Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip Read online

  In the dream, just as the bird appeared, Grampa turned to me and his furious face filled my viewscreen, blocking the eagle completely. As the focus-indicator lights flashed red, he shouted, “Get the shot! Get the shot! What’s wrong with you? Gotta get the goddamn shot, Pete!” Then he leaned in even closer until I turned, dropped the camera, and ran.

  You don’t want to know what happened next. Let’s just say I wasn’t fast enough, OK?

  The other dream featured me on a pitcher’s mound, but the mound was in an operating room. I was trying to take some warm-up pitches, but there were a couple of things hindering me. One: I was wearing nothing but a hospital gown and my cleats. Two: There were people all around me, staring. My real-life orthopedic surgeon was there, holding a scalpel. So was my baseball coach, but he was carrying a chain saw. Then there was a whole ring of other spectators that kept shifting in and out of focus like reality does in dreams. I would catch glimpses of my mom, my dad, my older sister, Samantha (who’s been away at college for a year already), random kids from school. The ice cream man from my block. A scary clown.

  Coach and the surgeon were jostling each other for position next to me, arguing like little kids: “Me first!” “No, me!” “Tell you what. How ’bout if it’s a fastball, I get him, and if it’s a curveball, you get him?” “No, he’s mine! Finders, keepers!”

  I looked in at my catcher. Of course, it was AJ — but a mean-looking, evil AJ. He flashed me the sign: his thumb and forefinger joined together to form a zero. I shouted out, “Is that a one or a two?” He just threw down the same sign again, emphatically. Then I felt a searing pain in my throwing arm, and woke up screaming.

  After a few nights of this, I was sitting in my kitchen at two A.M. with my mom. Ever since I was little, she has always heard me whenever I’ve woken up in the night. We have this tradition: I pour us both some milk, she grabs some vanilla wafer cookies, and then I tell her my problems while we eat our snack. Meanwhile, my father and Samantha have always just slept right through everything.

  I secretly love those times. They’re comforting. I mean, the milk is cold, the cookies are good, and Mom is usually a great listener. Unless, that is, you’re trying to talk to her about a strange blanking-out episode her father had. Then she just shuts down.

  “You don’t understand, Mom,” I said. “He totally froze. You know how he always says, Gotta get the shot? That’s, like, his life’s motto. But he just sat there and let the eagle fly by.”

  “Honey, your grandfather has been shooting pictures for a long time. He knows what he’s doing. Maybe he just thought the light was bad, or the angle was wrong, or something.”

  “Mom, he told me he’d been going there for thirty years, waiting for an eagle to fly by early in the morning. Then one does, and he doesn’t take a single shot? There’s something wrong. I’m telling you.”

  “Peter, people’s reflexes slow down when they get older. And your grandfather is seventy-eight years old. He probably just couldn’t react fast enough.”

  “No, I saw his face after. It was like he wasn’t there, Mom. He just completely spaced out for, I don’t know, at least a minute. And then he was confused for a while, like he wasn’t sure what we were doing on top of the mountain.”

  “I don’t know. He seemed fine when you got home.”

  “He didn’t seem fine. He gave me his cameras! To keep! He told me they were mine now. That’s not fine.”

  For a moment, Mom looked shaken by this piece of info. But then she said, “Oh, Peter. He was probably just trying to give you something to do with your time — you’ve been so mopey lately, ever since the … uh … Anyway, maybe he thought you could get some good use out of the equipment.”

  “Yeah, he gave me the whole speech about finding a hobby or whatever. But I’m telling you, Mom: This was bigger than that.”

  “Well, we can keep an eye on him, honey. All right?”

  I nodded, and went back to my room. But I knew she still couldn’t understand. She hadn’t seen what I had seen.

