“Known what?” I said. “How could you know? I didn’t even know. It was my fault.”
“It was nobody’s fault,” my mother said. “I should have realized that just because I could accept the idea of your father’s death didn’t mean that you were ready to do that.” She looked at me with a rueful expression. “You’ve always done things on your own schedule.”
“I woke up this morning and remembered when Dad was killed,” I said.
“I used to dream about it,” said Mom. “About waking up and answering the phone that day. Sometimes I’d dream that the voice at the other end said, ‘There’s been an accident, but everything’s okay.’ But I don’t dream that dream anymore.”
“I miss him,” I said. “I guess I always will.”
“Yes,” said my mother.
“It hurts. I guess that won’t go away either.”
“I don’t know,” my mother said simply.
I took a deep breath. I said, “When we go back to Long Island, I have something I want to take to the cemetery for Dad.”
I had an idea. I wanted to wait until after our last game to put it into effect, though.
We lost our last game, 2–1. But there were some victories, too. I stayed in my new position. I did a good job. And the one goal we scored was off a long ball that I sent up the field. Petra trapped it and passed it neatly to Erin, who calmly put it away.
We also wore our brand-new purple shirts. After the game, Claudia took our team picture. She was going to have it enlarged and let everybody order copies. I planned on asking all my teammates to autograph my copy. Then I was going to put it on the wall with my posters of famous women athletes.
After the game, my team went to Pizza Express. To my surprise, several people (teammates and a couple of employees at Pizza Express) told me how great it was that I had friends who supported my team.
I’d never thought about it like that, but it was true. My friends had shown up to support me and the team I played on. And they proved to be true-blue because they’d kept on supporting the team even when I had acted like anything but a team player.
My friends and I were blowing bubbles in our drinks and talking soccer, soccer, soccer. They were making silly mustaches with their straws and trading the toppings from the pizza.
They were acting like a team. Like my team. I’d earned my place on it at last. It had been humbling, but humbling is okay sometimes. I had learned some important lessons.
I slurped some soda and scarfed some pizza and felt generally right with the world. I thought about the new soccer cleats I was going to buy with the baby-sitting money I was saving.
You can’t hold on to the past forever. It was time to let my lucky cleats go. When I visited my father’s grave, I was going to knot the laces together and hang the cleats on one side of the stone.
And then I was going to tell him a little bit about who I’d become, about how far my old cleats had brought me, and where I hoped my life — and my new cleats — would take me.
I figured my father would like that.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT SPECIAL OLYMPICS AND UNIFIED SPORTS!
Special Olympics Unified Sports® provides opportunities for individuals with and without intellectual disabilities to train and compete together on the same teams. There are multiple winter and summer sports to choose from! Teams are constructed to provide sports opportunities that meaningfully challenge all participants and often lead to improved self-esteem, equal status with peers, and new friendships. Special Olympics is truly “training for life”!
To find out how you can become involved in Special Olympics or compete on a Special Olympics Unified Sports® team, check out the Special Olympics site at http://www.specialolympics.org.
* * *
Dear Reader,
For a long time, I’ve been interested in the Special Olympics. Special Olympics is a year-round program for people with intellectual disabilities. Athletes train and compete in twenty-three official Special Olympics sports, including alpine and cross-country skiing, aquatics, basketball, bowling, figure skating, gymnastics, roller skating, soccer, softball, and track and field.
It is often said that Special Olympics is “training for life.” The men, women, boys, and girls who train throughout the year are not only preparing themselves for competition but also for greater participation in family, work, school, and community life. Like Abby, participants in the Special Olympics Unified Sports® program learn a lot about teamwork, friendship, and spirit. It’s an experience Abby will never forget!
To find out more about Special Olympics and Unified Sports, contact your local Special Olympics office (listed in the phone book) or check out the Special Olympics website at http://www.specialolympics.org.
Happy reading,
* * *
The author gratefully acknowledges
Nola Thacker
for her help in
preparing this manuscript.
About the Author
ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.
There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-sitters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.
Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.
Copyright © 1997 by Ann M. Martin
Cover art by Hodges Soileau
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First edition, August 1997
e-ISBN 978-0-545-79322-3
The Baby-Sitters Club #110: Abby the Bad Sport (Baby-Sitters Club, The) Page 8