Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (6 page)

Heh-heh. It's really too bad students aren't allowed to throw cameras at their teachers.

As we headed back to our seats, Mr. Marsh dropped the bomb. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “as ya know, there is a lot of overlap between the yearbook and school newspaper staffs and the roster of this class. And as ya also know, many of yer assignments throughout this year will be used as material for the school publications.”

Had we known those things? Everyone else seemed to be nodding in agreement, but as a fur-resh-mannnnnn who had basically been thrown into the class, I wasn't sure I had heard anything about joining the newspaper or the yearbook.

Mr. Marsh continued, “Anyway, this morning I received a very disturbing e-mail message from the school business office. Some of ya might remember that for the past several years, the school has outsourced all of our sports photography to Ackerman's Photo Studio here in town. Ya might also be aware of our district's budget crisis. Well, apparently, the school board has voted ta freeze the budget for this year and has also canceled all outstanding contracts.”

One of the junior girls, Danielle, who was layout editor for the yearbook — which I knew because she mentioned it approximately every fifteen seconds — said, “So what are we going to do? We can't have a yearbook without sports pictures!”

Mr. Marsh said, “I have an idea, but it's gonna take a lot of extra work. I was thinking that maybe we could rearrange our class assignments so that you guys take the sports pictures. Does anybody here know anything about sports?”

The only sophomore boy in the class, James, said, “Well, I shot a sports spread for the newspaper last spring, remember?”

Danny leaned across his desk and stage-whispered, “Uh, Jimmy, I'm not sure chess really counts as a sport.”

James turned and spat, “Oh, yeah, Mr. Big Shot Senior? And I suppose your status as cocaptain of the debate society makes you an expert on all things athletic?”

A junior named San Lee, who usually leaned way back in a chair in the corner of the back row and rarely spoke, sat up and said, “Guys, shooting sports is really tricky. We need somebody with a lot of experience, or the whole sports section of the yearbook is going to look like it was shot with a little kid's toy camera.”

Angelika raised her hand. “Mr. Marsh, guess what? Pete and I are very experienced. I mean, at sports shooting …”

And that's how I became athletics coeditor of my high school yearbook.

I haven't mentioned the worst thing about my arm situation yet, mostly because I hate thinking about it, and it's way worse than just not being able to throw. It's even worse than the scarring. The truth is, after my surgery, when all the splints, supports, and bandages came off, my left arm was super-weak, and the muscles were starting to get all shrunken and withered. I mean, I'm a sports guy. I've been working out every day of the week for years. Every time I've ever watched a ball game on TV, which was pretty much every night, I've done push-ups, sit-ups, and wrist curls on and off the whole time.

It's not like I was some huge hulk of muscle before my injury, but I was wiry. I was strong. So when the wrappings came off, and I saw how wimpy my
forearm had become, I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. The doctors told me I'd be able to regain “much of the functionality” of the arm, which I'm sure they thought was very comforting. Then they sent me to physical therapy. All summer long, it was three afternoons a week. The first few weeks I wasn't even supposed to move my own stupid arm. The therapists would twist it and turn it, or put it in machines that rotated and revolved while I bit my lip until it bled.

I knew that stretching could hurt, but never like this. Just getting my arm extended until it was almost straight was like some horrible endurance event in the Cruelty Olympics. The hardest thing was that as soon as therapy was over for the day, the muscles would pull tight, and the arm would start to bend again.

How bad was it? There were nights when I could barely sleep from the cramping. And plenty of other nights when I did sleep, but the pain found its way into my every dream. During the day, I wore nothing but long sleeves from July through October just so
nobody would have to look at my wimpy little jacked-up limb. I never told anybody how bad it all was, physically or mentally. The physical therapist would make me fill out these pain self-evaluation forms and I'd just check off whatever column was closest to fine.

There was no column for “epic arm fail” anyway.

After the weeks of “passive mobility” exercises — in case that wasn't too much of an oxymoron — the therapists made me start actually doing the stretching myself. Right around the time I became an official sports photographer, my arm was starting to feel a little looser. And then one day, when AJ had been bugging me again about getting back into pitching shape, I got home from school and the house was empty. So I went a little nuts.

I took my pitchback net out of the shed, grabbed a bucket of baseballs from the garage, and set myself up maybe twenty feet away from the target. I'm not stupid or anything, OK? I knew I had to be careful and take it slow. I wasn't trying to throw from a regulation distance right off the bat, and I definitely wasn't
thinking I could throw anything resembling a real pitch.

Mostly, I just really missed standing there with a baseball in my hand.

I stood there for the longest time, with that sick-to-the-stomach feeling you get when you've broken your mother's favorite lamp or whatever, but she hasn't noticed yet. I could even feel my legs trembling a little. But I went ahead and cocked my left arm behind my head. Then I tossed the ball.

