Safe at Home Read online

  The new catcher

  Nick could actually hear himself breathing, even though he didn’t feel as if he’d heard a lot from Coach Williams since he’d said “varsity catcher.”

  “Anyway,” the coach said, “I just wanted to come over and tell you myself that you’re going to have to play up for now.”

  Nick noticed for the first time that the coach was small for a grown-up, taller than Nick but not by a lot, with blond hair and a young face.

  Nick said, “You still want me after seeing a throw like that?”

  Coach Williams put his hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Anybody can teach you control, son,” he said. “God has to give you an arm like that.”

  “But I thought there was a rule at Hayworth that says you can’t play varsity sports until eighth grade,” Nick said. Almost sounding like he was trying to talk the coach out of it.

  He saw that Coach Williams was smiling again.

  “Not anymore,” he said.

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  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  First published in the United States of America by Philomel Books,

  a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2008

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2009

  This book is published in partnership with Walden Media, LLC. Walden Media and the Walden Media skipping stone logo are trademarks and registered trademarks of Walden Media LLC, 17 New England Executive Park, Bldg. 17, Suite 305, Burlington, MA 01803

  Copyright © Mike Lupica, 2008

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PHILOMEL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Lupica, Mike. Safe at home: a Comeback Kids novel / Mike Lupica. p. cm.

  Summary: Playing baseball was the one thing that made twelve-year-old Nick Crandall feel at home until he found acceptance with adoptive parents, but he faces a new struggle to fit in when he becomes the first seventh-grader ever to make the varsity baseball team.

  [1. Baseball—Fiction. 2. Self-confidence—Fiction. 3. Teamwork (Sports)—Fiction.

  4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Orphans—Fiction. 6. Adoption—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L97914Saf 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007042100

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65354-8

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Once again, for Taylor. And for Christopher and Alex and Zach and the real Gracie, our Hannah Grace. There isn’t a single time I walk through the front door when I don’t feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta of the New York City Fire Department, a foster-care child who never believed his dreams were out of reach.

  And all those at New Yorkers For Children who were so generous with their time, and wisdom.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Long Shot

  ONE

  More than anything, Nick Crandall’s real family had always been baseball.

  He’d always felt that way about the teams he’d played on, since his first T-ball team. And he felt that way about the teams in the majors he followed, usually the ones with the best catchers, because Nick was a catcher, too.

  Baseball was the only thing that made Nick feel like he really belonged. There were a lot of reasons why he loved baseball season, but that was the biggest.

  Maybe everybody else on junior varsity at the Hayworth School, all the other sixth- and seventh-graders on the team, looked at the calendar and thought the school year was coming to an end.

  Not Nick.

  As far as he was concerned, everything was just beginning.

  School baseball was for the spring, and that was his only team in the spring, because Paul and Brenda Crandall had one rule about sports: one team per season. Even that was all right with Nick. He got to play school ball every day except on the weekends, and he could look forward to playing in their town’s summer Little League from the end of June into August.

  So when he looked at the calendar, all he could see was baseball, practically all the way until school started again in the fall.

  It was the first week of tryouts for JV, even though hardly anybody thought of them as tryout tryouts, because everybody who came out made the team. Some guys did get cut off varsity, made up of eighth- and ninth-graders, depending on how many came out. But even those guys, no matter how old they were, got moved down to JV if they still wanted to play.

  Nobody moved up, though.

  You didn’t get to play varsity at Hayworth until you were in eighth. Nobody was sure if it was an official written-down rule. But if you played sports at Hayworth, and everybody had to play at least one, you knew that’s how things were done.

  Nick didn’t care. No way did he care. He was in no rush to play varsity, anyway. The varsity catcher, Bobby Mazzilli, was graduating with the rest of his class in June. So in Nick’s mind, a mind filled with baseball stuff the way his desk drawers were filled with baseball cards and magazines, next year he had a good shot at being varsity catcher.

  That was no sure thing, of course, even though things seemed to be set up just right for him. Because more than anything he knew about baseball, Nick knew this:

  There were no sure things in your life.

  For now, Nick was happy on JV. Most of this year’s team was made up of seventh-graders, which meant that Nick knew all of them from class, whether they were in his homeroom or not, Hayworth not being that big a school.

