“It’s about time you showed up, Joseph!” Frankie called from the top row of bleachers. A pair of binoculars hung around his neck, and he kept looking through them every few seconds.
I climbed the bleachers reluctantly and sat next to Frankie. He can be really annoying sometimes.
Frankie stood up and pointed the binoculars at our team’s dugout. “Yes, folks, the Frankie radar is scanning the playing field. Numbers one and two are in the dugout, and number three is up at bat.”
“What are you talking about?” I squinted as I looked at the players. The batter’s jersey number was twelve, not three.
“Sherrie Harrington, Tara Riddle, and Molly Palanski. They don’t know it, but they’re all finalists in my Farewell Formal date selection.”
I groaned. “What inning is this?”
“Bottom of the third. We’re up 3–1. Kelly’s pitching great. They only got one hit off her in the last inning.”
I looked over to the dugout. An assistant coach was explaining something to Kelly, but she looked like she didn’t want to hear it.
I wiped my forehead, pulled my water bottle from my backpack, and took a gulp. On the lower bleachers I noticed Yongsu, wearing another collared shirt—a white one this time. Like a kid in private school.
He must have sensed someone was staring at him because he looked up and began waving like crazy, as if I couldn’t see him from ten feet away. Then he grabbed his flute case and books and climbed up the bleachers to join us.
“Who’s this nerd?” Frankie whispered as Yongsu approached.
“Yongsu Han. He’s new. And anybody who eats fluffernutter sandwiches in middle school shouldn’t be calling anyone else a nerd.”
That zipped Frankie’s lips temporarily.
Yongsu sat next to me. He had a bag of Cheetos under his arm. “So you’re a softball fan?” I asked.
“My sister, Ok-hee, joined the team.” He pointed toward the bench.
“I thought she was in Flushing. At some fancy music program.”
“She finished. The coach said she was good enough to make the team, but she has to practice before playing in a game,” he said, in between mouthfuls.
This my-sister-is-a-superstar talk was almost too much. “Piano, school, softball…is there anywhere your sister doesn’t kick butt?”
“Cleaning her room.” He grinned. “She’s a slob.”
I looked down at our team. Ok-hee sat on the bench next to the coach. She had super-long hair. Long legs, too. I could tell she was taller than Yongsu, even though she was younger.
“What are you doing here?” Yongsu asked me.
Frankie blurted out my answer. “Joseph’s trying to pitch himself to the pitcher.”
The other team was up at bat now. It was the top of the fourth and Kelly just threw a beauty, a perfect strike. Cheers roared from our section of the bleachers. None louder than mine.
Yongsu’s eyes scanned the softball field. I had this hunch that, in Frankie’s terms, he was a zero-contact kind of guy. He hadn’t discovered the agony and the ecstasy of girls yet.
“Did you find a famous Korean for your paper?” Yongsu asked.
“Yeah. Now I have to write about him,” I said.
“Who’d you pick?”
“Sohn Kee Chung, the Olympic marathoner.” I skipped over how I planned to magically make him my grandfather.
Yongsu nodded. “My father’s told me stories about him. He was fast! And brave, too, even when Japan was bullying Korea. Good choice, Joseph.”
“Thanks,” I said. But I wondered if I was making a good choice. Sohn Kee Chung was brave for sure, but was I? Maybe I was taking the easy way out. I didn’t want to cheat, and I knew this Korean gold medalist would never have cheated.
But then again, Sohn Kee Chung didn’t have an ancestry essay to turn in to Mrs. Peroutka, either.
Frankie left for the late bus at the top of the sixth, just after the other team scored. But then our team caught a hitting fever. Janice Reed slammed a double, and then Kelly hit a line drive for a single, bringing Janice to third. I started whooping and hollering and even shouted out some rhyming raps. I thought I saw Ok-hee glare at me. Maybe I’d interrupted her Zen concentration on the game. Or maybe she was just looking for her brother.
Just as I shoved a handful of Cheetos in my mouth, Yongsu tapped my shoulder.
“About my mom,” he said, “she doesn’t understand adoption. She says it’s not natural for parents to raise other people’s kids. Sorry if she hurt your feelings.”
He was staring down at the ground under the bleachers. I could tell he felt embarrassed.
“Let’s forget it,” I said, reaching for more Cheetos. What did I care about Mrs. Han? There were plenty of Americans, including my own family, who didn’t understand adoption either.