Free Screaming at the Ump by Audrey Vernick

“About what?” I realized, too late, that I shouldn’t have answered.
    â€œYou Suck, Ump! Day. If I can film. Does this not ring even a quiet little bell?”
    â€œQuiet little bell?”
    â€œTell me you asked. And that he said it was okay for me to shoot.”
    â€œIzzat Zeke?” my father called in a sleepy voice.
    â€œHi, Ibbit!” Zeke yelled. Then he mouthed at me, “Should I ask him?”
    I pictured him marching into my father’s room.
I
didn’t even go in there. There was something about seeing how little space he took up on that big bed that I didn’t 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 determined—a not-normal-eleven-year-old-guy way to act determined—to 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 Dad’s room. It was a Zeke fact I had come to accept—sometimes you had to choose which thing would be less bad for him to do.
    â€œSo, You Suck, Ump! Day,” he said.
    â€œI don’t know, Zeke. He’s not going to like it if it seems like you’re making fun of his students, you know? And turn that off, okay?”
    He put the camera down. “Picture it, okay? BTP has all these students—they’ve already given photo and video clearance to your dad, right?”
    â€œYou know they have, yeah.”
    â€œBut it wouldn’t even matter, because what if I filmed someone from behind? Like no identifying features of any kind. You don’t need any special permission to use someone’s likeness if they can’t tell it’s them.”
    â€œI just don’t think he’s going to want negative publicity—”
    â€œThere’s no such thing as negative publicity. Any publicity I can get for your dad’s school is going to be a good thing.” Find me another eleven-year-old who says, “There’s no such thing as negative publicity.” Only someone who watched people make fools of themselves on TV on a regular basis could use language like that.
    â€œDude. You’re sitting there with a straight face, telling me that getting a clip of a BTP student onto
So
You Think You’re the Biggest Idiot?
is going to do wonders for the image of the least successful umpire school in the country? Come on.”
    I silenced him. Go, me.
    I had to remember, next Saturday night, to lock all the doors so Zeke couldn’t do this again.

Still in the Game
    â€œY OU’RE back?” 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.
    â€œGood to see you,” 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. I’d never pulled that tool out before. But I’d never been told the odds were stacked against me before either.
    Mr. Donovan started the meeting. “Pretty soon we’re going to need to know how many ads we’ll have so we know how many pages we can afford to print. How’s everyone doing with ad sales?”
    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, “I got Luigi’s Pizza to take a quarter page, and my dad said his store will take a full page.”
    â€œThat’s fantastic,” Chris Sykes said.
    â€œNice work,” Mr. Donovan said.
    â€œHow’d you do, Snowden?” Sykes said.
    â€œI forgot to take that folder of ad-sales information,” I said, an answer that wasn’t really an answer. An answer that sort of said,
I haven’t sold a single ad, and I don’t intend to. I want to write for the newspaper, not be