Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (3 page)

You have these dreams of what the first day of high school will be like, you know? You'll walk down the hallway and all your boys will give you high fives. Hot girls from the other middle schools will check you out as they whisper and giggle behind their hands. The teachers will immediately notice your incredible brilliance. The coaches will seek you out and invite you to try out for their teams, although they also tell you that, for you, the tryout is just a formality. If you get lost or something, you'll be guided to class by some of the friendly and nurturing upperclassmen.

I'm here to tell you, my introduction to ninth grade wasn't quite that good. First of all, I kept getting jostled and banged around in the halls, so my bad arm (that's how I thought of it now) felt like someone was stirring it around in a vat of ground glass. Second, I
got lost over and over again, but nobody came jogging over to rescue me. At one point, I asked a girl who looked like she would know her way around, and she and her friends made a whole big deal out of teasing me:

Ooh, look at the cute little furr-reshmannnnnn! Are you lost, little freshy-guy? Where do you need to go? Don't worry, we won't let you wander the big, scary halls. Will we, ladies? Now, all you have to do is go through this big metal thing called a door, and then walk up these steppy things called the staircase, and …

I basically just wanted to die. Especially because the girl was a complete babe, and I could feel my face bursting into a crazy blush. That was on my way to third block, which for me meant my elective art class: Introduction to Photography. We had gotten a course guide in the spring of eighth grade, and when I was looking over it with my parents, my mom had forced me to sign up for this one. I could still hear her voice ringing in my ear half a year later:
Ooh, that will be perfect for you! You know so much about cameras already — it will be an easy A. And look — it counts in
your grade point average! It's never too early to think about looking good to colleges….
I had tried to tell her that photography was a private thing between me and Grampa, but that had gone over like a lead balloon. So not only had I given in, but I had also convinced AJ to sign up with me.

AJ and I met up on the way into class. He asked me how my day had been, but totally stopped listening when this one girl walked in. My back was to the door, so I didn't really see anything except that she was tiny and had on a black hoodie. From my angle, she could have been anybody. Apparently, from his angle, not so much. “Wow,” he said. “Cuteness alert! Thanks for making me take this class, Pete. I love you, man!”

Half an hour into the period, I was ready to strangle my mom. First of all, the teacher had stomped into the room and immediately assigned us seats alphabetically — never a good sign — which put me across the room from AJ. Second, Mom and I both should have paid a little more attention to the “Introduction” part, because the teacher was saying
stuff like “The lens is the part of the camera that lets light in.” And “One important thing to remember with a digital camera is that water is
not
your friend.” Or my favorite: “If you all pass the first three written tests, in just a few short weeks you'll be ready to touch a real camera!”

I snuck a glance over to the far corner of the lab, where AJ was sitting, looking bored out of his skull. He was completely going to kill me for getting him into this. The girl he had pointed out was sitting next to me, and she looked bored out of her mind, too. In fact, she was muttering sarcastic comebacks under her breath, à la “Oh, so the lens cap needs to be
off
for best results! Ooh, better write that one down.” I tried to eavesdrop without being obvious about it, but when she said, “A
real
camera? In just a
few short weeks
? Mercy! We're not worthy!” I snorted.

She noticed. More than that: She turned and stared at me. Head-on, she was really pretty, in an angular way. She had jet-black hair that fell long and a little bit wavy over one shoulder, dark wire-rimmed glasses,
sharp cheekbones, a tiny nose that might have been slightly pointy, and the palest blue eyes in the world. I mean, incredibly pale blue, like the eyes of a sled dog or something. Which might sound unattractive, but somehow on her, these eyes were working. She would have been cute with regular, normal-colored eyes — but with the ones she had, she was slaying me.

“Don't look at me,” she stage-whispered. “You might miss some priceless tidbits.”

I just looked at her some more, because I didn't know what to say. Between the eyes and the incredibly rare conversational use of “tidbits,” I think I was stunned.

