Game Changer

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  KT reeled backward. She hadn’t thought of that. She was actually glad that she had the wheelchair underneath and behind her. And, anyhow, Max put a steadying arm on her shoulder. He was there to hold her up too, if she needed him.

  KT grabbed Evangeline’s arm once more.

  “Evangeline, please,” she said. “I promise you, things will be different if you come back. When you come back. No matter what happens with your injuries, no matter what happens with my heart problems—we’re a team now. Everything’s better when you’ve got a team around you. You, me, Max—we’ll show those other kids different ways to be winners!”

  Dimly KT realized that trying so hard to wake up Evangeline was partly just a way to avoid thinking about her own problems.

  But what’s wrong with that? she wondered. Isn’t it better to do something good for someone else, rather than obsess about myself? Or—hide from everything in some fake alternate world?

  This didn’t feel like hiding. This felt more like . . . like growing past her own problems. Like finding a new way to win.

  “Please, Evangeline!” she repeated.

  She was practically screaming now. Well, who cared if Evangeline’s parents and the doctor heard that last part? Who cared if the whole hospital heard? She had to make her voice loud enough to drown out the echo of Max’s voice in her head: Sometimes people lose. KT knew it was possible that Evangeline would never wake up. It was possible that she would die. It was possible that KT’s heart would never heal enough that she could play softball again. It was possible that KT would die.

  Was it also possible that Evangeline’s eyelids were starting to flutter open? Or did KT just think that because she wanted it to happen so badly? Because she always, always, always wanted her team to win?

  Epil0gue

  Three and a half years later

  It was the first day of school at Brecksville Middle School North. The new sixth graders, looking young and scared and barely hatched from elementary school, sat waiting in the auditorium. They’d already spent most of the morning being told how to open their lockers, how to organize their plan books, and how to find their way around the school. Now, Principal Arnold announced, some students from the high school were going to talk to them.

  Striding toward the podium, KT scanned the faces in the crowd. She thought that maybe some of the kids had perked up at the mention of high schoolers. She hoped they had—she wanted them to actually listen.

  “The young lady you’re about to hear from is a very involved, very busy student over at the high school,” Mr. Arnold said. “It’s KT Sutton—KT, you want to remind me what all you’re doing? Are you playing any sports?”

  This was a scripted question—she’d asked Mr. Arnold to ask her this. But for a moment it took her breath away, the cruelty of it all. The cruelty of her life.

  “No, Mr. Arnold, I don’t play any sports,” she said. “For some reason the high school’s a little cowardly about putting athletes out on the field when they have a good chance of keeling over dead if they run to catch a ball.”

  Mr. Arnold winced—she hadn’t exactly warned him about her answer. She recognized the look in his eye: He would want to have a little talk with her afterward. But she was a high-school senior now. She wasn’t afraid of the middle-school principal.

  And anyhow, her blunt words had accomplished what she wanted. The entire auditorium had fallen silent. The boys in the back rows had stopped fidgeting in their seats. The girls who looked like they’d spent the whole summer figuring out what to wear the first day had stopped messing around with each other’s hair.

  Everyone was listening now.

  “So, sixth grade,” KT said speculatively. “I remember the first day of my sixth-grade year. I thought I had middle school all figured out. I remember, I sat right there.” She pointed out into the crowd, toward a section just a few rows from the back. Appropriately enough, the group of kids sitting there now looked like they might be athletes. “I thought I was going to be the greatest softball player Brecksville North had ever seen. And then I was going to be the greatest softball player Brecksville High had ever seen. And, after that, I was planning to get a softball scholarship to college and become the greatest softball player the whole world had ever seen.”

  “So what happened?” a kid called out. He probably thought that was his bid for the role of class clown. Out of the corner of her eye KT saw Mr. Arnold narrow his eyes and write something down on a clipboard.

  KT didn’t care.

  “What happened?” she repeated. “Real life. Sixth grade did go the way I expected it to. So did seventh. But then, during a softball game my eighth-grade year, I collapsed on the field and found out I had a heart problem I’d never known about. I could have died because of it. I was lucky I didn’t.”

  It had been a long time before her parents had explained exactly how bad things had looked for KT on the field of the Rysdale Invitational finals. She’d been lucky her collapse had actually just been from fainting, not anything worse. But she’d also been lucky that one of the parents of the Cobras was a cardiologist who’d insisted that she be checked for something called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

  It was just unlucky that she actually had it.

  “Even then,” KT went on, “even being told sports could kill me, I kept thinking, Well, I’ll surprise everyone and heal completely. I’ll be the one person who recovers and goes back to being a star athlete. But I didn’t. I can’t. Sure, the doctors tell me I can have a normal life, but only if my normal life doesn’t include playing my favorite sport.”

  The sixth graders looked appropriately horrified, so she didn’t add any extra information about all the tests she’d had, all the time she’d spent in medical facilities, all the discussions she’d been in about treatment options . . . She didn’t tell them how hard she’d cried the first time someone told her some competitive sports were allowed—but only “sports” like billiards and archery. Three years of high school had already slipped by, and she’d been benched from softball the whole time. She now understood that she probably would be the rest of her life.