It went about three feet and plopped into the grass like a fat little dead pigeon. I sat down on the lawn and wept so hard I could barely breathe. Then I picked up the ball, dropped it into the bucket, carried the whole shebang over to our garbage can, and dumped it.

 

“A sports photographer, huh?” AJ asked me a few days later on the way home from school. “With Angelika? Suh-weet!”

“Yeah, but —”

“But what? She volunteered the two of you, right?”

“Yeah, but —”

“But nothing. You're gonna be hanging out together, like, nonstop.”

“Yeah, but —”

“First you're going to go to all the games together, right?”

“Yeah, but —”

“And then you're going to have to edit the photos together. In the yearbook office. Wa-a-ay after school. Alone. It's gonna be, like, your office of lo-o-ove.”

“Yeah, but —”

“Ooh, I know what you're going to say, though. What about baseball season, right? I mean you're good and all, but I don't see how even you can pitch and take pictures at the same time.”

Yeah, I know I could have told him the whole truth then. Believe me, I know. But instead I just let him roll over me. As usual.

“But wait, that's perfect, Pete! Then she'll have to come take pics of you in action. And she'll be all, ‘Wow, did you really just strike out thirteen batters
in one game?' and ‘Oh, Petey, your butt looks so
cute
in that uniform!'”

We stopped on the sidewalk in front of my house, and AJ said, “Uh, Pete, weren't you going to say something?”

“Nah, it's all good,” I said. “I just, uh … oh, forget it.”

“What, man? You can tell me anything. I trust you with all my secrets, don't I? I mean, that one time when we were in second grade and Nikki Krupnik kissed me in the coat closet, I told you. Am I right or am I right?”

I laughed. “Uh, AJ, you told me that because you
wanted
me to tell everybody. This is different.”

AJ put on his most serious face and sat down on my front steps. And once again, I had the perfect opportunity to tell him. “Well, Pedro, what is it?”

I took a deep breath. Then I chickened out and came up with a weaselly half-truth. I mean, it was true, but it wasn't everything. “I don't know how to tell Angelika this. Or Mr. Marsh. But I'm supposed to take pictures of a volleyball game tonight. And …”

“And what?”

“And I don't know anything about shooting volleyball.”

“What's there to know? You just point the camera wherever the ball is, and press the little button. Oh, and don't get all distracted by the bouncing babes in tight shorts.”

“No, you don't understand. Shooting indoor gym sports is really complicated. The light is crappy, you can't use a flash because you'll blind the players, and the action happens really, really fast.”

“And there are bouncing babes in tight shorts. Sorry, Petey, you just can't convince me that this is a problem. You'll figure it all out. Just don't stare too much, or Angie will get mad.”

So there you have it, sports fans: The Official Caveman's Guide to Sports Photography.

That night, I found myself sitting on the top row of the bleachers next to Angelika, lined up with the volleyball net. I was weighed down with enough cameras, lenses, and other assorted gear to collapse the whole structure. Before heading out, I had called
my grandfather for advice, and he had told me all I would need was one specific lens. But he had also once told me that it's better to carry three extra lenses, have a tired shoulder, and get your shot than to have a nice, light camera bag and miss the moment.

Angelika was going to be shooting, too. She was all set up with a pretty nice camera of her own. It was a Canon, which meant we couldn't share lenses, but it looked like she would do fine. The game started, and I learned something really fast: If you don't know the sport, you can be the freaking Michelangelo of photography, and you still won't get what you need. My camera was always pointed in the wrong direction; I missed every key play by a split second; I couldn't get the shutter speed fast enough to keep the pictures from getting blurred in the dim light. I felt completely overwhelmed. After one game, I was ready to quit. “What I really need,” I said to Angelika, “is a pause button.”

Angelika smiled, pointed to her camera's viewfinder, and said, “No worries.” Then she said, “Keep shooting, though, partner. Try to get at least one
good shot of Number Nine spiking the ball, OK? She's the captain. I'll be down there for a while.” Angelika pointed to an area right behind the back line of the court and a little bit off to one side. She took the long telephoto lens off of her camera and put on a much shorter one. Then she was off.

I watched her walk around the edge of the gym floor to her chosen spot, kneel down, and start shooting.
Wow
, I thought.
She called me “partner.”
I got back to shooting, but as soon as I got a picture of the captain girl jumping and spiking, I switched subjects and took maybe forty shots of Angelika in profile. I don't know why exactly. I just did it.

After the match, in the middle of packing all our gear away, Angelika asked me for the memory card I had been using so she could go home and process the photos on it. Without thinking, I handed the card over. I called my parents on my cell phone for a ride, and it wasn't until I was halfway home that I realized Angelika would see all the footage of her.

