That's What Friends Do

  Back in the locker room, I change into my dry T-shirt, and listen to the girls all around me talking.

  Olivia and DeeDee are discussing the science test we all have on Friday. Savanna’s telling Zari some story about her sister, who plays on the high school softball team. The chatter doesn’t seem so overwhelming.

  “What’d you think?” Haley asks me, grabbing her backpack out of the locker.

  “It was fun,” I say. “I know most of the seventh graders.”

  “You sound surprised by that.”

  “Not surprised,” I say, but I don’t know how to explain it to Haley. It’s like I forgot about girls besides Sarah and Carli and their crowd. The others were there, all along, but I stopped seeing them.

  “Want to come again tomorrow?” Haley says as I grab my backpack.

  I shrug. “If my sisters can pick me up after, I guess so.”

  The Peas pick me up at five on the dot, and say they’re happy to get me at five all week.

  At home, Dad is already in the kitchen, getting dinner ready, when I walk through the door.

  “Hey, Buddy,” he says. “The letter came today!”

  He nods toward the fridge: the baseball team first meeting letter. The letter Dad and I have been waiting for all year.

  “Want to read it?”

  Actually, right now, I don’t feel like reading it. I know everything the letter says. Coach D’s completely pointless mandatory first baseball team meeting is famous at E. C. Adams Middle School. “Sure,” I say.

  “How about you set the table and I’ll read it to you?”

  I shrug, grabbing the napkins and silverware and distributing them around the table.

  Dad takes the paper off the refrigerator and shakes it with a flourish, then clears his throat. “‘Dear parents, You are receiving this letter because your child has expressed an interest in joining the E. C. Adams Middle School baseball team’—blah blah blah—‘A mandatory meeting will be held on Tuesday, March third, during the lunch and recess period. At that time, all completed paperwork must be handed in, including medical forms, transportation permission forms and proof of academic eligibility’—blah blah blah. We’ve got those forms all done, right, Buddy? The letter goes on to say that boys who show up without the proper paperwork will be immediately cut. ‘There are always more interested players than the team can accommodate, so participation is not guaranteed.’ Coach is trying to separate the boys from the men, I guess.” Dad laughs. “He doesn’t scare us, right, Buddy?”

  Boys from the men, I think to myself.

  “Why’d you stay late today?” Dad asks.

  I planned to tell him. The truth is, I didn’t think about exactly how or when I would tell him, but I always thought I would. Until right now. When I say, “Group project for English.”

  Monday, February 23

  SAMMIE

  I go to softball practice again on Friday. We do more partner drills, plus a side-to-side drill to work on lateral movement. We also practice walking while pumping our arms because Coach Wright says it improves your running speed.

  We even run laps in the halls. I’ve never run inside before, and it’s fun. We thunder down the hallways, past open classroom doors. Mrs. Knell, still working in her room, waves at us as we run by. By the time practice is over, my face is flushed, my hair’s damp with sweat, and I feel loose and warm and good.

  “You coming to the cages this weekend?” Zari asks me as I’m packing my stuff in the locker room.

  I shake my head no. “Can’t,” I say, trying to think of a good reason why.

  Luckily, she doesn’t ask. “See you Monday, then,” she says.

  On Monday, I’m changed and standing next to Haley in the gym when Amanda Archer walks out of the locker room and strolls over to Savanna.

  I watch her, wondering what the queen of the seventh grade could possibly be doing at a softball team practice. But apparently she’s doing the same thing I am, because when Valerie and Savanna start the warm-up, Amanda pairs up with Jelly Lee, and when we have to get into groups of four for catching drills, Amanda and Jelly join Zari and me.

  “I thought I heard you were playing boys’ baseball,” Amanda says to me.

  “I did,” I say. “I mean, I am. But I’m trying this out too.”

  “Me too,” Amanda says. “I’m trying it out. I play field hockey in the fall, but I wanted a spring sport too.”

  I never thought I had anything in common with Amanda Archer, but maybe I do.

