Game Changer (11 page)

Neither Mom nor Dad came after her.

KT had always thought the worst feeling in the world was being stuck on the bench during a close game, when you couldn’t do a thing to help your team.

She’d been wrong.

It was infinitely worse to stand cowering in an empty hallway, outside a huge, important game that the whole town seemed to have shown up for—and have it not be her game or her sport or even her reality.

It was incalculably worse not to even have a team.

This is just a dream,
she told herself.
A nightmare. It couldn’t possibly be real.

But didn’t dreams usually end right about the time you figured out they were dreams?

She pinched her arm—nearly hard enough to draw blood—and still she didn’t wake up. The sign staring at her from across the hall still said
ALL OUR NUMBERS ADD UP—
YOUR
TEAM IS AN INCORRECT CALCULATION!
Just as girls now seemed to think guys like Ben and Max were hot, maybe that passed for a clever taunt in this world.

It’s not a different world,
KT corrected herself.
It’s just . . . just . . .

She didn’t have words to explain it to herself. She couldn’t get her mind around any of this. But did she actually have to understand this place to be able to get out of it?

She slammed her shoulder against the wall, just in case it was possible to break through, to get back to the real world that way. This was how KT barreled through first basemen who got in her way, catchers who got in her way—
anything
that got in her way.

The wall was perfectly solid. It
seemed
real.

Hitting it just made KT’s shoulder hurt.

Like last night, at the Rysdale Invitational . . .

Just thinking about the Rysdale Invitational—thinking about the real world containing something as amazing as the Rysdale Invitational—made KT’s whole body ache with loss.

Down the hall, a burst of cheering spilled out of the library, followed by a collective groan of disappointment and another exultant cheer.

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,
KT thought.

She couldn’t stand listening to the crowd noise anymore. Not when it was for math. Not when it was a reminder that everything she loved had vanished.

She edged farther down the hall. A door stood partly open, an electrical cord winding from an outlet in the hallway to a vacuum cleaner just inside the classroom. It looked like maybe the janitor had walked away from his job
to go watch the math competition.

But that’s ridiculous,
KT thought.
Why would a janitor care about a math competition?

Why would anyone?

She forgot this line of reasoning when she noticed what else was in this classroom: desks. Computers.

See? See?
she told herself.
There are normal classrooms! So there should be normal sports, too!

Then she saw the words on the classroom bulletin board:
WELCOME TO AC ED!

Ac ed,
KT thought.
Academic education. Has to be this world’s answer to phys ed. It’s the nearest room to the library, just as my phys ed classroom was the nearest room to the gym.

But she sat down at one of the computers and turned it on.

This time she didn’t bother looking for the Rysdale Invitational site, the “Bring softball back to the Olympics” Facebook page, or any of the other sites she normally had bookmarked on her computer at home. She did a simple Google search, typing in one word:

SOFTBALL

A short list of responses came up. KT clicked blindly on the first one. It was only a definition.

SOFTBALL: a little-known game, rarely played, involving bats and balls and bases

In a panic, KT hit the red-squared
X
at the top of the page. She sat still, breathing hard.

Little-known? Rarely played? Nooooo . . .

She decided to start slow, maybe with sports she didn’t care about so much. She Googled soccer, tennis, football, basketball, rugby, lacrosse. Field hockey. Water polo. And it seemed like people still played these sports some in this version of the world.

Okay, rarely,
KT told herself, forcing herself to face facts.
So . . . kids spend all day in school doing sports conditioning and almost never actually play the games?

She guessed it was kind of like how, in the real world, students spent so much time drilling and drilling to be ready for the state tests but almost never did lab experiments or field trips or other activities that kids who actually liked school might call fun.

Well, who cares? I don’t need a lot of people playing the same sport as me,
KT thought.
I don’t need hundreds of people cheering me on. I just need softball.

She took a deep breath and Googled “softball” again. She added a second word: “leagues.” After a moment, she added four more: “in the United States.”

The search results came up.

The nearest softball league was four hundred miles away.

“There you are,” a voice said from the doorway.

KT looked up. It was Dad.

“Max had a terrible game,” Dad said. “I think you rattled him, running out like that.”

KT shrugged.

“Sorry,” she said. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded
sullen and sulky.

“What has gotten into you?” Dad asked. “We’ve never had this kind of problem with you before. You get such good grades . . .”

KT remembered Molly and Lex laughing about how if you got straight As, teachers and parents acted like you should be a saint. She’d never really thought about it before, but Molly and Lex probably did get straight As.

In the real world.

Probably in this one too. They were lucky. They could be happy both places.

“What are you doing in here?” Dad asked.

“Looking for people like me,” KT said, and somehow all the pain she’d been holding back throbbed in her voice.

“Oh, princess,” Dad said. He eased the door almost all the way shut and came over and wrapped his arms around KT.

