Game Changer (14 page)

It will,
KT thought.
I’ll get to play softball on Saturday.

The only class she didn’t like was ac ed, which was indeed academic—every subject from regular eighth grade crammed into one class. The teacher, Mr. Stone, who was a science teacher in the real world, seemed to assume that everyone played an ac, so he didn’t teach anything. He just asked a bunch of hard questions about topics KT had never heard of.

KT avoided talking to Mr. Stone. She avoided talking to any of the other teachers too, even the ones who seemed to be trying to be friendly.

I’m already a pariah,
KT thought, when Ms. Alvarez, the
weight-lifting teacher, seemed to want to engage KT in a long one-on-one conversation about the best gripping technique.
Does she think I want to make things worse by acting like a teacher is my best friend?

She especially avoided all the teachers who’d had strange conversations with her the first day: Mr. Huck and Mr. Horace and Mrs. Whitbourne.

She didn’t have to work very hard at avoiding the other kids, because they mostly avoided her. In fact the only time anyone her own age talked to her was Wednesday afternoon after they’d had a pop quiz in throwing class. “Pop quiz” in this world evidently meant standing on a line and firing ten balls in a row at the target. Mrs. Sanchez called out a type of pitch with every one: “Fastball!” Curveball!” “Changeup!”

KT had to admit, this was a lot more fun than true-or-false.

So why don’t they have batters standing there instead of a stupid old target?
she wondered.
That would be even better!

But as soon as the quiz was over, two kids came rushing over to KT. One of them, Anthony Seitz, had been the starting quarterback of the eighth-grade football team in the real world. The other, Celia Waters, had been big into volleyball.

“What’d you get?” Anthony asked.

“Bet she got a higher score than you,” Celia teased.

KT shrugged.

“A hundred,” she said, and resisted adding,
Are you kidding? That was easy! I could have aced that test when I was nine!

Celia punched Anthony’s bulging bicep.

“Told you so!” she cried.

“Ah, man, couldn’t you just get a ninety-nine once,
give the rest of us a chance to catch up?” Anthony complained. “I would have had a hundred too, if Mrs. Sanchez hadn’t stuttered on that last changeup. I thought sure she was going to say curveball!”

“Poor baby,” Celia mocked him. “Did your average in this class actually fall to ninety-nine-point-eight?”

Great,
KT thought.
The jocks in this world are the ones who are grade-obsessed. And they can’t even do math!

Celia seemed to be counting up her own score on her fingers.

But the way Celia and Anthony were joking around together . . . it was like they were friends. With each other, at least. Being good at school hadn’t made them into outcasts.

“Hey, how about if I sit with you at lunch and tell you my secret strategy?” KT asked.

Celia and Anthony exchanged glances.

“Sorry,” Anthony said. “We’re sitting with our chemademics team. I don’t think you’d be interested in what we’re talking about.”

Chemademics. Of course. Anthony had to point out that he wasn’t just some grade-obsessed jock. He played an ac, too. He was cool.

But how could bonehead Anthony Seitz know anything about chemistry?
KT wondered.
Unless . . . maybe he was just faking his boneheadedness in the real world? Acting like he thought jocks were supposed to act?

It was too confusing. Who was the real Anthony? Who around her had showed their real self in the real world, and who was more their real self here?

KT had a lot of time to think about this during lunch that
day. It was just her and her iPod and phone. She pretended not to care, and hunched over the iPod and phone acting like she had dozens of massively important texts and messages to send out.

“It would be great if you let me know if you’re going to be able to come or not on Saturday,” she messaged her entire list during lunch. “Let me know what position you’d like to play, too. That way I can start planning team rosters ahead of time.”

But she didn’t really expect everyone to answer. That was, like, RSVPing. Kids just didn’t do that.

At least the bat arrived from UPS on Wednesday afternoon. KT immediately took the package up to her room, tore off the wrapping, and stood there in the middle of the floor in batting stance. She swung.

A little too heavy at the end,
she decided, swinging again to double-check.
Not as good as my bat in the real world. But it’ll do.

It felt great just holding a bat, just crouching with it in batting position. She didn’t think she could wait all the way to Saturday to actually use it. As soon as dinner was over that night, she turned to Dad.

