“Go hold the board for her, then hand her the cat.” Great. I was the assistant. I helped the director and the talent.
“How is she supposed to stop?” I asked.
“She puts out her feet. That’ll stop the board.”
“I think she should try without the cat the first time,” I said.
“It wouldn’t exactly be That’sPETacular material without a cat, moron,” Zeke said.
Boy, were we having fun. “I meant so she learns how to stop. Moron.”
“You guys are fun,” Sly said. She smiled, and it seemed like she actually meant it.
I held the board with my feet while the cat was in my arms. “Go slow,” I told her, trying to imagine how I’d explain the blood to her grandmother and mother after Sly capsized into a face-plant on the asphalt. I had a quick thought about helmets, but before I could even mention it, she was off.
“So like this?” she asked, and did it perfectly.
“No!” Zeke yelled. “Not at all like that! Did you hear me yell ‘Action!’? I don’t think you did because I didn’t. That’s only the most important part of this whole production. Nobody moves until I say so.”
Sly rolled her eyes at me.
I’d never wanted a little sister. Ever. And in books, I wished I could just remove the pesky little sister who got in the big brother’s way. I still got annoyed when I thought about some of them, like that Annie in those Magic Tree House books—she always made me want to scream, the way Jack would be figuring things out and Annie would screw everything up. But there was something appealing about having a sidekick when Zeke was at his worst—someone to roll eyes at me.
“AND! ACTION!” Zeke said.
Sly, sitting on the skateboard, rolled down the slope of the driveway about a third of the way, then put her feet down and stopped. “Ta-da!” she said.
“And CUT!” Zeke said. “Excuse me. Who gave you lines?”
“I don’t know what you’re asking me,” Sly said. She looked at me. “I don’t know what he’s saying.”
“‘Ta-da,’” Zeke said. “That’s what you said. No one told you to say anything. I’m the director.”
“You know what this is?” Sly asked, standing up and reaching for her cat. “This is so not fun. Goodbye.”
“No, no, no, no, no!” Zeke said. “I’m sorry. You can say ta-da. It’s just my first time directing, and this camera is a little messed up, which takes some of my concentration away, and if you, as one of the stars of this film, felt ta-da was an important part, then I should consider that. I’ll tell you what, practice now with the cat on your lap one time, okay?”
Sly looked unconvinced. She looked at me, and I shrugged, like it was her call.
“Maybe another day,” she said. “I want to go inside now. And you,” she said to Zeke, “need to be nicer. If you are, you can come back.”
I’d been waiting my whole life for someone to say that!
“Where did I go wrong?” Zeke asked, probably not really expecting an answer, as Sly headed back into her house.
“Next time,” I said, “try to suck less.”
He gave me a look that suggested maybe I wasn’t being what Dad would call my best self.
“You know what that was?” I asked Zeke as we headed slowly back to BTP.
“A total waste of time?”
“That,” I said, “was PETacular.”
Bush League
WE’D gotten to the point at home where we were eating cereal for almost every meal, and I really didn’t want to live through another week like that, so I asked Pop to cover for Dad while I dragged Dad to the Shop A Lot.
I’m not sure why I picked that time to bring it up. Maybe it just felt too big to hold in anymore. “You know that student MacSophal?” I said. “The one you talk to a lot?”
“Patrick,” my father said.
“It’s not Patrick, right?” I had to be careful here. I definitely knew it was wrong to eavesdrop, and that was how I had gotten all my information.
“What are you talking about?” Dad asked, eyes on the road. “Patrick MacSophal, Group H.”
“Well, that’s sort of a weird last name, right?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“Zeke and I think MacSophal is actually J-Mac, that steroid pitcher.”
“And how did you come up with that?”
“I guess it was really Zeke who figured it out.”
“Did you tell anybody else?”
“Who would we tell?” Did Dad picture our friends at school as some big, connected posse? Our world was a small world, after all. And anyway, I hadn’t even shared the confirmation with Zeke. “So can you help me understand why you’re letting a drug-using, steroid ex-athlete attend BTP? The guy was practically thrown out of Major League Baseball—”
“Casey, what are you talking about? He wasn’t thrown out. He left.”
“After Rhodes told everyone that MacSophal was the one giving him drugs.”
“All he was guilty of is being accused of something. How come you’re so fast to say he’s guilty?”
“How come you’re so fast not to?” I said. Everyone knew that J-Mac left baseball because he was caught red-handed. You didn’t need to overhear his confession to Dad to know. He disappeared like a coward because he was ashamed.
“Well, we’re here,” Dad said.
It felt ridiculous to even consider getting out of the car and pushing a giant shopping cart around, filling it with food. This conversation was too important. I turned to face him.
“I don’t get it. If you knew it was him, why would you let him come to your school? He’s a cheater. Taking drugs and giving them to other people isn’t only breaking the law, it’s cheating. It’s giving yourself an unfair advantage over your teammates. It seems pretty obvious that he’s guilty. So I don’t understand why you would let a bad guy like that anywhere near the school. You always talk about integrity. What kind of integrity does J-Mac have? He’s the anti-integrity.”
