Dodger and Me

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  “Oh, great, Willie. You’re saying she thinks I’m so imaginary that I’m not even really imaginary?”

  “Dodger, this isn’t about you. It’s about how this was the worst school day of my life. And how my mom is going to kill me.”

  “Dude, funny you should mention that. Because it’s time to start working on Part Two of the Three-Part Plan … .”

  By the time we walked in my front door, I was basically terrified. I now knew two parts of Dodger’s plan. The first was to “solve your Lizzie problem,” and the second was to make my mom stop being so overprotective. Dodger still wouldn’t tell me the third part, but I was having trouble imagining how it could be worse than the first two.

  Silly me. Looking back, I should have imagined a little harder.

  Naturally, as soon as my mom read Mrs. Starsky’s note, she sent me to my room until dinner, with strict orders to study my spelling words. She also warned me that I should “Just WAIT until your father gets home, young man!” So I was a little nervous, and being nervous made it hard to study. So did Dodger.

  “Dude,” he said as soon as I sat down at my desk with my spelling book, “you’re going to spend the whole night in your room, anyway—we might as well play for a while before you look at those words.”

  “What do you mean, the whole night? My mom just said until dinner, not the whole night.”

  “Trust me, Willie. Things happen.”

  Oh, that was excellent news. I asked Dodger to leave me alone for a while, which made him get all huffy. But he went POOF and disappeared. I forced myself to go over the words. I even wrote them five times each. It didn’t take long for me to become an expert on S-e-r-e-n-g-e-t-i and T-a-n-z-a-n-i-a. Then I had nothing to do. I tried playing games on my handheld system, but Mom heard the beeps, came in, and confiscated my toy. I tried reading, but I was too hyper. Finally I said, “Dodger—come back!” I felt kind of dumb talking to the air, but didn’t know what else to do.

  I waited. Nothing happened. I raised my voice and tried again.

  Still nothing.

  I tried one last time, almost shouting it. Dodger didn’t magically appear, but my sister, Amy, did, popping into my room without knocking, as usual. “Who are you talking to, Willie?”

  “Nobody. I’m just studying my spelling words. Sometimes I like to say them out loud.”

  “Yeah, right,” Amy said with a seven-year-old sneer. “You’re up to something, and I’m going to find out what. I’m on to you, buster!” Then she stomped out. I swear, sometimes it was like she was my mom’s clone or something. And one of my mom was already too much for me.

  As soon as I heard Amy’s footsteps fading down the stairs, I had an idea. It killed me to do it, but I said, “Dodger, please come back!”

  Poof. Dodger appeared. “Hey, bud,” he said. “I knew you’d miss me. Wanna play fear-ball?”

  Fear-ball? What the heck was fear-ball? It was hard to believe I had actually asked Dodger to come back, especially when he explained fear-ball to me. The object of the game was to fix what Dodger saw as the root of my baseball problem. He said I was afraid of the ball. Part Three of his plan was to make me a better ballplayer by conquering my fear. And the way to do that was to throw balls at me.

  Fear-ball was dodgeball without the dodging part.

  I tried to get out of the situation by suggesting other activities. But we couldn’t play Trivial Pursuit because Dodger felt that spending years on end in a bottle gave him a disadvantage when it came to keeping up with the news. He refused to play chess because he said the horse-shaped pieces were degrading to animals. I offered to read to him, but he said, “Human books? Ha! Like what? Clifford the Big Red Dog? Have you ever tried to have a serious discussion with a dog? You might as well be talking to a tree—a tree that has an annoying habit of slobbering all over your fur. Charlotte’s Web? Oh, because spiders are such great role models—except for the part where the females EAT the males. Curious George? At least he has opposable thumbs—but please. Dude, where’s the chimp literature? There was this one book that my last master read to me called Chimpy and the Chocolate Factory. Do you know that one? About a kind, honest young chimp who finds a golden ticket and—”

  I had to interrupt. “Uh, Dodger, I know that book. But it’s not about a chimp. It’s called Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

  Dodger looked heartbroken. “Oh,” he muttered. “Oh.”

