Honestly Ben Read online

  I glanced over at Steve, who was up after me. He was watching the stupidity too, and then he must have felt my stare, because he turned and looked at me. I rolled my eyes, and he did too. Then he shrugged and smiled the way kids who have grown up with powerful dads and just about no struggles tend to smile, with perfect, privileged teeth. I mirrored him, knowing that my left front tooth was slightly uneven, and that I would never, ever look like Steve.

  After practice, Donnelly called a team meeting, and as we assembled on the floor in the center of the gymnasium, he began talking about the importance of teamwork.

  “You know what teamwork is? Ask the poor Russians working in the Gulag. The Russian leaders, they used teamwork to create a situation where the poor were the underclass and had to toil while the leaders did nothing. That, kids, is the result of teamwork.”

  I was pretty sure even Stalin himself would be turning over in his grave with that one.

  I realized that I hadn’t said a single word all practice. Not one. I looked around. Had anyone noticed? Probably not.

  “So now it’s time to pick a captain,” Donnelly said. “Nominations?”

  This guy named Reagan’s hand shot up. “I nominate Mendenhall.”

  “I accept,” he said, and someone began to clap as if he’d already been elected.

  A kid named Rodriguez yelled out, “I nominate Marcus.” Marcus was a senior outfielder who batted leadoff. He said, “I accept.”

  Then Steve called out, “Carver,” and I snapped my neck in his direction. What? I was a junior. No junior had ever been captain, at least as far as I knew.

  He raised an eyebrow at me, and I glanced over at Mendenhall. He was glaring at Steve, and then me. It got quiet, and after about ten seconds of silence, I realized it was my line.

  “Um, I accept,” I said, and I purposefully didn’t look at Mendenhall. I knew that he would not be pleased that I was trying to subvert the natural order of things. Seniors lead. Juniors follow. I studied the gym floor.

  “Anyone else?” Donnelly said, and when no one else was nominated, he asked us all to say a few words.

  Mendenhall stood and said, “I’ll go first,” and I realized it hadn’t even occurred to me to take charge like that. I was just going to wait until Donnelly called on one of us. Maybe I wasn’t the right choice for captain, anyway.

  Mendenhall’s speech went something like this:

  “Respect is everything. You don’t get anywhere in life jumping in line when it’s not your turn. I’ve been on this team since my freshman year. Every year, a senior takes on the role of captain, and every year, we line up behind him and play as a team, and we gel on and off the field. Having a captain who hardly ever talks—never mind. The point is, you know who is born to be a leader and who isn’t. Vote for a leader who can lead the team.”

  When some people clapped, I felt punched in the gut. He hadn’t so much as advocated for himself as maligned me. And all I’d done is said, “I accept.” I sucked in my teeth and swallowed.

  Marcus went next. He went on about what a real leader is, but I wasn’t really listening. I was focused on what I would be saying in a few minutes.

  Then the guys were all looking at me, so I slowly stood, surveyed my teammates, and took a deep breath.

  “Playing on this team has been an honor,” I said. “I learned so much last year as a sophomore, and, I suppose, I … think there’s something to be said for quiet leadership. For walking softly and carrying a big stick.”

  “Carver is hung,” a junior named Rollison said, and as much as I felt like turning purple, I took a deep breath and laughed a little with the others.

  “C’mon, boys,” Donnelly said.

  “Not that kind of big stick,” I said. “What I want to do is lead us in an honorable way. I want us to thrive on the field, and off the field I think we can—do better. When I was a freshman—well, all of us. When we were freshmen, we were put through an initiation process that’s supposedly a noble tradition here at Natick. I love traditions. I believe in them. But I don’t believe in humiliation as a tactic. And yes, it happened to us, so now it’s supposed to be our turn to dish it out. But where does it end? What do we gain as a team by humiliating our teammates? Let’s stop the whole initiation thing. Let’s be the group that restores honor to the baseball team. And also, let’s just have a great year. Win some games. That’s what we need to focus on. Thank you.”

