Gabby Garcia's Ultimate Playbook Read online

  Another grown-up mind trick!

  “Just . . . ,” Louie said. “Make sure they know you’re excited to be there as part of something new.”

  “But I’m not exactly,” I sighed. “I was part of a good something old.” And the Piper Bell team would get excited about that, to have a Luther Golden Child ready to play for them. I didn’t say that, though.

  “Just be humble.”

  “Okay,” I told her. Just because I need to make my mark doesn’t mean I’m not humble! I’m the best humble person I know!

  “And, remember, sometimes a smile and a hello are all you need.”

  Yes, if you’re just a regular new kid, I thought. “My uniform will be a conversation piece. Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

  “Hmm. Okay. Well, at least you have a positive attitude.”

  NOOOOO!

  She’d understand later when I gave her the update on how great my day was, I figured. I’d come home on the baseball team, totally adapted to my new environment. Another record for my record-setting year. I couldn’t lose.

  And I couldn’t waste time deciphering grown-up mind games because . . .

  WE WERE PULLING UP TO PIPER BELL. My strategy would be put into action!

  It turned out that Piper Bell Academy was called an academy for a reason. Junior High was kid stuff compared to this place.

  The driveway was made of fancy stones!

  The trees looked like they had haircuts! Good haircuts!

  There were bricks everywhere! (And not sad gray bricks like when your school has asbestos, but fancy red bricks that someone probably picked out of a catalog printed on heavy paper. The kind of bricks that said, “You won’t find asbestos here!”)

  And the students looked like they came out of a fancy catalog, too.

  Some of them had on Piper Bell uniforms (jackets with gold buttons and pants—fancy ones) and some wore street clothes—actually, the choice was part of the whole “progressive” thing because Piper Bell was holding on to tradition AND embracing the new, said the brochure—but they really were like a private school playset that someone just opened that morning.

  They were shiny and fresh-faced and I bet only drank water that had cut-up fruit floating in it. (I once went to get a haircut with Louie at her fancy salon where they had water with cut-up fruit in it, and Piper Bell reminds me of that.)

  I did three quick in-and-out breaths and clapped my hands together, just like I did when I took the mound at the start of each inning.

  “Wow, this place looks nice,” Louie said. “You sure you don’t want to wear the Piper Bell uniform for your first day? I have it in the trunk.”

  I waved her off like a bad sign from my coach. “Nah. This is the only uniform I need. It’s totally me!”

  I almost jumped out of the car before Louie had completely put the brakes on. I was one part excited, one part nervous, but the nervous part was BIGGER. I needed to imagine I was going off a high diving board: jumping right away was better than standing up there, staring down.

  I did wish Diego were there (yeah, he was selected to go to Piper Bell, too, but of course wouldn’t be because he was in Costa Rica). Since he was basically in the deepest part of the jungle, and his parents wanted him to be fully immersed in jungle life, we only got to talk sometimes, usually when he went into a nearby village and used a computer at an internet café to email or video-chat with me.

  “Okay, see you later! Bye!”

  With my backpack over my arm, I approached the front door of the school.

  Over the door was a quote from Piper Bell: “Success and failure are equal, because in each we try.”

  Pfft.

  Trying is fine, I guess.

  But winning? That’s the good stuff.

  And really, school, you put a sign over your front door that says, “Hey, you might fail to learn anything! But you tried!”??

  As I walked through the entrance, I listened to the announcer voices in my head that kind of follow my every move. (Not in a crazy way!)

  Bob: One thing is clear as Garcia heads inside . . .

  Judy: I can finish that sentence for you, Bob, and it’s to say, she does NOT look like she fits in here. Her stepmom may have been right. Why would she wear something to make her stick out like a sore thumb?

  Bob and Judy were ticking me off.

  Bob: Garcia’s angry at our doubts, Judy. But I just don’t know if this play is going to work.

  SHUT IT, Bob and Judy, I thought.

  But truth be told, I was getting some funny looks. Okay, a lot of funny looks.

