âAbout what?â I realized, too late, that I shouldnât have answered.
âYou Suck, Ump! Day. If I can film. Does this not ring even a quiet little bell?â
âQuiet little bell?â
âTell me you asked. And that he said it was okay for me to shoot.â
âIzzat Zeke?â my father called in a sleepy voice.
âHi, Ibbit!â Zeke yelled. Then he mouthed at me, âShould I ask him?â
I pictured him marching into my fatherâs room.
I
didnât even go in there. There was something about seeing how little space he took up on that big bed that I didnât like looking at. I shook my head no. And closed my eyes.
Sometimes if you ignored something, it really did go away.
Only not when Zeke was involved. He was all kinds of determinedâa not-normal-eleven-year-old-guy way to act determinedâto get something, anything, on TV.
He picked up his camera and started shooting video of me. Instead of telling him to cut it out, I smiled. It was better than him running into Dadâs room. It was a Zeke fact I had come to acceptâsometimes you had to choose which thing would be less bad for him to do.
âSo, You Suck, Ump! Day,â he said.
âI donât know, Zeke. Heâs not going to like it if it seems like youâre making fun of his students, you know? And turn that off, okay?â
He put the camera down. âPicture it, okay? BTP has all these studentsâtheyâve already given photo and video clearance to your dad, right?â
âYou know they have, yeah.â
âBut it wouldnât even matter, because what if I filmed someone from behind? Like no identifying features of any kind. You donât need any special permission to use someoneâs likeness if they canât tell itâs them.â
âI just donât think heâs going to want negative publicityââ
âThereâs no such thing as negative publicity. Any publicity I can get for your dadâs school is going to be a good thing.â Find me another eleven-year-old who says, âThereâs no such thing as negative publicity.â Only someone who watched people make fools of themselves on TV on a regular basis could use language like that.
âDude. Youâre sitting there with a straight face, telling me that getting a clip of a BTP student onto
So
You Think Youâre the Biggest Idiot?
is going to do wonders for the image of the least successful umpire school in the country? Come on.â
I silenced him. Go, me.
I had to remember, next Saturday night, to lock all the doors so Zeke couldnât do this again.
Still in the Game
âY OUâRE back?â Chris Sykes said when I walked into the room after school on Monday. In the same tone of voice he might have used if he had noticed a moth flying out of my ear.
âGood to see you,â I said in a weird and confident-sounding voice. Just selling it with a no-doubt-about-it tone, the key to being a good umpire. Iâd never pulled that tool out before. But Iâd never been told the odds were stacked against me before either.
Mr. Donovan started the meeting. âPretty soon weâre going to need to know how many ads weâll have so we know how many pages we can afford to print. Howâs everyone doing with ad sales?â
The whole room turned to look at me. Was I
everyone
? I guess not, because a girl in the front row by the window said, âI got Luigiâs Pizza to take a quarter page, and my dad said his store will take a full page.â
âThatâs fantastic,â Chris Sykes said.
âNice work,â Mr. Donovan said.
âHowâd you do, Snowden?â Sykes said.
âI forgot to take that folder of ad-sales information,â I said, an answer that wasnât really an answer. An answer that sort of said,
I havenât sold a single ad, and I donât intend to. I want to write for the newspaper, not be