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For Jobim, who said he wanted to read about zombies;
for Arjun, because it always is;
and for anyone who has ever wanted to save the world
CHAPTER 1
Losing sucks.
Don’t let anyone tell you it builds character or any of that junk; it sucks. It sucks that someone else is beating you. It sucks that you’ve worked so hard and it’s going to mean nothing. It sucks that you can’t hit the ball the way you want and can’t field the grounder the way you imagined—a thousand things about losing suck.
But it sucks worse when you’re stuck in the dugout on a 102-degree day in the humidity, and the heat index is 120, and sweat is pouring off you, and your team is losing—not because you suck at baseball, but because your baseball coach, Mr. Cocoran, sucks at coaching.
Mr. Cocoran won’t listen to you when you tell him he’s got the batting order wrong. He likes big hits and loves guys who hack at the ball and swing for the fences and all that junk, and he doesn’t understand about getting runners on base. He doesn’t know squat about baseball.
But you know the thing about losing that sucks even worse than that?
Knowing you’re the one who’s going to get blamed.
When you’re finally up at bat, with Miguel on third and Sammy on first, and you’re down by two in the bottom of the sixth, and you’re the last and final hope of the Delbe Diamondbacks—you’re the one everyone is going to remember.
Maybe I could hit a single on my good days (and if the pitcher was off his game), but basically, for me, the ball just moves too darn fast.
My dad says I swing with my heart.
Well, he said that after I struck out once and spun myself all the way around and all the other kids were so busy laughing at me—even my own team—that nobody minded so much that we’d lost another game.
After that game, my dad came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it, Rabi; you swung with your heart. You were all in. We can work on your swing. As soon as I’m back from the rigs, we’ll work on it.”
Of course, baseball season was going to be over by then, so my swing wasn’t going to improve in time to save me from more humiliation. Dad works oil and gas rigs—ten weeks on, two weeks off—so I was on my own.
There was no way I should have been batting cleanup, I can tell you that, but there I was, sitting on the bench, watching the lineup come down to me, like a slow-moving train wreck.
Miguel was sitting next to me, chewing gum. “What’re the odds?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, Rabi.” Joe, who was sitting on my other side, poked me in the ribs. “Do that trick you do. With the numbers.”
A couple of the older guys, Travis Thompson and Sammy Riggoni, both looked over. Beefy dudes with mean piggy eyes who liked to hassle anyone who was littler than them. I didn’t want their attention at all. I looked away.
“Nah,” I said. “There’s not enough numbers to do it. I need more stats. You can’t do stats with Little League. You need a lot of numbers before you can predict anything.”
“Come on,” Miguel said. “You know you can.”
I looked out at the bases, frowning. I studied the batters in our lineup, eyed the Eamons Eagles defense, their catcher and fielders and pitcher. And then I started setting stats. It was a trick I used. I could set stats over the different players’ heads in my mind, a little like health bars in World of Warcraft, and then I could figure out probable outcomes.
Numbers. Stats. I have a cousin in Boston who calls it my inner Asian math nerd.
But whatever it is, I’m good at it. The Eagles pitcher was still going strong, even after pitching most of the game. We hadn’t worn him down much. I’d read up on his stats and seen how he normally did after pitching four innings. I’d been counting how many times he’d actually had to pitch against all our batters, and I knew he wasn’t tired. Not a bit.
He’d just struck out Billy Freudenberg on three straight pitches. And now Shawn Carney, at the plate, had two balls and two strikes on him. But Shawn barely hit .225, even against a weak pitcher. Against the Eamons guy, he was more like .075. Shawn was always hacking at random pitches. When he hit, he hit with power, but the Eamons pitcher was smart enough to bait him into swinging at a mean little curveball.
Shawn was dead meat.
Then there’d be Miguel. Miguel was hitting .525 on the season, steady all the time, dangerous. And the Eamons pitcher was afraid of him. Miguel could get himself on base, for sure. He was a slugger and he hit for extra bases more often than not. After that, Sammy would be up—.305, but not with as much power as Miguel. Then there’d be me. It all added up to…
“You need a double or better,” I said. “And Sammy needs the same for us to tie.”
Miguel cracked his gum. “And if we do, that means you got to…”
“I got to do anything except strike out. Anything at all.”
“What are the odds?”
I laughed. “If you two nail it? Twenty to one, against. If you don’t?” I shrugged. “No shot.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Miguel said. “You can get on, no problem.”
“Numbers don’t lie. It wouldn’t be a problem if they moved me ahead of you two. I do better when there’s no one on base, and no pressure. If Mr. Cocoran would just concentrate on getting players on base, concentrate on getting more walks instead of big hits, we’d already be winning right now. And this wouldn’t matter at all. We’d probably be up two at this point. Game over, Delbe wins.”
Miguel nodded out at Shawn, who was getting ready for his next pitch. “What if Shawn gets a hit?”
I looked over at the redheaded boy. “He won’t. Not with two strikes on him. He always chokes once he gets two strikes.”
“Shut up, Rabi. You’re on a team.”
