Diego was in bed with a fever, and Alex.? My God, what about Alex? How could we possibly beat the Unbeatables without him?
“Dad, we have to go out again,” we yelled, and hurried out into the street. We picked up Danny, Josh, Julian, and Roger, and the six of us ran over to One Woodlawn Avenue.
Alex was in his room, sitting on his bed. His father stood in front of him, talking. He talked and talked. How disappointed he was in his son, how little he respected his own father, and how downright rude he was. In the end he demanded an explanation for it all. But Alex didn’t talk. That’s why his father started talking yet again. He talked and talked, and then he explained that it was necessary to resort to more drastic measures.
“That’s why, my dear son, you will spend all of your spring break here in your room. Is that clear?”
Alex’s father stood in front of his son and waited for an answer. But as usual, Alex didn’t say a word. He just sat on his bed and looked right through his father out the window. That’s when we rang the doorbell. And we kept ringing.
“What do you want?” Alex’s father asked when he opened the door.
“We want to save the day. We’re the superheroes!” Josh grinned.
“And we can explain everything!” Tyler added.
“It’s about honor and pride!” I said.
“And we have to be honest and sincere!” Julian hurried to say, while kicking Danny in the shin.
“Yes, ahh, right,” Danny stuttered. “I was the one who told Alex how to escape. You know, the garage and the apple tree — you know the one you always wanted to get rid of? That’s why you can’t blame Alex.”
“Yes, and that’s why Danny will share his punishment,” Roger chimed in.
Danny riveted him with a chilling look. Being grounded voluntarily was just too much, and for the first time I noticed that Roger didn’t have a free pass with Danny after all. Roger felt it too, and it made him nervous.
“No, seriously, Mr. Cannon, and ahh, I mean we’ll all help him, of course. You know, that means we all want to be grounded just like Alex. All of us!”
Alex’s father raised his brow. He had never heard of such a thing. And to be honest with you, neither had we. We all looked at Roger as if he had just escaped from the funny farm, and that made him even more nervous.
“Yes, seriously, that’s precisely what we want, Mr. Cannon, but only if we can postpone the whole thing for a very short while. We would be available to serve our sentence in say, two weeks? What do you think?”
Roger managed a smile, realizing he had almost messed the whole thing up. We thought so, too.
“Without Alex, we’ll never win!” he blurted one last time.
Alex’s father just stared at us. Seconds passed, minutes, and hours. At least it felt like it. We were about to take a hike when Alex’s father cleared his throat and finally said: “OK, fine.”
Alex’s father, who usually talks up a storm, said nothing more that day.
The First Touch
In soccer, sometimes the first touch of the ball can decide everything. That was particularly true for Diego the next day. Really early in the morning, about seven, he tiptoed into the kitchen of 11 St. Charles Street, took three ice cubes from the freezer, and put them in his mouth. He was sure it would be enough until his mother got up — and then nothing would stand in the way of practice.
He closed the freezer door and danced out of the kitchen. But his mother stood in the doorway, and her expression told Diego that he was trapped. He fearfully swallowed all three ice cubes at once and stammered, “Hello Mom, um, I mean good morning!” His breath formed frost on the pot that was sitting on the stove six feet away.
Luckily his mother didn’t notice. She approached him and looked into his open mouth as he continued to hold his icy breath. Then she put the thermometer between his teeth.
“Did you really think I’d fall for your little scam twice in a row?” she asked and left the kitchen.
Diego pulled the thermometer from his mouth, and took as deep a breath as he could. Then he put the thermometer back into his mouth.
“Don’t breathe, no matter what! Don’t breathe, no matter what!” he told himself over and over. “If you breathe now, the thermometer will freeze to your lips.”
Seconds passed. First ten. Then twenty, then thirty, and finally forty. Diego stopped counting. His eyes bulged from the lack of oxygen and finally his mother came back into the kitchen. Diego was sure he’d explode at any moment. The thermometer would fly out of his mouth and — just like Iceman’s ice cannon — his breath would freeze his mother and the entire apartment.
