Game Changer (18 page)

It would be great having Dad on their team. She kind of felt like a little girl again, knowing Daddy would take care of her.

He’ll get us back to the real world,
KT thought.
He wants me to get that University of Arizona scholarship and play in the Olympics as much as I do!

But Max was shaking his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The garage code is 2024 in this world because that’s when Mom and Dad think I’m going to play in the International Mathlympics. Dad only mentioned it seven times this morning when he was helping me practice math.”

“Oh,” KT said. She slumped over, as deflated as a balloon that had lost all its air.

“But you’re on the right track,” Max said, and this was even more demoralizing, that he was trying so hard to cheer her up. “I think we should be looking for things that are a little off, details that are out of place in this world—hints that somebody brought some piece of the real world with them. Like you trying to set up a softball tournament or talking about Dad being an accountant, and me—”

“What did you do?” KT asked curiously. “Did something happen that I should have noticed?”

“Well, I was terrible at mathletics on Monday,” Max said. “I froze up completely because—do you know how much pressure even a middle-school mathlete is under?”

“Try being a middle-school pitcher,” KT muttered.

“How do you stand it?” Max asked, and it seemed like he really wanted to know.

“I like it,” KT said. This was and wasn’t
true, all at once. “It makes me play better. Because . . . it makes me feel important.”

Max was shaking his head.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “It just made me want to throw up.”

KT laughed.

“But you played pretty well yesterday,” she said.

“Yeah, because I’d decided this whole world was fake, and nothing I did here mattered,” Max said.

“Do you still think that?” KT asked. “Do you think we could rob banks or—I don’t know, kill people—and it wouldn’t be any big deal?”

“I think we probably shouldn’t test out anything that extreme until we’re sure,” Max said.

KT laughed again. She was actually enjoying hanging out with Max. That was maybe the weirdest part of this weird world.

“You want to know the worst thing I did, when I first got to this world?” Max said. “On Monday I was so bad at running on the treadmill that I actually shot out the back. Flew halfway across the room and slammed into the wall. It was like something out of a cartoon!”

“Did you get in trouble?” KT asked.

“No, Ben told the teacher I was just nervous about the mathletics game, and she let me set my treadmill on a really slow speed,” Max said. He looked a little wistful. “It is kind of nice having the teachers give me special treatment. Because I’m a jock now—er, a Spock.”

“A Spock?” KT asked.

“You know, that’s what they call kids in this world who do mathletics or chemademics or some
other ac,” Max said. “I’m guessing it’s from that old TV show
Star Trek—
wasn’t Mr. Spock the really smart guy?”

KT realized that Max must have been paying more attention to the oddities of this world than she had.

“Wouldn’t you think it’d be the kids who are good at school who get the special treatment from teachers?” KT complained. “I had Mr. Horace yelling at me and Mr. Huck acting all weird about some e-mail I supposedly sent—it must have been something weird-world KT did before I got here, right?”

Max squinted at KT.

“What did the e-mail say?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I never checked,” KT said. “I was too busy planning for this softball tournament.” She gestured toward the empty bases once more, but her brain was already moving past that. “Wait a minute, this really doesn’t make sense, does it? Mr. Horace is like the football coach in the real world, and the football coach wouldn’t go out of his way to yell at some random kid who gets straight As. And some of the stuff Mr. Huck said, about how the school has its priorities messed up, and it’s students like me who get hurt . . .”

She reached back into the wagon and pulled out her iPod.

“Let’s see if I can get Wi-Fi out here, to look it up,” she said, scrolling through her choices.

“You think Mr. Huck or Mr. Horace remembers the real world?” Max asked. “You think one of them is our mystery person?”

“One of them, or . . .” KT got distracted logging on to the Internet. She quickly clicked into her e-mail account, and scrolled back through her sent file. Why would she—or rather weird-world KT—have bothered with e-mail instead of just sending a Facebook message?

“This must be it,” KT said. “This e-mail went out a week
ago Friday to Mr. Arnold, Mrs. Szymanski, Mr. Horace, and all these other teachers—er, coaches?”

Max was looking over her shoulder.

“So you hit the principal, the vice principal, the academic director, and it looks like coaches and assistant coaches for every single ac,” he muttered. “What did you say to all of them?”

KT scrolled down to the text of the e-mail:

To the administration, teachers, and coaches of Brecksville Middle School North:

All my life I have been told that the point of school is to prepare students for adulthood and the world of work. The way everyone acts at our school, you would think that all of us are going to grow up to do professional acs. Oh, sure, the teachers make a halfhearted effort to teach us running, throwing, biking and lifting—the skills 99.9 percent of us will actually need in our adult lives. But very few teachers try to challenge us to work to our fullest potential. If a student on her own works really, really hard in class, other students—and sometimes even the teachers themselves—make fun of her.

Instead, the students who consistently get held up as role models and praised and rewarded the most for their efforts are the ones who do acs. The greatest energy and enthusiasm in this school always goes toward mathletics, chemademics, etc. Why do we waste valuable classroom time going to pep rallies for acs? Why are the morning announcements always
about which team won which game the night before? Why is the first thing anyone sees walking into the school the trophy case of academic trophies? Why does Principal Arnold on the first day of school each year tell all the sixth graders that the best way to take full advantage of a Brecksville North education is to be an athlete-scholar and make sure that they get involved in acs?

I have a great idea. Why don’t we cancel all the acs, and have the teachers and coaches use all the energy they usually put into acs for making classes as fun and interesting and educational as possible? And for making students the best
students
they can be? Why don’t we make school important as school, not just as an excuse to play acs?

