“We’re going to clear out our summer brains with a fun, easy math warm-up,” she says, and everyone breaks into grins. I have never done math before with a ball, or standing up, or with everyone smiling. This will be a first.
Mrs. Wu opens her mouth to say something else, then stops and waves toward the door. A man with yellow hair and the beginnings of a beard stands in the doorway, his hand raised in a wave.
“Mr. Jacobs, come on in!”
He strides into the room with a clipboard. On his way over to Mrs. Wu, he gives one boy a high five. “Not coming with me this year, buddy!” Mr. Jacobs says.
The boy grins. “I passed my reading test,” he says, and stands up straighter.
“I saw, man.” Mr. Jacobs smiles. “With flying colors!”
Flying colors must be a good score, because Mr. Jacobs high-fives the boy once more.
Mrs. Wu gives the boy a thumbs-up. I imagine Mrs. Wu doing this gesture in front of my teachers in Pakistan, and I can’t help it—a laugh escapes. I slap my hand over my mouth, and the boy with flying colors narrows his eyes. I want to tell him I am not laughing at him, but now everyone is looking at me, including the teachers.
Mrs. Wu waves me over. “Bilal, this is Mr. Jacobs, the ESL teacher. You’ll be going with him for a bit this morning.”
Mr. Jacobs shakes my hand. “Great to meet you, Bilal. What do you say? You ready?”
What I want to say is no, I am not ready to leave for ESL class. Not when we are about to play a math game.
But I have no choice. I follow Mr. Jacobs into the hall where three kids are waiting. None of us says a word as we head outside into the morning sun. I wonder if the others think it’s weird that we are leaving the school building.
“Almost there, folks!” Mr. Jacobs says. We round a corner of the school and head up a ramp to another building—not big and brick like the school, but smaller and square and the color of sand. When we get to the door at the top of the ramp, Mr. Jacobs passes his badge over a gray box next to the door. There’s a beep and a click, and the door unlocks. This must be a very important building if you need a badge to beep you in.
It doesn’t look very important inside, though. It smells a little damp, and our footsteps make hollow sounds as we walk down the hall. We come to a door that reads Welcome! in about fifteen languages. I find the Urdu Khush amdeed, and it feels like it is there just for me.
Mr. Jacobs unlocks the door. “Come on in.” He swings one arm wide, and we file in past him. A U-shaped table surrounded by dark blue plastic chairs takes up half the room.The sun streams in through a small window onto a neat stack of papers on Mr. Jacobs’s desk.
Three of the walls are bare, but the fourth one is full of photos and posters—one says Istanbul, another Rome, and two are from somewhere in China. I scan the wall for a poster from Pakistan, but I don’t see one.
“Take a look around, if you’d like.”
No one moves at first, so Mr. Jacobs waves us over to the display of photos on the wall. Up close, I can see that Mr. Jacobs is in most of them—sometimes alone, and sometimes with other people. There’s one of Mr. Jacobs on a camel in front of a pyramid, another of him standing on the steps of the Great Wall of China, and one where he is standing next to a pretty lady with long, dark hair who is holding a yellow-haired baby on a beach. He names the places in the photos, but there are no photos of Pakistan.
The girl standing next to me says she’s from a place called Cartagena, Colombia. She seems excited about a photo of Mr. Jacobs standing on top of some fort overlooking the sea.
“Okay, everyone,” Mr. Jacobs calls. “Let’s take a seat.”
We gather around the U-shaped table.
“You’ve seen my photos and heard a little bit about my travels. Now I’d love to hear about your first country.”
“First country?” the boy next to me asks.
Mr. Jacobs nods. “Some people call the place where they come from their home country, but after a while, the United States might feel like home to you, too.”
I don’t say this to Mr. Jacobs, but I can’t ever imagine feeling at home here.
“I grew up in lots of different places,” Mr. Jacobs explains. “I didn’t even live here in the United States until I was nine years old.”