“Casey. Whoa. You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened. How do you know who’s guilty and who’s innocent? Doesn’t a journalist need to listen to all sides of the story and present it honestly and fairly?”
“An innocent guy doesn’t disappear. He clears his name,” I said. “I don’t get why you’re defending this jerk.”
“Because everyone deserves a second chance,” he said.
We got out of the car and slammed our doors. “And you need to call your mother again.”
Unreal.
Digging in at the Plate
FROM Saturday evening until Monday morning, BTP students were on their own. Clay Coves was only ten minutes from great beaches, and a surprising number of umpire wannabes were also surfers. Some headed out for an afternoon surf after Saturday class was over. I always liked watching them return, standing on top of their cars and vans to take their boards down, stamping sand off their feet. They looked like some combination of human seals and penguins in their wetsuits.
This Saturday, a lot of guys went to the Tavern or the Well and drank too much and talked too loud when they came back to the dorms. Dad and Pop didn’t like it. They said umpires need to command respect on and off the field.
But students worked so hard all week. I thought they deserved to relax however they wanted.
My brain was doing that thing again—thinking about everything from surfing umpires to the BTP schedule. Everything but the article I was sitting outside trying to start.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone and Steamboat’s number, but it just kept ringing and never went to voicemail. I ran back into the house and grabbed that folder Mrs. G. had given me and a BTP sweatshirt before I went back to where I’d been sitting. I looked through the folder, expecting to see maybe another number or an address. I had assumed that folder would have all the information I needed to run You Suck, Ump! Day. But all it had were receipts from the copy shop for each year’s flyers. Nothing else.
> “Did you decide what to write about?” It took me a minute, squinting through sun, to see that it was Soupcan.
“I need to turn something in on Monday,” I said, putting the folder down.
“Monday like the day that is tomorrow?”
I had half a day. I nodded slowly. I already knew, kind of, what I was going to write, but my conscience was keeping me from starting.
Soupcan spotted a group of students walking toward us. “How you doing?” he called. It was June Sponato, one of the Franklins (I still couldn’t tell Robbie and Bob apart), two short guys, and MacSophal.
“What’re you up to this evening?” Soupcan asked. “You all know Casey, right?” He pulled something—a lollipop—out of his back pocket and unwrapped it, then stuck it in his mouth.
They nodded at me. June Sponato smiled.
I smiled back at her, but had a hard time looking at MacSophal. Who did he think he was, telling my dad it would be fine to leave me? To go to Florida without me. Why didn’t Dad talk about taking me? And who was this idiot cheater guy to tell my dad it was okay for a dad to leave his kid for five weeks anyway? It was annoying that I only knew this stuff because I’d listened to something I wasn’t meant to hear, but it wasn’t like I could unhear it now.
“Thinking about heading into town for some burgers,” the Franklin said. “You want to come?” he asked Soupcan.
“May as well. Good luck with that, Casey. Let me know how it goes.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Oh, hey. Do you know how I can get in touch with Steamboat?”
“Sorry, man.” They all walked toward the parking lot.
I put on my sweatshirt—even with the sun still out, a chilly hint of fall was in the air.
I wondered if I could really write the article I wanted to write. It was exciting to think about being the writer who solved one of baseball’s big mysteries—what had happened to J-Mac? Even if the story did fall into my lap, I was still going to be the one to break it wide open. This could be really big. I could tell the world, or at least the middle-school students of Clay Coves, that the accused steroid user, the big-bearded wonder who never cleared his name, was now trying to start over right here in our town. That the former megabucks relief pitcher was now a lowly umpire-school student, fighting it out to get a shot at the Professional Umpire Evaluation Course in Cocoa.
Except.
I was pretty sure this fell under the category of Things You Know You’re Not Supposed to Do Even Though No One Ever Exactly Told You. Other things on that list probably included putting beans up your nose and painting your guinea pig with honey.
I could ask Dad if it was okay to write about one of his students. But I knew he’d say no, not without MacSophal’s permission, anyway.
So I could not ask and not give him a chance to say no. And learn to live with a little guilt. Maybe Dad would never even know. Maybe I’d just start writing, and it wouldn’t be good, and I wouldn’t even have a whole stupid conflict on my hands.
I wrote my headline: BASEBALL’S MYSTERY MAN SPOTTED IN CLAY COVES, with the subhead What Happened to That Big-Headed Cheater?
I started writing, getting more and more keyed up as I went on. This could be the hugest article ever. Not only the kind that makes them publish a sixth-grader’s piece for the first time. But the kind that some other kid might read, next year or years from now, and think, Wow. A kid wrote this? A kid wrote this huge breaking-news story that won the Honorbound Competition? He’d look at the byline and see by Casey Snowden.
I went back inside and got online to research J-Mac’s career and his mysterious disappearance. It hadn’t been in the news much lately, since it happened years ago, but back then, wow. It was a really big story. And then for a while afterward, there had been all these photo-only pieces about J-Mac sightings—in Tampa, at CitiField in New York. I guessed these days maybe people had stopped wondering. That was how it was with news. But what would happen if I really got this totally out-of-nowhere scoop, reminded people about J-Mac, told the true, breaking-news story . . . that MacSophal was really here, in Clay Coves, New Jersey, trying to become an umpire in the sport he ran away from. A rule breaker was studying the rules of baseball. It was too much!