That’s when he was finally saved by the beep. In a flash he pulled the thermometer from his mouth, handed it to his mother, turned around and blew out his arctic air and took another deep breath. When his breath hit a fly, it fell to the ground, killed by frost.
“Oh God!” Diego said.
“You can say that again!” his mother confirmed. “Only God knows how you do that!”
“Do what?” Diego asked innocently as he turned towards her. “How high?”
“98.2!” his mother answered as skeptically as if the thermometer had said the sky was purple.
But Diego was already rushing to his room.
Just like us. Tyler and I were in a terrible hurry. My dad was out taking Sox for a walk, and it would just be bad timing if we were gone when he came back. As much as we loved and cared for Sox, we simply didn’t want him around during practice.
At 9:00 AM sharp we were all at the park by the lake. Of course we knew that practice didn’t start until an hour later, but we couldn’t wait any longer. So we just started to kick the ball around. I kicked it high up in the sky. Then we ran. Every one of us wanted to get to the ball first, but I tell you, none of us did.
Right at the start, Diego slipped and fell face first into the muck. Josh and Roger couldn’t even move. They were stuck in the mud up to their ankles, as if they had glue on their feet. Julian and Tyler started to run, but they didn’t get far. They stumbled over the stones that were all over the grass. And finally, Diego, Alex and I plunged into a knee-deep hole filled to the brim with water.
“Bravo! Bravo!” somebody clapped. I crawled out of the hole and saw Larry sitting on a tree trunk just a few feet away from us.
“This is no soccer field!” I yelled at him and Julian rubbed his knee. “We’ll break our necks here!”
“That’s for sure!” Roger moaned desperately. He was still stuck. “Just look at us.”
“I am looking at you,” Larry grinned, amused, but I didn’t think this was funny at all.
“Wipe that grin off your face!” I spat at him. “You can’t practice here! The only thing you can do here is …!” I was so mad that I couldn’t think of anything to say. “The only thing you can do here is …!”
“Learn to swim?” Larry filled in the blanks.
I sucked in a lungful of air. I was ready to put a curse on him, but Larry beat me to it.
“I think the water is still too cold for swimming. That’s why I suggest you first learn how to run.”
He limped towards my ball and kicked it to the other end of the field.
“We won’t need that yet.”
We stared at him in utter disbelief. How could we practice without a soccer ball? But Larry ignored our protests. “You don’t think that Mickey the bulldozer and his Unbeatables will play fair, do you? That’s why for right now, you’re going to run a race. Always in pairs. And while you are running, imagine that the stones and holes are the legs of those jerks. They will foul you; you know that, don’t you? That’s why you’ll dodge them, jump right over them, and dance between them.”
“You got to be kidding!” Danny yelled and wiped the mud off his face. “The mud is as slippery as an ice rink.”
“Exactly!” Larry said. “I almost forgot about the mud. The mud is your fear. The fear and the wobbly knees you’ll have when someone like Mow-down, Juggernaut,
or Kong is running towards you.”
“They don’t scare me,” snapped Julian. “I’ll just take the ball from him.” His eyes glittered with fury. When soccer was at stake, Julian feared no one. Larry let out a sigh.
“Look,” he said and picked up a small pebble. “This pebble, that’s you, and the big boulder over there, that’s the Unbeatables.”
Then he threw the pebble as hard as he could. The small pebble bounced off the boulder and came flying back. Larry looked at Julian.
“You will learn what fear is,” he said.
Julian looked to the ground, embarrassed, but Larry didn’t stand for it.
“Unless, you learn to use the pebble’s advantage,” he said. “The pebble is quick and nimble and light as a feather. The pebble can dance.”
Larry tossed a second pebble. This time he tossed it flatly. The stone landed in a puddle, bounced up and over the big boulder, bounced up again and over three more big chunks of stone.
