Safe at Home (5 page)

In that moment Nick couldn’t believe how much he wanted to be down there catching him, wanted to be back with
his
team in the worst way.

The JV team, that was his baseball family.

Nick could tell that already.

Already he was hoping that Bobby Mazzilli was a fast healer, maybe the fastest in history.

Nick Crandall’s first varsity practice never did get any better.

When it was his turn to hit, Steve Carberry strapped on the gear and went behind the plate. And when Nick, after a few weak grounders and some wild swings and misses, finally managed a weak fly ball to left-field, Steve said, “Shoot, I lost the bet.”

“What bet?” Nick said.

“The one with Jack that you couldn’t get the ball out of the infield.”

“Sorry,” Nick said.

Then as Nick was walking away, he heard this from behind him: “Quit now.”

It could have been Steve, could have been somebody over near the bench on the first-base side of the field, Nick wasn’t sure. When he turned around, all he saw was Steve settling into his crouch, waiting for Coach Williams to pitch to Joey Johnson.

“What?” Nick said.

Now Steve turned. “You talking to me?”

“Yeah.”

Steve flipped his mask back, and when he did, Nick could see the big smile on his face. “I didn’t say anything,” Steve said.

By then, it didn’t matter whether he had or hadn’t. His message, and Gary Watson’s, had already been delivered loud and clear.

When Joey had finished taking his cuts, Coach Williams told Nick to get his equipment back on while everybody took a water break.

Nick went to the end of the bench, alone, put his knee pads on first, the way he always did, then slipped his chest protector over his head. When he was finished, he saw that Coach Williams had come over to sit next to him.

“I know this has been a rough day for you,” he said.

“I can’t do
anything.
”

“Today,”
Coach Williams said. “You can’t do anything today. You must feel like this is your first day at school all over again.”

“More like I’m
getting
schooled,” Nick said.

“It will get better, I promise.”

“No it won’t.”

“Sure it will.” Coach Williams gently turned Nick around a little bit on the bench, so Nick was facing him. “Look at me,” he said.

Nick did.

“It’s gotta work,” Coach Williams said. “And I’ll tell you why: Because if you look bad, so do I.”

Nick said, “No, no, no, this is on me.”

“Now, that’s where you’re
really
wrong,” Coach Williams said. “Because this deal is on both of us. For however long we’re together.”

Nick settled down a little bit after that. He still wasn’t throwing the way he knew he could, still hadn’t nailed a single guy trying to steal. There was too much air underneath most of his throws, but at least he was getting them to second and third on the fly, wasn’t skipping balls past his fielders or shooting them so far over their heads they would have needed brooms to knock them down.

Still, when Coach Williams announced that Conor Bell was going to be the last batter of the day, Nick was relieved. Usually he didn’t want
practice to end. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to get home, now that he had a real home. It was just that baseball, even baseball practice, was the best and most fun part of his day, and he never wanted the fun to stop.

Today he was happy that practice was finally going to be over, the way you were happy when you got dismissed from your last class in school.

There were runners on second and third, two out. Coach Williams yelled in to Conor that he better have his helmet on tight, because he planned on striking him out.

“You got nothing, Coach,” Conor said.

“Even when I got nothing, I got enough to punch you out.”

“Bring it,” Conor said.

Everybody on the field knew that they were just having fun, that neither of them meant what they were saying as trash talk. Especially not Conor Bell. From what Nick had seen, he was one of the cooler kids on the varsity team. And he hadn’t gone out of his way once to dog Nick the way Gary and Steve had.

One time when he was running off the field, he had veered a little so he could run past Nick and tell him to hang in there.

Now he dug his back foot in and said to Nick, “Watch the swing I’m going to put on this baby.”

He went after the first pitch he saw, went after it with a huge swing, as promised, but the best he could do was pop the ball straight up in the air.

Nick wasn’t sure whether it was going to be fair or foul. He just knew, with this sixth sense he had—catcher’s radar—that it was going to land somewhere close to home plate.