“I’m not anyone’s princess,” KT said fiercely. Dad hadn’t called her that since she was four. Nobody called pitchers “princess.”

She pushed him away and pointed to the softball-league information frozen on the screen.

“Will you take me to this?” KT asked.

Dad looked at the screen, then did a double take.

“That’s hundreds of miles away!” he said. “You know we couldn’t do that!”

“You’d do it if it were Max’s math team,” KT said, the sulkiness back in her voice. She didn’t know this for a fact, but she couldn’t say,
You drove me that far in the real world for softball.

Dad sighed.

“Max’s math . . . has a future to it,” Dad said. “He’s young yet, but if he plays as well as I think he can in
high school, he’ll get a full-ride college scholarship out of it. Maybe he’ll even go pro. The sky’s the limit for Max.”

“But not for me?” KT wailed.

“Now, now,” Dad said, patting her shoulder. “You’ll have a very . . . stable life. Easier than Max’s, in a lot of ways. You’ll be a good employee someday out in the work world. Of course, maybe if you start playing some sort of ac now, maybe you can still have a better high-school experience . . .”

A sly note crept into his voice, and KT thought maybe this was an argument Mom and Dad had been making with her alternate-world self for a long time.

Just like they keep bugging Max in the real world to start playing some sort of sport,
KT thought.

“
You
didn’t play acs in high school!” KT protested. “You played sports! Cross-country! Wrestling! Baseball!”

“KT, you know that’s a lie!” Dad scolded her. “You know I got varsity letters in three acs—mathletics, chemademics, and geography find. Though, I have to admit, I was
lousy
at geo. There just weren’t that many other guys at my school who wanted to go out for that team.”

That was how he used to talk about cross-country.

KT blinked, doing something like translation in her head.

All those stories Dad always tells about his high-school career, how he was “this close” to a baseball scholarship at UCLA, and how that’s why it would be doubly sweet to see me get a softball scholarship—it’s all flipped around in this world. It’s acs he was good at, acs he almost got a scholarship for, acs he wants to see his kid do better at than he could do himself . . .

And it flipped around so Dad wanted Max to
succeed, not KT.

“You only care about Max,” KT accused bitterly.

Dad let out another deep, heavy sigh.

“We’re back to that, are we?” he complained. “Your mother said you were just jealous of Max.”

“No, I’m not!” KT protested.

“Then stop acting like it!” Dad said. “Stop whining! You want people to play some silly game with? Then find them right here in Brecksville! Organize a league yourself!”

KT opened her mouth to protest the word “silly.” Then she shut it. Dad was being mean, but KT had dealt with plenty of mean coaches and teammates and opponents over the years. It didn’t help to taunt back.

Especially when he’d actually had a good idea.

KT Sutton, pitcher, did not sit around moaning and groaning and complaining when things didn’t go her way. She
made
them turn around. She’d snatched wins away from stronger, faster, better opponents. She’d pulled off come-from-behind victories when her team was losing by as many as ten runs.

Maybe the way to get back to the real world was by making this one actually bearable.

All she had to do was create her own softball
team.

KT and Dad met up with Mom and Max in the school lobby, in front of the school trophy case. The engraved desks still hung near the top of the case where the jerseys belonged. And KT saw now that the trophies were all for acs, not sports: the three acs Dad had named—mathletics, chemademics, and geo find—as well as historia, poetry slam, write-a-thon, bio bash, translatOr and something called spelldown.

Never mind,
KT told herself.
I’m still going to have softball.

“You are
so
deep in trouble,” Mom said, glaring at KT. “We’ll talk about this later.”

Other kids and families walked by, dutifully calling out, “Good game, Max!” Mom pasted on a fake smile and turned around to face them.

“There’s always next year against Winchester!” she called out.

Max’s team must have lost.

KT glanced at her brother. He didn’t look like he’d added up a couple of numbers wrong. He looked like he’d been tackled. Possibly by an entire football team at once.

Max’s face was even more colorless than it had been at the beginning of the competition. His hair stuck up all over the place, as if he’d been tugging on it, trying to pull answers out of his brain. His fingernails were chewed down to the quick.

And—worst of all—his bottom lip was trembling.

“Shake it off,” KT told him. “Buck up.”

She actually meant that in a friendly way. “Shake it off” was what Coach Mike had told her that time she’d been hit in the chest by a line drive so fast she hadn’t had a chance to get her glove behind it. When bad things happened, you did just have to shake them off and keep going. That was why KT was going to shake off this crazy mixed-up world by starting her own softball team. Maybe an entire league.

But Mom grabbed KT’s arm and yanked her off to the side, out of the path of the disappointed crowd leaving the mathletics competition.

“If you utter the words ‘it’s only a game’ or ‘it’s only math—it’s not like it’s something important like school,’ so help me, you will be grounded the rest of your life,” Mom said.

“I wasn’t saying that!” KT protested.