“Where you live?” someone asks.
“My parents were missionaries.” He pauses and takes in our confused faces. “A missionary is someone who goes to another country to help people.”
We nod, although I don’t really understand. What kind of help?
“So we lived in China, Nepal, Tanzania, and Bolivia.”
I try to imagine living so many places in nine years.
I raise my hand.
“Bilal, you don’t have to raise your hand in here. With only four of you, we can take turns talking and still be respectful when it’s someone else’s turn.”
I glance at the boy next to me, and he shrugs as if to say, “Look, I’m not used to this, either.”
I ask, “You like moving all those times?”
Mr. Jacobs thinks about this before answering. “Not back then. But later I figured out that the hardest part of moving is right before you move. That’s when you know what you’ll be missing—friends, places—but you don’t know yet what you’ll be getting. You’ll have friends in your new town; you just haven’t met them yet.”
I do not want to disagree with Mr. Jacobs, but for me, the hardest part of moving is now. Or maybe the hardest part was saying good-bye to Baba. I decide they are two different kinds of hard that cannot be compared.
Mr. Jacobs taps a marker on the edge of the table. “Okay, now for introductions. We’ll each say our name”—he uncaps the marker and writes something on a small whiteboard—“then where we’re from, one thing we miss, and one thing we like about living here.”
One girl speaks up for the first time. “What if nothing I like here?”
Mr. Jacobs adds something in parentheses to the whiteboard and holds it up for us to see:
1. My name is __________________________ .
2. I am from ____________________________ .
3. One thing I miss from my first country is
_____________________________________ .
4. One thing I like (or one thing that surprises
me) about the USA is ______________________ .
He gives us a minute to read the board.
“Okay, I’ll start,” he says, pointing to the first sentence. “My name is Mr. Jacobs. I am from many places, but mostly Fairfax, Virginia. One thing I miss from Bolivia is playing soccer in the street. One thing I like about the United States is watching the Maryland Terps play basketball.”
He pulls out a photo of a bunch of dark-haired kids and one yellow-haired boy playing soccer on a dusty road near some low houses made of stone. He passes it around, and I notice a date stamped on the back: December 1990. Next he shows us a magazine cover with a man wearing a tank top and shorts, slamming an orange ball into a basket. The words next to it read: Terps’ Chance for Wild Card Slim to None.
“What do those words mean?” I ask, pointing to the magazine cover. It feels strange to blurt out a question without first raising my hand.
Mr. Jacobs slaps his hand onto his heart and sighs. “It means my team has not been winning the past few seasons. But they’re still my favorite team.”
In the next fifteen minutes, I learn that my ESL classmates are Sofia, Ana, and Samir. They come from El Salvador, Colombia, and Sudan. They miss things I have never heard of—atole de elote, arroz con coco, and waika. Sofia and Ana like pizza and frozen yogurt, and Samir is surprised by a kind of truck called eighteen-wheeler.
And then it’s my turn.
I take a breath. “My name is Bilal. I am from Karachi, Pakistan.” I check the whiteboard again so I won’t make a mistake. “One thing I like about America is the air-conditioning.”
Everyone laughs and nods.
“And what do you miss most, Bilal
?” Mr. Jacobs asks.
It might seem like a hard question, because I miss so many things—too many to say in front of everyone. I miss my friends and my school. Knowing where to go in the city if I am hungry for an after-school snack like makhai, a cob of corn roasted over coals with red pepper and salt and wrapped in newspaper. I miss understanding everything people say, not just some things. And cricket. And searching for pebbles at Hawks Bay and seeing the green sea turtle babies hatch from their eggs and scuttle across the sand to the water.
But this question is actually an easy one, because of the word most.
I look at my hands, my voice quiet when I say, “The thing I miss most is my father.”
Everyone is silent. I wonder if maybe I should have said a different answer—something funny or interesting. But then Mr. Jacobs asks, “Who else misses family in their first country?” All three of my classmates raise their hands, and I feel a little better. Not because I am happy they miss their families, but because I am not the only one.