  None of the guys on the team were what he thought of as real friends, just because that was a small category for him, wherever he’d gone to school. For now, Nick Crandall had only two real friends in the whole world.

  And one was a girl, not that Nick would ever admit that to the other seventh-grade boys, actually admit having a girl as one of his best buds.

  The girl was Gracie Wright, also a seventh-grader at Hayworth. Not only was she in his homeroom, she lived directly across the street from Nick and took the same bus and spent about as much time in the Crandall house as he spent in hers.

  His other bud—not quite up there with Gracie, but close enough—was Jack Elmore, an eighth-grader. Jack was fourteen, and Nick hadn’t even turned thirteen yet. His birthday was still a couple of months away, officially making him the youngest seventh-grader at Hayworth. That official-type information came from Gracie, who pretty much knew everything about the kids at their school as far as Nick could tell.

  But what even Gracie, as much of a know-it-all as she could be sometimes, didn’t know was how truly fast things could change in baseball, when you least expected them to.

  And how fast they were going to change for Nick today.

  The JV practiced on the last of the upper fields at Hayworth, the one with the best view of the soccer and lacrosse fields below. The varsity practiced way closer to the white classroom buildings and had the best-taken-care-of field at their school, one with a real dirt infield and a working scoreboard and even bleachers behind both benches, where parents could sit to watch games.

  Nick had been stealing looks at the varsity practice all afternoo
n. At one point, he noticed a big crowd of players at home plate and thought they might actually be quitting early today, even though they were usually still on the field when the JV packed it in for the day.

  Soon after that, Nick spotted the varsity coach, Coach Williams, leaning against a tree down the left-field line of the JV field, hanging there by himself in the shade.

  Watching them.

  “What’s he doing there?” Zach Dugas, their third baseman, said as he stepped to the plate.

  The JV version of the Hayworth Tigers was scrimmaging by now, using just two outfielders—there were still only fifteen players on the team, total, until they found out about varsity cuts—and their coach, Mr. Leeman, was doing the pitching for both teams.

  “Don’t know,” Nick said. “Maybe he just likes baseball so much he’ll watch any game. Even one of ours that doesn’t count.”

  “Doubtful,” Zach said.

  Jeff Kantor was the runner at first, having just singled, and there were two outs, which meant to Nick that Jeff was going to be running, even with Mr. Leeman pitching from the stretch.

  Everybody was encouraged to run by the coach. He’d told them from the first day of practice they were going to be the runningest team in their league.

  Probably running on the first pitch, Nick thought.

  Bad idea.

  Really bad.

  It wasn’t something he’d ever say out loud. When you’d spent your whole life trying to fit in, trying to please people, trying so hard to be one of the guys, the last thing you wanted to do was sound cocky. Or sound like you were big-timing anybody.

  But facts were facts. Four runners already had tried to steal today—tried Nick—and he had thrown out all four of them.

  He couldn’t help wondering now if Coach Williams of the varsity had seen any of those babies, especially the one that had Ollie Brown by so much at second base that Ollie didn’t even bother to slide.

  In the language of baseball announcers, all of whom felt like members of Nick’s baseball family, like funny uncles he’d never met, he had thrown absolute peas all three times.

  “Frozen peas,” according to Zach, who’d been Nick’s first victim when he’d been rock-headed enough to try to steal third on him in the first inning.

  Everybody knew by now what kind of player Nick was. The rest of the seventh-graders knew he could hit, knew he could run for a catcher, even as stocky as he was, with those short, thick legs that he kept hoping would grow one of these days.

  Even at twelve, he could locate a pop foul behind the plate with the best of them, toss his mask away and actually catch the ball, something hardly anybody his age could do.

  Like he had some kind of radar tracking system going for him, what Gracie said was like some chip he had inside his body somewhere.

  Yet that wasn’t what set Nick Crandall apart on a ballfield. What set him apart was the way he could throw from behind the plate.

  Nick Crandall had an arm on him.

  He’d always been able to throw, even on the playgrounds, back when he was living in Riverdale, in the Bronx in New York City. But last year was the first year he’d really been able to show it off. From the first few days of tryouts last year, when Coach Leeman had asked for volunteers to catch and that right arm of Nick’s had shot straight up in the air, he could see how shocked everybody was when he erased another runner as if he’d hit the Delete key on his computer.