“Would you help me with some . . . homework?” she asked.

Dad frowned.

“Does it have to be tonight?” he asked. “I was going to review some math strategies with Max after dinner.”

Max had already had two hours of math practice right after school. He’d already had Mom and Dad fussing over him during the meal: “Are you getting enough protein to have enough energy to prep
for Friday’s game?” “You’ll make sure to go to bed early tonight, won’t you? You have to make sure you’re rested up and your brain is sharp. I bet that was your problem Monday. You just aren’t getting enough sleep.”

“I guess I could help you, KT,” Mom said reluctantly.

Mom was a terrible pitcher. Even in the real world.

“Okay,” KT said, equally reluctant.

Having Mom pitch to her was better than having no one at all pitch to her until Saturday.

They went out in the backyard, KT lugging the bat and the basket of balls from the garage.

“You want me to throw to you?” Mom asked suspiciously. “And then . . . you’ll catch the ball on the tip of that club thing?”

“It’s called a bat, Mom,” KT corrected. “And I’ll hit the ball, not catch it. Throw the ball to me in about this area.” She moved her hand around, showing Mom a rough version of a strike zone.

Mom frowned doubtfully, but tossed the ball. Like all Mom’s throws, it was fit mostly for a kindergartner newly moving up from hitting off a tee. But KT swung at it anyway. The ball dribbled off into the grass at the bottom of the yard.

“You have to do this for pitching class?” Mom asked skeptically. “I don’t remember this being in the curriculum.”

“It’s kind of . . . extra credit,” KT said. “For a game called softball. I read about it online.”

Mom shrugged, and threw another pitch.

This time KT swung so the bat and ball collided right at the bat’s sweet spot. The ball went soaring up into the air, sailing across four neighbors’ backyards.

“Home run,” KT whispered to herself.

“KT!” Mom exclaimed. “You could have broken a window doing that!”

“No, no, I can control where I hit it,” KT explained.

“That was control?” Mom asked. “KT, I don’t think—”

“We can go to the park,” KT offered quickly. “No windows will be in danger.”

Mom shook her head.

“I’ve got three loads of laundry left to do tonight,” she said. “This is just extra credit, right? I thought it was going to be something you had to do. I’m sure you’ve already got an A in this class. Probably even an A-plus.”

“But—”

“KT,
no
,” Mom said impatiently. She dropped the next ball back into the basket. “I don’t have time for this.”

Mom was already walking back toward the house. She slid open the patio door and disappeared inside.

KT did not like this world’s version of Mom.

In the real world Mom was a terrible athlete too, but she was proud that I was so good at sports,
KT thought.
Here, it’s like she resents me getting good grades. Like she thinks I think I’m better than her.

KT knew plenty of girls who fought constantly with their mothers. But she’d never been one of them.

She tried tossing the balls up in the air herself and batting them away.

“This one’ll go into the Millers’ yard, right by their patio,” she whispered to herself, and hit it away. “This one will go over top of the Lurias’ swing set.”

But batting alone just made KT feel lonely. After a little while she gathered up all the balls and went back
into the house. She pointedly avoided walking past the dining-room table, where she could hear Dad saying to Max, “Now, if you take the square root, it could be positive or negative, right?”

She went straight up to her room and sent another message to her entire potential softball league: “You know, if you have any friends you think would want to play softball, you’re welcome to bring them on Saturday too. They’ll thank you for it, I just know it. You’re going to love softball as much as I do! Your friends will too!”

On Friday afternoon Mom and Dad made KT go to Max’s mathletics game once again.

“Mom, why?” KT asked, as Mom and Dad arrived home from work and began shouting out orders about getting ready. “I’ve got my own stuff to do.”

Mom fixed KT with a stern glare.

“You’re supposed to be supportive, remember?” Mom said.

“I kept my promise! I haven’t said anything bad to Max all week about math!” KT protested.

Of course, she hadn’t said
anything
to Max since Monday. She’d done a perfect job of avoiding him. It hadn’t been too hard, since he was almost always away at math practices or coaching sessions. But she’d also avoided meeting his eye the one night they’d all had dinner together; she’d avoided going out for the bus at the same time as him; she’d even skipped brushing her teeth one night because she didn’t want to cross paths with him walking to or from the bathroom.