  Mom didn’t know this, but my nighttime ritual wasn’t over at that point. Ever since my last baseball game, when I went back upstairs, I would turn on my computer and spend another hour or so flipping back and forth between a folder on my hard drive and a set of favorites on the Internet. It’s sad, really: All across America, untold thousands of teenagers were downloading music illegally, bullying other kids online, searching for sexy pictures, finding bomb-making recipes, hacking the Pentagon’s computers. Me, I always did the same exact thing every time. I would click into the “My Photos” folder and look through hundreds and hundreds of sports pictures my grandfather had taken of me since I was a little kid playing T-ball. The doctors had told me I would never pitch again, so I didn’t know why I was torturing myself, but there I was. Click! I’m six years old, running for first base with all my might. Click! I’m seven, looking very serious at the plate, facing a real live kid pitcher for the first time. Click! I’m eight, accepting the Player of the Year award. Click! I’m nine, ten, eleven, leaning forward on the mound, cool and composed, ready to mow down batter after batter.

  Sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop, I can feel the seams of an imaginary baseball against my fingertips. Sometimes, I even catch myself switching grips over and over again: four-seam fastball, two-seam fastball, cutter, change.

  When this has gone far beyond unbearable, I go to the favorites folder. “Favorites” is a pretty ironic word for what’s in there. What I have is a set of maybe a dozen web pages about an injury called osteochondritis dissecans: my injury. I know you probably haven’t heard of it. I hadn’t, either, until the doctors broke the news to me after several X-rays and an MRI. Basically, I should have told my parents about the stupid pain in my elbow. And because I hadn’t, because I had kept pitching when I should have stopped, I had worn out my elbow joint. The cartilage at the end of my upper arm bone had lost its blood supply, died, and cracked off. Then the surgeon had had to go in there, fish out the broken-off pieces that were jamming up the joint, carve away some more unhealthy cartilage, reshape the end of the bone, close me up, and hope for the best.

  “The best,” as in, “You’ll never pitch again, but maybe you won’t have crippling arthritis in your arm before you’re thirty.”

  By the second week of school, I had such big bags under my eyes, I looked like a bad-guy alien from Star Wars. Or a rabid raccoon. Of course, our first assignment in photography class was to do a portrait of a partner. And naturally, I got assigned to the only other freshman in the class: Angelika Stone. Tidbits Girl.

  The school cameras had been fancy when they were new but were kind of primitive now, and we couldn’t use studio lighting or camera flashes because everyone was shooting in the same room. I knew my grandfather’s amazing lenses would work better in low light than anything the class had, but I would have felt a little weird bringing in his $1,500 Nikon with its $500 portrait lens. Anyway, I figured Angelika was so pretty, I’d get a good grade no matter what I did.

  When shooting time came, Angelika wanted me to pose first. I felt like the biggest idiot in the world sitting there with my shadowed eyes, in a grungy long-sleeved Philadelphia 76ers jersey, my hair spiking in random directions.

  I gave it a good effort, though. Angelika made posing fun by pretending this was a real modeling shoot. In fact, she was so loud about it that I thought the upperclassmen were going to smack her, or officially shun us, or something: “Work those lips, Petey! Really give it to me! Love the camera! Lo-o-ove the camera!” So I worked the lips. I really gave it to her. I lo-o-oved the camera. We were having a great time until Mr. Marsh came over, looked at Angelika’s photos in the camera’s viewfinder, and started critiquing:

  “Angelika, what do ya see in your mind when ya pic-chuh Pee-tuh? Ya need to know what ya want before ya shoot. I mean, you guys can edit the shots all you want aftah — you can work togethah on the editing, by the way — but it’s always bettah if yer raw mate
rial has a direction. Is Pee-tuh a serious person? Are ya goin’ for gravity — the Abe Lincoln effect? Is he gorgeous — are ya going in a GQ direction? Is he mysterious? Ya need to develop a concept! Think about what ya want the world to see through your lens!”