  I was used to hecklers in the stands, though. It’s how you know you’re really good: you have a cheering section, but you also have opponents who live in fear of what you can do and sometimes make a point of saying so.

  So I just strutted to my locker, the way I would strut back to the dugout even if I’d had a not-great inning. It was a mental thing.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to just fit in. I wanted to play baseball first, then fit in—but fit in in a winner kind of way. Diego sometimes says winning is too important to me, but it’s not like that at all. It IS important to me, but the reasons aren’t just so I can win and someone else can lose. I’d love if everyone could win. Winning is great! But they can’t, so why wouldn’t I want to be on the winning side? When I’m winning, I don’t have as many questions about everything. When I win, I know I did the right thing. Not like now, writing this in my bedroom at the end of the day, wondering if I went wrong.

  WHAT MAKES A WINNER/WHY I WANT TO WIN

  •A winner knows what to do: the play to make, the right thing to say, exactly how to be.

  •A winner is good to everyone, even the losing side. (This is important. Sore winning is as bad or worse than sore losing.)

  •A winner gets picked for things, instead of trying to figure out how to ask for them.

  •A winner doesn’t have to worry, because winning means you don’t doubt as much. YOU’VE WON=YOU DID THINGS RIGHT.

  •A winner hardly ever wonders if things could have gone better, because they already went the best way they could!

  When things were fuzzy, like at Piper Bell today—Had wearing my uniform been a mistake? Would the baseball team approach me?—I got this icky feeling in my stomach that I was playing everything all wrong. Maybe no one was talking to me because they were nervous. Maybe they didn’t know about my high-dive strategy. Kids today have trouble making new friends, right? We were all wrapped up in our social media profiles and images and—ugh, that’s just something I heard Louie say once.

  Just jump, I tried to communicate to my new fellow students through a toothy smile, I’m friendly! Confident Golden Child strut or not, talking to me is as easy as the throw to first. Plus, everyone would want to know me once the baseball team recruited me. I was offering all these kids a head start on friendship with me.

  But apparently my rep was getting in the way of making a good impression. Just not my baseball rep.

  In homeroom, our teacher, Ms. Pluhar, had me stand at the front of the class to introduce myself.

  So I said, “I’m Gabby Garcia. I used to go to Luther and they transferred me here.”

  Everyone started talking at once.

  “Until they found a rat army in your school’s basement, right?”

  “Yeah, I heard that no one took the garbage out there for YEARS.”

  “I heard that sometimes rats fell into the lunch special and they cooked them and you ate them!”

  “Wait, didn’t all the Luther students have to get hazmat baths just to be decontaminated?”

  “Those baths don’t work.”

  “Eeew! She’s a Luther Polluter!”

  So I tried to reassure them there was nothing to worry about: “No, it was asbestos.”

  This doesn’t help.

  “As-what-sos?”

  “Gross!”

  “Luther Polluter!”

  Ms. Pluhar finally settled the class down, but eve
n she seemed to be keeping her distance from me. Really, a teacher!

  By the time lunch period came, it was clear word got around because no one had talked to me all day. Not that I tried to talk to anyone either. Being called a Luther Polluter is kind of rough. And not the start to the baseball career I’d planned to have here.

  I was definitely losing my strut, and then I overheard someone in my U.S. history class say, “I heard Gabby breathed on Katy Harris in their biology class and Katy went home with a fever.”

  I didn’t know who Katy Harris was but I certainly didn’t breathe on her. I had been practically holding my breath in since homeroom!

  Strut GONE.

  In the hallways, I ditched the toothy smile and started grinning to myself like I knew some great secret and would be willing to share it if someone would just talk to me. I even kind of tried to look like I was so into my interesting thoughts that I didn’t notice the way no one was talking to me. And I crashed right into a janitor pushing a garbage can and fell down, taking the garbage can with me.

  Fortunately, it was a recycling can, so when I was sprawled out on the floor, I was only covered with papers and a few plastic water bottles. But still, I looked even more like a Luther Polluter on my butt in the hall covered in discarded worksheets. The janitor started to pick up papers as other students swerved around us.

