Save Me a Seat

by Gita Varadarajan

  Dillon will be surprised when he sees how well I play. I predict he will regret not picking me first.

  It’s time to warm up, so I grab one of the bats and give it a good hard swing. Baseball bats are quite different from cricket bats, and I want to get a feel for it before the game begins. The next thing I know, Coach Victorine is screaming his head off at me.

  What have I done now?

  Coach Victorine reminds me of a penguin. He has a long nose, like a beak, and when he walks, he waddles.

  “Line up, ladies and germs,” he tells us.

  I played Little League for one season when I was seven, but I wasn’t any good at it. Even with my earplugs in, all that yelling was too much for me. Plus I’m pretty uncoordinated. As soon as the coach figured out I couldn’t hit or throw or catch a ball, I spent the rest of the season sitting on the bench eating sunflower seeds. I didn’t mind. I like sunflower seeds.

  I don’t like playing baseball, but I like to watch it on TV. My dad is a Phillies fan, but I’m into the Boston Red Sox. They’re epic. In gym class, instead of baseball, we play slow-pitch softball. Dillon and Jaslene Arnado are the best hitters, but Amy Yamaguchi has got mad skills too. Emily Mooney isn’t bad either—which is surprising, because she’s white as a marshmallow and so skinny her arms look like toothpicks.

  Jaslene picks first.

  “I want Amy,” she says.

  Amy Yamaguchi runs over and starts hugging her.

  “This is baseball, girls,” squawks Coach Victorine. “Not a slumber party.”

  Ravi is pointing to himself, trying to get Dillon to pick him, but Jaslene picks Ravi instead. He is so shocked he looks like he’s about to pass out. Jaslene probably chose him because she feels sorry for him. Girls do junk like that.

  Dillon and Jaslene go back and forth picking teams until finally Henry Futterman and I are the only ones left. Henry is as uncoordinated as I am, plus he plays the violin, so his mom wrote a note to Coach Victorine saying Henry’s not allowed to climb a rope or catch a ball or anything else that might hurt his fingers.

  “I’ll take Futzy,” says Jaslene, pointing at Henry.

  So I end up in the last place on earth I want to be. Dillon’s not too happy about it either.

  “If we lose because of you, you’re gonna be sorry, Pud,” he tells me.

  We start tossing the ball around a little to warm up, and all of a sudden, Coach Victorine starts yelling at Ravi.

  “No Rec Specs, no ball! No exceptions!”

  “Excuse me?” says Ravi. “I don’t understand.”

  “You can’t wear your glasses when you play ball, kid. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

  “In India, I always wore my glasses when we played cricket,” Ravi says.

  “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, this is New Jersey, kid. You need to go to the eye doctor and get yourself a pair of Rec Specs—like those.” He points at Henry, who’s wearing a pair of prescription goggles instead of his regular glasses.

  “Can you see without those things?” Coach Victorine asks Ravi.

  “Not very well,” he says, pushing his glasses up with his thumb.

  “Take your pick, kid—sit on the bench or play without your glasses,” says Coach. “Up to you.”

  Ravi takes off his glasses and puts them in his pocket.

  “I’ll play,” he says.

  * * *

  OUR TEAM IS up first. We do okay for a while, but then when the bases are loaded, I strike out and Dillon gets ticked off.

  “Way to blow it, Pud,” he says, grabbing his glove off the bench and stomping off to the pitcher’s mound.

  Dillon Samreen does not like to lose.

  Amy leads off for the other team and she gets a hit. Emily and Jaslene get hits too, so Ravi comes up with the bases loaded. He’s squinting pretty hard as he steps up to the plate, and I notice he’s holding his bat funny, down low like a golf club. He swings and misses twice, but on the third pitch, he brings his bat up, catches a piece of the ball, and sends it foul.

  “Good cut!” shouts Coach Victorine. Jaslene and the rest of her team go nuts, jumping up and down and screaming for Ravi to do it again.

  Even from far away, I can tell Dillon is up to something. When he turns his head to the side, I see the gleam in his eyes. In slow-pitch, the ball is supposed to come at the batter in a nice high arc, but Dillon winds up and pitches a fastball right at Ravi’s head.

  “Duck!” I yell.

  But it’s too late.

  Coach Victorine comes rushing over to help me.

  “Get the first-aid kit!” he yells.

