My Most Excellent Year Read online

  “Did you tell her I have a cute butt?”

  “I pointed her in that direction. She’ll figure out the rest for herself.”

  “Please don’t let her know that I used to be your boyfriend. That could create complications.”

  “How? It was in third grade and it only lasted two and a half hours. She’d get over it.”

  Today Pop showed up at the top of the fourth and found Dad in the bleachers—sitting with Andy and Augie and trying to make a conversation happen between them like he was a rehab counselor. (Andy is our backup third baseman, so he doesn’t always get to start. Which is actually a good thing this season, because whenever he sees Augie in the stands, he starts getting hit by softballs from not paying attention to what he’s doing.)

  But this afternoon I played like a bush leaguer with a broken leg. Eighth inning, I was still hitless, and there were two out with two men on when I came to the plate for my last at-bat. While Grid Tarbell and Kip Tracey held a mound conference to figure out what to pitch to me, I noticed a little boy sitting by himself behind the third-base line and studying every move I made like I was under a microscope: He watched me adjust my helmet, he watched me take a practice chop, and he watched me knock the mud off my cleats (okay, there really wasn’t any mud, but it looks so cool when you do that). He was maybe five or six years old, his hair was cut short with a little piece sticking up in front, and he—

  “Yo! Keller!”

  “Sorry.” By then, Kip was back behind the plate with his mask on and Tarbell was winding up like he meant business, so I had to snap out of it fast. But just before Grid let go of the ball, I glanced over at the kid one more time and saw him shaking his head no. I swung.

  “Steee-rike one!” What kind of a gink ARE you, Keller? Even Grandma Lily wouldn’t have fallen for a meatball like that! Pop and Dad cheered me on anyway, so I shrugged as if I’d done it on purpose, then cocked my bat and leaned over the plate like I expected Tarbell’s second pitch to be an early dinner. (Pop calls this “an intimidation tactic.” So far nobody’s been intimidated.) But I couldn’t help looking over at the kid first—who was still wearing the same frown and wrinkled forehead and who was shaking his head again. I swung.

  “Steee-rike two!” Dude, this SO isn’t the way to get to the Hall of Fame. Not unless you want to hitchhike there. Well, by now I was a little weirded out. It almost seemed like he was trying to help me. That’s when I started wondering if it was really you looking over my shoulder, the way Pop always says you do. So when he shook his head again, I watched the third pitch go by without doing anything about it.

  “BALL ONE!” It’s just a coincidence! He’s not Harry Potter, dude. Get a grip! I got a grip, all right. Just before pitch number four, the kid and I locked eyes like we were finally in synch, and he nodded his head yes. This time I swung the bat with every muscle I had, and the next thing I saw was the ball clearing left field—just the way Carlton Fisk’s did in 1975. And while I was circling the bases and listening to the cheers and watching Dad and Augie and Pop and Andy high-five each other in the stands, there were only two questions on my mind. “How?” and “Who is he?” But when I crossed the plate to score, he was gone.

  Was that you, Mama? Or did I imagine the whole thing?

  I love you,

  T.C.

  LAURENTS SCHOOL

  BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

  VIA E-MAIL

  Dear Ted:

  I heard a rumor that the school is going to have to purchase an additional seventy-five square feet of floor space in order to accommodate your latest construction project. Are you insane?! I know I made myself clear. I recognized my customarily strident threats. I also saved a hard copy of my e-mail warning you about the consequences. Call it plaintiff’s Exhibit A.

  How does Hannah put up with you?

  Lori

  KELLER CONSTRUCTION

  BOSTON • GLOUCESTER • WALTHAM

  ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION

  Dear Lori:

  Assuming there was even a shred of truth to such a spurious rumor (and there isn’t—I had to shave twelve inches off the board just to get it through the front door, so it’s only seventy square feet), you might want to reserve judgment until you see the finished product. Tony C is downstairs right now playing with the Vietnam Wall and gluing the houses of Congress together (hey, it’s about time somebody did it). Besides, if you really didn’t want us to turn in an entire city, all you had to do was have a hamburger with me and you’d have gotten a six-inch Jefferson Memorial instead (without any cherry blossoms either). In hindsight, can’t you see how easy that would have been? The defense rests.

