Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œSo,” 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?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, what? You saw my scars.”
    â€œUh, 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 breakand 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.
    â€œYuck,” Angelika said.
    â€œThanks,” I replied.
    â€œNo, 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