Boys in Control Read Free Page A

than I do. The sale's going to be in our front yard, right up on the driveway and the front porch. If the Badgers play that day, everybody will be going to that, and I have to stay home to watch over the sale stuff till the others get back.”
    “
I'll
help you!” said Caroline. “I don't think Eddie will miss me. I'll just come over that morning when everyone else is at the game. I'll make change or show people around or whatever you say.”
    Wally didn't seem to trust her, because he was still looking at her sideways.
When a person trusts you,
Caroline was thinking,
they look you right in the eye.
    “Well, okay,” said Wally finally. “Maybe. If nobody else shows up to help.”
    And
maybe,
thought Caroline, beginning to smile, Wally had just said yes to taking a part in her play.

Three
Thinking Things Through
    W hen practice was over, Wally and his brothers headed home. Wally and Peter looked somewhat alike, with round faces, brown hair, blue eyes, and thick, square hands like their father's. But the twins, Jake and Josh, had dark hair, and skin that tanned to a golden brown in summer. They were both string-bean skinny.
    Usually their mother called them around three-fifteen from the hardware store where she worked to make sure they'd gotten home safely. But when they stayed for baseball practice, they called her instead.
    Wally dialed the number, and as soon as his mother answered, he said, “We're all lying poisoned on the floor.”
    Mrs. Hatford seemed to know that meant everyone was okay because she said, “Peter didn't get his new shoes muddy, did he?”
    “No, we kept him on the bleachers during practice. We didn't let him run around any.”
    “Good,” said his mother. “You can have crackers and peanut butter, but the spaghetti is for supper, so don't touch that. The applesauce either.”
    “Okay,” said Wally, “bye,” and put the phone back down.
    It used to be that as soon as the Hatfords got home from school, they would sit around the kitchen table with their afternoon snack and decide what kind of trick they were going to play next on the Malloy girls. It used to be that nothing was too awful for those girls, and the boys would do whatever they could to make them persuade their father to move them back to Ohio.
    The Whomper, the Weirdo, and the Crazie, the boys called them. Eddie was the Whomper because she could hit a baseball so far—way out in center field sometimes; Beth was the Weirdo because she read such gross and scary books; and Caroline was the Crazie because she would do almost anything to be the center of attention.
    But now, with Jake and Eddie on the same team, and with all the things they'd been through together, the boys had to admit that if they weren't quite friends with the Malloys, they weren't exactly enemies, either. The brothers had found themselves cheering every time Eddie made a really good play out on the field, and the Malloy girls cheered when Jake did something special.
    “But if it wasn't for baseball…,” Jake said almost to himself, with a mouthful of crackers.
    “If it wasn't for baseball,
what
?” asked Wally.
    “Nothing,” said Jake.
    Wally seemed to know what Jake was thinking, however, because he said, “If you guys win the championship, you won't mind having Eddie around so much. You'll have your pictures in the paper and you can brag all over the place.” While he spoke, Wally was fooling around with the magic trick he had traded for the two baseball cards at school. You put a quarter in one drawer, but when you pulled the drawer out a second time, the coin appeared to be gone. Then you closed it and pulled it out again and there was a fifty-cent piece in it. Except that it wasn't the same drawer. It only looked as though it was.
    “And if we
don't
win?” said Jake. “What if we bomb on our very first game and then all we can play are neighborhood games for the rest of May?”
    “Then…I don't know,” said Wally, and leaned over to show Peter