  By the way—who the hell is Hannah?

  Ted

  P.S. Did you like the “spurious”? It’s my son’s vocabulary word this week and it’s contagious.

  LAURENTS SCHOOL

  BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

  VIA E-MAIL

  Dear Ted:

  Hannah is the social worker you’re dating. Isn’t she?

  Lori

  KELLER CONSTRUCTION

  BOSTON • GLOUCESTER • WALTHAM

  ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION

  Dear Lori:

  No, I think you’ve been ambushed. But you’ve got to admire Tony C’s style.

  We can probably sort all of this out tomorrow night at Legal Sea Foods on State Street (that great street). I’ll even meet you there so it doesn’t look like a date.

  Ted

  Dear Nat,

  Do you remember what happened in between takes on Inside Daisy Clover while you were shooting the circus scene? You and R.J. were already divorced, but as you were going back to your dressing room, you saw him standing on a ladder near the set and you realized he’d come over from the soundstage where he was making Harper just to watch you work. You didn’t say much to each other except “Hi” and “That was great” and “You look good” and “So do you”—but the next thing the headlines knew, you were getting married all over again. It was those couple of words on the ladder that did it.

  Even though Andy and I can hardly even look at each other anymore—let alone talk in person—our cell phones and IMs are a whole other story. We’ve had about 100 ladder conversations of our own, and they keep getting more and more unbearable. Especially when he calls me things like Spidey and Wonderboy and (sigh) Sleepyhead. I’ve got a Broadway-bound talent show on my hands and I just don’t have the time for the mess my life has turned into. In fact:

  I know now that Emma Thompson will not be bearing my child.

  School shower rooms are evil. I can never figure out what to do with my eyes. I mean, they’ve got to look somewhere. AND DOES EVERYBODY HAVE TO BE NAKED?? Thank God Andy’s always at least five nozzles away. I’m not cut out for routinely scheduled vascular incidents. (And this doesn’t even include the other targets suddenly registering on my scope: Kyle. Aaron. Derek. Bobby. Jay-Jay. Zack. Doug. Holy shit! When did Micah get cute?!)

  “Mom? Dad? I’m gay.” Oh, please. That is like SO pedestrian. What happened to my sense of style?! Maybe I’ll throw a coming-out party. With a grand entrance down a staircase. “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” No. Engraved coming-out announcements.

  I can’t stop thinking about him. Andy while I’m brushing my teeth, Andy while I’m pouring Rice Chex, Andy while I’m trying to remember what a pluperfect subjunctive is, Andy while I’m lying in bed at 11:30 at night with my eyes wide open and wondering if sleep deprivation ever killed anybody.

  These are supposed to be the best years of my life. What’s that all about?

  INSTANT MESSENGER

  AugieHwong: This is a crisis. I need you to be a supportive brother for a minute.

  TCKeller: Oh. Like I’m usually the other kind.

  AugieHwong: What would you say if I told you I think I like boys? I mean LIKE boys. I mean the way you like Alé.

  TCKeller: “Duh”?

  AugieHwong: That’s it??

  T
CKeller: Depends. Who’s the boy?

  AugieHwong: Andy Wexler.

  TCKeller: The jury’s out. I need to see how he treats you first. Hey, listen. Even if I don’t win a Tommy Award for Best Supporting Actor, this inaugural address may be the most bitchin’ thing I’ve ever done in my life—including the back-to-back home runs in fourth grade. Pop says I’m only ten steps away from the White House already. Just promise me that when I kick the bucket, you won’t let them put anything on my epitaph except “Here lies T.C. Keller. Tempered by a hard and bitter peace.”

  AugieHwong: I promise. And it’s “Tony Award,” not Tommy. Does everybody else know?

  TCKeller: About my epitaph?

  AugieHwong: About me being gay, you gink-head hoser-face!

  TCKeller: Not everybody. There’s a night watchman at a Dunkin’ Donuts just outside of Detroit. He doesn’t know yet.

