The Off Season (2 page)

I pitched a fast one and Curtis swished a strike, and the little kids went bonkers like this was the World Series or something, and then he smashed right through my second pitch and it was clear that all those folks in the outfield hadn't gone back nearly far enough, and he ambled off toward first base because that ball was a couple hours from being found.

A bunch of little kids, though, took that ambling personally. They ran up and started tugging on his arms, and his legs even, shrieking at him to run, and then another bunch of kids, his defenders, decided that this first group shouldn't be so bossy and so they started pulling Curtis the other way because I guess they decided that walking would make him happier. Until finally you couldn't even really see Curtis, just a dozen little kids hollering and waving their arms and giggling hysterically, pulling him in every direction.

You know the expression "fall down laughing"? I actually did. I was laughing so hard, standing there on my little pitcher's mound, that after a while my knees didn't work and I had to lie down and try to breathe as I watched Curtis getting dragged around the bases. It was, hands down, the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Anyway, that's a very long story that doesn't have much to do with anything. But even now that memory makes me grin, Curtis and all those little kids wriggling together ... It's hard to believe, sitting here in the hospital writing this down, that I ever felt so happy. That once, not so long ago, my life actually seemed okay.

O
NE OF THE ANNOYING THINGS
about dairy farming—I mean, there are a ton of annoying things, like the smell, although you get used to that pretty quick, and the fact you spend your so-called summer vacation bringing in hay and worrying about the weather, and that Dad never spends any money to fix anything so all our equipment is just a hair from being completely broken—but one of the most annoying things is that you have to milk the cows twice a day no matter what. It's not like you can take a day off and go somewhere and they'll milk themselves. You have to be there every morning and every night. If you're even a couple hours late, their udders get too full of milk and the cows can get really sick. Which is why we had to leave the Labor Day picnic after only five innings. Although one nice thing is that the Jorgensens are friends with a bunch of dairy farmers so it's not like we were the only ones skipping out early. Randy and Cindy are pretty used to it.

Anyway, we were still pretty late getting home, which the cows weren't too shy about telling us, and even from inside the Caravan I could hear them mooing up a racket when we pulled in. I was so busy watching the cows push against the gate to get milked and figuring that I should probably offer to help Dad before he flat-out told me to that I didn't even look toward the house, which is why when Mom said, "Isn't that Brian?" my heart stopped for a second.

You see, our world of cows and busted equipment and twice-a-day milking doesn't have one thing to do with the other world—the real world, I think of it—of normal families and popular girls and good looks and Brian Nelson. There wasn't a reason I could think of for him to be sitting on our kitchen step with school starting the next morning, plus the cows making a racket and Smut wagging her tail all over the place and practically crawling into his lap, she was so glad to see him. But there he was.

"Hey there, Mr. Schwenk, Mrs. Schwenk," he called out with his nice manners as we piled out of the Caravan.

"Hey there, Brian," said Dad. "Whatcha doing here?"

Brian shrugged. "Just passing by." Which was impossible because our farm is something you pass only if you're headed to nowhere. "Hey, Curtis."

Curtis hunched down, staring at the ground. "Hey," he whispered, his ears bright red. Like I said, Curtis isn't so great with anyone over the age of ten. Or eleven, maybe.

"You gonna give us a hand with the milking?" Dad asked Brian in that way he has.

"You don't have to—" I started to say really fast, but Brian just shrugged again.

"Sure." He came over to the back of the Caravan, where Mom was unloading the buckets of food we hadn't eaten and our lawn chairs from the softball game.

"Hey, D.J.," he murmured, coming up beside me to take a load.

"Hey," I said, wishing like anything that my ears weren't turning bright red too. "How's your arm feel?" I asked. Quarterbacking an entire game, which is what he'd done Friday for the Red Bend–Hawley scrimmage, can really wear you down.

"Not bad," he said, swinging it a little. "How about your ribs?" During the scrimmage a couple Hawley players had kicked me pretty hard. That sort of roughing up comes with the territory in football, especially when you've got two teams that hate each other as much as Red Bend and Hawley.
Especially
when you happen to be a girl playing varsity in her very first game, a girl with two older brothers who are pretty much football legends around our two towns.

