Game Changer (13 page)

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

She heard the garage door, then Mom and Dad and Max talking downstairs. She should go down, watch some ESPN with Dad, wait until his team was winning, and then, during a commercial break, suggest that maybe it really wasn’t necessary to ground KT for two whole weeks.

She heard the TV coming on, an overly loud announcer’s voice calling out breathlessly, “Which of these poets will make it to the semifinals?” before someone—probably Dad—set it back to a normal volume.

Poets?
KT thought.
Oh, yeah, there’s probably no ESPN anymore, either.

Of course. Something else she loved that had vanished from this world.

She heard someone climbing the stairs, and quickly reached over and turned out her light. She couldn’t face talking to Dad or Mom or Max anymore tonight. She sat perfectly still in the dark, barely daring to breathe. The footsteps paused outside KT’s door, then moved on.

KT let out her held breath, and tiptoed over to her bed and lay down. She would go to sleep. Maybe that
was all she needed to do to escape this world. Maybe she’d made things more complicated than they needed to be. She would go to sleep, and when she woke up, she’d have her real world back. She’d have softball back. She’d even know the outcome of the Rysdale Invitational.

She closed her eyes, and some of her fears from the morning came back to her.

Hospital, beeping monitors, concerned voices . . .

She fought back with her visualization coach’s best strategies.

I’m on the field. I’m pitching a no-hitter. I’m back in the world where everyone loves softball. Mom and Dad are proud of me again. This whole day is barely even a memory. I have softball back. I have softball back. I have softball back . . . .

She fell asleep whispering those
words.

KT woke to Mom standing over her bed, the early-morning sunlight glowing around her.

Yes!
KT thought.
It must be the regular world, back again! Why else would Mom bother coming in to talk to me?

“About last night . . . ,” Mom said, sitting down on the edge of KT’s bed.

“Yes?” KT said, springing up eagerly. This must be the way yesterday was supposed to go. All that weirdo-world stuff must have been a dream. Mom was going to say,
We were so proud of you at the Rysdale Invitational,
or maybe,
We’ve already heard from the first scout from a top-tier high school club team,
or maybe . . .

“Dad and I were talking after you went to bed,” Mom continued. “We really need you to be more supportive of Max.”

“What?” KT exclaimed. Behind Mom, KT could see the blank space on her wall where the Olympic softball pictures were supposed to be. Pretending to stretch, she craned her neck and looked at the bulletin board over her bed.

It held report cards, not softball goals.

KT sank back into her pillows.

“You heard me,” Mom said grimly. “Though you may not realize it, Max looks up to you. You’re his older sister. This new attitude of his, not wanting to play mathletics—he must be paying too much attention to your opinions. You’ve put doubts in his mind, sent him into crisis.”

Are you nuts?
KT wanted to scream at her mother.
Max messes up, Max is too lazy to work hard—and it’s my fault? How is that fair?

She pressed her lips together.

You can’t say what you really think,
she reminded herself.
Not unless you want Mom to ground you even longer.

She swallowed hard.

“I won’t say anything bad to Max about math,” KT said. “If you un-ground me.”

Mom frowned, deliberating.

“Deal,” she said.

KT gaped at her mother.

Geez, Mom, I guess you never took debate class in school—er, I mean, you never did an ac teaching negotiating skills,
she thought.
You caved a million times faster than I expected.

Unless—what if Mom cared only about keeping Max in mathletics? What if she didn’t care at all about teaching KT a lesson by grounding her?

It was weird to feel
so dejected about not being punished.

Mom and Dad almost never punished me in the real world,
KT thought.
There was never time, because I was always playing softball.

And it would be that way again.

“Can you leave now so I can get dressed?” KT asked Mom, not bothering to keep the rudeness out of her voice.

As soon as Mom was gone, KT went over to her laptop. She’d left it on overnight, almost as if she’d expected the answers to come in faster that way. She had three messages, one from Bree on her club team, one from Keshia Washington, and one from a sixth grader from school she’d seen playing softball once at the park.

“Who are you?” said Bree’s message.

“Do I know you?” asked Keshia’s.

“My big sister says hanging out with you will make me really, really unpopular in middle school,” the sixth grader’s said.

KT sat staring at the sixth grader’s message for a long time.

“Shake it off,” she whispered to herself.

She deleted the sixth grader’s message, and deleted the sixth grader’s name from the group she’d assembled for sending out messages.

I’m not grounded anymore,
she reminded herself.
We can start playing softball immediately.

She remembered that some of the girls lived far away and would have to make arrangements for someone to drive them.

Saturday,
she told herself.
I can survive until Saturday.

She typed out a new message to send to the whole group:

“You may or may not know me, but I heard that you are someone who does really well in school but might be a little bored by it. That’s how I am too. I know about a game called softball that I think you will love. Want to play? Come to Ridgestone Park in Brecksville at ten a.m., Saturday, February 13, for
lots of fun!”