“This is what we do as a family—we support each individual member of the family in every important endeavor,” Mom said. “And that means you’re coming to Max’s game and you’re going to cheer him on. Besides, I can tell you’re
just making excuses. I know you don’t actually have anything else to do this afternoon.”

KT really, really, really hated this world’s version of Mom.

Don’t say or do anything to get yourself grounded again,
she told herself.
Remember, you get to have softball tomorrow.

She repeated that to herself again and again to get through the national anthem. When the last notes, “of the brave,” died out, she whispered to herself, “Play ball tomorrow. You’ll get to play ball tomorrow.”

Her words were drowned out by the roaring of the crowd. They stamped their feet and wolf-whistled and cheered. A line of cheerleaders came backflipping through the library doors, chanting, “Go, Scholars! Go, Scholars! Gooooooo, Scholars!” They finished with a string of cartwheels.

As far as KT could tell, cheerleaders in this world were almost identical to cheerleaders in the real world, except that their uniforms incorporated a bit more argyle and they all wore fake horn-rimmed glasses.

Great, that would be the one thing that stays the same,
she thought.
Stupid old cheerleaders. They’re like cockroaches—they could probably even survive nuclear war.

“One, two, three, five, eight,” the cheerleaders chanted. “Fibonacci freaks are great!”

Okay, maybe the cheers were a tiny bit different now.

They launched into another string of chanted numbers, and KT realized this was what Mom had as her ring tone.

Crazy,
KT thought.
Totally nuts.

But it turned out that the numbers were just a lead-in to a cheer that KT actually recognized: “Whyyyyy are you so blue? Is it because you are number two?
We’re number one!”

KT had to blink hard.

Of course her softball team was much too serious to do cheers now, but way back when she’d played in the Ponytail League in third grade, her coach had encouraged all the girls sitting on the bench to cheer their teammates on. KT had loved hearing her friends chanting that, louder and louder and louder, even as KT pitched strike after strike after strike. It was before KT had learned to focus properly, to block out everything but pitching. The cheers had made her pitch better back then. They had made her love her teammates even more.

Now she pulled out her iPod.

“I miss you guys so much,” she wrote in a message to everyone she’d invited to play softball with her. “I can’t wait to see you all tomorrow!”

“Put that away!” Mom said through clenched teeth, batting away the iPod with her hand. “Pay attention to the game!”

Don’t get grounded,
KT reminded herself.
Don’t do anything to let anyone stop you from playing softball tomorrow.

The mathletics game was starting now, and fortunately that made the cheerleaders shut up.

Max looked slightly less like he was on the verge of vomiting than he had before the last game. KT was still almost embarrassed for him when he buzzed in on the first question, even before he’d written anything down.

“Brecksville North, Maxwell,” the announcer said.

“Um,” Max said. He gulped. “Is it f-f-four?”

“It is indeed!” the announcer cried. “Excellent!”

Max just gulped again and smiled weakly, maybe like someone who’d been told he was going to be eaten
alive by a pack of vicious lions but the death sentence had been delayed by a minute or two.

KT couldn’t watch Max. She couldn’t.

She discovered she couldn’t watch her former friends Molly and Lex either, because they did so many things in mathletics the same way they played softball: Molly gripped her pencil way too tightly, just like she did with her bat; Lex tossed her hair over her shoulder before giving an answer the same way she always tossed her head after every pitch on the softball diamond.

Max’s friend Ben was kind of funny to watch, because he stated every answer with absolute, perfect assurance—even when he was wrong.

But none of that really mattered, because the person who buzzed in almost every time was wacky little Evangeline Rangel. KT realized she’d never really seen Evangeline grin before, and it turned out that Evangeline had the type of grin that made you feel like you should be grinning just as much. She was fierce, too, slamming her pencil down and hitting the buzzer twice as hard as she needed to. After one particularly convoluted question that made KT’s head hurt, Evangeline swatted the buzzer triumphantly and, grinning full-blast, cried out, “Forty-freaking-four!”