  Dear Nat,

  A year after Tick and I decided to be brothers and our parents realized we weren’t kidding, they knew that the sleepover routine was going to get old fast if we kept having to remember to bring things like our pajamas and clean socks and comic books and sleeping bags whenever one of us spent the night. So we both began moving in piece by piece—starting with the comic books. That was six years ago, and now Tick has his own bed in my room, his own dresser and desk and DSL port, his own toothbrush in the bathroom, his own half of our closet, and his own bulletin board for his Red Sox scorecards and the picture of his mom that he just put up last week. Meanwhile, I have all of the same things on his side of town, except for my Suzanne Pleshette production stills in place of the Red Sox junk. Whenever I stay over, Nehi sleeps on my bed and not Tick’s. He knows who the real diva is.

  Our room at Pop’s is definitely the cooler of the two. The green-shingled house is almost a hundred years old and plunked halfway down a hill in the middle of a narrow little neighborhood street. There’s no front yard and only a couple of feet of grass in the back, but inside it’s a whole other century. We’ve got sliding doors and secret panels, a stone fireplace and wooden beams, and a living room that’s big enough for either thirty people or a half-finished diorama of Washington, D.C. But the best part is the original servants’ quarters on the top floor, especially after Pop turned two of them into one big hideout for me and Tick. (Since it’s the same size as my room at home, Tick and I figure that they must have been really little servants.)

  Once Mom and Dad and Pop discovered they’d each inherited an extra eight-year-old without expecting it, they came up with one set of ground rules for both of us, no matter which house we were sleeping at.

  “We’re sunk,” groaned Tick. “Whose idea was it to let them talk to each other?”

  “Don’t look at me!”

  The only difference between their two empires is that Mom and Dad gave us thirty minutes after lights out for Galaxy Fighters on the ceiling or View-Master slide shows on the wall, and Pop let us have forty-five before he told us to knock it off and go to sleep. These days, I don’t know what we’d do without the extra fifteen minutes.

  • • •

  Tonight’s Topics

  The time Tick’s mother sat with him on the Plum Island beach at night and told him to pick out his favorite star so they could name it “Anthony.”

  Going to China with Dad someday to see where my great-grandpa was born and wondering if they have Slurpees there yet.

  An invisible boy who Tick says he’s seen twice at Amory Park and who tells him what pitches to swing on. Either my brother has an overactive imagination or else he needs Ritalin.

  Why Route 128 is also I-95 South and I-93 North. And how.

  A hard and bitter peace.

  Claudette Colbert’s childhood. (Tick’s usually in the bathroom during this one. Some people have no interest in broadening their horizons.)

  Plots for getting Pop and Lori together. As in really together. (Has Tick thought far enough ahead to figure out that his adviser would be his stepmother? Or should I let him be surprised?)

  Where the hell I’m going to find a closing act for the talent show since we’re almost out of time and Phyllis didn’t go for the idea of stepping in with Sophie Tucker’s “Red Hot Mama.”

  Why Rhode Island accents are annoying.

  But there’s one new addition. Ever since fifth grade, I’ve been a little worried about what would happen if my brother and I grew up and discovered that we liked the same girl. Would we fight over her? Would we stop speaking to each other? Forever?! But now that somebody’s calling me Wonderboy, I’m pretty confident that girls will never be a problem for us as long as we live.

  “Are you asleep yet?” I whispered, living on the wild side by pushing the edge of our forty-five minute envelope. From the other half of the dark bedroom, Tick yawned.

  “I’m thinking about Alé’s eyes when she’s trying to be mad at me,” he sighed dreamily. Well, since nobody ever upstages me and gets away with it, I stared up at my own part of the peaked ceiling and sighed right back.

  “I’m thinking about Andy’s nose when it wrinkles.”

  “I’m thinking about Alé’s hair.”

  “I’m thinking about Andy’s smile.”

  “Alé’s sparkle.”

  “Andy’s butt.”

  “Too much information, dude.”

  Maybe I was wrong. This is more fun than I thought.

  Love,

  Aug

  FROM THE DESK OF LISA WEI HWONG

  Honey—

  This morning you left your socks in the refrigerator and put sugar in your orange juice instead of on the Rice Chex. If Dad and I aren’t supposed to notice the stars in your eyes yet, you need to do a better job of hiding them.