That was Mr. Cocoran, our king of a coach. Funny-looking guy with a big nose and a face that was red like a tandoori chicken. He was always irritated. Mostly at me. “You don’t rip your own teammates,” Mr. Cocoran said. “Especially with your batting average.”
Sammy Riggoni snickered. “Yeah, Rabi, have you even hit a ball this season?”
I think somewhere in the Little League rule book, there’s something about being a good sport, and everyone playing hard, and winning clean, and working together as a team. I’m pretty sure it’s there, somewhere.
For Mr. Cocoran, that meant telling the good players they were amazing, and pretending the crummy players didn’t exist. I mean, sure, I’m a terrible hitter. But so is Shawn. I’m not being mean; the kid’s got a serious hole in his swing. When the count’s 2–2, he always chokes. It doesn’t do any good to stand around clapping and cheering and saying he can do it, after you’ve spent the entire season ignoring the problem.
My dad says there’s no point pretending reality doesn’t exist; otherwise, you can’t fix anything. Mr. Cocoran should have paid attention to Shawn and helped him get better. Instead, he spent his time helping Sammy, because Sammy was a “natural.”
That was how Cocoran rolled, and now, under Cocoran’s glare, I shut up. I didn’t want to argue with him, and I sure didn?
??t want to get in a fight with Sammy. Besides, two seconds later, the numbers lined up, just like I expected, and made my point for me. Shawn hacked at a crummy pitch and popped the ball straight up, and the catcher snagged it nice and easy. Two outs.
Cocoran glared at me even harder.
It’s got to be annoying when a middle school kid knows more about baseball than you.
Miguel was up. He went out into the sun, and just like the numbers predicted, he got a hit. He roped a double, which wasn’t as good as we needed. Then Sammy singled, which moved Miguel to third. If Sammy had tripled, then we would’ve had a chance… but no.
It was down to me, walking out to home plate.
It should have been Miguel standing where I was now. The guy who hits a double on his bad day. If Cocoran had changed the batting order, Miguel could have driven runs in all day long. Instead he liked to get Miguel out there early, and tried to get him to steal bases.
Cocoran was standing at the entrance to the dugout, sweating and shouting for me to make it happen. I stood over the plate. The pitcher was looking at me, smirking. He had runners on first and third, which might have worried him, except he was facing me, a batter he’d struck out every time. He knew that I was the end of the inning—and the game.
Miguel was nodding encouragingly, willing me to bring him home. Sammy was just staring at me. I could tell he hated that he had to depend on a shrimp like me to do something right for once. Too bad for him that I’m a strategizer, not a slugger. I think. I don’t do.
The sun pounded down. The stands got quiet.
And then my mom started clapping.
Everyone swung around to look at her.
There she was, up in the stands, calling, “Rabindranath! Ra-bin-dra-nath! Ra-bin-dra-nath!” This crazy Indian lady in a bright yellow sari, with night-black hair in a bun and a red bindi in the middle of her brown forehead, was cheering for me. She didn’t care that everyone was looking at her, or that she was embarrassing me. She was all in, supporting her son.
I wanted to die.
I looked down at the plate, then up at the pitcher. He was grinning at me. He knew he had me now. And that made me mad, him thinking he could just whup me that way.
So what if I had a name no one could pronounce? So what if I had a mom who wore saris? I was going to take his pitch and knock the cover off the ball. I was going to teach them all not to laugh at me.
I looked at the pitcher, and I pointed, just pointed toward left field, letting him know where I was going to put the ball, staring him down, letting him know that I owned him.
Rabindranath Chatterjee-Jones was going to knock the ball out of the park.
Around me, everyone went quiet. Even my mom.
I was ready. I touched the plate. Wound up the bat.
The pitch came in high.
I let it go.
“Strike one!” the umpire shouted.
I stepped off the plate, trying not to let it rattle me.
The catcher snickered. “Shoulda swung at that one, huh?”
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to let him get to me. I just needed to think about the bat knocking the stuffing out of the ball.
“You should swing at this next one,” the catcher said. “We’re trying to make it easy for you, man.”
I let the second pitch come by, too, knowing that the Eamons pitcher would try to fool me. It was coming low, this time.
“Strike two!”
What the…? I thought it was a ball, for sure.
But now, here it was: the pitch I’d been waiting for—fast and straight and right down the pipe. Perfect.
I swung like there wasn’t ever going to be another tomorrow—and once again, I swung so hard I spun around and tripped over my own tangled legs.
I fell down in a pile.
Everyone groaned.
And that was it. End of the game. Everyone laughing at me… Miguel walking toward me, shaking his head… my mom, up there in the stands, sitting there like a bright yellow dandelion, looking sad, like I’d disappointed her—even though she never really liked baseball anyway and only cared about cricket… and Sammy Riggoni, coming over to me as I started to get up.
To my surprise, Sammy reached down to give me a hand up. I let him pull me upright, but then he jerked me close.
“Coach is right, red dot, you’re a crummy hitter,” he said in my ear, and then gave me a shove that made me stumble back.