  “Dude,” Ollie Brown had said to him today, after Nick had schooled him so badly on his stolen-base attempt. “Guys our age aren’t supposed to get thrown out by that much unless they do a header between first and second.”

  Throwing out guys stealing was Nick’s very best thing. He didn’t get all the runners who tried him. Even Johnny Bench, the old Cincinnati Red from the Big Red Machine, who Nick had read up on and who was supposed to be the best defensive catcher of all time, didn’t come close to doing that.

  Sometimes Nick would bounce one.

  Sometimes he’d throw wild left or wild right.

  Sometimes, as if he didn’t know his own strength, he’d really let one fly and the ball would go sailing in the direction of Dave Chester, their center fielder, known as Junior on their team because he looked so much like Ken Griffey, Jr.

  Most of the time, though, Nick was money.

  And he had been money today.

  The safest Nick felt in his life, the most confident and sure of himself, the most normal, was when he’d hear one of his teammates yell “he’s going!” just as he saw the runner take off from first, and then he’d be coming up and out of his crouch, and his arm would be coming forward, and he would be the no-worries Nick Crandall he wanted to be more than anything.

  That was the way it was happening now as Coach Leeman brought his arm forward and delivered his first pitch to Zach. It wasn’t any kind of pitch-out, the kind that big-league catchers would call to give them a better chance if they thought a guy was about to steal, a pitch they’d have the pitcher purposely throw high and way off the plate so they’d be standing and ready to throw as soon as they came out from behind the batter to catch it.

  It might as well have been.

  Coach Leeman’s pitch just happened to be high and wide, and that could have been a problem if Nick hadn’t read it perfectly almost from the time it came out of Coach’s hand. As Nick straightened up to catch the ball, he could see that Jeff, one of their fastest guys on the bases, hadn’t gotten nearly a good enough jump.

  If Coach Williams hadn’t seen the other throws, he was sure going to see one now.

  Nick really leaned into this one and cut it loose, grunting loudly as he did.

  The moment the ball came out of his hand, he knew he had put too much on it. Way too much. And he knew why, knew it the way you knew you’d said something wrong the second the words were out of your mouth, when it was too late to take them back: because he was a dope trying to show off for the varsity coach.

  To Nick’s eyes, the ball was still rising like a plane taking off as it went over second base, over the head of Reed McDonagh, playing short for Nick’s team, and over the head of the sliding runner. It was still so high in the sky that Nick was suddenly afraid that the ball might make it all the way to center field on the fly.

  Junior wound up fielding the throw on one bounce and didn’t even bother trying to get Jeff at third. There was no chance, so he just threw the ball back in to Reed at second. As he did, Nick heard Zach Dugas, in a real loud voice, saying, “I was starting to worry that sucker was going to need one of those parachutes you see on rockets after reentry.”

  Nick didn’t say anything. He was too embarrassed. He didn’t mind getting people’s attention with his arm. But you never ever wanted to draw attention to yourself like this. He was used to messing up in his life. Sometimes the messing up was epic, too.

  More than anything he hated to do that in baseball.

  He took off his mask finally, just because it gave him something to do. Then he walked slowly back around the plate, taking long enough that it felt like he was taking a walk around the block, and yelled out to his fielders to remember there were still two out.

  Then he got into his crouch and watched from there as Zach beat the next pitch into the ground and Reed at least showed off a strong accurate arm by throwing him out from deep short.

  It was then that Nick saw Coach Williams walking in from where he’d been standing in foul territory, walking past third base now, straight down the faded white line between third and home.

  Walking straight toward Nick.

  Yeah, Nick thought, he probably can’t wait for me to be his catcher next season.

  As Coach Williams got closer, Nick could see that he was smiling, slowly shaking his head.

  Great. He’d cracked up the varsity baseball coach.

  Coach Williams was still smiling when he got to home plate and was standing where a right-handed batter would stand, right there in front of Nick.

  “That was some throw,” he said.

  Nick put his head down. “I usually have better control than that.”

  Now Coach Williams laughed. “Well, I hope so.”

  “Really, Coach, I do.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s Nick, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, “Nick Crandall.”

  He put out his hand the way he’d been taught by Paul Crandall and looked Coach Williams in the eye as the two of them shook hands, Nick thinking, My hand is almost as big as his.