  Then he grabbed a Nerf ball from the corner near my closet and whipped it at my head. Nobody knows how to change a subject like Dodger.

  Fear-ball wasn’t very fun for me, although Dodger seemed to enjoy it. The game went like, this: I would stand in front of my bed, after piling up a bunch of pillows on it. Dodger would grab one of the various balls that were scattered around the bottom of the old toy bucket in my closet. Then he’d instruct me not to move, and try to throw the ball as close as possible to my body without actually hitting me. He also said he’d start out with throws that weren’t very close or very fast, but that each throw would be faster and closer. For the first ten throws or so, I flinched, ducked, whimpered, dived, etc. Then I started to have some confidence, some nerve, some guts. After fifteen throws or so, I didn’t even blink until the ball whacked into the pile of pillows. Dodger announced that we were playing to fifty. I shuddered. At around the fortieth ball, Dodger took a couple of steps back, so that he was as far from me as the room allowed, and really started whizzing the balls by me. In fact, I was pretty sure the forty-fourth had grazed my right elbow. But I made it through to the last throw with all of my parts in one piece.

  “Here goes, my fearless young friend. The final throw! And then you will be the new World Fear-ball Champion (Human Youth Division)! For this, we must add to the challenge. I want you to hold these weights!” He made me straighten my arms out to both sides, and put a notebook in each of my hands. “Now I want you to close your eyes. No, wait—that’s not good enough. Here, try this!” He went into my closet and took the belt off of my bathrobe, tossing the robe to the floor in a heap. Then he wrapped the belt around my head so it covered my eyes and tied it tightly behind my head. Then I heard him walking away from me and picking something up from the floor.

  “Uh, Dodger?” I asked shakily “You’re using a Nerf ball for this one, right?”

  “Well, basically,” he replied.

  “What do you mean, ‘basically’?”

  “Well, it’s a ball … . Now get ready!”

  How was I supposed to get ready—make a last request? Watch my life flash before my eyes? I figured if I was going to get beaned, it might as well happen quickly, because my arms were starting to tremble under the weight of the notebooks. “All right, Dodger,” I forced myself to say in the deepest, steadiest voice I could manage, “I was born ready!”

  I felt every muscle in my body tense up, awaiting the sharp, sickening THWACK! of impact. I heard a swish and a creak that must have been Dodger winding up. Then, just when I knew the ball must be about to fly, I heard my mom pound on the door. “Dinner!” she shouted.

  And that’s when Dodger released the ball.

  When I woke up, my mother was kneeling over me, holding the belt from my bathrobe and screaming my name. It took me a moment to figure out where I was, and another moment to realize what must have happened. The throbbing agony in the center of my forehead was the big clue: Dodger had missed. Or not missed, depending on how you looked at it. He was standing behind Mom, peering anxiously over her shoulder at me. I put my hand to my head and could feel some kind of weird indentation lines crisscrossing about two inches above the bridge of my nose. Over Mom’s wailing, I heard Dodger say, “Oops! Sorry about that, dude. It’s this eye patch—messes up my depth perception. But man, you should have seen it: a perfect spiral. It was like, bang! And then you were like, ugh! And your mom was totally—”

  I let my head ease back to the floor. Amy and my dad came bounding into the room way too fast. Amy tripped over Dodger’s foot and crashed into
Mom’s back. Then Dad tripped over the football that was lying there and crashed into Amy’s back. I watched in horror as all three of them tipped forward onto me. By the time we got untangled, Mom was scolding everyone in sight, Dad was helping me to my feet and looking sheepish, Dodger was hiding in the corner under my bathrobe, and Amy was cracking up while pointing at my forehead.

  When my mom paused for breath, I asked Amy, “What? What’s so funny?”

  She couldn’t stop laughing, but she did manage to hold her hands in front of her so that her two pointer fingers made a plus sign. I looked at her. I looked at the football. I looked at Dodger, or at least the blue bottoms of his feet sticking out from under the robe. I felt my forehead again. Then I dashed out of my room and down the hall to the bathroom. I hit the light switch and looked in the mirror. What I saw was horrible: Dodger had pegged me smack-dab in the middle of my forehead with the point of the football, where the seams meet. The impact had left a perfectly formed, bright red plus sign dented into my skin. I looked like what Harry Potter would have looked like if Lord Voldemort had been really into math.