  Everyone crowds around. I check myself, but nothing is broken. There is no blood, just a painful spot on my shoulder where the ball struck me. A terrible thought suddenly occurs to me. My glasses! But when I reach into my pocket and pull them out, I’m relieved to see they are not broken either.

  “What happened out there, Samreen?” asks Coach Victorine. “You forget what game we’re playing?”

  “Sorry, Coach,” Dillon says. “The ball must have been wet or something. It just got away from me. I didn’t mean to hit him. Honest.”

  “It’s nothing,” I say, standing up and brushing myself off. “Please can I bat again?”

  But Coach Victorine won’t allow it.

  “How about you take our young friend here down to the nurse’s office so she can look him over?” he tells Dillon. “We don’t want to take any chances.”

  As Dillon and I walk to the nurse’s office, it seems I do most of the talking. I have so much I want to say.

  “Can you believe Mrs. Beam thinks I need special help?” I laugh. “Ridiculous! You saw my Vedic math. Does she think I’m like Ramaswami?”

  “Who?” asks Dillon.

  “He was a boy at my school in India who couldn’t read. Does she think I’m like him? Or Big Foot? All he did when we were in the resource room yesterday was talk about candy and look at sports magazines. Ha!”

  “Make sure to tell the nurse it was an accident,” says Dillon. “I didn’t hit you on purpose.”

  “No worries, man,” I tell him. “Do you know Kapil Dev, the famous Indian cricketer? He came to Vidya Mandir as the chief guest at our sports day last year. My best friend, Pramod, and I had our pictures taken with him. When you come to my house, I’ll show you. You can see all my trophies too, and Amma will make dosas for us. Our garden is quite big. Maybe I can teach you how to play cricket, and you can teach me how to hit a home run.”

  Dillon smiles at me and winks. “I can hardly wait,” he says.

  When we arrive at the nurse’s office, Dillon reminds me once more to explain that he didn’t hit me with the ball on purpose. Then he leaves and goes back to class.

  The nurse gives me an ice pack for my shoulder and tells me to lie down on a cot and rest. I close my eyes for a while, and when I open them again, there’s a girl in a green uniform standing in the doorway, holding my backpack and jacket. She’s from my class, but I don’t remember her name.

  “Mrs. Beam told me to bring RAH-vee’s stuff in case he has to go home early,” she tells the nurse.

  “I’m fine,” I say, sitting up. “I don’t need to go home.”

  The bell rings, and fifth graders start coming down the corridor towards the lunchroom. The girl in the green uniform puts my things on a chair and leaves.

  “Please,” I beg the nurse. “Can I go to lunch now?”

  Nothing is going to prevent me from eating my lunch with Dillon Samreen.

  “If you’re sure you feel up to it,” says the nurse. “Let me get you a fresh ice pack to take with you. It will help keep the swelling down.”

  The nurse takes so long preparing the ice pack that by the time I get to the lunchroom, Dillon has already bought his lunch and is sitting at the table in the corner by the window shooting straw papers with his friends.

  I look at the menu board on the wall. Today they are serving something called chili. I see someone eating a bowl
of soup filled with red beans and tomatoes. In India, we call this kind of soup rajma. It’s more of a North Indian dish, but Amma makes it sometimes anyway, adding plenty of cumin seeds and black pepper to make it spicy. Rajma is served with rice, but American chili is served with some kind of yellow bread that looks like cake. I have my tiffin box with me, but I grab one of the plastic trays anyway and tuck it under my arm. I have a plan I’m certain will help me fit in.

  Big Foot is sitting at the same table where I sat on my first day. I walk past him straight to Dillon’s table. I recognize some of the other faces—Robert Princenthal and Keith Campbell, Tim/Jim, Tom Dinkins, and the redheaded boy called Jax.

  “Excuse me, can you make some room for me please?” I ask Tom Dinkins, who is sitting next to Dillon.

  Tom Dinkins looks at Dillon.

  “You heard the man—move over, Dink,” says Dillon. Then he laughs and snaps his head back to shake the hair out of his eyes, Bollywood-style. I wonder if Amma would ever let me grow my hair long like that.

  Tom Dinkins moves over, and I sit down on the bench next to Dillon. I place the plastic tray in front of me, unbuckle the lid, open the top compartment of my tiffin box, and transfer the creamy white raita into one of the small square sections of my tray. I smile.

