Free Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) by Jordan Sonnenblick Page B

from you, and I’m walking.”
    â€œJust … please … hurry.”
    â€œGrampa?” I said. But he had already hung up. I started running.
    If you ever find yourself a mile and a half away from an emergency, carrying a backpack full of heavy textbooks and camera equipment, that’s probablynot going to be a good time for you to realize that for the first time in your life, you are woefully out of shape. Within a couple of blocks, I was gasping for air, and my bad arm was throbbing. Every step felt like an eternity, like I was running through Jell-O. The only part of me that was racing successfully was my train of thought. I was in a complete panic. What would I find at my grandfather’s house? Was he in a heap at the bottom of his basement stairs? Did he have broken bones? Was he lying in a pool of blood?
    I know it couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes for me to get over there, but I also had time to worry about all the things that could happen in fifteen minutes. Plus, of course, the whole way there I kept thinking, Call Mom. You have to call Mom. You’re a kid. This is too deep for a kid!
    But I never, ever disobeyed Grampa. I kept running.
    I didn’t know whether my grandfather could make it to the front door, so I went charging around to his back porch, where he had always kept a key hidden under a ceramic planter full of long-dead flowers. My hands were trembling, but I got the key into the door and pushed my way in.
    â€œGrampa?” I shouted.
    Nothing.
    â€œGRAMPA?”
    Still nothing.
    I looked around the whole kitchen, then the living and dining rooms. By this point, I wasn’t running. In fact, I was tiptoeing, even though that made no sense. I mean, I knew it was urgent for me to find my grandfather, but I was also terrified of what I would see.
    Grampa had to be near a telephone, so I tried to think of where all the extensions were in the house. I realized then that, before my grandmother’s death when I was in fifth grade, she had convinced my grandfather to get a phone installed next to the toilet. He had put up a big fight (“Why do we need a special toilet phone? Who do we know that needs an update from there ?”), but eventually the line had gone in.
    I crept up the hallway toward the bathroom, and stuck my head around the doorframe. Grampa was sitting on the floor, with his eyes shut and his back against the wall. There was no blood, which mighthave been a good sign. Plus, he was breathing — loudly. If I could hear his breathing over all of the gasping and heart pounding that was coming from me, you knew it had to be loud.
    I knelt in front of him, put my good hand on his shoulder, and said, “Gramp?” I hadn’t called him that since I was little, but somehow the time seemed right for it. His eyes opened, and for a moment, I got the feeling he wasn’t seeing me at all. Then they sort of snapped back to life, and he said, “Peter, can you help me?”
    Not “Can you help me up?” Just “Can you help me?”
    This was deeply, deeply not good. How was I supposed to know what to do? I asked if he could move, and he said, “I think so.” With what looked like a lot of effort, he braced each hand against the floor, then pulled his legs in so that if he straightened them, he would be standing up. He added, “I don’t know what happened, but nothing hurts. Can I stand up? I want to get up.” I asked him to lock forearms with me, and together we managed to get him leaning uprightagainst the cold tile of the bathroom wall. After a pause there, he was able to walk out, down the hallway, and into his kitchen, where he slumped down in a chair.
    I got him a drink — I don’t know what a drink was supposed to do, but it seemed like something one might do in a grandfather-rescue-type situation. He gulped it down and asked for a refill, so score one for Peter Friedman, Boy Untrained