  Jeepers. This was no good at all.

  I trudged back to my room, feeling sort of woozy from the impact of the ball, followed by the impact of my family. When I walked in with one hand covering my forehead, everyone started in on me. My mom said, in that icy-cold voice moms use when they’re just on the edge of a total meltdown, “William, what exactly happened to you?”

  “Well, uh, I was trying to use that belt”—she was still holding the belt from my robe—“to make a catapult. Um, for science? It’s, like, this project-type thing, and—”

  “A catapult? IN YOUR ROOM? William Ryan, why don’t you ever use your head?”

  Amy couldn’t resist: “He did, Mom! Didn’t you see?”

  Dad looked like he was trying hard not to smile at that until Mom turned to him and said, “James, tell William that we won’t tolerate this kind of behavior! He could have been severely injured.”

  Dad gave me a weak little shrug, but said, “William, we won’t tolerate this kind of behavior! You could have been severely injured!”

  “But Dad, I wasn’t severely injured. I just got banged up a little. I’m fine, really.”

  Mom still looked upset, but now she focused on my injury. Gently, but forcefully, she pulled my hand away from my head. Amy snickered and said, “Wow, Willie, that’s some addition!” I just looked at her. She snorted. “Addition—get it? Wow, I am definitely the funniest kid in second grade!”

  And I was definitely going to be the dorkiest-looking kid in fifth grade.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Two Birds with One Stone

  SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d thought it would be, even though everyone looked at me funny because of my forehead. The plus sign had turned a lovely shade of purple overnight, which made it stand out even more than it had the night before. But nobody asked me about it directly except Lizzie. When she got on the bus, she asked whether it hurt, and when I said it didn’t, she blurted out, “Well, that’s a plus!” Then she realized what she had said and blushed. In fact, she was so embarrassed that she didn’t talk to me the whole day.

  So that was half of the good news. The other half was that Dodger had stayed home. He could barely look me in the eye after beaning me with the football, and insisted that he needed the whole day by himself so he could set up something super-special for after school. I admit that the thought of what Dodger could do with an entire day of planning was pretty scary, but at least it kept him away so I could get through school without getting in any more trouble. Craig and I both got hundreds on Mrs. Starsky’s pretest-retest. Or re-pretest. Or preretest. Whatever you called it, I was relieved.

  At lunch I sat at my usual table, alone. But with no Lizzie to bug me and no blue hair in my soup, I told myself it wasn’t so bad. The afternoon went by quickly, because we were planting terrariums. I love terrariums, especially the good kind with real worms in them. And in fact, our homework was to bring something to put in our terrarium. Mrs. Starsky even gave each kid a little plastic jar. Which meant I could dig for some nice, juicy worms on the way home. Five minutes before the end of school, I was in a great mood. Then a monitor came in with a note. Mrs. Starsky called me and Lizzie to the front of the room.

  There went the mood.

  The note said that my mom and Lizzie’s mom had to meet to discuss the work of their PTA committee at my house, so we should walk home together. “Take your time, and feel free to play outside on the way,” the note said. Clearly, that was the work of Lizzie’s mother; my mom’s worst fear was what I could do to myself if I had free time to play. Rubbing my forehead, I could almost see her point.

  When school let out, I started walking as fast as I could. Lizzie practically had to run to keep up. But then, just as we got to the place where the Little League fields ended and the edge of the forest began, I had to slow down. I couldn’t believe my eyes: Half of the sidewalk was blocked by a hand-painted wooden sign on a homemade stand:

  THIS WAY

  4 WORMZ!!!

  I stepped around the sign, just as Lizzie caught up with me. I had a bad feeling the sign was Dodger’s work. First of all, the lettering was blue. Second of all, who else would misspell “worms”? I just thanked my lucky stars that Lizzie wouldn’t be able to see the sign, and started walking even faster. I noticed I was pulling away from Lizzie again. Looking back, I was happy to see that she had stopped to pick up some litter from the sidewalk. It looked like a red, yellow, and white fast-food bag.

