Page 137 of The Fine Art of Faking It
The women waved and returned to their respective springtime afternoons.
One house down, a pick-up baseball game was brewing behind the white picket fence of Jenny Zhao’s big backyard. It was a rag tag group of children who had been cooped up for too long. The bases were Jenny’s mother’s underwear, yanked from the clothes line. The bat was a stick plundered from the unruly garden of Bruce Oakleigh’s mother. The ball, a monogrammed golf ball discovered in the alley behind the Nuswing home.
Johnny Pierce, who was already quite tall for his age, took a practice swing with the stick while Jenny warmed up her throwing arm.
“Bend your knees more,” Bruce called helpfully to Johnny.
Johnny pulled his ballcap lower on his brow. Jenny took the mound—two pairs of her father’s coveralls folded neatly on top of a patio cushion.
“Now, I’ll go second. You go third. And Jillian, you’re up after that,” Bruce announced to the rest of his team. Organizing was his specialty as his mother had repeatedly told him. He kept his room spotless, always took out the garbage, and had spent a week making nametags for his classmates before the first day of school.
There was a satisfying crack as the golf ball and stick connected, and the kids watched as the ball sailed up, up, up.
“Home run!”
“Foul ball!”
A good-natured argument broke out as the ball continued its flight over the Nuswings’ manicured backyard before finally dropping behind the Moodys’ fence.
“Awh, man!”
“Game over!”
Bruce waved his hands. “Wait! I’ll get it,” he insisted. This was the first game he’d been invited to, and he wasn’t letting it end on the first pitch.
He jogged out the back gate of Jenny’s yard down the alley past the Nuswings’ garage to the Moodys’ fence. He tried the gate and found it locked. With a running leap—he had an audience after all—Bruce scaled the fence, his shoes slipping on the wood, his fingers gripping the pickets like he was one-hundred feet off the ground, not two. With a graceless heave, he rolled over the top of the fence and landed face down on Mrs. Moody’s garden.
Hauling himself up, Bruce scoured the backyard for the missing golf ball.
“Hurry up, Bruce!” Jenny called from two yards away.
“Didja find it yet?” Jillian yelled.
“Be a hero, Bruce,” he murmured to himself. “You can do it.”
He tiptoed closer to the house, not keen on Mr. Moody bursting forth and starting an awkward conversation about “when I was a boy…”
Finally, he spotted it under the picnic table. The white ball with red initials. BN. Burt Nuswing. He crawled under the bench and grabbed it triumphantly.
“I got it!” he announced, holding it aloft so his friends could see.
“Throw it back,” Johnny called, waving the stick in the air.
Bruce wasn’t exactly the best thrower, and Jenny Zhao’s backyard looked like it was a million miles away.
“C’mon, Bruce!” someone else yelled.
Bruce glanced around the yard. Maybe if he got up on the picnic table, he could throw the ball farther? With a shrug of his seven-year-old shoulders, he climbed up on top of the Moodys’ spotless white picnic table and took a deep breath.
“Hurry up! We wanna play!”
He took a deep breath and got a running start. Things didn’t go quite according to plan.
His wind-up was great. But he released the ball just a smidge too early. Early enough that the golf ball hit the brick of the Nuswings’ house and ricocheted right through the Moodys’ window.
And Bruce didn’t exactly come to a stop at the end of the picnic table. He had too much momentum. And that momentum carried him right off the end of the table and into the low fence that divided Nuswing yard from Moody. The fence crumpled against his flying body like that folding chair under his Great-Uncle Artie last Thanksgiving.
“Uh-oh!” the resounding cry rose up from Jenny’s backyard. Bruce was tangled in some kind of flowery vine, but other than having the wind knocked out of him, all his pieces and parts seemed to be working.
