Plunked Page 6

  Coach turns and says something to Dustin. And then I see the others, in a semicircle just outside the first group. There’s Andy, Jackson, and the big pitcher who hit me, Tebow. Jackson sort of shoulders past him, maybe rougher than he needs to, but the pitcher doesn’t seem to notice.

  Someone asks me if I can get up. “I’m trying!” I say. “Coach won’t let me!”

  But then it occurs to me that it might have been Coach who asked, and what he means is should I.

  And then I can hear my mom coming from about twenty feet away. She’s saying, “Let me through,” and “That’s my son,” and her voice is louder and higher than the others, like a siren. All I can do is pray she doesn’t call me sugar bear or honey bunchkin or any of those other things she does sometimes at home. Oh, man: I bet she will.

  Finally, she and Dad make it through the other parents. Once they arrive, everyone else relaxes a little. Not that it changes anything, but it sort of lets the others off the hook a little. It sort of makes me think of the lawsuit drill.

  Anyway, Coach takes his hand away, and I get up without too much trouble. Mom tries to help, but I hurry so I can do it on my own. I look at her, trying to make my eyes say: “no honey bunchkin.” Luckily, she’s too busy asking me questions to say anything else.

  They start walking me over to the bleachers. I don’t want to come out of the game, but I guess I don’t have a choice. This thought pops into my head: Little League is like a magic spell. It’s kids only, like Peter Pan or something, and once a parent touches you, it’s over. The spell is broken. I guess that’s a weird thought, but whatever: I was just drilled in the cranium. I’m just glad my brain is still in the thought-producing business.

  I head toward the gap in the fence that leads to the bleachers, but I sort of drag my feet a little to let them know I’m not happy about it. And then I sit there. I try to watch the game and not listen to what people are saying around me, but the game still hasn’t started again. That seems weird, too.

  Dad leaves and comes back with an ice pack. It’s one of those chemical ones, where you just twist it and snap open some pouch inside and it gets really cold. So then, of course, coldest day in weeks, and they put the thing right on my head.

  “Can you hold this here?” Dad says, pushing the thing into the left side of my head.

  “Of course!” I say, because I’d just been insisting that I should still be in the game.

  I ask for my glove, and Dad looks at me suspiciously.

  “What? I’m not going to run out onto the field!” I say. We’re still up to bat, anyway. “What am I gonna do, field for the other team?”

  So someone gets my glove, some adult, because the players are finally getting back to business. Jackson is back on base waiting around for the pitching change. They just lifted that pitcher, Tebow.

  I look around the field, trying to find him and wondering why the game hasn’t started yet. And then I realize that he’s coming right toward me. I can feel the people around me tense up. I hear some old guy suck in his breath. I watch Tebow step up onto the first row of the bleachers. I think maybe I’m supposed to fight him, but I really don’t want anything else hitting my head right now, just when it’s starting to get numb.

  “Sorry,” he says, holding out one big hand.

  “No problem,” I say.

  I raise the hand that’s not holding the ice pack, and we shake.

  “Didn’t have it today,” he says.

  “Yeah, I could see you were kind of wild,” I say. “Thought maybe you were settling down.”

  It feels a little weird to talk, but it doesn’t really hurt that much.

  “Yeah,” he says, “so did I!”

  He sort of grimaces at that last part. Then he turns around and heads back down the bleachers.

  He’s an OK kid, that Tebow, even if he just drilled me in the head with a rock-hard missile.

  Someone hands me my glove, and I put it on so that I can hold the ice pack with it. That way my hand won’t be so cold while I’m freezing my brain.

  Finally, the game is starting up again. The Haven coach shuffles some players and sticks Tebow in the outfield, where he can’t do any more damage. I guess the umps had just given him, like, extended time-out to come over and make nice.

  And what was Jackson doing at home plate, now that I think about it? My thinking is clearing up. Suddenly, I’m sort of annoyed that they’re bending the rules around so much.

  My head is getting really cold, like so-cold-it-hurts cold, and not just the surface, either. And I’m no doctor, but are you really supposed to do that to your brain?