  OK, it was cheesy, embarrassing, fortune-cookie-wisdom stuff, but I could handle it. Until Mr. Marsh started getting technical:

  “And then there are the, um, cosmetic issues. That hair” — actually, he said “hay-uh” — “are ya going Wild Man of Borneo on purpose? The skin — are ya gonna get rid of that shine in Photoshop afterward? We might have a filter that would help. It’s always easier to fix the image than to deal with the blemishes in processing. Oooh, and the glare from his glasses. Again, ya could go with a filtuh now, or …”

  I have to admit, I sort of tuned out the rest of the speech. In fact, I asked to be excused and headed for the rest room. By the time I got back, Mr. Marsh had moved on to his next victim, and I thought the worst was over.

  That’s what I get for being optimistic. The instant my butt hit the chair, Angelika went to work on me. She produced a hairbrush and made me do a reasonable facsimile of self-grooming. Then she made me take my glasses off. I hate having my glasses off in public. First of all, when you’ve been wearing glasses since the second grade, everyone tells you how weird you look when you take them off, and second of all, I feel vulnerable when I can’t freaking see. But I didn’t want to mess up Angelika’s grade or anything.

  “So,” I said, trying to make some small talk, “what’s your concept for me? Are we going with Rugged, Yet Vulnerable? Mister Smooth Goes to High School? The Handsome Stranger?”

  I think she smiled, although I couldn’t actually see her expression without my glasses. “Actually, I’m thinking Dork Boy Gets a Makeover. What do you think? Genius, right?”

  I gritted my teeth and growled, “Just remember, soon I’ll be the one with the camera.”

  Angelika snapped off a few frames, then decided to move me closer to the windows in order to get some more natural light. Sure enough, with the tiny apertures of the school’s lenses, it was pretty hard to get a well-exposed photo without using a flash. It was kind of warm near the window, so I pushed up the sleeves of my jersey. Then Angelika asked me to lean forward on my forearms against a stool. I did, and she said, “Better … better … that light gives your skin a nice glow …”

  A nice glow? Was that a good thing for skin to have? Why was glow good if shine was bad? Whatever, if she was happy, I could roll with it. I flexed my forearms. Angelika gasped. Hey, I thought, I know I’m built, but this is a little bit much, don’t you think?

  Then I realized what Angelika must have seen: my surgery scars. They’re pretty hideous, so I understood the reaction. I yanked down my sleeves in a hurry. I tried really hard to read Angelika’s expression, but everything was too blurry, so I grabbed my glasses and shoved them on. I caught Angelika’s eyes darting away from their focus on my arm, just as she said, “What?”

  “What do you mean, what? You saw my scars.”

  “Uh, those little things around your elbow? They’re hardly noticeable. Really. You just, um, surprised me. That’s all. No big deal. Come on, let’s finish shooting before we run out of time, OK?”

  This was weird. She had definitely been staring, but now she wasn’t going to be nosy about it? I felt my face flushing, a look I did not need to have immortalized on film, so I said, “Why don’t we take a break and see what we’ve got so far?” She agreed, and we took the memory card out of our camera and hooked it up to the card reader at the closest computer workstation.

  You know what? Looking at hugely magnified close-ups of myself with an attractive girl whom I barely even knew was even less relaxing than it sounds. Also, the pictures were technically awful. The ones from before we’d moved to the window had probably looked OK on the tiny viewing screen of the camera, but on the monitor they were way underexposed, which meant that there were massive, gloomy shadows everywhere. The areas under my eyes looked caked in black makeup, like I was trying out to be the bass player in an emo band. Plus, I didn’t look posed enough, somehow. In every frame there was some problem with timing: I wasn’t quite looking at the camera, or my mouth was dangling open, or I was slouched over.

  “Yuck,” Angelika said.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  “No, not you,” she said. “It’s the camera. It has a really horrible shutter lag, so every time I tried to get a good shot, by the time the autofocus locked in, it was too late. And the exposure … that’s all my fault.”