I shrugged. "Okay. The bruising's fading." I said this kind of quietly because I didn't want Mom hearing I even had rib bruises and getting all fluttery on me. Besides, it wasn't Brian's fault that so many other Hawley guys were jerks.

After we'd unloaded the Caravan, Brian came right into the barn with me and Curtis and Dad, helping put the feed out, which goes super fast with four people, and opening the doors so the cows could go to their places they all have memorized, the cows so happy to be eating grain and getting milked at last.

Dad was in a pretty good mood—he'd had a couple beers at the Jorgensens', and it's always a boost to have extra hands with milking—and he kept chattering away about the picnic, how Brian should have been there to see Curtis and me play. Brian shot me a look, and we grinned at each other because Dad can be a little over the top. If I didn't know Brian so well, I'd be just about dying. But it was okay.

"You should come with us next year," Dad offered, like the only thing Brian would want to do on Labor Day was play softball with a bunch of smalltime farmers and ice cream store folks from Red Bend when he could be off doing something much cooler with the kind of pretty girl that guys like Brian date.

"Sorry, but I'll be at college," Brian said, sounding sorry even.

"That's right, isn't it. Gonna play college ball?"

"I hope to. Sir."

Which got everyone on a discussion of Win and Bill, my two big brothers, and the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota, how those two teams were going to do and how much better both of those teams were—how much better both
schools
were, from the way Dad talked—with Schwenks playing football for them.

Through all this talk, I couldn't help thinking how nice it would have been to have Brian at the Jorgensens' picnic, poking at the pig roast and talking football and playing in the game. Maybe if he wasn't from Hawley. Or maybe if he was from Hawley but I was a normal girl so you could see why he'd be hanging out with me. Not that we were Officially Dating or anything like that, although we'd talked about it a little, and we'd even tried making out once, in such an awful way that I still winced thinking about it. I mean, Brian had tried to make out with me but I didn't figure out what was going on and ended up giving him a bloody nose. Which is a pretty good way to make sure you
never
date a guy, I think, doing that.

Also, having Brian at the picnic would have been especially awkward given that pretty much everyone there had been at the scrimmage, and all afternoon whenever I wasn't pitching, folks would come up to tell me how well I'd played, how I looked almost like Bill out there on the field, and how great my interception of Brian had been. Which probably wouldn't have made Brian's day, hearing that, even if I was probably the first girl linebacker to score in the whole history of Wisconsin, which several folks had to tell me. Plus that scrimmage was the first time in four years that Red Bend had beaten Hawley in football, so it mattered a lot to everyone in Red Bend, and three days later at the picnic they were still celebrating. Even when I was eating ice cream, I'd get slapped on the back and stuff. I tried to act like the guys on TV saying it was all teamwork and the season hadn't even started. Which is something you never see on TV guys being forced to talk with their mouths all full of vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce and walnuts. And chocolate on their chins too, probably, if it was me on TV.

Still, it was great having Brian giving us an extra hand with evening milking, the barn still fresh with that new paint the two of us had slapped up, and him finally looking comfortable with our big, big cows. He sure hadn't been comfortable with them at the beginning of the summer, but then, he hadn't been comfortable with any of us. It's not exactly Disney World when your coach sends you off to a rundown old farm because he doesn't think you have a work ethic. By the looks of it, though, Brian sure had found one, because he sure seemed to like hanging around us now.

As we were finishing up, Dad asked Brian if he'd like to stay for dinner. We'd already eaten a ton of food but I was starving again, go figure, and I guess Dad was too. Plus Mom had brought home a big chunk of meat from the pig roast that made me twice as hungry, remembering that.

Brian checked his watch. "Aw, I should go home. You know, first day of school and all." He sounded really nice when he said it, like he wished he didn't have to.

I walked him out to his Cherokee.

"So there, did you have a nice Labor Day?" I asked, doing my best imitation of Mom.

Brian laughed. "I just hung out with some guys. We didn't do anything as fun as that softball game. That would have been a blast."

That was so great, hearing that. "Yeah, well, you can come next year," I said. "Skip college, come play softball instead."

