again, and she shook her head from side to side and whispered, “No, no, I’m not okay.”

  I stepped into the practice room and pulled the door closed, and held her, and let her cry on my shoulder. She cried for a long time, her body trembling. Her tears wet the back of my shirt. “He … he didn’t even say goodbye,” she finally whispered.

  “Maybe it was an emergency and he left in a hurry.”

  “No, he left to go to Spain,” she said. “I know because his father dropped off a note for me. Wasn’t that thoughtful of him, to write a note that his father could drop off ?” She sounded broken-hearted and furious at the same time.

  “Why Spain?” I asked.

  “He said in the note he had a chance to train with a team in Barcelona, and it seemed like too good an opportunity to turn down.” She took a few breaths. “He said he would try to write to me from Spain. But he said he’s a really bad correspondent, so I shouldn’t expect too much. And he didn’t give me an address to write to him.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have one yet,” I suggested.

  “Sure, right,” she said. I spotted a manila envelope on the floor, and she followed my gaze to it. “Along with the note, he sent me an autographed picture of himself. As if I’m some groupie. Which is, I guess, what I was.”

  Kris started crying again. I bent down and picked up the envelope, and pulled out an eight-by-ten glossy. It was, indeed, a photograph of the Phenom, suitable for framing, with his name written in script in big blue letters. No message. Just his autograph. “Nice picture,” I said. “He’s a good-looking guy. I didn’t realize his eyes were that shade of blue.”

  “I loved him,” she said, and her voice quivered. “I loved him so much. And he just used me … for his American adventure. That’s all I was for him.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I told her. “At least you got to go out with him for a while. And be one of the most popular girls in the school.”

  Kris pulled away from me fast, and we studied each other for about five seconds without speaking. “I hurt you,” she finally said. “Is that it?”

  “Every time you tell me you love him, you hurt me. And you know that, but you keep doing it.”

  “Well, I did love him,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I did.”

  “I know,” I said. “And don’t worry. There are lots of other good-looking guys in our school for you to go to the senior prom with. And some of them also own their own cars.

  She turned away from me and packed up a few things. “Thanks for comforting me, Joe,” she said. “I’m going now.”

  “Goodbye, Kris. Get home safe.”

  33

  I took a lot of flak for not fighting Slade. A number of guys called me a coward, or at least whispered it behind my back. Other students seemed to respect me for what I had done, or at least to be glad that a full-scale war between Lawndale and Bankside had been averted. With each day that went by, I was surer that I had done the right thing. And I had other things to think about. I was studying harder than I ever had before. Final exams were a few weeks away, and somehow I had to do better than C’s and D’s.

  It was a strange week. The School Board voted to promote Tobias to principal, and he celebrated by announcing a whole new series of rules. Each student was given a booklet containing new regulations and penalties. Clearly the iron grates and metal detectors were not coming down anytime soon.

  I ran into Kris a few times in the halls, and we nodded at each other, but neither of us said anything. Her eyes were red and she looked tired. I knew a lot about insomnia from recent experience, and my guess was that she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since the Phenom disappeared.

  That Saturday my soccer team played its second-round tournament game, against a high school from Rockland Township. Even though we played at home, the crowd was much smaller than we had grown used to. There were no TV cameras, and the popular clique from Lawndale decided not to honor us with their presence.

  My father surprised me by showing up just before the opening kickoff—it was the first soccer game he had ever come to in his life. He walked up hand in hand with Dianne Hutchings, and the two of them stood by our sideline, smiling and shouting. In honor of his coming to the game, and despite the fact that we had no offense at all, I managed to keep the game scoreless for the first half.

  I could tell my father didn’t know what to yell at soccer games. He kept shouting football stuff, like “Block him,” and “Chop him down,” and even “Watch the run,” which really didn’t make any sense at all.

  A soccer team without an offense is a losing proposition, and eventually Rockland broke through. They scored five goals in the last half hour, to humiliate us and end our glorious season on a dismal note. To tell you the truth, even though I’m highly competitive, I didn’t mind losing. We just weren’t that good a team. I enjoyed the thumping tackles, and the cold mud that slowly congealed on my shirt, and I felt like I deserved to wear every thread of the captain’s armband. And when Kris shouted from the high bleacher, I glanced at her and she looked back at me.