Cake, he thought.

Finally.

“Mine!” he yelled, even as he could see Steve coming down from first and Gary Watson, playing third with Conor batting, racing in from the other direction.

Nick casually tossed his mask away, looked up for the ball. And right into the last of the afternoon sun.

It blinded him just for a second.

Nick stuck his catcher’s mitt straight up in the air, trying to use it as a shade. Out of the corner of
his eyes, he could see one runner coming hard from third, then another right behind him, just on the chance that the ball would land in fair territory.

At the last second, Nick spotted the ball. It was on its way down, just a little to the right of the plate, up the first baseline, not so far from where he had originally thought it was going to be.

His arm wasn’t working today, but at least his radar was.

He kept his glove hand in the air now, just moved a couple of steps to his right.

As he did, he tripped over his mask.

Tripped over the stupid mask and stumbled backward and couldn’t do anything to stop himself.

He ended up sitting down—hard—just outside the batter’s box on the infield grass, facing the pitcher’s mound as the ball landed squarely on top of his head.

It didn’t hurt nearly as much as the laughter that seemed to come from all over the varsity field.

Of all the comic book heroes, Nick liked Captain Marvel the best.

He didn’t care much for the newer version, the one that barely reminded Nick of the original, where they’d not only changed the way Captain Marvel looked, but a lot of the backstory.

He preferred the original version, because you don’t mess with a story like this, about an orphan named Billy Batson, who only had to speak the name of this ancient wizard—
Shazam!
—to be “magically transformed from boy to man—the world’s mightiest mortal!”

There were other comic book heroes Nick liked. He had always liked reading about the Justice League of America, which Captain Marvel would still show up to help once in a while, the way he’d
show up to help out in some of the Superman comic books.

Nick also liked Batman a lot, because Bruce Wayne’s parents had been killed by bad guys the way Billy Batson’s had been killed by Sivana.

But as far as he was concerned, Batman on his best day couldn’t touch Captain Marvel. Neither could the Fantastic Four or Aquaman or Daredevil, not just in the
real
old comic books that Mr. Boyd had first shown him, from his own collection, but much later, a more modern version, from what was called the Shazam series.

It had started accidentally enough one day in Riverdale, when Mrs. Boyd had stopped to pick up soft drinks at a convenience store in a mall not far from where they lived. Next door to it was a store called Cards and Collectibles, where you could buy old baseball cards and signed pictures of old players and even rare coins. Nick asked if they could stop in there for a second, just to look around. While they were in there, he found himself in front of a display of antique comic books.

It was there that he found a copy of one of the oldest Captain Marvels. And because the cover was
torn and a couple of pages were ready to fall right out, the store had discounted the price.

He had asked Mrs. Boyd if she would buy it for him. She said sure. When she saw what it was, Nick remembered how she smiled at him.

“Young man, you’re gonna make an old man real happy today,” she’d said.

“Why?” Nick had asked, and she’d said Nick would find out when he got home.

Later that evening, Mr. Boyd showed Nick what he called his “secret stash” of old comic books, in a box he kept in the closet of his bedroom. It turned out he still had a few of the original Captain Marvels, back from the 1940s. Mr. Boyd said they were worth good money now to collectors.

Then he added that it didn’t make any difference to him, because his weren’t for sale.

“I used to collect these the way other people collect stamps or baseball cards,” he said.

Nick fell in love with Captain Marvel that day, with Billy Batson, the orphan kid who, when he wasn’t turning himself into Captain Marvel, was a reporter for what was known as WHIZ radio.

“Probably be sports-talk radio, all these people yelling at each other, now,” Mr. Boyd had said.

There were so many things Nick loved about Captain Marvel, and one of them was the way he’d made a family for himself over the years. He had a sister, Mary Bromfield, who had a different name from Billy because she’d been adopted by a different family. And he had an Uncle Marvel in some of the comics. And there was even a Junior Captain Marvel, a boy named Freddy who’d gotten hurt one time in a fierce battle between Captain Marvel and a guy called Captain Nazi.