She started to type, “Don’t forget to bring your own glove and bat,” but then she remembered,
It’s weirdo world. What if no one has gloves and bats?
She went down to the garage, to the expanded section at the back that her dad always jokingly referred to as “KT’s sporting-goods store.” In the real world she had a whole lineup of bats, dating back to her third-grade version. And she had racks of cleats, some almost destroyed, some in the “still being broken in” category. And she had baskets full of softballs, three separate customized sports bags, a spare backup glove along with a collection of outgrown gloves, a similar lineup of old and new batting helmets, and a lifesize pitching mate to practice with when Dad wasn’t available to catch her blistering throws.

She turned the light on and peered around Mom’s car to see what lay there now.

One pair of cleats.

One old glove.

One small basket of balls.

And, incredibly enough, the pitching mate.

No bats.

Well, at least I have the cleats and balls and a spare glove,
she told herself, trying to put a positive spin on things.
If I still have my regular glove, probably other girls have gloves too. Maybe for that class at school where people throw balls all the time?

She hugged the sturdy frame of the pitching mate like it was a long-lost friend. But weirdo world was getting into her brain. KT had probably gotten the pitching mate for her eleventh birthday, just like in the real world. But in this world, getting it wouldn’t have been like Mom and Dad saying
to her,
Yeah! We believe in your pitching talent! You’re going to be great, and we’re going to do everything we can to help you!
It would have been like a little kid in the real world asking for a dictionary or a collected set of Shakespeare plays or a graphing calculator. It would have been something Mom and Dad kind of wondered at, maybe even laughed at with their friends:
You’ll never guess what KT wanted for her birthday!
But secretly maybe they’d worried:
If we get her this, will she just become odder? Why doesn’t she like what all the other kids like? What’s wrong with her?

“Stop it,” KT told herself aloud. The words echoed in the too-empty garage. “Focus on organizing your softball game for Saturday.”

She ran back upstairs and clicked over to eBay on her laptop. It was true—you really could find anything on eBay. Even in this pathetic, practically softball-less world, she had her choice of a dozen softball bats. She clicked on the next-day-delivery shipping option, but that made the price go up by sixty dollars. She opened another screen to check how much money she had on her debit card. What if Mom and Dad were stingier with their money here than in the real world?

She had roughly three hundred dollars more than she should have.

Oh, right,
she thought.
I guess Mom and Dad still pay for As on report cards, even in bizarre world.

At least there were some advantages.

But it’s not worth losing softball,
she told herself quickly, just in case her thoughts had any connection to getting out of this world.
I still want softball back!

“KT! Have you had breakfast yet?” Mom yelled from downstairs. “The bus is going to be here in five minutes!”

“Coming!” KT yelled back.

She hastily finished her order and sent out a quick message to everyone on her potential softball team: “I will have one bat and one spare glove for Saturday, but bring any softball equipment you can find, just in case.”

She rushed down the stairs and grabbed an energy bar and chugged some milk in the kitchen.

“KT! The bus is here
now
!” Mom yelled from near the front door. “Max is already on it!”

“I’m there!” KT said, running out of the kitchen. She raced past Mom, out the door, across the yard.

This is actually perfect,
KT thought.
I didn’t see Max all morning. I avoided him entirely.

How else could she manage to avoid telling him mathletics was stupid? How else could she avoid getting grounded, and losing softball all over again?

The days passed slowly.

Every morning KT woke up thinking,
Maybe it was all a dream! Maybe this will be the day the real world’s back!
But each morning she was less and less surprised to open her eyes to blank walls where Olympic pictures should have been, to report cards on her bulletin board in place of her list of softball goals.

Every night, falling asleep, she had the same flash of imagining some awful outcome to the Rysdale Invitational. Sometimes it was a sense of being in another place, in another condition:
hospital, traction, full-body cast, in a wheelchair, on crutches . . .
Other times it was more of a listing of injuries she didn’t want to have:
Broken bone? Dislocated shoulder? ACL tear? Concussion?

She countered those fears with the same thought every night:
The last thing I remember at the Rysdale Invitational, I was throwing a ball. How could something go that wrong, throwing a ball?

Her mind dodged searching for answers. She always shifted to planning for her softball game or league on Saturday instead.

How many girls will show up?
she wondered.
Will we have enough for just two teams, or enough for more of a tournament?
She knew she’d have to organize things quickly—softball girls didn’t like standing around waiting to play. She made up imaginary rosters in her head, based on which girls she thought would show up.

At school, she stuck to her policy of “Keep your head down and pitch.”
She savored stretching her legs in the treadmill class, throwing balls in the pitching class, feeling the pull of her muscles in weight lifting. Really, the classes would have been great—certainly better than the usual boring worksheets and homework and droning lectures—if only she’d had friends around her instead of kids who gave her sideways glances and whispered about her behind her back. And if all that working out had been leading to something, not just exercise for the sake of exercise.