There was so much to think about—right and wrong, exciting and scary—but instead of thinking, I just wrote.
Small Ball
WHEN I got on the bus, all I was thinking about was handing my article in after school. It was a lot better than thinking about Dad shipping me off to Mrs. Bob the Baker, and if I’d learned anything in the past few years, it was how not to think about her.
I was so excited about this article. I had worked really hard on it. I kind of couldn’t wait to see everyone’s reaction. I, Casey Snowden, was going to be the one who solved the mystery of baseball’s great disappearance, the accused steroid user who fell off the face of the earth. Uncovered. By me!
I wouldn’t be able to stay for the newspaper meeting after school today—I had to figure out how to get ready for You Suck, Ump! Day, how to get in touch with Steamboat—so I was planning to give the article to Mr. Donovan in English. I wondered if he’d be annoyed with me for not accepting the unwritten rule about sixth-graders, or if he’d maybe think it was cool that I was challenging it.
I had a hard time staying focused all day, even during English. At the end of the class, I took my time packing up my stuff, and I said, “Mr. Donovan?”
“Will I see you at the meeting later?”
“I can’t,” I said, standing up from my desk. “It’s a really busy week at home, at the school, at Behind the Plate. You Suck, Ump! Day is coming up, and this year I’m kind of running the whole thing myself, so I need a ton of time to get ready.”
He nodded.
“And I know this is weird, and that it’s sort of a little against the rules, or the unwritten rules, but I don’t agree with the rules, so I figured, well, I wrote an article, and I was hoping you could look it over. I won’t be there to hand it in myself, so—”
“You really can’t be there or you don’t want to be there?” Mr. Donovan asked.
“I really can’t. I mean, you’re right that I don’t exactly want to see Chris Sykes’s face when I say I wrote an article, or listen to him, or whatever, but I really can’t be there today.” I almost said, “You could call my father if you don’t believe me,” but then I remembered I was twelve. Not six.
“I’ll read it,” he said.
***
At home, Zeke and I sat down with pretzels and milk, a disgusting combination that he ate and drank all the time and which, to my own horror, I was starting to like too. As soon as we were done, I went to ask Mrs. G. if she had any other contact info for Steamboat.
She didn’t.
“Okay, so his first name was Kelly. I know that. Do you at least know his last name?”
She didn’t even go to a file drawer or anything. She just said, “Um,” and looked at me. “Kelly? Really? I only knew him as Steamboat. And because his family was in Rhode Island, he didn’t have a local bank account. So, Rhode Island, that’s something, right? Or wait. It might have been Vermont. Or possibly Maine.”
“Really? All I have to go on is the name Kelly, in the Northeast?” Perfect.
So Zeke and I went back to the kitchen, got more pretzels and more milk, and tried to think of everything we could having to do with You Suck, Ump! Day, from the flyers we needed to put up all over town, to letting people know when it was, to what time we needed to start, to what we needed to do to get the fields, stands, and public areas ready. It was a lot. I was pretty sure we could do it.
***
Zeke had to go home right away to “get some important stuff out in the mail.” I wished him good luck with that, because his room was an organized person’s nightmare—DVDs, addressed envelopes, stamps, postcards, reality TV contest entries—everything everywhere. I had no idea if half his ideas or entries or whatever were ever even submitted or if they were still in various
layers on his bedroom floor, maybe to be discovered by some research scientists years from now, who would try to understand the deep meaning behind the video cards and entry forms addressed to So You Think You’re the Biggest Idiot?
***
I went outside and made my way to the batting cages. I stopped in the space between two cages to watch Jorge Washington run through his calls. Bobbybo was there too, shaking his head (he didn’t hide his disgust very well). “Look at your feet,” he said to Jorge. It was bad news if you had to be told to look at your feet this late in the game.
“Right, right,” Jorge said. I stepped a bit farther into the cage and watched as he separated his feet more, shifted one a little ahead of the other. He got down into the crouch. His balance looked wobbly, and he flinched each time the pitching machine sent a ball into the catcher’s glove. He was good at the rest of it, though: coming up to standing position, moving his right arm at a 90-degree angle with a single knocking motion, and calling a big, loud “Strike!” Then he got back into the crouch with his feet in the wrong position again.
I pushed tarp after tarp back, walking past the other cages until I spotted Dad and J-Mac talking outside, near the door and thought, Wow, look at that—I don’t even call him MacSophal anymore. He’s J-Mac. And at that very moment, I tripped over an Ibbit stick. I fell straight to the ground and looked around, relieved no one had seen. From the dark inside the cages, Dad and J-Mac looked like they were in a movie or onstage in a play—two big well-lit actors. I scooted closer and tried to hear what they were saying, but I couldn’t make out a word. Until they were done, when J-Mac, walking away, turned back to yell, “Yeah, give him a call. Maybe you could start this January.”
Screaming at the Ump Page 9