Game Changer

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Dad pulled out a chair at the kitchen table for Max.

  “Here. Sit down. Want me to fix you pancakes? French toast? An omelet?” Dad asked Max. He looked over at KT as if he’d just remembered she was there. “KT, do you want any? Er, I guess you already ate, didn’t you?” He glanced toward the dishes in the sink, then squinted at her a little blankly. “Oh. Were you saying something a minute ago?”

  “Nothing, Dad,” KT said. “Never mind.”

  She left the kitchen, trying to hold on to her excitement from a few moments ago.

  Never mind is right, she told herself. He wasn’t interested enough for me to bother telling him anything. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’m going to have softball again.

  This wasn’t any different from a setback in a game. You just had to shake it off and keep going.

  She decided to head to the park early.

  “I’m leaving!” she called back to Dad and Max in the kitchen, even as she pushed the garage-door opener so she could pull out the wagon. “I’ll probably be gone most of the day!”

  She didn’t wait to hear if Dad even bothered asking, “Where are you going?”

  It took longer than she expected to roll the overloaded wagon all the way to the park. It was probably a good mile away, and KT’s arms started hurting before she’d even gone halfway.

  Oh, well. That will build better muscles for pitching, she told herself. I probably haven’t been getting enough practice this week, just pitching during that one short class every day at school.

  Soon enough the flat, open green of Ridgestone Park appeared before her. KT had picked this park because it was so huge—if enough people showed up to hold four games simultaneously, they could do that. Without backstops or fences everyone would just have to stay alert for runaway balls.

  KT set out enough pillow bases for two diamonds, for a start. She stepped off the proper distances between bases and readjusted all of the pillows slightly. Somebody persnickety—Vanessa? Bree?—might bring a yardstick or something to measure it precisely, but KT was satisfied. She could feel the distances in her bones, could tell even with her eyes shut what it should feel like to run from base to base.

  In the center of each diamond she stomped down the grass and dug in her cleats to mark the pitcher’s place. She practiced the motion of each throw, whirling her arm just right without actually releasing any balls. Then she went to home base and practiced hitting tossed-up balls.

  Probably some of the girls will be so eager they’ll show up before ten, KT thought. We can get started with an impromptu practice until everyone gets here.

  She reminded herself that she’d probably have to teach everyone the game, so she’d have to be patient and not expect them to play at a Rysdale Invitational level right away.

  But they’re all great athletes, she thought. They’ll learn fast.

  She targeted the location of all the balls she hit: This one will go to second base, she told herself. This one will go to right field . . .

  She used up all the balls, then jogged out to collect them all. On her way back to home base, she stopped at the wagon to check the time on her phone: 9:56.

  Any minute now, she told herself.

  She kept batting, in between looking back toward the parking lot. This one will go toward third base, but don’t let it go foul, she told herself. Now, this one will go toward where a shortstop should be . . .

  She came to the bottom of the basket of balls once more. She was slow walking out to retrieve the balls again, slow walking over to the wagon, slow picking up her phone.

  Ten fifteen.

  She slid down to the ground, grabbed one of the water bottles, and gulped it down.

  Maybe some of the girls got lost, she told herself, wiping the sweaty bottle against her own sweaty forehead. In one of her multiple mass messages, she’d given everyone her cell number—maybe she’d just missed hearing the phone. She checked both her missed-call log and the text-message in-box.

  Nothing.

  She watched the deserted parking lot.

  Nothing.

  At ten forty-five, she had to face the truth: Nobody had shown up. Nobody was going to.

  Nobody.

  KT pitched her head forward, burying her face in her hands. Then she collapsed all the way down to the ground. She wasn’t much for crying, but she sobbed now; she wailed; she scared herself with how violently the tears came.

  I can’t get softball back, she thought. I can’t. No matter how hard I try, I can’t play softball alone. I need a team and—nobody wants to be on a team with me.

  She pounded her fists on the ground, rubbed her face back and forth in the dirt.

  Two hundred girls I contacted. Two hundred! All of them used to love softball. Most of them used to be my friends. And none of them even bothered writing back to say they weren’t coming.

  She was getting snot in her hair, mud in her ears.

  How can I survive in this awful place without softball? How can I ever get back to the real world now?

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. She heard a voice.

  “You were voted one of the best eighth-grade pitchers in the entire state. You pitched a no-hitter in that championship tournament game in Atlanta—or was it Houston? You’d think I’d remember, I’ve heard the story so many times.”

  KT lifted her head.

  It wasn’t one of her softball friends or teammates crouching beside her, holding her shoulder, trying to pull her up.

  It was her brother, Max.

  Chαpter Eighteen

  “You remember!” KT cried, springing up from the dirt. She wiped the mud and snot from her face onto her sleeve and grabbed her brother in a gigantic hug. “You remember the real world!”

  “Won’t . . . do you any good . . . if you squeeze me to death,” Max struggled to say.

  KT laughed. She let go for a minute, then hugged him again. She kept hugging him.

  “I thought I was the only one who remembered,” she babbled. “I thought I was going crazy!”

  “This alternate world is crazy,” Max agreed.