  Finally, I am where I belong.

  “It was an accident,” Dillon tells Mrs. Beam when he comes back from dropping Ravi off at the nurse’s office.

  Yeah, right.

  Celena Gervais, who’s wearing her dorky Girl Scout uniform as usual, volunteers to pack up Ravi’s stuff for him and take it down to the nurse’s office. She accidentally drops Ravi’s pencil case as she’s trying to put it in his backpack, and the last of his three mechanical pencils goes rolling under the desk. Dillon sees it, and before Celena can bend down and pick it up, the pencil disappears down the front of his pants. She hunts around for it a little, but all she comes up with is a balled-up piece of paper. Crud! It’s that stupid cartoon that Dillon drew. Why hadn’t I thrown it in the wastebasket instead of dropping it on the floor? Before I can do anything about it, Celena tosses the crumpled-up cartoon into Ravi’s backpack and zips it closed. Two seconds later, she’s out the door and on her way down to the nurse’s office.

  At 11:30, the lunch bell rings. Wednesday is chili day. Einstein’s chili isn’t nearly as good as my mother’s, but the corn bread is decent, especially if you put a lot of butter on it. Mom is standing near the door in her red-and-white-striped apron when I get to the cafeteria, but when she sees me, she looks the other way. I have to give her points for that.

  Ravi is nowhere in sight. He might still be in the nurse’s office, or maybe he went home. I get my lunch and head for the empty table near the trash cans, but Dillon steps in front of me.

  “It’s a good thing Coach decided to call the game,” he says. “If we’d lost, you would have paid for it big-time.”

  “I know,” I say. “You told me.”

  He grabs a piece of corn bread off my tray and stuffs it in his mouth. His eyes are pinned on me like two thumbtacks on a bulletin board.

  What was it Mr. Barnes had said? The world is full of Dillon Samreens. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, trying to remember the rest.

  “Wake up, Puddy Tat!” Dillon shouts in my ear.

  I jump, and Dillon laughs, shaking the hair out of his eyes. I wonder how much time he spends in front of the mirror every day. In fourth grade, our desks had been right next to the windows, and I’d seen him checking out his reflection in the glass all the time. Once, Mr. Barnes and I caught him doing it at the same time, and we both had to try hard not to laugh. Thinking about that jump-starts my memory, and the rest of Mr. Barnes’s advice comes flying back into my head.

  “You have to find a way to keep him from getting to you,” I whisper.

  “What was that, Pud?” asks Dillon, grabbing another piece of corn bread off my tray.

  I look at Dillon and try to imagine that, instead of a crocodile, he’s a harmless little rodent like a mouse or a chipmunk. I never noticed it before, but his ears are actually kind of small and round and set high on the sides of his head. And with his cheeks stuffed full of corn bread, he does look like a chipmunk! All of a sudden, instead of feeling nervous, I start to laugh.

  Dillon’s eyes aren’t sparkling anymore. They’re cold and dark, like two lumps of coal. “You want to tell me what’s so funny, Pud?” he says.

  As he hitches up his saggy pants, I notice his boxers for the first time. Of all the things they could be decorated with today—polka dots or clover leaves, taxicabs or buffaloes—he’s wearing boxers covered with peanuts. Peanuts! My grandma has a family of chipmunks who live under her porch, and she always puts a bowl of peanuts out for them. Dillon Samreen—the crocodile turned chipmunk—standing there in his peanut boxers with his cheeks full of corn bread pushes me right over the edge, and I totally lose it.

  I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time, and every time I think I’m done, I look at his little round ears and his peanut boxers, my stomach bunches up and it starts all over again. I’m laughing so hard I’m crying now. Dillon’s an expert at dishing it out, but he hasn’t spent much time on the receiving end. He is clearly not enjoying this. Kids are crowding around, laughing and shouting, and I don’t even care that I don’t have my earplugs in. This might be one of the all-time greatest moments of my life.

  “I’m outta here,” says Dillon.

  Mr. Barnes was right! I found a way to keep Dillon from getting to me, and it actually worked! For one perfect second, I feel like I’m standing on top of the world … and then I hear the whistle blow.

  “Break it up,” my mom says, pushing her way through the crowd of kids. “What’s going on here? Joey, are you okay?”

