Free Benched by Rich Wallace Page B

back at Ben. Ben caught it with his scraped-up arm and winced.
    There were four sinks. Ben stood at the one farthest from Loop and pushed the soap dispenser, then carefully lathered his arm. He looked into the mirror to see what Loop was up to, but Loop was looking down at the sink.
    Loop finished washing and shook his hands rapidly. Then he cleared his throat and pulled some paper towels out of the dispenser. As hedried his hands, he leaned toward the mirror to inspect a tiny cut below his eye. “Maybe that wasn’t
quite
a slam,” he said.
    Ben patted his own scrape with a paper towel. “Yeah, well, maybe I should have been ready for that first serve.”
    “Then again,” Loop said, “it probably
was
a slam. Otherwise I would have returned it.” He turned to Ben and grinned. Then he threw the wad of wet paper towels at him.
    Ben caught the wad and threw it back. It thumped against a metal trash can and fell to the floor.
    “Now
that
was a slam,” Loop said.
    Ben laughed. “What are we supposed to do all week with no recess? I’ll go nuts just sitting in the classroom.”
    “Me too,” Loop said. “Three days of that.” He shook his head. “That’s what I call distress.”

CHAPTER TWO
Too Much Thinking
    —————
    His mom’s car was in the driveway when Ben came home from school. She worked part-time at a bank. Ben arrived at the house before she did a couple of days a week, and he hadn’t expected her to be home today.
    She was waiting in the kitchen as Ben walked in.
    “Hi, Mom!” he said, trying to sound asupbeat as he could. He walked past her and set his knapsack on the table.
    “Come over here,” Mom said. She examined the scrape on Ben’s arm. Then she put her finger under Ben’s chin and tipped his head up. “I had a call from Mrs. Nolan this afternoon.”
    Ben swallowed hard. He looked back down. “Oh,” he said.
    “What’s the problem, mister? You know better than that.”
    Ben shrugged. “It was nothing.”
    “Principals don’t call parents about nothing,” Mom said. “And boys don’t get their clothing and skin cut up from nothing.… I thought Loop was your friend.”
    “He is.”
    “So why were you two fighting?”
    Ben didn’t have an answer for that. He knew he’d been feeling rotten all morning. Surprisingly, he’d felt much better after the fight.

    “No answer?” Mom asked.
    “Nope.”
    “Then you’d better spend the rest of the afternoon in your room,” she said. “You thinkabout why you were fighting. And think about why you shouldn’t.”
    “I already spent the whole day thinking about it,” Ben said.
    “Well, go think some more.”
    Ben lay on his bed with a rubber ball, tossing it toward the ceiling with one hand and catching it with the other. He tried to get the ball as close to the ceiling as he could without actually hitting it.
    Tired of that, he opened his dresser and took out the standings for the town soccer league.

    Ben’s team—the Bobcats—would be playing the Tigers on Saturday. The Tigers had won the first time they’d met, back in the opening game of the season. Ben’s team had improved a lot since then, but they needed to keep winning. Only the first two teams in each division would qualify for the league play-offs.
    Ben glanced out his window. The sun was still shining. He wished he was outside shooting baskets or kicking his soccer ball around the yard.
    He heard a knock on his door.
    “What?” Ben said sharply.
    “It’s me.” It was Ben’s older brother, Larry, who was thirteen.
    “Oh.”
    Larry opened the door. “Heard you had a fight, knucklehead,” he said. “Let’s see that arm.”
    Ben held it up. Larry whistled. “That’s a nasty scab,” he said. “I guess I’m the only one in this house who
hasn’t
been fighting lately.”
    Larry laughed, but Ben didn’t think that was very funny. “What was that all about last night?” he asked softly.
    Larry shook his head. “I don’t know. Mom and Dad were