  Oh, no, I thought. But it can’t be. It just can’t. I turned and walked even faster.

  About ten feet later, with a pretty loud POP, another sign appeared right in front of me:

  HAY! YU MIST

  THE WORMZ!

  Again I stepped around the sign. This time I broke into a jog, thinking I could just run the rest of the way home. But the next sign popped up so close to me that I crashed into it and had to step back to read it:

  TERN AROUND!!!

  I did, and saw Lizzie standing behind me with her arms crossed, looking annoyed. She said, “Why are you running? Aren’t you curious about these weird signs?”

  Jeepers, I thought, she can’t see the signs, can she? With a POP, one more sign appeared over Lizzie’s shoulder:

  YES, SHEE CAN!

  SHEE PICKD UP THE BAGG TOO!

  I sighed. This was too much. I knew Dodger had tested me with the litter trick. But just because Lizzie picked up a stupid paper bag, that didn’t make her special.

  Did it?

  A bright blue carpet appeared right between me and Lizzie, and unrolled itself so that it became a path into the woods. I started to turn away from it, but Lizzie’s voice stopped me: “Oh, come on, Willie. Don’t you want to see what this is all about? We can have an adventure together!”

  Oh, yay, I thought. An adventure with Lizzie! But as she stepped happily onto the carpet and started skipping into the forest, I followed. Who knew what trouble Dodger and Lizzie could make for me if I let them have time alone together?

  I caught up to Lizzie a few feet beyond the tree line. She smiled at me. “Isn’t this delightful?” she asked. “Worms, a mystery, and a friend to share them with—what could be better?”

  I almost choked. We walked side by side for a few minutes, until suddenly we were in a clearing. A blue clearing. Only this time, instead of a little blue clearing with a stream, it was a huge blue clearing with an entire blue baseball field in it, and thick, dense bushes all around. In fact, as we stepped off of the carpet, the bushes closed behind us so that there was no way anybody but us could possibly find the field. Dodger appeared next to Lizzie with a huge grin. He was fully decked out in a baseball uniform. Across the chest, it said CHIM-PAGO CUBS. Next to him, in a neat pile, were two extra jerseys, a pair of mitts, and two sets of cleats. I held up one of the jerseys: It said NEW YORK MON-KEES in fancy lettering. Dodger tossed the other one to Lizzie
and shouted, “PLAY BALL!”

  While Lizzie was pulling her jersey on over her school clothes, I grabbed Dodger’s elbow and dragged him around the edge of the backstop. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Dude, you wanted me to solve your Lizzie problem, so that’s what I’m doing! Plus, we’re practicing baseball together, so this is like splitting two coconuts with one stone.”

  “Uh, the saying is ‘killing two birds with one stone.’”

  “Wow, you humans are, like, so violent.”

  “Oh yeah?” I pushed my hair back from my forehead so my bruise would show. “If humans are the violent ones, who did this to me? And anyway, how do you figure this is going to solve my Lizzie problem?”

  “Because, dude, after this, you’ll be great friends with her!”

  Did you ever feel like someone was listening to you but completely not hearing what you were trying to tell them? Anyway, when we emerged from behind the backstop, Lizzie was wearing her jersey, her cleats, and even her mitt. “Wow, everything fits me perfectly! Thanks, Mister Orangutan!”

  You know, if anyone else called him an orangutan, Dodger would flip out, or launch into some long speech about why chimps are far superior to orangutans. But all he said to Lizzie was, “No problem. I’m a chimpanzee, though. You can recognize us by our handsome, prominent ears and lively sense of fun! My name is Dodger, and I’m a close personal friend of Willie’s. He’s told me all about you, so I thought you might want to come and help me with his top secret practice regimen.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I was also amazed at how Lizzie wasn’t getting all freaked out by any of this. I mean, signs popping up in the middle of the sidewalk, self-rolling blue carpet trails, a magical baseball field, a talking blue chimp—she was going with the flow all the way. For a horrifying second, the thought crossed my mind that Lizzie might be kind of—well—cool.