  Tuesday, February 24

  DAVID

  I spent the entire weekend trying, and failing, to come up with an idea for a comic strip about friendship and scary things. When I should have been working on my science lab homework, I was trying to tell the story of how Sammie and I went trick-or-treating together and some kids were throwing eggs, and we were afraid we’d get in trouble, so we skipped a whole street of houses. But I couldn’t make the story work. When I was supposed to be reading Tangerine for English, I instead spent two hours outlining a story about Sammie and me finding the fort, but there wasn’t anything scary about that. And of course, Mr. Phillips collected the science lab on Monday, and Mrs. Dougherty gave us a reading quiz.

  When the dismissal bell rings, I pack my backpack and head upstairs to the art room for the after-school meeting. Stepping out into the hall, I’m surprised to see Sammie at the other end with that new girl Haley. They’re walking away from me, toward the back staircase, so they don’t see me at all. I watch them, Haley talking and waving her hands around, and Sammie nodding and watching Haley and even laughing a little.

  That used to be me, I think. I’m the person who used to make Sammie laugh.

  All of a sudden, I remember our trip to Splish Splash Water Park last summer. Pop had taken the day off and Sammie’s dad drove, and it was just the four of us because Allie was too short for most of the rides—and too much of a scaredy-cat anyway—and Sammie’s sisters would never do that kind of thing. They’re more the lying-in-a-lounge-chair type.

  We started with the rides we could all do together—a couple of circuits on Mammoth River, and then down the Bootlegger’s Run water roller coaster. The dads wanted to go on a couple of the double raft slides with us. Sammie and me, we wanted to go by ourselves, but we compromised and did Dinosaur Falls three times. Then the dads told us we could go by ourselves for a while. I think they were kind of tired by that time, and needed a break. But we didn’t.

  I was psyched to do Dinosaur Falls on a raft with Sammie instead of Pop, but she wanted to go down Dr. Von Dark’s Tunnel of Terror.

  The truth is, I didn’t really want to, but I couldn’t tell Sammie, so I went. My teeth were chattering while we waited in line, and not because I was cold. When we got into the raft, I was shaking all over. Then we were off, into the tunnel. I’ve never been as scared as I was inside the tunnel. It was pitch-black, and just when I was getting used to the total darkness—whoosh! The slide dropped away, and we fell straight down. It felt like a hundred feet, that drop, through pure blackness. I didn’t scream because, honestly, there wasn’t time. My brain thought of screaming, and then we hit the bottom of the drop and we were sliding again.

  When we came out through the waterfall and into the sunlight, Sammie said, “That was totally cool. Let’s do it again!”

  Of course I went, even though I kind of felt like I might poop my pants. So we did (and I didn’t). We rode the Tunnel of Terror three more times, and then, after lunch, we did the Abyss on a double raft and raced down the Giant Twister body slides.

  It’s the perfect story for this contest.

  At the far end of the hall, Sammie and Haley push through the doors and disappear into the stairwell. I turn and walk to the art room, feeling like there’s something heavy and painful inside my chest, right behind my ribs. I wonder if it’s indigestion, like Pop gets, and whether Mrs. Olivar has any Tums.

  I sit down between Sean and Arnold, who leans over and whispers, “Want to sit wit
h us on the bus?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  Mrs. Olivar goes over all the details about the field trip—that we’ll be leaving in the middle of second period and arriving back at school during lunch, so just in case, we should pack a lunch.

  The whole field trip review takes all of ten minutes, so Mrs. Olivar tells us we can work on our comics until four thirty, when the late buses come.

  “I want to tell the story of two friends at a water park,” I say to Arnold.

  So, with Arnold giving me pointers and suggestions, I start drawing the first frames of my first comic strip ever, the story of me being terrified at Splish Splash. I draw Sammie as a cat, again, and me as a dog, but I draw Pop as a polar bear, wearing a bathing suit and a Mets baseball cap that are both too small, and I draw Dr. Goldstein as a cheetah, kind of lean and hungry-looking, but with a goofy smile so you know he’s not a scary cheetah.