  I sat down, my head buzzing. There was silence, and then, slowly, there was applause. More, maybe, than the other guys had gotten. I wasn’t sure. I gulped and studied the floor in front of me.

  The candidates had to leave the gym while there was a vote. I followed Mendenhall and Marcus out, and when we got to the hallway, Mendenhall turned on me.

  “That’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “You better not win.”

  I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say.

  “You don’t fuck with Natick tradition just because your pansy-ass feelings got hurt as a freshman. You take it like a man. It’s how we become men, Carver.”

  I stared him directly in the eye, but I said nothing.

  He laughed. “Men speak up,” he said. “You’ll never be one because you don’t.”

  The door opened and we were invited back in. I looked around, and the first thing I saw was a big smile on Steve’s face.

  The final vote had gone ten to nine to three.

  “Congratulations, Ben!” Coach Donnelly said. “You’re our new captain.”

  As my face heated up, the first thought I had was, I can’t wait to tell Dad. My second was, This is going to look great on my résumé.

  “Bush league,” Mendenhall muttered as he bumped past me on the way to the locker room, and any guilty feeling I was harboring in my gut went away. “You made a powerful enemy today.”

  And I thought: What are you, a supervillain? Who says shit like that? Tommy Mendenhall, perchance. I didn’t say that, though. Instead I said, “It was close.”

  He flipped me off.

  Excited about my new position, I called home.

  “That’s great, Benny,” my mom said.

  She handed my brother the phone, and he said, “Broseph.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Guess who’s captain of the baseball team?”

  “You’re captain?” he said. “Cool.”

  I heard my dad’s voice in the background. “Tell him not to get a big head about it.”

  The first meeting of Model Congress occurred on Tuesday afternoon. I’d joined the club my freshman year, as a way to expand my résumé for college applications. My uncle gave me the idea. I also really enjoyed pretending to be a congressman and making political arguments. It was the kind of thing I’d envisioned myself doing when I applied to Natick, and while the social aspect hadn’t been that exciting—I didn’t hang out with the guys outside of the club—I’d always enjoyed the events. I’d been given permission to miss Tuesday baseball practices, at least until games started in April. Any Tuesday game would take precedence over the club.

  Mr. Sacks was a cootish old guy with more hair on his hands than he had left on his head. He wore a beige suit jacket every day, and he loved to talk about the “damn liberals” and how they were ruining the country. Everybody pretty much loved Mr. Sacks and his codger-y ways; even the liberal kids thought it was fun to rile him up, and he seemed to enjoy a good riling.

  “Well, looks like we got the usual suspects,” he said as the twelve of us sat down. “We do best when we don’t get to choose our topics, I think, so that’s what we’ll do. Any questions?”

  Mitchell Pomerantz raised his hand. “What if I really, really want to argue something?”

  Mr. Sacks adjusted his thick glasses. “What is it that you really, really want to argue, Mr. Pomerantz?”

  “Fracking.”

  “For, or against?”

  “Are you kidding me? Against,” Mitchell said.

  “Of course,” Mr. Sacks said. “As a kid who doesn’t ye
t support himself, why would you worry about gas prices or energy independence? No skin off your nose.”

  “So we should rape the environment?”

  “There you go again, misusing the word ‘rape.’ Just like a lefty to throw that word around and devoid it of meaning.”

  “ ‘Devoid’ isn’t a verb, Mr. Sacks,” Mitchell countered.

  “Correcting my grammar won’t get a bill passed. How do you propose to argue against lower gas prices? Anyone?”

  I smiled. This. This was why I came to Natick in the first place. A club where kids could talk about current events and plead to write bills? That wasn’t about to happen in Alton, but here I could do it to my heart’s delight.

  Mr. Sacks had smiled at me when he saw me walk in. I think he liked me, probably because I kept my political beliefs to myself. I wasn’t an ideologue, as he would say. At a congress in Boston just before break, I’d successfully argued in favor of school vouchers. After, he’d tried to get me talking about politics, but I didn’t bite. Better to keep people guessing about my real beliefs.