  With about ten minutes left, I gave my father what he wanted. The biggest Rockland player made a solo run at our goal, and I stopped him with a chest-to-chest collision that knocked me back three steps and sent their big guy flying face first into the mud. I heard my father shout excitedly from the sideline, “THAT’S IT, SON. CRACK HIS RIBS!”

  And I think I heard Dianne Hutchings’s voice shout at the same time, “YEAH, JOE! RIP HIS GUTS OUT!”

  In some ways they made a lot of sense as a couple.

  The final whistle blew, and we shook their hands and then circled up for Coach Collins’s final bad speech of the year. “I’m proud of you all,” Coach Collins said. “Maybe we weren’t as good as we thought we were, but we’re not as bad as we could have been, either, and we’re also not mediocre.” He stopped, as if he’d run out of categories, and stood there looking around at us. “I don’t know what else to say,” he finally admitted, “except that I don’t know what else to say. Joe, do you want to add anything?”

  “Nope,” I told him. “Season’s over. Let’s move on.”

  My dad and Dianne waved me over as I headed back to the locker room. “Good game,” Dianne said. “You really conked that guy.”

  “He’s a tough soccer player, but he’s an even better swimmer,” my father told her. “I call him Marlin Man.”

  I watched the two of them walk off together, and then started to run back toward school with my head still turned. I bumped into Kris, and nearly ran her over. “Sorry,” I said.

  “No, I’m sorry, Joe,” she said. “Tough loss.”

  “Sometimes losing feels better than winning,” I told her.

  “You played great,” she said. There was a long, silent beat. She asked very tentatively, “You don’t want to walk home together? I mean, I wouldn’t mind waiting around.”

  “Thanks, but don’t bother,” I told her. “I’m gonna walk home with the guys.”

  “Sure, yeah,” she said, and turned away. “Bye, J.”

  I let her get five steps before I grabbed her from behind. “All the years we’ve known each other, and you still don’t know when I’m pulling your leg?”

  “Actually, you’re standing on my foot,” she said.

  A half hour later Kris and I were walking home together, along the same side of the street we had always walked on, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk.

  We talked about stupid stuff for about ten blocks, but by the time we reached the big maple tree with the low-hanging branches we had run out of small talk. So we stopped and faced each other and spoke the truth. “I feel sorry for a lot of the things I said to you,” Kris told me. “I was a jerk. Some of what I said must have hurt bad.”

  “It did. But some of it was true.”

  “Can you forgive me?” she asked. “Can we be friends, like we were?”

  “Never friends like we were,” I told her. “Maybe more
than friends, or maybe less, but we have the rest of the year to figure that out. I do know I’m going to need your help.”

  “For what?”

  “To get a B in algebra. I know it’s a long shot, but there’s this ship called the Sea Gypsy.”

  She looked confused. “What ship? What are you talking about?”

  “I actually have you to thank for it. You made me open a door. But come on, I’ll tell you all about it as we walk. It’s getting late, and I have a lot of studying to do.”

  We walked off together into the sharpening late November wind, which for the first time held more than a hint of the coming winter. We were heading toward her house that was across from my house, so that any way you figured it, we were going home.

  ALSO BY DAVID KLASS

  You Don’t Know Me

  Screen Test

  Danger Zone

  California Blue

  Wrestling with Honor

  Copyright © 2002 by David Klass

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Barbara Grzeslo

  eISBN 9781466810426

  First eBook Edition : January 2012

  First edition, 2002

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Klass, David.

  Home of the Braves / David Klass.—1 st ed.

  p. cm.

  “Frances Foster Books.”

  Summary: Eighteen-year-old Joe, captain of the soccer team, is dismayed when a hotshot player shows up from Brazil and threatens to take over both the team and the girl whom Joe hopes to date.

  ISBN 0-374-39963-8

  [1. Soccer—Fiction. 2. High schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.K67813 Ho 2002

  [Fic]—dc21

  2002019391