  I reached for the mouse, then clicked down through the photos on screen until we got to the ones we’d taken by the window. “Maybe you had better luck with the brighter light,” I said. But if anything, the brighter shots were worse. They were so overexposed I looked like a ghost. Or a perfectly white mannequin with a deep-black wig. I kept clicking until the last few frames were up. I looked really closely at those, partly because I wanted to see how horrible my elbow looked, and partly because I wanted to see whether Angelika had focused in on it. But the shots were so washed-out you couldn’t really even tell that my arm was an arm.

  Angelika sighed, said, “I give up,” clicked out of the screen, and ejected the memory card. Then she flipped the card into my hands, slung the camera into my lap, and said, “Your turn, Pete. Make me a star!”

  I know this isn’t going to make sense to anyone who isn’t a camera nerd like I am, but I couldn’t even stand the thought of using such inferior equipment for anything I was being graded on. After my grandfather’s stuff, this was like asking a fighter pilot to fly a hot-air balloon. As Angelika tried sitting at different angles on the stool by the window, I tried to find some decent menu options for programming the camera, but there were huge gaps between the available shutter speeds, the maximum aperture of the lens was pathetic, and the ISOs only went up to 800, instead of the 25,600 on Grampa’s Nikons. Put into simple English, what this meant was that there was no way I could get any kind of decent shot.

  That’s why I said what I said next. Even if it came out sounding totally wrong, I was just trying to put some effort into the first graded project of my high school career. “Listen, Angelika, why don’t we meet up at my house to work on this? I, um, I have much nicer equipment.”

  Oh, God, I thought as soon as it was too late. That sounded wildly inappropriate. Angelika pushed her glasses down her nose a bit, peered over them at me, and said, “Ooh, I’d love to come to your house and check out your equipment.” Then she laughed and added, “But don’t you think you’re moving a little fast?”

  Why is it that every single desirable female I’ve ever met can make me feel like an idiot in five seconds flat?

  A few days later, AJ invited himself over to my house to shoot baskets. He only lives a couple of blocks away, and he used to have to walk right past my door to get to middle school, so we’ve probably spent five hundred hours playing basketball in my driveway. Now, you’re probably thinking, “How can you shoot baskets if you’re not medically cleared to play sports?” The answer is that I can’t. Which leads to the next logical question: “What kind of insensitive weenie would invite himself over to his best friend’s house to do something his friend would totally kill to do, but isn’t allowed to?”

  I find myself having those kinds of thoughts all the time, but that’s just AJ. I love the guy, but he barely seems to notice that other human beings have emotions, so he says and does completely offensive stuff at random moments without a shred of explanation. Once, in seventh grade, I had a huge argument with AJ because he wouldn’t stop saying my sister was “suh-mokin’ hottt!” I ended up storming out of his house. When I got home, I was so mad that I told Samantha what had happened, and she said, “Ooh, that’s so cute! You have to understand, Petey, your friend AJ is essentially a caveman. He only has three feelings: hungry, hyper, and horny. He’s a great kid if you can just resign yourself to that. And maybe throw him some chunks of raw
meat or something once in a while to keep him happy.”

  My sister is a genius judge of character.

  So there I was, sitting on my butt, cooking in the Indian summer sun and watching my caveman buddy take about forty-three million foul shots. As an added bonus, he was enlightening me with his insights about the female mind. “So then” — grunt, shoot, swish — “she just invited herself over here and told you to take pictures of her?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s not what happened at all. Mr. Marsh assigned us to be partners, and then —”

  “She wants you, man.”

  “What are you talking about? I just said the teacher assigned us to work together. And then I was the one who asked her to come over.”

  “Oh, yeah” — grunt, shoot, swish — “she totally wants you.”

  I stood up, walked over to AJ, and knocked on the side of his head. “Are you listening to me at all? The teacher made the assignment, and then I made the invitation.”

  He pushed me away with one hand, and shot with the other. It was a complete air ball, and he said, “See, now you made me miss. Like it’s my fault you can’t accept what’s happening in your love life.”