  “I’m doing a story about a princess who’s a secret ninja,” Arnold says. “Her bodyguard is the only one who knows she’s a ninja, because he’s one too.”

  “Cool.”

  Arnold slides his paper over toward me so I can see. “In this episode they’re battling a giant glostosphere that wants to poison the Earth’s atmosphere.”

  Arnold’s comic has the same large-eyed girl and spiky-haired boy as the strip he was working on last time, so I figure that’s the princess and her bodyguard. The two kids are battling a giant round thing that looks kind of like Jabba the Hutt.

  “Is that the glostosphere?”

  “Yeah. It eats the enemies it vanquishes. That’s why it’s so big.”

  “Cool,” I say. “Eating your enemies seems like a really good way to get rid of them.”

  “Thanks,” Arnold says.

  “If I were an evil villain, I’d want to be one who ate my enemies, with whipped cream and hot fudge, and a hot chocolate after to wash them down.”

  “My glostosphere doesn’t bother with whipped cream,” Arnold says, sounding a little defensive. “He’s not tasting his enemies.”

  “Do you have any snacks?” I ask Arnold. “I’m kind of hungry.”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve got nothing.”

  I turn to Sean, who’s drawing some kind of bird with a long, curved beak. “You got anything to eat?”

  He reaches into his backpack, pulls out a plastic container, and twists the lid off. “I have an apple cut up, with the skin off. Two of the pieces have brown on them, so I can’t eat them. You could have those. If Mrs. Olivar has a clean plastic fork you can use.” He sets the Tupperware down in front of me. The slices of apple all look white to me, and I’m afraid I’ll take the wrong slices and ruin Sean’s snack. Also, apples are too healthy.

  “Never mind.”

  Sean slides the apple container so that it’s in front of him, leans over it, looks at the apple slices inside, then screws the lid back on.

  I point to the bird drawing in front of him. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That bird you’re drawing.”

  “A long-billed curlew,” Sean says. “It’s a North American shore bird found primarily in the western United States. Curlews mostly eat insects, although they sometimes also eat small amphibians, like frogs. I saw one this summer when I went bird-watching in New Jersey with my dad. A curlew, not a frog.”

  “Would you rather eat a frog or a bug?” I ask Sean.

  He tips his head to one side, thinking. “I personally would rather not eat either of those things, but if I were a curlew, I think I’d rather eat a frog. It’s bigger.”

  “I agree on both counts,” I say. Then I turn back to Arnold, who’s focused on his comic strip. In one panel, the princess shoots out some kind of rays from her eyes, but they seem to be bouncing off the glostosphere. Then she does a spinning kick and kicks the glostosphere right between the eyes.

  “I like how you drew the spinning,” I say. “That’s really cool.”

  “Thanks.”

  I slide my partly done comic over toward Arnold. He looks at it, and laughs. “That’s hilarious,” he says. “That dad polar bear in his tiny bathing suit, that’s really funny.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I need to show the two friends going into Dr. Von Dark’s Tunnel of Terror, but I can’t figure out how to draw it when they’re inside because it’s pitch-black.”

  “Draw the characters first, wherever you want them in the frame,” Arnold tells me. He grabs a blank comic template and sketches two stick figures in the middle of the first frame. “Then make the rest of the frame really dark, right up to like a millimeter away from the characters. You have to leave that little bit of white space, to make the characters pop out from the background.” He shows me, shading in around the two stick figures.

  “Thanks.”

  I grab my pencil and get to work. I draw and draw and draw until Mrs. Olivar claps her hands and says, “Start cleaning up. It’s almost four thirty.”

  I look down at my first ever comic strip, and feel proud. I grin, then glance at Sean and Arnold, hoping they haven’t noticed. They’re both busy packing up. I put my comic strip in my backpack, carefully so the paper doesn’t get wrinkled.

  “This was fun,” I say.

  “What?” Sean asks.

  “Drawing. Hanging out in the art room. With you guys.”

  Arnold snorts. “You’re weird.”

  “Thanks,” I say, wondering who they sit with at lunch.