Great
, I thought.
There's nothing as thrilling for a girl as finding out her new coeditor is a stalker.

 

Freshman year rolled along, kind of. Well, parts of it rolled along, parts of it lurched along, and parts of it scraped and screeched along in the manner of scrap metal being dragged across a chalkboard. For me, class was easy. I aced all of my academic courses without too much sweat, and the extra time demands of my sudden editorial gig weren't anything compared to all the sports practices I'd always had before — between the lack of indoor baseball workouts and the fact that I wasn't playing basketball, I had more time than I knew what to do with. Home was a little weird, though. Mom still didn't want to hear there was anything wrong with her father. Dad was still working a million hours, and with Samantha off at college, the house was wa-a-ay too empty and quiet most of the time.

The scraping and screeching mostly came from inside my own head. I was still having nightmares about surgery, pitching, and my grampa all tumbled up together. Plus, I kept wanting to tell AJ I wasn't going to be his teammate ever again, but I was still
chickening out. He was networking like a madman with a lot of the older athletes, especially once he made the JV basketball team, and he kept introducing me to everyone as “Peter Friedman, Future Star Pitcher.” I wondered what he would call me if he learned the truth: “Peter Friedman … Uh, Some Kid with a Camera”? Or even worse, “Peter … Uh, Your Name
Is
Peter, Right?”

One Saturday, I went to Angelika's house so she could redo my portrait shots. Of course, I had tormented myself over what to wear, until I just gave up and threw on jeans and a New York Yankees T-shirt over a white long-sleeved Under Armour — which was basically my default outfit anyway. I met her mom, who had this smirk on her face the whole time, like
Oh, you're the boy that takes forty random pictures of my daughter, huh? Nice T-shirt, Stalker Boy!

By the time I had smiled and bluffed my way through the maternal interview, I realized it had been a mistake to wear the Under Armour, because I was sweating bullets. AND I couldn't take it off,
because then my jacked-up elbow would be on full photographic display.

Angelika had set up a little studio area in the dining room, with a gray backdrop pinned to the wall, and a wooden chair next to a row of north-facing windows. I sat in the chair, and even without any direct sunlight, I was cooking. Angelika sat on a stool about ten feet away, and picked up her camera. Then she put it down again, and said, “Hey, Pete, I've thought a lot about what was wrong with the shots we got last time, and I think I have it. You know how Mr. Marsh said I needed to come up with a concept?”

Angelika picked up a brown paper lunch bag that had been next to the stool, and looked away from me. Obviously, she was going to surprise me with something from the bag. I tried to work out what could be in there — Shades? Hair gel? A really, really tiny leather jacket? None of those things would be weird enough to make her break eye contact, though. As she so often did, Angelika had once again made me really curious and just a tad terrified at the same time.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Well, I think the problem is that I don't know what my concept is, because I don't know you.”

“What do you mean? You've been to my house. We have class together every day. We're coeditors and everything.”

She looked up from the bag, right into my eyes. “And you take lots of pictures of me when I'm not looking.”

Whoa. I'd been wondering for weeks whether she was ever going to bring that up. Looked like this was my lucky day!

If you've noticed so far that I had been doing a lot of blushing and sweating in my ninth-grade year, you haven't seen anything compared to what was happening to me in that moment of Under Armoured bustedness. Plus, now I added stammering to my list of socially awkward panic symptoms. “Uh, I, um, I was just checking out the — the — the white balance setting on the camera. So I …”

Wow, Angelika's smirk looked remarkably like her mom's. “It's OK, Pete. I like it that you wanted to take pictures of me. I like
you
.”

Good God.

“But,” she continued, “I still don't know anything about you. And no offense, but you don't really, um, express your feelings much.”

Sure I do
, I thought.
I express my feelings by slowly drowning in my own undergarments.

“So I went to your friend Adam.”

Double good God. Adam is AJ's real name. I could only imagine what AJ might have told her about me.

“And I asked him for some ideas.”

“Ideas about what?”

“Ideas for objects I could pose you with. Objects that are important to you.”

Triple good God. What had he suggested: My old Rescue Heroes action figures? My childhood Buzz Lightyear night-light? A stack of dirty magazines? I was going to have to kill him.

She reached into the brown paper bag and pulled out something worse than all of those. I'll give you a hint: It was round and white, with curves of red stitching, and said
OFFICIAL YOUTH TOURNAMENT APPROVED
on the side. OK, so it would have been
bad enough if AJ had just given her any old baseball, but he hadn't. This was an incredibly special baseball. It was the game ball from the best game AJ and I had ever had together.