Rounding Third Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t make eye contact.
    “Thanks again. With your head for baseball
and my pitching arm we make a good team.” Josh again slapped Bobby’s bare back
and walked away.
    Bobby slipped his shirt on and turned to
leave, walking right into the landmass that was Buff Beechler. He seemed to
always be running into Buff, but since Buff took up half the locker room, that
wasn’t hard to do. Buff was at least two and a half times Bobby’s 110 pounds.
“Sorry,” Bobby mumbled as he tried to move around the large obstacle. Buff
grabbed his arm.
    Here it comes, Bobby thought, I’ve bumped
into him once too often, and now he’ll pound me into the tile floor like Bobby
had watched Danny Taylor do to a kid after gym class one day. Bobby had lived
in fear that his time was coming and now it had.
    “Hey,” Buff said, forcing Bobby to look up.
“That was a good catch today.”
    “Good catch?” Bobby stammered. “I didn’t
play.”
    “You know what I mean. Schlagel was right--you
were the MVP today. It’s nice to know when a fastball is coming, especially
when the guy throws heat the way Fujiyama does. He’s been clocked at over
ninety.” Bobby stood in slacked-jaw silence, unsure that Buff Beechler was
really carrying on a conversation with him. Bobby could say nothing even if
he’d had a clue what to say. Buff chucked him lightly on the shoulder. “Keep up
the good work. And if you have any hot tips on any of the other teams we face,
clue me in, ‘k?”
    Bobby could only nod weakly as Buff eclipsed
him. Bobby tried to leave again, but this time found himself face to face with
Jason Farino. “Nice going, Wardell, make the rest of us look bad again!” Farino
poked him in the shoulder. Next to Bobby, Jason was the smallest kid on the team,
and was by far the worst baseball player, but even he had enough size to pound
Bobby and they both knew it. Bobby almost felt sorry for Jason that he was so
low that the only person he was able to lord it over was Bobby. Bobby thought
there should have been some bonding at the bottom, but Jason was too dumb to
notice that picking on Bobby would never be enough to get him accepted by the
rest of the team.
    Bobby said nothing. Being the center of
attention wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. He popped in his earbuds and darted
out the door to run home.
    *                     
*                     
*                     
*                     
*         
    All day Saturday, Bobby and his father, and
at times his mother and sister, took advantage of the warm weather to work in
the fields his father jokingly called “the back forty.” It was more of a hobby
than work for his father. His father’s accounting business and his mom’s part
time work paid the family bills, but they also grew much of the family’s own food.
Although his father hadn’t gone hunting in a few years, venison used to provide
winter meat. Bobby had a feeling their living off the land had more to do with
some kind of tradition than economics, but he never asked. They weren’t rich or
poor. He didn’t have his own car, but then many kids his age didn’t either. And
he had never even thought to ask for one since he had no place to go.
    Although they often spent full days in the
field, he and his father didn’t talk much. Bobby thought they should be having
some sort of meaningful dialogue when they spent these long days together, that
a male-bonding father-son thing should be happening. He tried to avoid his
father, but not any more than he avoided anyone else.
    His parents weren’t terribly social and sometimes Bobby had
wondered if he got his lack of social skills from them. For someone who had
been raised in the town and ran a business there, his father didn’t seem very
much a part of the town. He was not an Elk or a Lion or a Kiwani. He belonged
to the Chamber of Commerce, but rarely went to meetings. Bobby got