She raised an eyebrow. I felt myself blushing for the second time in less than an hour. “Seriously, dude,” she said. “Tidbits.”

I kept staring. In a few seconds, this girl was either going to have to marry me, or get a restraining order.

She pointed one finger across her body at the teacher. “Come on! This way to the tidbits!”

That finally did it. I laughed out loud. I mean,
This way to the tidbits
? Who
wouldn't
be forced to laugh? I turned back toward the teacher, who was glaring at me. He had the class list in his hand. This was so not good. “What's your name, young man?”

First the “tidbits,” now the “young man.” What was this, Outdated Expression Day? “Peter Friedman, sir.”

I caught the girl, in the corner of my vision, mouthing, “Sir?”

“Well, Peter Friedman, perhaps you'd like to repeat what I just said about the difference between automatic and manual modes on a digital camera.”

Ugh. The old repeat-after-me trick. “Um, did you say that automatic mode figures out the aperture, shutter speed, ISO speed, white balance, flash setting, and —”

He cut me off.

“Mr. Friedman, what do you mean by aperture?”

“Well, it's the width of the opening in the lens.”

“And what is ISO speed?”

“That would be, umm, the light sensitivity of the
camera's sensor. If you turn it way down, you get more clarity, but your shutter speed has to be slower and —”

The teacher cut me off again. “What are you doing here, Mr. Friedman?”

“Uh, I'm in this class.”

“No, I mean why are you in an introductory photo class when you clearly know a lot about photography already?”

“Well, uh, I thought …”

“You thought you'd get an easy A, didn't you? I think we had better send you across the hall to Advanced Photographic Techniques. Grab your things.”

Before I even knew what hit me, I was sitting in a different classroom, surrounded by upperclassmen. Wow, AJ was completely going to kill me. I met my new teacher, Mr. Marsh, who had the strongest New York accent I had ever heard. He welcomed me in by saying, “Take any empty chay-uh, Peetuh!” I sat down, looked around, and instantly knew this class was going to be a whole lot more challenging than
the one I had just left. There were huge blowup prints of all kinds of photos all around me: nature, sports, portraits. There were also a couple of expensive SLR camera bodies lying around on tables, and a class set of super-new computers with huge monitors. As I found a seat — which wasn't hard because there were only maybe eight people in the class — Mr. Marsh introduced himself and went right back to what he had been doing.

About five minutes later, just as Mr. Marsh was demonstrating how to choose between three different kinds of lens filters (or “filtuhs”) for outdoor photography, the door opened again. Blue Eyes Girl walked in.

AJ was absolutely, completely going to kill me.

For the first time all day, I smiled.

I didn't sleep well the first week of freshman year. I know you're thinking I was probably worried about all the usual new-school stuff: settling into classes and making friends and not getting stuffed into a locker for the weekend by hulking football players. But as scary as those things were, they weren't horrifying enough to make it into my nightmares that week.

No, my dreams were way, way worse than that. They were all pretty much variations on two themes. The first one always featured a flashback of what had happened a few weeks before with my grandfather and the eagle trip: Grampa sitting on the edge of a cliff with his camera and me crouching next to him, looking through the viewfinder of the spare camera. The eagle appeared and I tried to line up a shot. But everything else was a crazed distortion. In real life, I
had gotten maybe fifteen shots off, but half of them were blurry and the other half had the eagle at least halfway out of the frame. Grampa hadn't taken a single shot. It was like he was frozen in place, for no apparent reason. When the eagle had gone, I looked over at Grampa, and he was just staring over the ridge blankly. After maybe a minute, he jumped up, shook himself like he was waking up from a daydream, and started packing. We went home in a weird, stunned silence. Back at the house, Grampa had unpacked all of his camera gear from the back of the SUV, brought it into my room, and said, “Here, Pete, this is all yours now. I'm done.” Then he hugged me hard and left. I tried to get him to stop and talk — to tell me what was going on — but he just walked away.

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 switch
ing 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 material 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.