  “Is this a good idea?” I say. I don’t say it to Mom or Dad in particular, but they’re both hovering around me so they both hear. And just like that they start walking me over to the car. They’re on both sides of me, and they each have an elbow. I try to shake them off, but they’re holding on so tight it’s like they’re going to make a wish.

  Geoff is on first base, even though that should be my base. J.P. is just stepping to the plate. I think I might get to see a swing or two. He has power, but he kind of strikes out a lot. Everyone starts clapping for some reason, and he steps back out of the box.

  It seems so dumb. Yeah, he’s a great pitcher, but he hasn’t even taken a swing, so why are they all clapping for him? And then I realize they’re clapping for me. That seems dumb, too. What did I do except get hit in the head? Yeah, what a skill … I hold up my hand because I don’t want to be rude, and they clap louder. It’s still dumb, but I admit that I kind of smile.

  And then we’re at the car and Mom is closing the door for me. I get shotgun without even calling it. All of a sudden, Dad is in a huge hurry and driving about a hundred miles per hour. His eyes stay on the road this time.

  I don’t have to wait long for the doctor. It’s not like there are a lot of drive-by shootings to attend to out here in the sticks.

  “So we meet again,” says Dr. Redick.

  I have to smile at that. I’ve been here before, for my ankle and my wrist and my other ankle. Dr. Redick is probably the leading expert on which kids around here play sports and which ones don’t.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I see you’ve stepped it up this time,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I thought you might be getting bored of ankles.”

  He takes the ice pack and throws it away. He doesn’t ask about it or say that it was the right or wrong thing to do, he just takes it from me like it’s a leaf that I didn’t realize I had in my hair.

  Then he asks me some questions and makes me follow a light with my eyes.

  “Is there a ringing in your ears?” he asks. “Anything like that?”

  I try to listen to the inside of my head, which is weird. “Maybe, like, a hum?” I say. “A humming, maybe?”

  “A humming?” he says.

  He flicks his eyes up toward the ceiling.

  I look up at the big bank of lights there. I listen again, and yep, that’s what that is. “Oh,” I say.

  That’s kind of embarrassing. Duh. He asks me some more questions and pushes my hair aside to take a look at the knot I can feel just above my left ear. The skin feels really tight, and it hurts when he touches it.

  “Maybe a minor concussion,” he says when he’s done. “Maybe not. Nothing too serious, but I wouldn’t run out and get another one anytime soon.”

  It’s not clear if he’s talking to me or my parents, but I look him in the eye because it’s my head.

  “Does it hurt now?” he asks, and now he’s talking to me.

  “Yeah,” I say, “a little.”

  And it does, but it’s just a normal sort of hurt, as if I got punched. It isn’t some special brain pain or anything.

  “It’s what we used to call getting your bell rung when I was a kid,” he says.

  Adults are always saying things like that: “When I was a kid…” Like life was so much tougher and more hard-core back then. I sort of want to say som
ething like, Yeah, what happened? Did the first caveman wheel run over your head?

  I don’t, though. I like Dr. Redick. And anyway, I figure I’ll be back again before too long.

  “I got my bell rung,” I say. I guess I’m sort of trying it out to see how it will sound in school on Monday. Pretty good. You know: tough. “I got my bell rung; no biggie….”

  After I get out of the little white room, my mom lets me borrow her cell phone. I don’t bring mine to games: no pockets. The game must be over by now, so I call Andy to get the scoop. He picks up right away and says, “Hey, my man. How are you?”

  I hold the phone against my right ear, because of that knot above my left.

  “OK,” I say.

  “We won,” he says. “Seven-zip.”

  “Sweet,” I say. “Did I score?”

  What I mean is, Did Geoff come around to score when he was pinch-running for me? And with anyone other than Andy, that’s probably what I’d have to say. But Andy knows what I mean, just like he always does.

  “Nah,” he says. He pauses, setting something up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thrown out at the plate!” he blurts.

