Free Screaming at the Ump by Audrey Vernick Page A

an ad salesman
.
    â€œYou know what? Your attitude’s crap. Why don’t you just get out?” Chris said.
    â€œI don’t think so,” I said.
    Shouldn’t Mr. Donovan defend me? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just wanted to write news stories. And this
was
a school newspaper meeting.
    Mr. Donovan put up his hands in a let’s-have-peace-here kind of way. “The folders are on that desk, Casey,” he said. “Chris, why don’t we move on.”
    I went to the back of the room and found a folder, and tried to stay there until the conversation resumed. But there was this big pile of silence just sitting in the room.
    So I turned around, walked back to the desk, and said, “I still have a question. If I wrote an article that was better than anything anyone else wrote, maybe something that you thought could win that Honorbound Competition, would it even get considered? Or do you really believe that sixth-graders can’t write as good as eighth-graders?”
    â€œAs well,” Mr. Donovan said.
    I sighed.
    â€œWow, seriously?” Chris Sykes said, all huffy. “You think you’re so great. Like you’re going to come in here and be better than kids two years older than you? Get over yourself, Snowden.”
    â€œLet’s move on to preliminary assignments now,” Mr. Donovan said.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said. Or at least, I thought it was me. I had always been good with following rules. Maybe you picked up on this already, but I grew up at an umpire school. I believed in rules. And here I was, the kid in the classroom who wouldn’t shut up, who kept challenging the rules. “What about my question? Would you really turn away a great article only because someone in sixth grade wrote it?”
    Mr. Donovan looked like he’d rather be, well, anywhere, I guess. Not here. Not dealing with me.
    â€œI can’t speak hypothetically. Until I see an article, I just . . . I don’t have any answers for you.”
    That was not an option in baseball. Imagine it: The pitcher throws some heat. Did it catch the outside corner? It was close. The pitcher’s looking in, waiting for the call. The batter turns around. The ump flips up his mask and shrugs, saying, “I don’t have any answers for you.”
    Middle school was not like umpire school.

Players Take the Field
    O N the late bus home, I read through the Honorbound Competition notes and examples of papers and articles that had won in the past few years. They weren’t what I thought they would be. They seemed like they could be in a regular paper, not some school newspaper. They weren’t about the lousy food in the cafeteria or the amazing come-from-behind win staged by the boys’ track team.
    One of the articles was about how all the schools in that district were in violation of the town’s fire code. How did a student figure that out? And one was an undercover story, or something like that, where this kid figured out that a company in his town was dumping illegal stuff in a big lake. And one had an interview, a really good one, with an ex-senator, where the senator didn’t only talk about all the important things he had done, but also the things he wasn’t able to do, and the mistakes he made. That was my favorite article. You didn’t usually see important people like that admitting they’d ever done anything wrong. It was sort of doubly cool that it was in a student newspaper.
    I told Zeke all about it when I got to BTP. They were doing outside drills, and Zeke was sitting on the low wall that ran behind the batting cages. “I just need a good idea,” I told him, kind of hoping he’d hand me one.
    But instead of lingering around like he always did, he said, “Good luck with that. I’ve gotta go,” and jumped on his skateboard. “History project’s due tomorrow.”
    Dad saw me and motioned that it was okay to come