  And yet . . .

  “But you know what?” KT said. “It’s okay. I’ve found other things to get involved with. A variety of groups: service clubs and artsy clubs and even a few things connected to academics. I’ve made friends I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’m busy. I’m happy. I’m fine.”

  Two years ago, the first time KT had come back to speak at the middle school, it had been hard to say these words. They hadn’t quite sounded true. This time KT was surprised at how easily that “I’m happy” slipped off her tongue.

  If I got zapped into some sort of alternate world where I could have played softball all through high school, would I actually have wanted to? she wondered. Or would I just think about everything else that I wouldn’t get to do? The challenging classes that turned out to be fun, that I wouldn’t have taken because they would have interfered with softball. The friends I never would have made, or even bothered to speak to: Miguel from drama club, Ally from service club, Teddy and Misha and Stu from the Special Olympics team I’ve been coaching, and of course my best friend, who . . .

  KT got distracted, because one of the girls in the front row was making a snarky comment in a slightly too loud voice.

  “Oh, I know what this is about,” the girl said in a bored, haughty tone. “This is one of those stupid ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ speeches.”

  She rolled her eyes, and the girls on either side of her quickly adjusted their own expressions to imitate her smirk.

  KT fixed the girl with the same kind of deadeye stare she’d once used on opposing batters.

  Sorry, kiddo, I know you’re only a sixth grader, she thought. But you just made yourself fair game.

  “No, girl in the front row, this is not a ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ speech,” KT countered. “This is a ‘no matter what life gives you, don’t treat the people around
you like lemons’ speech.”

  The front-row girl—and both of her sidekicks—looked totally confused.

  “You’re all starting middle school,” KT said. “And maybe you’re sitting there thinking you know exactly who you are and what you’re good at and how you’re going to fit in here at Brecksville North. Or maybe you don’t have a clue. Either way, you probably think you can look around and know those things about the other kids. You’ve probably already started labeling the other kids popular or outcast or hot or ugly or smart or stupid or talented or useless or someone you would want for a friend or someone you would never in a million years be friends with. But you know what? You don’t know anything at all about the people around you.”

  Snarky girl in the front row looked like she wanted to keep making nasty comments, but she was afraid that she might miss something if she did.

  “This is middle school,” KT continued. “All of you are going to change a lot in the next three years. A jock like me might end up benched. The so-called popular kids may be the ones everyone hates by Christmas. The ugliest kid in the school might end up being the hottest guy in your class by eighth grade.”

  KT instantly regretted saying that last part, because half the auditorium turned to peer at one particular kid. He looked like his hair had never met a brush or a comb, and his ears and mouth and nose seemed to have reached grown-up size about five years before the rest of him. But he just sat up straight and looked back at the others with something like confidence, as if to say, Oh, yeah? Hear that? Whatever you think of me now, I might be hot by eighth grade!

  “But, believe me, you are really going to miss out over the next three years if all you see when you look at your fellow classmates are labels,” KT went on. “You’re going to miss out on finding out what makes them interesting, and they’re going to miss out on finding out what makes you interesting.”

  It was almost time for KT’s sales job.

  “That’s why some other high-school kids and I started a club for middle schoolers a few years ago,” KT said. “A club where kids can talk about anything they want to. Where they can share what they’re thinking without being labeled weird. We voted to call it the Evangeline club.”

  As KT could have predicted, snarky girl in the front row whirled around to her friends and said in a voice just loud enough for KT to hear, “Sounds like a club for losers! I would never join that!”

  KT needed to bring out her secret weapons.

  “Let me introduce a few other kids involved with the group to help me explain,” KT said. “Max? Ben?”

  Her brother and his best friend stepped out from behind the stage curtain. A stunned hush fell over the crowd, followed by a rush of high-pitched, sixth-grade-girl whispers. Even snark-girl in the front row immediately hissed to her friends, “Let’s join that club! I don’t care what we have to do, I want to meet those guys!”

  Max and Ben had both gone through an incredible metamorphosis over the past three and a half years. Max was still KT’s brother, and Ben might as well have been, so she still tended to think of them as just a couple of goofy guys. But other girls drooled over them all the time now.

  Is it that Max is actually that good-looking, or do girls just think that because he acts so confident now? KT wondered. And . . . he’s managed to keep Ben from being a total jerk about his looks, so everyone likes both of them?

  Whatever. They were having the right effect on the sixth graders.

  Ben leaned toward the microphone and said in his now-deep, cool-sounding voice, “The whole time I was in middle school, I was terrified that someone might find out that my real first name was Ebenezer. If we’d had an Evangeline club back then, I could have just told everyone in the group, and that would have been that. My terror would have ended three years early.”

  KT could practically see half the guys in the audience thinking, Whoa. I wish my real first name was Ebenezer. Then people would think I was cool. And many of the girls seemed to be thinking, Ebenezer. What a great name. I’m going to name my first kid that. After I marry this guy, of course.

  The nerdy name had been transformed just because someone who looked like Ben admitted that it was his.

  Max took his turn at the microphone.