  One student did reach out a hand. A boy in a plaid tie. And a pen behind his ear.

  He helped me up as papers drifted off me to the floor. He saw the front of my jersey. “Luther, huh?” he said. “Wow, are you on the ball team there? I mean, were you? You’ve got a pitcher who’s awesome.”

  I’M the awesome pitcher, I wanted to say, but I also thought I might cry. This day was nothing like I thought it would be. I wiped away the start of my tears. There’s this saying, “There’s no crying in baseball.” My aim in life was to basically not cry, ever. It’s another part of what makes a winner. So instead of answering, I mumbled “thank you” and zoomed away to my locker.

  I didn’t bother with my secret grin anymore.

  I decided to skip lunch and go to the library, where I flipped through the spring training issue of Sports Illustrated I’d already read, hoping for an answer to leap from the pages. But everyone in the magazine had a team. I didn’t. I had to regroup. There was no way the cafeteria crowd was going to make things better. If the whole student body thought I was covered with rat droppings or whatever, they didn’t want to eat lunch with me.

  I wouldn’t want to eat lunch with a Luther Polluter, either. Or probably play baseball with one.

  So what I feared has already happened.

  It’s hard to write this, but: my win streak is OFFICIALLY OVER. I have to chalk up today as a LOSS.

  WINS: 0

  LOSSES: 1

  REASONS WHY IT STINKS DIEGO IS IN COSTA RICA

  •We usually watch spring training baseball games together and this year we couldn’t because no one in Costa Rica cares about spring training.

  •He missed my unicorn. And my partial unicorn.

  •If I need an uplifting sports highlight or fact to get me through the day, I now have to send him an email that he might not get for hours, instead of just slapping his arm and saying, “Hey, I need some sports trivia.” This is very inconvenient.

  •If anyone would be excited about transferring to a whole new school, it’s Diego. He can go anywhere and make new friends instantly.

  TAKING A MULLIGAN

  Goal: To wash the stench of Luther Polluter off my person, get my new classmates to appreciate my greatness, and take my rightful spot on the baseball team.

  Action: Mulligans are technically a golf thing. Golf is SOOOOOO boring. I mostly don’t know much about it. But the one thing it has that’s pretty neat is called a “mulligan.” It’s really just a do-over but it’s probably named after some lousy golfer named Mulligan who needed to do things over a lot. So today is meant to be a do-over of yesterday, and instead of my uniform, I will have baked goods to WIN PEOPLE OVER.

  Post-Day Analysis:

  April 16

  A quick replay of yesterday for perspective . . .

  My first day at Piper Bell was awful and stinky because, well, everyone thought I was awful and stinky. And losses happen.

  But I HATE losses. Every one puts you further and further into a losing streak. The opposite of a winning streak. I can’t get my life back to PERFECT if I keep having setbacks.

  Dad picked me up from Piper Bell, and he must have been able to tell something was wrong because he asked the question I was dreading: “How was school?”

  How could he have been so inconsiderate? Couldn’t he see that school was NOT GOOD?

  It was like a press conference when they ask the losing team how they think they played. But they lost! Who wants to talk about that???

  So instead of answering honestly, I gave the answer adults dread: “Fine.”

  It was partly because I was in a bad mood and partly because my little brother, Peter, was in the car and I definitely didn’t want to give him anything to use against me.

  “That good, huh?” Dad can always tell when I am “stewing” about something (a phrase he LOVES as much as actual stew). Unfortunately, he didn’t know not to bring it up.

  I sank into the car seat, wanting to get home and regroup for the next day.

  Peter laughed: “I bet Gabby has no friends!”

  “I do too. Or, I will. Once Diego gets back.”

  Of course, Diego wasn’t going to be back forever (well, a little more than a month) and had been the one other Luther student picked to go to Piper Bell, which would have been really good luck if Diego wasn’t also in Costa Rica with monkeys and coconuts and whatever else they have there. “Or, maybe even tomorrow.”