Miguel and Joe saw it happen and charged in to back me up, but then Sammy’s friends were there, too. Rob Ziegler and Bill Tuffin and the rest of them, glaring. All of them bigger and stronger than us, except maybe Miguel. There was no way we could beat them. If you stacked up the stats, a fight with Sammy’s friends added up to GAME OVER.
“Come on, Rabi. Take a swing,” Sammy goaded. “I want to watch you spin around again.” He gave me another push. “What you got, red dot? Let’s see that pretty twirl you do.”
Parents were starting to stand up in the bleachers, trying to see what was going on between us, but they were too far away to help. Sammy gave me another shove. “Why don’t you swing, twirly? Let’s see your swing.”
Miguel grabbed my bat off the ground. “I’ll take a swing.”
That got everyone’s attention. Sammy took a step back, and I swear he looked scared. Joe gave a whoop of glee.
“Oh yeah! Now it’s a fight!”
I grabbed the bat away from Miguel. “Are you crazy?”
“Someone’s got to shut him up,” Miguel said.
Mr. Cocoran came busting in between us as I turned around to glare at Sammy.
“What’s going on here?” Mr. Cocoran shouted.
Sammy pointed at us. “They were going to hit me with that bat!”
“That’s not what hap—” I started to say, but Mr. Cocoran shut me down.
“Cool it, Jones! I don’t take shift time off from Milrow just so I can watch you pick fights on this team. Especially not after you lose a game.”
“I didn’t pick—”
“Is that a baseball bat in your hand?”
“Uh…”
Sammy was grinning at me from behind Cocoran’s back.
“What are you thinking, Jones? You don’t pick fights with your own team. And you sure as heck don’t threaten another human being with a bat.”
“Sammy’s human?” Joe asked. “You sure about that?”
Mr. Cocoran swung around. “Save the smart remarks, mister. One more, and you’re off this team.”
I tried again. “I didn’t pick the fight—”
But Mr. Cocoran was all wound up now. “Not another word, Jones. You’re an inch from being kicked off this team yourself. You snark from the bench and you pick fights after you lose games. That’s not good sportsmanship, not by a long shot.”
I could tell Mr. Cocoran was going to go on, but someone honked a horn from the parking lot.
He glared at us all, looking from Sammy and Travis and Rob and Bill, to me, to Miguel and Joe. Parents were coming down onto the field now to see what was happening, including my mom and Sammy’s parents. The car honked again. “You’re lucky I’ve got to get to my shift,” Mr. Cocoran said. “But we’ll talk about this next practice. Don’t think we’re done here. Now clear out, all of you.”
My mom came up behind me in her yellow sari. “Rabi, what’s going on? Were you fighting?”
“It wasn’t anything, Mom. Just some joking around.”
“It didn’t look like joking.”
As everyone else left the field and walked up the low grassy slope to the parking lot, Sammy looked back at me one more time, making a face at my mom’s back.
Red dot, he mouthed.
I was so mad, I could have gone after him right then and there. But Mr. Cocoran was watching me, and I could tell he was just waiting for me to step out of line.
“Rabi?” my mom pressed, not seeing what was happening behind her.
“It’s nothing, Mom.”
I glare
d after Sammy, wishing he were dead. Hating Mr. Cocoran for taking Sammy’s side. Hating them all.
I feel bad about it now, looking back.
When you’re mad, you wish all kinds of things on people. Maybe you even think they deserve it. But it turns out that I didn’t want anyone dead. I didn’t even want anyone hurt.
Not even when Mr. Cocoran tried to eat my brains.
CHAPTER 2
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Mr. Cocoran didn’t try to snack on my skull candy right away. I mean, he hated me right from the moment when I started asking questions about his baseball strategies, but that’s not a brain-eating offense, right? It takes some serious weirdness to turn your baseball coach into a flesh-hungry maniac.
After the baseball game, I was going to stay behind with Miguel and Joe to practice batting, because no matter how crummy Mr. Cocoran was as a coach, I really had lost the game for my team. I had to be honest about that: I needed serious batting help.
My mom says that if you want to get good at anything, you have to practice at it, and practice really hard, otherwise you don’t deserve to have anything at all. She speaks four languages—Hindi, Bengali, English, and French—because she practices. She likes to remind me about how my grandpa (my dadu, in Bengali) walked out of Bangladesh and into India with nothing to his name. Just a poor farmer who couldn’t read or write or even do math, but he was crazy determined, and he taught himself all those things. Eventually he worked his way up until he was the finest sari merchant in Kolkata, taking custom orders for saris that had diamonds and gold woven into them for some of Bollywood’s biggest stars. But he sweated it all the way.
So I knew that if I really wanted something, I had to be willing to sweat for it. And even if it was 102 degrees, I was willing to sweat for baseball, and Miguel and Joe were willing to help.
The problem was that Sammy and his friends decided to hang around the baseball field, too, looking to finish what Sammy had started. They were watching us from the bleachers, passing a cigarette back and forth among them, acting all tough. Now that everyone else was gone, they were starting to call us names.