  “And when I was in middle school, I had my parents nagging me and nagging me to join a sports team, to get some exercise, to do something,” he said. “And I was too embarrassed to tell them that there was actually a sport that I kind of liked, and would be willing to try.”

  Ben rested his arm on Max’s shoulder in that casual way guy jocks always had.

  “You are looking at the cocaptains of the Brecksville High School bowling team,” he drawled into the microphone.

  The entire auditorium full of sixth graders laughed and cheered. In that moment they seemed to forget that the only cool sports for boys were football and basketball and baseball. It was like they were all vowing to become bowling fans.

  Well, Mom and Dad adapted, KT thought, grinning a little to herself.

  She was actually kind of proud of the way her parents had become the biggest boosters the bowling team had. At least they still had some sporting event to watch one of their kids play. It was a nice distraction from all of KT’s heart problems. And the heart problems did keep Mom and Dad from forcing KT to go watch Max play, too. But sometimes she went to cheer her brother on anyway.

  “Oh, we’re on math team too!” Ben added, and the auditorium roared again, probably because the sixth graders thought it was a joke.

  We’ll let them come to the first Evangeline club meeting before we tell them that’s true, KT thought.

  “We’re making this sound like it’s all fun and games, because, well, we’re kind of funny guys,” Max said with a shrug that KT thought was sure to endear him even more to the audience. “But the Evangeline club does serve a serious purpose.”

  This was KT’s cue to step back to the microphone.

  “Back when the three of us were in middle school, one of our fellow students, Evangeline, had a tough time of it,” KT began. “She was—well, there’s no other word for it—weird. She wore clothes nobody else would be caught dead in, and she thought about things nobody else thought about, and she told the teachers they needed to make their homework assignments harder.”

  Someone in the back of the auditorium began booing.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” KT said, nodding. “But it gets worse. She sent an e-mail to all the administrators and coaches and teachers and everybody telling them that they should get rid of school sports and spend all their time and energy on school itself.”

  The booing got louder.

  KT held up her hand to silence it.

  “Now, you can probably guess that I didn’t agree with that myself,” she said, rolling her eyes for emphasis. “But Evangeline was entitled to her opinion. And there were other kids who actually felt the same way she did. Who maybe could have teamed up with her and had fun together. Built up some new groups at the school for themselves, instead of trying to take away the things that other kids thought were fun.”

  Now Max leaned toward the microphone.

  “But for kids like me, the last thing we wanted was to have someone think we were friends with Evangeline. What if people decided that made us as weird as her?” he asked, and in just that moment, he sounded like his sixth-grade self again: forlorn and cowardly.

  KT realized that the auditorium had fallen silent once more.

  “So Evangeline didn’t have any friends,” KT continued. “After that e-mail a lot of the adults were mad at her too. She couldn’t see an end to it. And so this brilliant, talented kid started doing things to mess up her own life. She had all these opportunities ahead of her, if she could just stick it out through middle school. But she was ready to throw it all away.”

  KT’s voice had taken on a huskiness that flowed out into the quiet room, seeming to affect the new, unformed sixth graders more than she’d expected. Somehow it
was different kids she picked out in the crowd now. Amid the jocks and the nerds and the brainiacs and the queen-bee wannabes, certain faces were wrinkled up in concern, as if the kids behind the faces were thinking, I would have been her friend. I would have talked to her, no matter what other people thought of me.

  And, just as she had the past two years, giving this same speech, KT reminded herself, See? Even in middle school there are some kids who are truly kind.

  She really needed to get some of those kids into this year’s Evangeline club, or it would never work.

  But a wave of whispers was also starting to cross the room, gossipy mutterings that KT caught in bits and pieces:

  “Was there some girl three or four years ago who actually committed suicide?”

  “How is it our fault if some girl offed herself because she didn’t have any friends?”

  “What are we supposed to do about something that happened so long ago?”

  KT let the whispers reach their crest, then she leaned back toward the microphone.

  “But you don’t just have to take my word for all of this,” KT said. “Why don’t we let Evangeline tell her own story?”

  The sixth graders let out a collective gasp. The curtains at the side of the auditorium began to sway, and all the kids in the room snapped their attention in that direction.

  Slowly, dramatically, Evangeline stepped out from behind the curtain.

  “Yep, that’s me!” she announced, her voice loud enough to carry through the room without amplification. She posed, a hand on her hip. “Ta-da!”

  All the sixth graders burst out laughing—laughing with Evangeline, not at her. KT almost expected them to break out chanting like the cheerleaders back in weirdo world: “E, E-V, E-V-A-N-G-E-L, and I-N-E!”

  For Evangeline had changed just as much as Max and Ben in the past three years. It wasn’t that she’d turned beautiful—well, KT thought, studying the other girl’s face, maybe she could be beautiful if she wanted to, but she’d think that was way too boring and ordinary. Instead she’d become cool. Where her odd clothes had seemed pathetic and weird in middle school, now they gave her an air of being more stylish than anyone else, in a funky, hippie-chick kind of way. The thrift-store paisley skirt she was wearing now made all the Abercrombie and Hollister clones in the audience look cookie-cutter dull.