  Home early tonight. Somebody decided to revive Carousel. (Remember how I warned you about that one when you were eight?) This won’t take long.

  I love you,

  Mom

  THEATRE

  “WHAT’S THE USE OF WOND’RING?”

  A NEW CAROUSEL AT MERRIMACK

  BY LISA WEI HWONG

  Nice songs to beat your wife to. Attend at your own risk.

  www.augiehwong.com

  PRIVATE CHAT

  AndyWexler: Spidey, I saw your mom on Boston Today. How cool is that? Especially when they called her “the Lizzie Borden of drama critics.” Does she like anything?

  AugieHwong: Yeah, she loves Guys and Dolls. But she says that’s because there’s so much wrong with it, you just have to know when to surrender.

  AndyWexler: Hey, were you feeling okay today? I was worried. I’m usually the one who falls on my ass, not you.

  AugieHwong: I don’t kick well in the mud. I always slip.

  AndyWexler: There wasn’t any mud. It hasn’t rained in two weeks. Face it—Spidey’s getting old.

  AugieHwong: Sorry I kept landing on you. Were you really worried?

  AndyWexler: Well, yeah. How were we going to beat Rockport High if our Spider-Man wasn’t 100%? How was Brookline going to survive without him?

  AugieHwong: Do you want to come over to my house for dinner? You don’t have to.

  AndyWexler: I’m there. When?

  AugieHwong: How about the night after the talent show? I’ll be back to normal by then.

  AndyWexler: Spidey, don’t ever get back to normal. Then you’d be just like everybody else.

  AugieHwong: Gotta go. My brother is shooting spitballs at my neck. It’s the only reason he saves his Slurpee straws.

  AndyWexler: Sleep well, Wonderboy.

  AugieHwong: U 2.

  Dear Nat,

  I changed my opening number in the Follies from “Maybe This Time” to Daisy Clover’s “You’re Gonna Hear From Me.” You’re lucky the show goes up during one of my Natalie Wood obsessions.

  Tech rehearsals went as well as the Titanic did. Ricky Offitt ac-cidentally bit the reed off his saxophone in the middle of “In the Mood” and wound up with splinters in his tongue. Tick won’t let anybody find out about his secret
JFK monologue until the night we go on (our cover story is that he’s doing the “Friends, Romans, and countrymen” speech from Julius Caesar, which is about as believable as William Shakespeare playing center for the Celtics), so he made up for it by forgetting three verses of “Casey at the Bat.” In today’s version, Casey came up to the plate with nobody on base, which defeats the whole purpose since who gives a shit whether Mudville loses 4–2 or 4–3? And Stu Merliss thought it would be really funny if he farted on every downbeat. It so wasn’t. In the meantime, Alé timed the whole thing to make sure that we came in under an hour, but with all of the screwups we ran longer than the Italian Renaissance. I’m getting out of this business before it eats me alive. No money in my budget for sequins, no crowd-pleaser to bring down the curtain with, AND WHO NEEDED TO SEE ANDY WEXLER IN BASEBALL PANTS A SIZE TOO SMALL??

  “Do you want to come over to my house for dinner? You don’t have to.”

  “I’m there. When?”

  Oh, God, my heart hurts.

  Subject: URGENT!!!

  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  1. Lee Meyerhoff just peeked over Andy Wexler’s shoulder, and before he could scroll up or turn off his monitor, she pretended not to see “Augie Spidey Augie Spidey Augie Spidey” written in 11 different fonts. You’re winning, dude. Now if only I could get Alé to do that (even though the whole Spidey thing is getting a little barfy).

  2. Lee says you should NOT meet Alejandra at 1:00 in front of the Lycée tomorrow for the production meeting. Instead show up at 11:30, walk the halls like you belong there, and keep your eyes and ears open. She also says you should try to find the room where they’re holding the class in Jazz Dance, because you’ll probably find your closing act inside. “Somebody needs to be dragged out of her shell, whether she likes it or not.” Whatever that means. You’re lucky you like boys. Girls are so over-complicated.