We finally got it. A smile played on our lips, and we ran off. No matter how often we slipped, fell, plunked into puddles or scraped our knees and elbows, nobody gave up. We raced each other over and over again. In the end we even did it blindfolded. And when Larry turned on his boom box, nobody protested. With blindfolded eyes we moved to the rhythm of the music. To us, the muddy field seemed smoother than a golf course, and we danced all over it like laughing elves.
In the end, Larry sprang for lemonade, which he had brought from his stand, and although we were all exhausted, we couldn’t stop laughing. In our minds, we pictured how the Bulldozer or Humungous or scary Kong stood in front of Larry’s stand, locked up because Larry was here with us. We imagined how they’d fall to their knees, sweat pouring down their faces, how they’d hammer against the stand, begging, eyes to the heavens, pleading for something to drink.
Oh man, life was beautiful, especially when Larry told us we’d finally get to play with a ball the next day. We all felt fabulous and after that first day, nobody had any doubt that we’d beat Mickey the bulldozer and his Unbeatables.
A Moment of Truth
But the next morning, everything was different. I wanted to jump out of bed, but the pain in my legs forced me back. At first I thought something was seriously wrong, but then I realized that I was just really sore. I struggled down the bunk bed ladder. Tyler was no better. We had to tie each other’s shoes. We just couldn’t reach our own feet. We limped out of the house. Just like the day before, we wanted to leave before our dad came home from his walk with Sox. But he was still home, waiting in the backyard, holding out Sox’s leash.
“No, please don’t,” we moaned.
Our dad surprisingly just shrugged his shoulders.
“OK,” he said, and we sighed a breath of relief, “but then I get the ball. That was the deal.”
“No, no way!” I yelled. “We need it today. Absolutely. Larry said so.”
“Good. And Sox needs you!” my dad said, Sox sitting right beside him, wagging his tail, as if he wanted to sweeten our harsh fate.
We were furious, because we knew what that wagging tail meant: attack the ball. We knew we wouldn’t be able to play a normal game because every time the ball goes into play, Sox bites deeper into it. It was only a matter of time until our last soccer ball would be ruined, too. And so, before that could happen, I grabbed Sox and tied him to the best tree I could find. Sox yelped and howled, but I didn’t care. My sore muscles had made me angry, and all I wanted to do now was play soccer. But just as soon as I had tied up Sox, Larry arrived for practice, and took the ball away from me. He kicked it high in the air, all the way to the other end of the field and said, just like yesterday:
“We won’t need it today.”
I completely lost it.
“Excuse me?” I yelled. “But yesterday you said we would. You said that we’d play with a ball today.
Didn’t he?”
The others nodded. So I was right and Larry was a liar. I stubbornly stormed off to get my ball, but Larry stopped me in my tracks.
“Wait, Kevin,” he said. “I didn’t say you couldn’t play with a ball today. Here you go.”
Larry grinned, and showed us what he was holding. We were horrified.
“That’s not a ball,” I said.
“Sure, it is,” Larry said, “I believe around these parts we call it a tennis ball.”
“You can’t play soccer with a tennis ball,” I countered.
“Yes, you can, if that’s all you have. Way back when, we used to play with tin cans and stones.”
“Big deal!” I complained. “We have something better. Over there, that’s my ball. I had to bring Sox with me because of that ball, and because of that ball he’s over there whining and we’re all going to need ear plugs. No way!”
Determined, I stomped off. But Larry stopped me again, and this time he was dead serious.
“Okay knock it off, enough of this!” he demanded in a voice that immediately stopped me in my tracks. “I am your coach, and I tell you what to do. Is that clear?”
I looked over to my friends. No, it wasn’t quite clear to us yet. This is not how we imagined our practice was going to be. Roger laughed his typical laugh. “Hey, guys, whatever. Yesterday we danced here. Why not play with a cute little fuzzy yellow ball today?”
“And what’s on for tomorrow, a hard-boiled egg?” Danny laughed and we all chimed in. But today’s laughter was not quite the same as yesterday. Perhaps this was because we were all sore and cranky. With that, we began our practice.