When you feel alone, it is better to feel alone together.
Lunch at this school is nothing like lunchtime at my old school. There is no food stand—there’s a whole huge kitchen in the back with two counters long enough to fit ten kids across. There are plastic spoons instead of metal ones, and tiny cartons of milk instead of glass bottles of Coca-Cola poured into bags. Instead of paying in rupees, I have to punch in my lunch number on a keyboard. Luckily, Ammi made me memorize my number.
José sits next to me, although he spends his whole lunch talking to the boy sitting across from him. Jordan picks at her food down at the other end of the table, and it looks like her lunch is going about as well as mine is. The girls nearby talk around her like she’s not even there. Then again, she doesn’t seem to mind. She doesn’t even try to talk to anyone. A girl with a dark brown braid down her back says something that makes the other girls drop their forks and lean in. Not Jordan—she just takes another bite of spaghetti, staring down at her pink foam tray.
Mrs. Wu strides into the cafeteria and heads for our table. “Are we ready?” She motions for us to stand, sending chair legs scraping against the tile floor. The class forms a line, and I follow the other kids to a side door.
“Yes! Recess time,” José says.
Now I will finally discover what recess is.
The heat hits me like a wall when I step outside. I stop for a moment and squint in the bright sun. In Karachi it is hot—hotter than here, sometimes. But I’m not used to going from cool buildings into this heat.
Most kids race toward the playground or the grassy field. So recess must be Games Period. I scan the crowd, trying to find someone I recognize, but I don’t spot anyone I know. All the kids run around, laughing and talking like they’ve known each other their whole lives.
“That’s great you’ll be training with the developmental team.” Jordan’s voice comes from right behind me.
She comes and stands next to me, arms folded.
“Thank you.” I wonder why she thinks this is so great when she is the Cardinals’ pitcher. Maybe she is making fun of me. But then she says, “Uncle Matt says this is your first time ever playing baseball. He told me you played some other sport back in Pakistan that’s kind of like baseball.”
I nod. “Cricket.” I can tell by the look on her face that she does not know cricket. “We play with a bat and ball, but it is not so much like baseball.”
She shrugs. “You’re a good pitcher.”
But not a good batter. Jordan doesn’t say this, of course, but she must think it.
“Congratulations on being a Cardinal. You are happy, no?” I remember how she looked when no one clapped for her.
“Kind of.” She kicks a pebble. “I mean, I love playing the game. But I can tell the other guys don’t want me on their team.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
Jordan slips her hands into her pockets. “My dad taught me to play when I was little. He was my coach back in Illinois.”
I smile. “My father was my cricket coach when I was little. He played on the national team.”
Jordan raises an eyebrow. “Wow. He must be really good.”
“Yes, a long time ago, but he never plays now. He hurt his knee.”
Jordan nods. “A bum knee’s the worst. Unless you’re a pitcher.” She grins. “If I could, I’d play in the majors for the American League when I grow up—the Chicago White Sox, if they’d take me. Then I wouldn’t have to bat—I’d just pitch.”
I didn’t understand everything she said, but I did get the part about some pitchers not having to bat. I grin. “Maybe I will try out for these White Socks, then.”
She frowns. “You’d probably make it, too.”
“Not if you are trying out.” I wish she would smile again.
“Only men get to play major-league baseball.”
“Oh.” I think for a minute. “In cricket, there is a world cup for women’s teams, but it is not so popular like the men’s world cup.”
Jordan shrugs. “At least they have a world cup to play in.”
“No women’s teams are in the baseball world cup?”
Her smile is back. “It’s called the World Series. And no, there isn’t one for women. There used to be, back in the old days, but not anymore.”
A red ball rolls our way from the blacktop, and Jordan gives it a strong kick back.
“What about the Olympics?” I offer.
She shakes her head. “No baseball in the Olympics, period. Not even for men anymore.”