  “No way!” I say.

  I wince because shouting into the phone hurts my head, but it’s not too bad, and I don’t miss anything. “Yuh-huh,” he says. “Gunned down!”

  I pause to make sure I’m OK, which is fine because it gives me time to think of something good. “Of course, you know: I woulda made it.”

  “Oh, by a mile. No doubt.”

  Andy laughs and so do I, even though that doesn’t feel so great, either. Mostly, I’m just glad we won.

  People look over at me. A kid sitting there in the hospital lobby, laughing into a cell phone while his mom signs some forms up at the desk. They probably think it’s “insensitive” or whatever. I don’t see it that way: I’m injured. Totally legit. I have as much reason to be here as any of the people looking over at me.

  But I’m leaving now. The sooner Mom can sign her name, like, seventeen times, the sooner we’ll be out of here. Dad has already gone to get the car.

  “J.P. was really mad after you got hit,” Andy is saying. “They just had no shot at him after that. If it was possible to score less than zero, they would have.”

  I feel good about that, like I contributed. Mom finishes the last form and pushes it across the desk to the lady. I say bye to Andy and hand the phone back to her.

  “Got everything?” she says.

  “Except for the pieces I left on the field,” I say.

  She doesn’t think that’s funny.

  We pull into the driveway. It sort of catches me by surprise that we’re home already. I’m thinking about one of things Dr. Redick said: “No structural damage.” That just seems so funny to me because the “structure” he’s talking about is my head!

  By now, Mom and Dad have figured out that it’s mostly good news and are in a much better mood.

  “It never really worked right in the first place,” Dad says to Mom in the front seat, still talking about my head.

  “Nothing to be done at this point,” Mom says. “Maybe we should think about boarding school.”

  Yeah, ha-ha-ha. Everyone is having fun now. I want to say, Hey! I got hit in the head here. But they’re just relieved. I can hear it in their voices. They’d been insanely tense, like seriously crazy, on the drive to the hospital.

  “Home again, home again,” Dad says as the car comes to a stop.

  Jiggedy jog, I think, because that’s the rest of it.

  I get out and start up the walkway. I look at our yellow house, not big but not little. I look up at my bedroom window on the second floor. It feels like I’ve been away for a long time because so much has happened since I left.

  I try to remember what games are on TV today and what snacks we have in the kitchen. Chips definitely, but I don’t know if we have any dip left. Then Nax appears in the window of the front door, barking and going crazy.

  “Someone needs to be walked,” Mom says behind me. Normally, that would be my cue, but today she says, “I’ll take him.”

  “Nah,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  The TV can wait.

  “Do you want to eat before or after?” Mom says once we’re inside.

  “After,” I say, because I already have the leash out, and Nax goes into hyperdrive when that happens.

  He bursts through the front door like a horse busts out of the gate at the Kentucky Derby. He doesn’t really settle down until we get to the Rail Trail behind our house. Then he comes up and rubs the gunk in the corner of his eye off against my pant leg and licks my hand.

  “Hey, boy,” I say.

  A bicyclist comes whizzing by, and I have to hold Nax back so he won’t cause an accident. Then it’s just the two of us for a while. The day still isn’t that warm, so I grabbed my favorite sweatshirt before I left. It was so big for me when I got it on vacation a few years ago, but now it fits perfectly and has been softened up by a hundred washes.

  “Little chilly, huh?” I say, because, yeah, sometimes I talk to my dog. It’s not that I think he can understand all the words, but he can understand some words, like walk. And he can definitely tell when I’m happy or upset or whatever.

  He looks back at me and then lets out one small bark, almost like a whoop. See? It’s like he agrees. His eyes are all over the trail, looking for squirrels.

  “I got hit in the head, boy,” I say. “It hurt.”

  It would be funny if he said ruff. He really does say that sometimes, but he doesn’t say anything now. He just looks back at me again. His eyes are big and wet and blank, so I go on.

  “I guess it was dumb. I mean, the pitcher had zero control, and I didn’t even really think about that….”