Sincerely,

KT Sutton

KT blinked.

“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of kids will need to do exercises on their jobs in this world?” she asked. “It’s not just Mom and Dad running on treadmills?”

Max was reading the e-mail over her shoulder.

“It’s almost like you have to translate this,” he said. “Substitute the word ‘sports’ for ‘acs’ everywhere, and that’s kind of how things were in the real world.”

“The school never put too much emphasis on sports!” KT protested.

“It felt that way for people who
weren’t any good at sports,” Max muttered.

KT wanted to keep protesting, but Max was already moving on to another point.

“Do you think somebody sent an e-mail like this one—or the reverse of this one—in the real world?” he asked. “Someone who’s as crazy about math or chemistry or some other academic subject as you are about softball?”

KT’s eyes blurred staring at the e-mail.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yeah, I’m sure of it.”

“You’re
sure?
” Max asked doubtfully.

“Last week,” KT said. “All the spring athletes got called down to the gym for a special meeting.” She put the words “special meeting”
in air quotes. “None of us knew what it was about, but Mr. Neal, the athletic director, went on and on about how we of all people were supposed to be role models, and we must never, ever bully anybody who wasn’t as athletically gifted as we were . . . . We all just thought it was stupid, and that’s why I forgot about it until now.”

“But you think that lecture was because someone sent an e-mail like this,” Max finished for her.

“And I know who it was,” KT said.

Someone who’s as crazy about math or chemistry or some other academic subject as you are about softball
, Max had said. And KT herself had sat through the mathletics competition the day before, watching the star player—the team’s pitcher, as it were—and thought she was as fierce and feisty at math as KT was at softball. This girl had literally taken KT’s place in the cafeteria, taking KT’s seat with Molly and Lex.

“You’re thinking of Evangeline,
aren’t you?” Max asked.

KT picked up the two softballs and the sweating water bottle and tossed them back into the wagon. She stood up and lifted the wagon’s handle.

“Wait—what are you doing?” Max asked.

“We’re going to go find Evangeline,” KT said, giving the handle a tug to pull it toward the first pillow “base.” “Do you know where she lives?”

“No, but—are you sure—”

KT tossed him the iPod.

“You look up her address and I’ll pick up all the pillows. Hurry,” KT said.

She jogged around the two makeshift softball diamonds, grabbing up the pillows as quickly as she could.

When she got back to Max, he had his cell phone up to his ear.

“You’re calling her?” KT asked, horrified. She swiped her hand at his cell phone and punched the button to hang up. “Don’t do that! Don’t give her any warning that we’re coming! We need every advantage we can get! She’s . . . well, you know, she’s a lot smarter than us!”

“I wasn’t calling Evangeline,” Max protested. “I was calling home to get Mom or Dad to drive us over there. Evangeline lives on Apple Valley Drive—it’s a million miles away!”

“Let me see that,” KT said, pulling the iPod out of Max’s other hand. She squinted at the map he’d called up. “You’re crazy! It’s just ten or eleven blocks. We get Mom and Dad involved in this, they’ll want to know why we’re going to Evangeline’s—you can use math as an excuse, but they know
I’d
never have anything to do with her!”

Max didn’t argue, but he frowned as he stood up stiffly. KT jerked the wagon forward, then glanced back to make sure Max was following her. He was just now taking his first step, awkward and limping.

“What’s wrong with you?” KT asked. “Leg cramp up or something?”

“Sort of,” Max muttered.

He winced as he took his next step too. He was shuffling along like some hundred-year-old arthritic great-grandfather. It hurt just to watch.

“Really, are you okay?” KT asked.

“Of course I’m not okay!” Max exploded. “Every muscle in my body is in agony! Muscles I didn’t even know I had before are screaming out, ‘Don’t take another step! The pain’ll kill you!’”

All that exercise,
KT thought.
Five or six hours a day, every day last week at school. After years of Max doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer
or video game screen, being a blob. Of course he’s in pain.

“Don’t say it!” Max warned, taking another halting step forward. “Don’t say, ‘Geez, Max, if only you were a finely tuned athlete like me, you could run to Evangeline’s house at top speed and not even start breathing hard!’ Don’t say, ‘This is what you get for being fat!’”

He actually had tears glistening in his eyes. But the part of KT’s brain that automatically would have labeled him a pathetic loser had switched off somehow.

“Poor Max,” she said.

Max looked at her skeptically, as if he thought she was being sarcastic.

“Really,” KT said. “Suddenly starting to exercise five or six hours a day is the totally wrong way to get into a fitness regime. You’re lucky you didn’t do any serious damage.”

“How do you know I didn’t?” Max muttered.

“You
can
still walk, can’t you?” KT asked. “And—it gets a little better with every step, right?”

“I guess,” Max said, sounding a little surprised as he took the next step.

“So, see, walking it off is the best thing you can do,” KT said. And then, just in case he thought she was being smug rather than sincere, she added, “And anyhow, just think if we’d been zapped into a world where we had to do video games five or six hours a day. I’m sure I’d be in agony with serious, uh, thumb strain.”

Max laughed.

“Thumb strain,” he repeated, rolling his eyes.

And somehow, the way he said it was so hilarious that KT started laughing too. They lurched forward, KT pulling the wagon, Max limping unsteadily, both of them pitching
side to side with gales of laughter.

This is fun,
KT thought in amazement. And even though KT had actually wanted to rush to Evangeline’s as quickly as possible—and get out of weirdo world as quickly as possible and get back to her beloved softball as quickly as possible—she found that she could slow down to Max’s pace without any problem at all.