Larry divided us into two teams. Danny, Tyler, Roger, and me against Alex, Diego, Julian, and Josh. Then he tossed the tennis ball onto the field. Oh man, this was harder than it looked! We learned the day before how to move on the mushy field, but that tennis ball had not. It was hiding in clumps of grass as if it wanted to play below the turf. Then, if one of us had it, it slipped through our feet or bounced off our shoes straight to the other team. We barked at each other more and more:
“Watch out!”
“Where’d you learn how to play?”
“Loser!”
Larry stepped in every time. He didn’t let us yell and insult each other. We were a team, he said, and everyone had to grow and learn together. But we were all irritated. And on top of that we were sore and Sox wouldn’t stop howling and so, again and again, one of the Wild Bunch would get frustrated, sit down on the ground or yell at Larry.
“I’ve had it!”
“I’m not playing anymore.” “That’s it, I quit.”
But Larry stayed firm. He reminded us that we only had two weeks and our number one goal was to beat the Unbeatables. And that’s why he tortured us with the tennis ball.
“If you succeed with the tennis ball,” he promised again and again, “every trick with the soccer ball will feel like child’s play.”
We sucked that day. In the evening, the lemonade tasted bitter and we walked home with our tails between our legs. We were so depressed we didn’t say a word, and every one of us thought to himself: “We’ll never beat the Unbeatables if this keeps up.”
“We’re never going to get our soccer field back.”
And: “Even if Larry is right, how can we possibly keep going like this for the next ten days?”
The next three days were even worse. It got hot. As hot as the dog days of summer, and with the heat came the mosquitoes. They buzzed around us and bit our arms and legs and faces. And then there was Sox’s howling, which wouldn’t stop even when we took turns sitting next to him. He didn’t like to be petted. He just wanted the ball. He was crazy for that thing, and the more he liked it, the more we hated it. We yelled at each other, cursed each other like crazy, and once I even grabbed Roger and pushed him into the mud.
“Moron! Start playing soccer for once!”
Larry tried to calm us down, but we hissed at him:
“Stay out of it!”
“This was your idea!”
“This is all your fault!”
Everyone shut up, including Larry, who limped to the sidelines and sat down and just watched us. At first we thought, “Hah! That’ll show him! Now we’ll stop playing!” But then we just stood there, looking at each other. We knew that whoever left first was a coward and no one wanted to admit to that. Nobody wanted to be the reason for losing the game. Nobody wanted to be the reason for losing our neighborhood soccer field. Ashamed, I walked to the ball, balanced it on the instep, lifted it up in the air, headed it, stopped it with the chest and, with my knee, kicked it to Danny. He did the same, and passed it on to Alex. Next came Julian, then Tyler, then Diego. It didn’t fall into the mud until Roger had it. But we didn’t care. We were laughing again, and eventually we all got the big picture. We played like Kaka and Ronaldinho at the beach in Brazil. Larry had told us about them many times, but we must have forgotten. At the beach you play the ball high, because otherwise it’ll just bounce around out of control. That’s why the Brazilians are such magicians with the ball, and that’s why we were magicians now, too — except Josh and Roger.
I didn’t say anything for the next two days. Maybe that was because I had traded my ball for Sox. We didn’t need the ball anyway and that way at least we didn’t have to listen to Sox’s howling. But then things started to annoy me. Every time Roger or Josh had the ball, they lost it and the other team scored a goal. The two of them were totally clumsy and to make things worse, they hadn’t learned a thing. Okay, I admit it, Josh was still too young. He was only six years old, three years younger than me, so he’s going to make mistakes, right? But Roger, though, he was just blind. Period. And then to top it off, Diego got sick. The fever finally caught up with him, and there were no more ice cubes to save him. His mother had defrosted the freezer.
That’s why on the ninth day of our practice, four days before the game, I called a team meeting with Larry. And if you know me, you know I didn’t hold my tongue.
“Josh and Roger have to leave the team!” I demanded. “Having them on our team is like having them on the other guys’ team.”
Kevin the Star Striker Page 5