  When Dillon hears her voice, he turns around. His eyes are sparkling again. “Poor Joey,” he says. “Here comes Mommy to save her little baby. Or maybe she needs to change his poopy diaper.”

  Dillon looks like his old self again. He grins at me, shakes the hair out of his eyes, and walks away.

  So much for being on top of the world. I should have known it wouldn’t last. Once a zebra, always a zebra.

  I look at my mom and shake my head. She just doesn’t get it.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Joey. I thought you were in trouble,” she says. “I’m your mother. What am I supposed to do—just stand there and watch?”

  “No,” I say. “You’re not supposed to be here at all.”

  * * *

  I’VE LOST MY appetite. I can’t even remember the last time that happened. My mom has to go break up a food fight on the other side of the cafeteria, so I put in my earplugs, carry my tray over to the table by the trash cans, and sit down by myself.

  A minute later, Ravi shows up, carrying his jacket and his backpack. I guess he didn’t go home after all. I don’t expect him to want to sit with me, but I can’t believe my eyes when he walks over to Dillon’s table and sits down right beside him. Maybe that ball hit him harder than I thought, because I’m pretty sure he’s lost his mind.

  “How do you like Einstein so far, RAH-vee?” asks Dillon.

  “Actually it’s pronounced rah-VEE,” I say. “Today has been my best day so far. I’ve been looking forward to eating lunch with you since day one.”

  “Did you hear that, Dink? He’s been looking forward to eating lunch with me since day one. Isn’t that nice?”

  “If you say so,” says Tom Dinkins.

  “Is that your lunch?” asks Dillon, pointing to the raita on my tray.

  I nod. “There’s vegetable curry too,” I say.

  “Let me guess—did your mother make it?”

  I nod again. “Amma is a very good cook,” I say proudly. “Would you like to taste the curry?”

  Dillon smiles at me and winks.

  “You first,” he says, handing me his spoon. “Have you ever tasted chili before?”

  “In India, we call it rajma,” I tell him. “And it�
��s served with rice.”

  “Yeah, well, this is American chili,” says Dillon, pushing his tray towards me. “Don’t be shy. Take a nice big bite.”

  I dip the spoon in the chili and put it in my mouth. It tastes horrible! It’s oily and sour, and there’s something strange and sandy about the texture.

  Dillon is watching me closely. Something about his eyes looks different—they’re glowing.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you like the chili, RAH-vee?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “It doesn’t taste like rajma,” I say, unable to swallow the horrible substance.

  “Must be all the hamburger meat they put in it,” he says, slapping me on the back.

  I cough and spit the chili out on the table.

  “What the heck!” says Jax, jumping up.

  “I’m vegetarian!” I cry, grabbing the sleeve of my jacket and wiping my tongue with it. “I don’t eat meat!”

  For some reason, Dillon finds this funny. He starts laughing, and pretty soon all the boys around the table are laughing too. I don’t think it’s funny. Amma would cry if she knew. And Perimma? I don’t even want to think about what she would say. Dillon had made me taste beef. How could he do that? Didn’t he know from my surname that I am Hindu, and eating beef is a sin? My head is swimming.

  “You should see your face right now,” says Dillon. “It’s hilarious! Almost as funny as it was right before I winged you with that ball.”

  Dillon screws up his face, squinting as he imitates the way I must have looked trying to play baseball without my glasses on.

  I don’t understand what’s happening. Why is he being so mean? Pramod and I kidded with each other all the time, but never like this.

  Dillon starts rubbing his nose and imitating the way I speak.

  “What you are about to witness is pure magic, a secret handed down from ancient times,” he says, exaggerating my accent.

  Is this how American friends treat one another? I don’t know what to do. If I get up and leave, Dillon will think I’m a coward who can’t take a joke. I decide it’s best to sit quietly and wait for it to be over. I look at the lump of half-eaten chili sitting on the table. I can still taste it in my mouth. Maybe the buttermilk and Amma’s curry will help to wash it away. I use my cloth napkin to wipe up the chili. I’ll be sure to throw it away after lunch so Amma won’t find any evidence of the chili. I’ll also need to keep my shirt buttoned up, to hide the bruise on my shoulder. As I open the bottom compartment of my tiffin box, a familiar waft of mustard seeds and onion drifts into the air, and I feel relieved.