Boys in Control Read Free Page B

his trick.
    “If the Bensons were here, and Steve was on our team…,” Jake said.
    “Oh, Jake, good as he was, Steve was never as good at baseball as Eddie, and you know it,” said Josh.
    “Yeah, but at least if we lost out then, we'd have the guys to hang around with, do things with for the rest of the month.”
    “We can hang out with the girls!” Peter said helpfully.
    “Eeee-yuck!” said Jake and Wally together.
    “I don't need any more to do,” Josh told them. “Ipromised Mom I'd make signs for her Women's Auxiliary sale.” He got up from the table then and went into the dining room, taking his colored markers from a drawer in the buffet. Then he reached around behind the buffet, where Mrs. Hatford stored sheets of white cardboard from the hardware store that she saved for Josh's art projects. He sat down at the table and began to make some signs.
    Wally watched from the doorway. ONE TO FIVE DOLLARS Josh penciled carefully, and when the letters were straight, he went over them again with colored markers. Then he began to draw a decorative border.
    Jake came and stood in the doorway too. “Hey,” he said. “If we lose this weekend—if we're out of the tour-nament—will you guys go camping with me the rest of the weekends in May? I mean, I don't think I could
stand
losing
and
having to hang around with the Malloys.”
    “Sure,” said Josh. “I'll go camping with you.”
    “Me too!” said Peter.
    “Not me,” said Wally.
“I
have to be here for the yard sale—” He stopped suddenly. “But if you lose, you won't be playing that day, and Mom will be here!”
    “Smart boy,” said Jake. “Don't go wishing we lose, though.”
    “Just look at it this way, Jake. No matter what happens, one of us wins,” said Wally.
    Jake opened his book bag and spread his homework out on the other side of the dining room table, across from Josh. Peter took a saucer of Oreo cookies into theliving room to watch TV, and Wally checked the bookcase to see if there were any books he hadn't read yet that he might like to read for his book report.
    Hatchet
he had already read. Same with
Maniac Magee.
There was another book by Jerry Spinelli he hadn't read yet, though
—Wringer.
Maybe he'd read that one.
    Mr. Hatford got home from work first that day. He took off his postal jacket and hung it on a hanger. Then he went upstairs and put on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. “Now, this is the kind of weather that makes me glad I'm a mail carrier,” he said when he came back down. “Days like today I can drive with the window of my truck open. I can carry mail up the hill to a house, the breeze blowing at my back, and think I've got the best job in the world.”
    “Just the same, I don't think I want to be a mail carrier,” said Wally.
    “Nothing wrong with that. You can be whatever you want,” said his father. “What do you want to be?”
    Wally shrugged. “I just like to study things.”
    “What kinds of things?”
    “I don't know. Just things.”
    His dad poured himself a glass of cold tea from a pitcher, then put the pitcher back in the refrigerator.
    “Well, you could be a biologist and study cells under a microscope.”
    “Maybe,” said Wally.
    “You could be a zoologist and study animals.”
    “That'd be okay,” said Wally.
    “Or you could be a sociologist and study people.”
    “I'll stick with animals,” said Wally. He settled down in one corner of the couch to start reading
Wringer.
It was about a town in Pennsylvania where there was a pigeon shoot every year to raise money, and boys about Wally's age worked at grabbing any pigeons that were shot but not dead yet, and wringing their necks, and this one boy didn't want to do it.
    I wouldn't want to do it either,
thought Wally.
What kind of a person would want to twist the head off a pigeon?
Maybe he
should
study people after all.
    When Mrs. Hatford came home, she found all the members of her family busy. After checking on everyone in turn, she