  When no one responded to Mr. Sacks’s request for an argument against lower gas prices, he told us that he’d written twelve issues on pieces of paper and put them in a hat. We could choose which side of the issue we wanted to argue once we’d picked a topic from the hat. He passed it around, and I thought about what subject I’d like to argue. Legalization of marijuana would be fun, but so would how best to handle terrorism.

  “DREAM Act, crap,” said Tucker Collins, and Mitchell said, “Trade ya. I got Iran.”

  “No trades,” Mr. Sacks said. “I’m taking you out of your comfort zone. You get what you get, and that’s it. Okay?”

  The hat got to me, and I reached in, felt around, and pulled out a thin piece of paper.

  It read, “Religious Freedoms Are Under Attack by Gay Marriage Advocates.”

  My face turned a little red, and then I stopped myself from feeling embarrassed. It was an interesting issue, one I could research and come up with a cogent argument against.

  We all shared what we got, and then Mr. Sacks asked us to pick a side. I didn’t worry about anyone’s response when I said, “Against.” He wrote our names, our topics, and our positions on the board. Then he stood at the board for a few troubling seconds, this impish smile almost hidden by his mustache, and I realized what he was going to do. Damn it, I thought.

  He erased the word “pro” next to the line on Tucker Collins’s topic, and he wrote “con” in its place.

  Groans all around, and that got Mr. Sacks to show some teeth, a rarity with him.

  “I said I’d be taking you out of your comfort zone. I meant it. We’re all going to argue the opposite side of our issue.”

  “But you said we could pick our side,” Tucker said.

  “I lied,” replied Mr. Sacks. “It’s Model Congress, after all. Can’t believe everything a congressman says.”

  Jesus, I thought. How am I going to argue that religious people’s freedoms are under attack by gay folks? I couldn’t even imagine how two guys getting married could be seen as an attack on someone else’s civil liberties. That just didn’t make sense.

  After Model Congress, I went to the school library to look up Peter Pappas. I’d had it on my to-do list ever since I’d heard about the award, because I was going to have to give a speech about him. The online catalog had two hits from the Natick Newsman, the school paper. The first was a profile of him as the captain of the basketball team. He was a tall kid, with a wide, toothy smile, and the article said he was from Dorchester, a suburb of Boston. While at Natick, Pappas lettered in four sports, and he won the top award at the Massachusetts state Model Congress, beating out kids from twenty other schools. After impressing judges at the state competition, he got a job working for a congressman the summer before his junior year.

  I photocopied the article and then looked up the other piece. It was written two years later, after he’d been killed in action in Vietnam. My heart dropped as I looked at the same picture of Pappas. When you know a lot of history, you get a lot of facts about war casualties, but it’s not at all the same as looking at a picture of a kid your age, who once stood where you stood, and thinking about how the very last thing he saw was likely some sort of explosion.

  I copied that article too, and I wondered what I could possibly say to do him justice. A guy who believed so deeply in a cause that he voluntarily went to war, and died for that belief.

  That was a level of commitment I’d never be able to understand, and I wished there was something out there I felt so strongly about I’d willingly die for it.

  “If you could have dinner with one person from history, who would it be?” Hannah asked as we sat down on a freezing wooden bench in Warren Park. It was Wednesday after practice; the sun was beginning to set. The park she chose was more like a playground, with a sandbox and swings and a jungle gym area surrounded by benches, but who cared if it wasn’t the most romantic spot ever for a first date? Not if it meant getting to be with Hannah.

  “Probably Winston Churchill. Maybe Abraham Lincoln,” I said. “Churchill, I guess.”

  “What would you talk about?”

  My legs were cold, so I stood and began walking. “I guess I’d ask him how it felt to be the one person most responsible for the Germans not annexing all of Europe.”

  “Wow, you really are a history geek.”