To make up for Freddy getting hurt, Captain Marvel had given some of his powers to him, and so later Freddy only had to say “Captain Marvel”—not
Shazam!
—to turn himself into a junior crimefighter.

Maybe that was the part Nick loved the best, that all you had to do to make things come out the way you wanted them to was say a magic word.

Then you were ready to slug it out with Sivana or Mister Mind or Black Adam.

Or Gary Watson or Steve Carberry.

If only, Nick thought.

When he’d left the Boyds to come live with the Crandalls, Mr. Boyd had let him keep all the Captain Marvels from that box of his and presented him with the last of the Shazam series from the 1970s that he’d been buying up for Nick online and giving him as presents from time to time. By the time Nick went to live with the Crandalls, he had all thirty-five comic books in the Shazam series.

“Someday you can pass them along to a boy of your own,” Mr. Boyd had said. “’Less you sell them for big bucks first.”

“I’ll never sell them,” Nick had said the night he was packing them up. “They’re the most valuable thing I’ve ever owned in my life.”

So by now he knew just about everything about Captain Marvel,
all
the versions of him, reading up on him on the Internet the way he would his favorite ballplayers. He didn’t like comics as much as he liked baseball—you couldn’t
play
comics after all, not even the way most guys his age liked to play video games—but they came in a close second.

His favorite Captain Marvel stories of all were the ones where Billy was guided by the spirit of his
real dad, C. C. Batson, who’d show up occasionally, even if Billy never knew when it was going to happen.

One day Nick was telling Gracie about those stories, telling her how cool he thought it was that Billy Batson finally got to know his real dad, even if it was just in the form of a ghost.

Gracie just looked at him and said, “You’ve got a real dad now, Captain.”

Tonight, though, Nick didn’t want to be anywhere near his dad, not the one telling him to get upstairs and do his homework. Nick needed Captain Marvel tonight, so he was on his bed with the door closed, reading one of the first comic books he’d ever read, about this huge beatdown between the Captain and Black Adam, the bad guy who pretty much had equal powers, even if the Captain always found a way to win in the end.

Most nights, Nick wanted to watch baseball if he finished his homework on time. Tonight, though, he didn’t want to even think about it, not after the way practice had gone, not with the goose egg he still had on his head where the ball had clipped him on the way down. This was one of those times when he
wished he had a baseball dad, one who didn’t just know the game but had played it at Nick’s age, who knew what it was like to have the kind of day he’d had at practice. And what did Paul Crandall know about failing or coming up short, anyway? He was the smartest person Nick had ever been around.

What could he possibly understand about being the kind of total loser Nick had been out on that field?

Maybe tomorrow he could get his baseball powers back. But tonight, he needed to get lost in his comics.

Nick knew he was supposed to be doing homework. He had promised his English professor dad and his math professor mom that he was going straight upstairs after dessert to crack open his schoolbooks.

He went with comic books instead.

And became so lost in Captain Marvel’s world that he didn’t hear his dad’s footsteps on the stairs or hear the door open or even know he was standing there in the doorway until he heard his voice.

“For which class would that book be?”

Busted.

“I just didn’t feel much like studying tonight,” he said.

“But you told us downstairs you were coming up here to work,” Paul Crandall said.

“And I meant to,” Nick said. “But when I got up here, I changed my mind.”

“Well, you need to unchange it, young man. Unless you’re under the impression that your grades are just going to magically improve on their own. As if they’re the ones with the magic powers.”

“Maybe they’re not going to improve this year no matter what I do.”

“Nick, there’s no way of knowing that unless you try. And one way to do that is to get your nose out of those comic books of yours once in a while.”

“But I like comic books better than real books!” he said, just blurting it out, realizing as soon as he did that real books were pretty much his dad’s whole life.

Nick was afraid for a second he might have made everything worse. But his dad just said, “Maybe if you gave real books a chance, you’d find out that they have heroes just like your Captain Marvel.”