  “Yeah, it’s even worse than something out of one of your video ga—” KT stopped herself. She pulled back from hugging Max. “Wait a minute—you did this, didn’t you? You zapped us into some sort of video game!” She began hitting Max, slapping him on the arm, punching him in the shoulder. The hits got harder and harder. “Get me out of here!”

  Max shoved her away.

  “If I was creating some sort of alternate world to make myself happy, do you think I’d make it so I spend five hours every school day exercising?” he snarled. “Do you think I’d make it so I have Mom and Dad breathing down my neck every minute at home, Coach Horace breathing down my neck every spare minute at school—‘Practice your math! Make sure your grades are high enough to play! Practice your math some more!’? Do you think I like this world any more than you do?”

  KT stared at her brother. He had a streak of mud across his cheek—mud that had smeared from her face onto his. He didn’t bother rubbing it off. He was still lazy. And he was still pudgy and pasty and everything else that had always disgusted and annoyed her about Max.

  But he was the real Max, the one she’d known his entire life. He was exactly who he’d always been. She didn’t have to go guessing about how he’d become a different person, growing up in this different world.

  She knew him. And . . . she believed him.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, I don’t think this is the alternate world you’d make, if you could make things the way you wanted.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “So—did you just make some sort of mistake? Can you fix it and send me back?”

  “KT, I’m not the one who set up this horrible world!” Max protested. “I don’t know any more than you do about why it exists or how we got here!”

  “Oh,” KT said. She sagged against the side of the red wagon. “But . . . we’re a team now. We both want the same thing. We can wo
rk together figuring out how to get out of here.”

  It was weird how much better this made her feel. This was just her no-good slug of a brother, Max. And he’d already said he didn’t know anything.

  But he remembered the real world, and the real KT. And he didn’t hate her so much that he wasn’t willing to help get all of that back.

  “Okay,” Max said evenly. He scooted over and leaned back against the wagon, sitting right beside her. “Where do you think we should start? What have you figured out so far?”

  “Not much,” KT said. She shrugged. “The last thing I remember from the real world was during a softball game—the fifth inning of the Rysdale championship game. So I thought, if I could just play a softball game here, it could be like, like . . .”

  “The doorway back?” Max asked skeptically.

  Spoken out loud, the idea sounded ludicrous. KT wrinkled her nose.

  “Maybe I just really, really, really wanted to play softball,” she admitted, looking sadly out at the empty pillow bases spread across the grass. “I wanted that to be an answer.”

  “When you’re a hammer, all you see is nails,” Max muttered.

  “Huh?” KT said.

  “It’s a saying. All you ever think about is softball, so of course you wanted that to be the answer,” Max said.

  He said this almost fondly, so somehow it didn’t make KT mad.

  “Yeah, well, what’s the last thing you remember about the real world?” KT asked. “What was your ‘doorway’?”

  “I don’t know,” Max admitted. “The last thing I remember was at your game, too—”

  “The Rysdale championship?”

  “I guess,” he said. “On Sunday. I was playing Starship Defense on my DS. And then I must have blacked out, because the next thing I remember it was Monday morning and Mom was waking me up telling me it was my big day. And I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.”

  “Because you were in weirdo world,” KT finished for him. “I heard Mom say that too.”

  She stared off into the cloudless sky—like the cloudless skies she’d seen over countless softball fields in the real world, but completely and utterly different because this whole world was different.

  She’d never thought of cloudless skies as empty before.

  She looked back, and Max was just watching her stare off into space.

  “So we both blacked out right before things changed,” she said briskly, trying to bring herself back to KT-gets-things-done mode. “Do you remember any pain? Did anything hurt when you blacked out?”

  Max squinted, thinking.

  “Maybe,” he said slowly. “It’s hard to remember . . . . Do you think the same thing zapped us both, at exactly the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” KT said. “For me, the last thing I remember is throwing the ball to make the third out in the fifth inning. Did you blank out at the top of the fifth, too?”

  “How should I know?” Max asked. “I wasn’t paying attention to your game! I was fighting aliens!”

  Back in the real world it would have made KT furious that he’d been at her softball game and not even watched. He’d just been fighting some stupid imaginary war.

  But she’d been at his mathletics game last night and not watched either. She’d just sat there longing for softball.

  “Mom and Dad made you go to my game, didn’t they?” KT asked. She snorted. “Let me guess—they said, ‘You have to be supportive of your sister. In this family we support the important efforts of each individual member.’ Right?”

  “That and, ‘This is what being a family is all about,’” Max quoted, in such a great imitation of Mom’s voice that KT laughed. “And, ‘Max, we want to spend time with both our kids. If you don’t come to the game, we’ll barely see you today.’”

  At least KT hadn’t been given that excuse. Maybe she should be insulted that this world’s Mom didn’t want to spend time with her.

  Max dug his heel into the grass.

  “Mom and I got into a huge fight that day, right before we got in the car,” he said. “I told her, ‘Yeah, well, why don’t you make KT watch me play video games?’”

  “Max, that’d be awful,” KT protested. “I’d hate it!”