  Wednesday, February 25

  SAMMIE

  I didn’t plan on going to the cafeteria. I was going to spend my lunch period in the nurse’s office, or maybe with Mrs. Knell, but when the bell rings at the end of English, Haley turns and says, “Do you have plans for the weekend?”

  So I tell her about how Dad and I were psyched to get in one more weekend of skiing, but my mother has a big Realtor event on Sunday night, and Dad has to go too.

  “I’ve never been skiing,” Haley says.

  “It’s totally fun. Dad’s taking me up to the Berkshires for the day on Saturday, just the two of us. I can’t wait.”

  “How long have you been skiing?”

  I launch into the story about how Dad took me on the bunny slope when I was three, and by the end of that first day, we were doing green trails on the big mountain. I only remember it from Dad’s telling, but I’m so caught up in the story that I don’t realize where we’re going until we’re pushing through the glass doors and I’m hit with the smell of grease and frying meat.

  And then it’s too late. I follow Haley through the lunch line, accept the plate with a burger, fries, and overcooked green beans that the lunch ladies pass to me, and walk with Haley to her table like it’s nothing.

  Savanna and Jelly are watching something on one of their phones. They look up and nod hello. Haley takes a chair at the end of the table, and there’s not an empty one next to her, so I end up between DeeDee and Izzy, with Adriana across from me.

  “Are you coming to softball practice again today?” Adriana asks.

  “I think so,” I say. “Probably.” Then I take a bite of my burger and chew slowly, hoping she’ll change the topic of conversation.

  “What’s not to be sure about?”

  “The first baseball team meeting is in one week. Softball’s fun and all, but I’m playing baseball.”

  “Boys’ baseball?”

  “Yeah,” I say. Then, before she can ask me anything more, I turn to Kennedy, who’s in my Spanish and science classes, and ask, “Are you doing softball?”

  “Can’t,” Kennedy says. “I run track in the spring.”

  “Me too,” a girl named Faith chimes in. “We do hurdles together. Except I’m better.” She grins at Kennedy. “Right?”

  “No way!” Kennedy says. “I rock the hurdles. I leave you in the dust.”

  Haley leans over and stage-whispers to me, “They have this fight all the time.”

  I turn to Olivia. “Weren’t you on my Little Leag
ue team?”

  “Yep. In first or second grade, I think. I switched to softball after that. My mom played in high school and college, so she really wanted me to. I’m psyched to finally be able to be on a school team.”

  Two other seventh-grade girls sit down at the end of our table.

  “Does anyone really eat green beans?” asks one, whose name, I remember, is Simone. “I mean, they have to know that we all just throw them right in the trash. It’s such a waste of food.”

  “I eat mine,” Haley says, popping a forkful into her mouth. “They’re not so bad.”

  “How about you, Sammie?” Faith asks.

  “No way,” I say. “I hate all beans. Especially overcooked green ones.” I poke at the pile of them on my plate for emphasis.

  “Do you still hate clowns too?” DeeDee asks.

  “Not anymore. I used to. How’d you know?”

  “We were in kindergarten together. In Mrs. Battapaglia’s class.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “I remember. Room 101.”

  DeeDee dips her burger in a blob of ketchup. “I invited the whole class to my birthday party. You came, but no one knew where you were for most of the party.”

  A memory from that party flashes in my brain: a horde of kids running around in the backyard on a warm, sunny spring day. “I completely blocked it out. It was a lady clown, right?”

  DeeDee takes a bite of burger and nods. “She made balloon animals for everyone.”

  “I remember being nervous about her, and then when she started doing the balloons I freaked. I thought they’d pop. Carli Martin was there, and I grabbed her arm and made her come hide with me.”

  “Your mom couldn’t find you guys,” DeeDee says.

  “She was pissed,” I say regretfully. “I think that was the last birthday party I went to for three years. I don’t hate clowns anymore.” I stab a green bean on my fork. “They’re better than cafeteria green beans.”

  Olivia and DeeDee laugh.

  “Hey, since you’re around on Sunday,” Haley says, “maybe you want to come to the cages with us? We’re having a practice there in the morning.”