  I stepped onto a wooden merry-go-round. It creaked under my weight and tilted almost all the way to the ground. “Guilty as charged.”

  She got up and stood on the other side, not quite balancing the weight but doing enough so the thing could spin if we wanted it to.

  “Who would you choose?” I asked.

  “Probably Dian Fossey.”

  I stumbled over to the center, where there was a round metal bar. I grasped it and pulled, and the merry-go-round moaned into action. “Who?”

  Hannah quickly stepped to the center and helped me turn the thing. I watched the world slowly spin, and I felt like the evening could just float by in this pleasant way.

  “Get with the program. You don’t know Dian Fossey? She lived with the gorillas in Africa? Gorillas in the Mist?”

  I shook my head momentarily before I realized how dizzy that made me with us spinning. I closed my eyes. “I didn’t know you cared about gorillas.”

  “I’m fascinated by animals. Did you know that every time a disreputable zoo poaches a gorilla from the wild, up to ten gorillas die?”

  “Really? How does that work?”

  “A lot of them die during the hunt to take one alive. Gorillas will fight to the death for their children. They aren’t so different than humans, really. Human parents would do the same. Well, not mine.”

  My wrists were tiring from spinning us, so I stopped and the world slowly came to a standstill. “No?”

  She scowled. “I went to use my dad’s computer over Christmas break, because mine was out of power and I couldn’t find the cord. And there’s this Google message chain between my dad and some chick named Marnie. All gross stuff. Can you believe it? Marnie?”

  “The name is what upsets you?”

  “I just think, like, if you’re going to fuck up your life and the life of your family members, don’t do it for a Marnie. Jesus.”

  I did a walking gesture and she nodded. There wasn’t much of a place to walk, so we wandered over to the sandbox.

  “So I told my mom about Marnie.” Hannah stomped on the hard, cold sand, leaving a sneaker mark. “She wholesale freaked out. Dad came up to my room and laid on the heaviest possible guilt trip, with this whole ‘I made a mistake, but you compounded that mistake’ shit. I stayed in my room for thirty-six straight hours after that. Suffice it to say it was not a stellar Christmas.”

  “That’s rough. Where are you with it now?”

  She jumped up and down on the sand a few times, and then leaned down, took a fistful of sand, and shaped it into a sand ball. “Well, it was three week
s ago, so not that different.”

  “I just mean—”

  “No, I get it. And it is better than it was that first day. It’s just a betrayal. I don’t think I’ll ever really get over that.”

  “Wow.”

  “So, like, just know that if you become my boyfriend, don’t go and find yourself a Marnie. Just tell me.”

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “I’m just saying. Don’t ever lie to me. It would not be amusing.” She threw her sand ball, raised her hands to the sky, and spoke in a weird authoritative tone. “Hannah establishes healthy boundaries with new friends.”

  I laughed. “Been a thing in the past?”

  “Yeah. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in therapy.”

  “You really say everything that comes to your mind, don’t you?”

  “I grew up in a family where no one listened to me. I learned to say everything, like if I threw it all out there, maybe something would stick. I was what psychologists would call a precocious child.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  She climbed up some steps of a jungle gym structure, and she sat on a deck under a gazebo with her legs dangling down a slide that was about my height. I stood by her side, my chin at about her thigh level. She let go, and she stuck to the frozen metal. We laughed together.

  “Whee?” she said.

  “Whee.”

  “They put me in therapy when I was six, so … ”

  “What the hell does a six-year-old even do in therapy?”

  “Play with dolls, mostly. The therapist watches. And even though I was six, I swear there was a part of me that was like, ‘Go ahead and watch me play with dolls, you freakazoid perv.’ ”

  I laughed.

  “What’s going on with you?” she asked. “I’ve been doing all the talking.”

  And I like it that way, I thought. This was a fascinating girl. I couldn’t imagine saying half the things she’d just said to me, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to.

  “Not much. I got voted captain of the baseball team on Monday, did I tell you that?”