  “I wasn’t serious,” Max said. “I wouldn’t want you guys watching me either.” He twisted up his face in disgust. “I was just trying to make a point. Why were your games so important, and all anybody ever talked about, when the games I played always had Mom yelling at me, ‘Max, shut that thing off! Go do something useful!’?”

  “Because—,” KT began, ready to hotly defend the honor of softball versus video games.

  Max held up his hands, stopping her.

  “I know! I know!” he said. “Believe me, Mom told me every single reason. ‘Because what KT does is healthy. It’s exercise. It’s hard work. It’s achievement. It could get her a college scholarship. It could lead to international fame and a high-profile coaching job or TV commentator job, and a lifetime of signing autographs for people who run into her at the mall.’ Or something like that.”

  Back in the real world that would have been the cue for KT to screech, “Don’t joke about my future like that! Mom’s right! Softball is a billion times more important than video games!”

  But KT had been dealing with Nasty Mom all week. She knew what it felt like to have her mother’s every look and every word carry the secret or not-so-secret background message: I’m not interested in what you’re interested in. I’m not really even that interested in you.

  “I guess . . . I guess some video games are exercise,” KT said. “Like, Wii or Kinect. And . . . if it’s all about preparing for the future . . . people do get jobs making video games. They talked about that at Career Day at school. Some computer programmers make a lot of money.”

  Max gaped at her.

  “You—you’re defending me?” he asked incredulously.

  “When we get back to the real world, I’ll tell Mom and Dad to lay off your case about the video games,” KT said. “And I’ll tell them not to make you go to my softball games if you don’t want to.”

  Max just kept staring. KT felt a little bit like she always felt in the pitching circle: powerful. In control. Maybe like a queen dispensing favors.

  “Thank you,” Max whispered.

  KT remembered she wasn’t powerful or in control in this world. She was nobody and nothing at home, and everybody hated her at school. And not a single one of her former friends from the real world had shown up to play softball.

  “Yeah, well, that’s when we get back to the real world,” KT said. “You’re the one who has the pull with Mom and Dad here.”

  “I’ll tell them not to make you go to my mathletics games, then,” Max said.

  “Why don’t we just get out of here before there’s another mathletics game?” KT asked.

  “I have mathletics club-team tryouts tomorrow,” Max said glumly. “Seven hours of people watching me do math, evaluating my every move.”

  KT watched Max, her head cocked.

  “Max,” she said slowly. “Forget the part about having everybody watch you—do you even like math? Were you that good at it in the real world?”

  KT tried to remember if she’d ever heard Mom or Dad talking about Max’s math brilliance in the real world. Mom had told Mrs. Bashkov about KT’s good grades in this world—surely if Max had been some math genius for real, there would have been some moment when Mom or Dad would have said, “Way to go, Max! I can’t believe you had the highest math grade in your whole class!” They would have come back from parent-teacher conferences saying, “Wow, Max, your teacher says your mind is made for math!” or whatever that ridiculous thing was that Mom had quoted in this world. They wouldn’t have been nearly as excited about it as they were here, and Dad probably would have gone right back to talking about sports, but still. Why couldn’t KT remember anything like that?

  KT kept racking her brain, but came up blank. Max was frowning.


  “I never thought math was hard,” he said. “Sometimes it was kind of fun. But mostly I just got in trouble in math and always had points taken off because I wouldn’t show my work.”

  KT rolled her eyes.

  “Good old lazy Max,” she muttered.

  “No,” Max said, but it wasn’t like he was being defensive. It was more like he was figuring something out. “I don’t think I was being lazy. Really. It was more like—there wasn’t any work to show. I just looked at the problems and I knew the answer. If they forced me to write something down, to show my steps, I always had to make something up.”

  KT remembered how he’d seemed to know the answers instantly during the mathletics game yesterday, the parts she’d actually paid attention to.

  She slugged him in the arm.

  “Whoa, Max,” she said. “You really are a math genius!”

  “Well,” he said modestly, “I don’t think it will work that way when I get to the harder stuff—calculus, trigonometry, all that. Ben says his parents say the American school system really doesn’t expect enough of sixth graders in math. That’s why they had him pushed up to seventh-grade math, in the real world. He wanted me to take the test to see if I could do that too, but, you know, everyone at school already thought I was a nerd. I didn’t need to make it worse.”

  KT felt a little pang in her heart. She’d always kind of thought that Max didn’t know how uncool he was. He was like some big, sloppy, happy dog lolling through life, not even hearing the complaints: “Yuck! He drools!” “He smells!” “He just made a mess!”

  Not that I think Max drools, but . . . but didn’t he think people liked him? KT thought. Wasn’t he happy?

  Somehow these weren’t questions she could ask her brother.

  Instead she put on a show of total outrage. She put her hands on her hips.

  “Maxwell Charles Sutton!” she said. “Are you telling me you had the chance to hit the ball out of the ballpark, and you didn’t even bother stepping up to the plate to bat?”

  “It wasn’t softball,” Max said defiantly. “And I’m not you. I don’t need people telling me how great I am all the time. I don’t need to show off!”