  But Nax isn’t listening anymore. He hasn’t seen a squirrel yet, and he’s getting antsy, pulling harder on the leash.

  “Until I got hit,” I say, wrapping it up.

  I touch the side of my head. It’s a little sore and a little swollen, just in that one spot. Tender, that’s the word. It feels a little tender.

  Thank God for batting helmets. What if I hadn’t been wearing one? I picture the ball bearing in on me. No, not picture: I remember. I remember the ball coming straight for me, and I have to shake the thought out of my tender, stupid head. I need to forget about that.

  Nax jerks on his leash, and I snap back to reality. “All right,” I say. “Let’s find you a squirrel.”

  Nax jumps at the end of his leash. Squirrel is another word he knows.

  “A fat gray squirrel,” I say, and he spins around in excitement.

  Then he squats and takes a dump, so he can move faster, I guess. He doesn’t move off the paved part of the Rail Trail this time, so I reach into my pocket for the Baggie.

  It’s Saturday night: time to start my homework. I’m up in my room, pushing around the pile of books and notebooks I dumped out onto my bed.

  Then I make individual piles. I put my notebook for English on the bottom of one pile, put the textbook on top, and then the little paperback copy of The Island of Dr. Moreau on top of that. The whole thing forms a little pyramid. Doing this does not help me get my homework done at all, in any way.

  I’m just putting it off. What’s the word, procrastinating? And see, right there, I think I should get credit for that, like vocabulary credit. And maybe something for the pyramid. Isn’t there a class called geometry, in high school, maybe? I should get advanced placement credit!

  And then I have another thought: Maybe I won’t have to do homework this weekend. After all, I got hit in the head. Apart from the batting helmet and my skull, I got hit in the brain. How could they ask a kid who had practically been hit in the brain to do homework so soon?

  Maybe I can’t even read right now, I think. But then I realize I’ve been reading the sports ticker at the bottom of the screen on ESPN all day. And right after that I realize it’s still only Saturday. People might cut me some
slack for my “maybe a minor concussion” today, but that still leaves all of Sunday and Sunday night.

  I’m stuck. I look at the piles. I’ll have to do all of it. Not tonight, though. I can give myself a break on that, even if it means more for tomorrow. I reach over with both hands and mess up all of the little piles.

  Then I get a phone call.

  “Yuh?” I say.

  “Do you have a big bandage around your head?” says Tim, instead of hello. “Did they give you a brain transplant? Do you look like Frankenstein?”

  “No, no,” I say. “They said my brain was already too damaged to operate on. Even before the game.”

  “I could’ve told ’em that,” he says. “But how are you, like, really?”

  “I’m OK,” I say. “Except I don’t want to do my homework.”

  “I must’ve been hit in the head, too,” he says. “Because I don’t want to either.”

  Then he tells me about the game. Even though I already know about it from Andy, it’s still cool, because Tim has different details. It’s amazing how different the view can be from second base and third. Plus, Tim hit a triple. Triples are pretty rare on our team, more rare than home runs, even.

  I get a few more e-mails than normal over the next day or so, and a bunch of my teammates call, which is even more unusual.

  “I wanted to knock that big gorilla out cold,” says Jackson.

  I know he means it, because I remember him bumping into Tebow when they were all standing around me at the game. It seems like a good sign that I can remember that. No brain transplant for me.

  Even J.P. calls. He doesn’t say much, but it’s still J.P. Coach calls an hour later, and I feel kind of like a rock star myself. Or at least like the bassist or drummer or something.

  We all have each other’s numbers from the team contact list. Most of my teammates don’t call, of course. A lot of them probably hear I’m OK secondhand.

  One of the people who doesn’t call is Katie. On Sunday night, I open the drawer on my computer desk and take out the team contact list. It seems funny that her name is right there: Bowe, Kathryn. I sort of wonder why it says Kathryn and not Katie. Did she give Coach that name to use for the list, or was it her parents? Does she prefer Kathryn, and just no one calls her that, or is it just because this is like an official team document?