“No cricket, either,” I say.
We stand there in silence for a few seconds. There are a lot of reasons not to play a sport—no talent, no money, no good fields for games. But I never thought about not playing just because you’re a girl.
I wonder out loud: “How much longer can you play on a baseball team?”
Jordan sighs. “Through high school.That’s pretty much it.”
I remember what Akash said about softball and ask Jordan if she could play that.
“Nah. The pitching is totally different. Baseball’s better.”
It seems like if she likes baseball best, she should be able to play it as long as she wants. “Maybe they can change the rules or something?”
Jordan shrugs. “Maybe.” But she does not look convinced.
Another class flows out from the side door onto the playground.
“Bilal!” Henry breaks off from the crowd and holds up a big, orange ball. “Let’s shoot some hoops!”
I look at Jordan and lower my voice. “I am not sure what that means.”
She shades her eyes with her hand and looks over at Henry. “Basketball. He’s asking you to play.”
Now Akash has joined Henry and is waving me over, too.
I wonder if Jordan plays this game of basketball. When I take a breath to ask, she cuts me off. “Go ahead. They’ll show you what to do.”
I spot Mr. Jacobs out there, too, and take two steps away from Jordan. Then I turn. “I see you later, okay?”
Jordan nods.
I join the guys and do not look back. If I do, I might change my mind.
“You’re not hanging out with her, are you?” Henry looks at me warily.
“She is in my class.”
Akash sighs. “Man, bad luck. Hopefully you don’t have to sit next to her.”
I don’t tell them that we already sit in the same group. I also don’t tell them that I am glad to know at least one person in my class, even if that one person is a girl.
We reach the blacktop, where Mr. Jacobs stands under one of the baskets. He raises his hand in a wave. “Hey, Bilal! You and your friends up for a game?”
My friends. It feels good to have friends.
We join the game, and it only takes about three minutes for me—and everyone else—to discover that basketball is yet another American sport I am not good at.
Mercifully, Mrs. Wu finally blows a whistle and holds up her hand, sending
kids running into line. Jordan stands a few kids behind me. Her hands are shoved into her pockets, and the toe of her shoe digs a hole in the dirt as we wait for the last of the stragglers to join the line.
I feel worse for Jordan than ever. I should ask her to play basketball with us next time. Maybe Akash and Henry would get to know her and be her friend, too.
But then I think of the way they acted when they saw me standing next to her.
When our line starts moving, I turn away from Jordan and follow everyone else back inside.
Fourteen
September passes, and still no Baba. The Cardinals practice three afternoons a week, and our developmental team practices on the field next to theirs. We aren’t a team really. We don’t play real games, we don’t have uniforms, and we don’t even have a real name. Henry decides to fix the name problem, and we vote on the phoenix as our mascot.
“It’s a bird, but better than a cardinal,” Henry says.
Apparently it is a mythical bird that rose from some ashes. Coach Matt calls that a metaphor for our team, which I don’t really understand.
No matter what we are called, it is painfully obvious that we Phoenixes are not ready to be Cardinals.
Akash told me how to figure out my batting average, and it’s .120. I think this is a big improvement, considering my average used to be .000. But it’s still not good enough for the Cardinals.
The one good thing about practicing next to the Cardinals is that I can study Jordan’s pitches and try to figure out how she strikes out so many players. Sometimes she pretends not to be ready, then she lets the ball fly. Other times she actually yawns and you think she’s getting tired or bored, but then the ball is suddenly in Akash’s catcher’s mitt and you don’t even know how it happened.
The best part of practices is definitely the pitching clinics, when it’s just me, Coach Pablo, and Jordan. Coach Pablo teaches us how to be better pitchers, while the other kids learn how to be better catchers or shortstops or whatever position they play. During pitching clinics, everyone knows I have to work with Jordan, so no one suspects that sometimes we talk about non-baseball things like our fathers and our homes before we came here.
A Long Pitch Home Page 9