  I was trying to tell myself that for sure tomorrow (which is now today) HAD to be the day the baseball team would make sure I was on it. They probably just didn’t do that sort of stuff on a Monday.

  “Whatever. The only way you can get friends is if you bribe everyone.”

  I was trying to come up with a nasty comment to make in return, but then I replayed Peter’s words: BRIBE EVERYONE.

  “Peter, I will never say this again so pay attention: you are brilliant!”

  Then I turned to my dad.

  “Dad, how do you feel about a little baking?”

  And this morning, I walked into Piper Bell a changed woman. I had a lunch bag brimming with Dad’s Monster Cookies—they had oatmeal, chocolate chips, and M&Ms, so that’s why they were called monsters.

  And though I hadn’t quite made peace with wearing the Piper Bell uniform, I WAS wearing school colors, red and black, in the form of my dad’s vintage Michael Jordan Bulls jersey with red high-tops and black jeans. Jordan is my dad’s favorite player.

  I could barely pay attention in my other classes because I was so excited for lunch. This would be my mulligan moment, and my win streak would barely be tarnished. I didn’t even get upset when a fashionista-type asked with a frown, “What is JORDAN?”

  So when lunch finally did roll around, I made a beeline for Devon DeWitt’s table. I knew what she looked like because I’d seen her pitch in the tournament games they air on community cable, and I recognized her from a photo in the community paper. (Not color, like mine.) They only put your picture in if you’re pretty good, so she’s competition in a way, but I figured we’d speak the same language. And, if she cared about her team at all, she’d want me on it.

  I plopped down without waiting for an invitation because I had cookies to share. Plus, the only way to recover from a loss is to BRING IT all to your next game. And bringing cookies wasn’t the same as having to ask to be on the team, which could be awkward and also make it seem too much like I needed the team more than it needed me. Cookies were a gesture that said, “Sure, I’d be open to an offer to be on the team”—and a winning gesture at that.

  For a long second—or maybe several seconds—Devon blinked at m
e. In slow motion. It was weird.

  (Blink)

  (Blink)

  (Blink)

  “I saw you pitch once against Franklin Middle. You’re good,” she finally said to me.

  “Yeah, I saw you against the Judson Junior High team. So are you.”

  Since we’ve never played against each other, it was a big deal to admit that we’ve seen each other and even bigger to give compliments.

  She blinked again and went back to talking to a boy I recognized as Ryder Mills, who’s a pretty decent catcher.

  But it wasn’t like she told me to go away. I felt on the verge of my first mini-win.

  Until Mario Salamida butt-flopped into the seat next to me. (Like a belly flop but your butt hits the chair as hard as your belly would hit water.)

  “What is she doing here?” he asked Devon. About me.

  Mario JUST. CAN’T. DEAL. Since our Little League days, he never has once gotten a hit off me, so I’ve always let it slide. (But not him. He never gets to slide when he goes against me because he can’t get on base! Ha!)

  “I don’t know, she sat here,” Devon said. “This isn’t some movie where I have to be mean because she’s new.”

  Mario’s nostrils flared up but he didn’t say anything. I liked that Devon could tell him off.

  I hoped she’d like my bribes. Um, cookies.

  I got to talk to Diego last night—on the phone and everything. (His parents want him to really understand deep-jungle living, so he’s pretty “entrenched” when it comes to regular communicating.) He didn’t understand why I didn’t just talk to the coach, or the team. “It’s not a weakness to just say what you want sometimes.”

  “But I need them to be EXCITED to have me. If I’m Mike Trout, I don’t go to the Yankees and say, ‘Please put me on the team.’ It’s better mojo if you know you’re wanted.”

  (Old Me, Mike Trout is a really, really good Major League Baseball center fielder for the Los Angeles Angels, and I am sure he’d agree with me.)

  “But you’re not Mike Trout and it’s junior high, not the major leagues,” Diego told me. I wished the phone would get crackly so I didn’t have to hear all this.