"Don't tempt me." He grinned at me. There was this little pause, and I wondered what was going to happen. The last time we'd been together, Brian had kissed my forehead. It had been really nice, actually, not bloody or embarrassing at all. This time, however, we sort of shuffled a little, and he climbed into the Cherokee still grinning. "I didn't know you were a pitcher too. You're good at everything, aren't you?"

And then he left before I had time to come up with an answer, an explanation about how I'm not good at most things, it's only with sports and cows that I can even pretend to be okay. I stood there in the yard for some time watching the dust settle back down to earth from the Cherokee, enjoying his compliment so much even if it wasn't true, and thinking how much I liked Brian Nelson.

N
ORMALLY IN SCHOOL I
'm one of those invisible people who the cool kids don't notice and the jerks don't pay attention to because I'm too big to pick on, and it's just me hanging out with Amber. Only Amber wasn't there Tuesday morning for the first day of school. Which really freaked me out, and made walking the halls even harder because now I didn't have anyone to talk to while bunches of people—and I mean bunches—kept looking at me. All because I was playing football. Kids slapped me on the back, saying hello, which wasn't bad or anything but sure wasn't something I was used to.

Even this little freshman whose locker was next to mine kept staring at me as he tried to open his combination.

"Hey," I said. To be friendly and all.

The poor kid nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of my voice.

"Want some help?" I offered, because he was really struggling.

He shook his head. There are times when I'm next to someone and I don't feel incredibly taller than that person, and bigger too. This was not one of those times.

"I'm D.J.," I said, taping up pictures of Win and Bill in their college uniforms, and Smut wagging her tail off with her slimy old football.

"I know," he said, sounding kind of like a mouse. Kind of squeaky. At least he got his locker open finally. "I'm Paul Zorn."

"Pleased to meet you," I said. I slammed my locker shut the way you do.

Paul jumped again at this noise, then apologized for jumping. Oh boy. "Hey," he managed to squeak out as I walked away. "Good game!"

That was what the first day of school was like for me.

My favorite class, I knew already, was going to be anatomy and physiology. Mr. Larson is one of the coolest teachers in Red Bend. Even Bill, who in a perfect world would play football three hours a day and spend the other twenty-one drinking beer with pretty girls, he liked Mr. Larson. When Mr. Larson isn't teaching A&P, or physics, which only the smart kids take and which no one named Schwenk has ever signed up for, he's enforcing the rules. In the fall he's a football ref, in the winter he's a basketball ref, and in the spring he's a baseball umpire. In the summer, I don't know, maybe he's a lifeguard. This means that in class whenever he's explaining something really complicated, he's got a great sports analogy to make it understandable, and whenever he needs to describe some horrifically disgusting injury, he has a real-life example. Like when he was talking about knees and he brought in a guy who'd been illegally clipped—the guy had a cane and everything—to illustrate it.

Plus I had English with Mrs. Stolze again—but not sophomore English, which was a really good sign because it meant that maybe she'd actually passed me—and Spanish, and algebra, and world history with a textbook that was written back before there was even a United States, it looked like, and a health class you can sleep through, and computers. Which was good because our computer is so old that it's a wonder it even works off electricity. It should use coal, or a little treadmill a goat walks on. One of my ancestors invented that for churning butter—we've even got a picture—although it probably didn't work any better than most of Dad's inventions. So anything related to computers was something I needed to know.

All day long kids kept talking to me about the scrimmage like I was some sort of public property that anyone could just walk right up to. Which I didn't care for much. I mean, I didn't set out to play football because I wanted lots of attention, I was doing it—well, I was doing it because for a while last summer, I wasn't sure what the whole point of life was, andtrying out for the football team was the best way I could think of to prove to myself that I was alive and, you know, a unique individual, not just a cow doing what I was told. Only it's not like I could ever explain that to anyone, and certainly not in the hallways of Red Bend High School. Or in the locker room after school either, when I was suiting up for football with all the volleyball players glaring at me and not so curious about my cow worries because they were too busy being mad that I quit volleyball for football, and because of me Kari Jorgensen quit volleyball for cheerleading, and then Amber quit to work at the Super Saver, so the volleyball team was now worse than ever.