Elementary Academic Boosters Club banner. The money raised tonight would finance our school field trips to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc and our less academic but equally inspiring annual visits to Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
I tracked Emilie as she made her way up to the top row of the bleachers, her honey-blond hair swinging behind her. It amazed me how she moved, how much confidence she had. A year ago she’d been a clumsy eighth grader. Now she was ready to take Lincoln High School by storm. “I’m going to join pep band,” she’d announced to me proudly when we were lying side by side in our twin beds one night. A shard of moonlight had fallen through the curtains and cut her slim body in half—her hipbones and long legs on one side, the small buds of her breasts, like plum halves, on the other.
“Why do you want to be in pep band?” I’d asked, thinking of the few football games I’d attended in my life. The pep band was a group of shivering kids who took the field at halftime after the cheerleading routine, right about when half the stands decided they needed a hot dog or a trip to the bathroom. “Those kids never get to watch the game.”
“I don’t care about the stupid game,” Emilie had said, sighing dramatically. “I want people to watch me.”
Bud Hirsch called my attention back to the game with two toots on his whistle. “All right! Switch it up!” Our team started a slow jog through the infield to our dugout, and Loetze’s Lions took a turn at their warm-ups.
Panting as he came off the diamond, Dad gave me a high five—as if by staying out of the way, I’d performed some huge feat.
I slid from the bench. “Can I have a dollar?”
“Sure.” Dad dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of change.
“Stay close,” Mom said.
I could feel her eyes on me as I walked behind the batter’s box, my feet kicking up little swirls of dust that instantly coated my tennis shoes. I resisted the urge to hike up my shorts, Emilie’s from years before. Sometimes I hated the way Mom looked at me, like I was a medical specimen.
A dollar bought me a can of Coke and three blue Pixy Stix, the kind of pure-sugar pleasure I was never allowed at home. Clutching the soda in one hand and my book in the other, I scanned the bleachers for a place to sit. A few people from church smiled encouragingly in my direction, but I spotted Emilie in the center of a tight, whispering circle of recent Watankee Elementary graduates and changed course. A few of my own soon-to-be-fourth-grade classmates were sitting in the stands with their parents, but we glanced away from each other with summertime awkwardness, as if we knew we weren’t meant to connect again until the Tuesday after Labor Day.
I lugged my volume of Myths and Half-True Tales to a shady spot beneath the bleachers and opened to the dog-eared page on Atlantis. The game began and cheers erupted.
We were only a mile or so from our farm, but to hear Dad yell, “Hammer one home, Hammarstrom!” during Johnny’s turn at bat was to imagine that we’d been transported somewhere far away, like an island in the South Pacific. Dad was only here at all because he’d worked out a deal with Jerry Warczak: Jerry, who had no interest in softball, would cover Dad’s last milking on these nights if Dad and Johnny would lend him a hand on Saturdays with the chickens. This was typical of the sort of deals they worked out. “It’s just being neighborly,” Dad had explained to me, but it had seemed that he was being more than neighborly when he’d clapped Jerry on the shoulder and said, “He’s like another son to me.”
When the noise of the game finally faded into the background, I spent the next few innings reading about Atlantis and wondering how a city could go missing—poof!—just like that. What would happen if Watankee, Wisconsin, and all the people I knew were to fall off the face of the earth one day—a sudden crack, then a quick slide into Lake Michigan? How long until the rest of the world missed us?
I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the crack of the bat, the sudden burst of applause. I imagined the ball hurtling through a blue sky deepening into purple with the sunset. The tall grass under the bleachers prickled and dented the undersides of my legs, and a mosquito seemed intent on sucking my blood. I was swatting my ankle when a shadow covered me.
“Hey, you’re Kirsten Hammarstrom, aren’t you?”
I struggled to sit up. For a moment, it looked like an angel was standing over me, even though my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Keithley said there was no such thing anymore, unless maybe you were a Catholic. The voice belonged to a girl who wore cutoff denim shorts and a checked shirt with the tails knotted at her waist, so that just a teensy strip of skin at her stomach showed. I realized that what looked like a fiery halo on top of her head was actually just her red hair, backlit by the stadium lights.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I’m Kirsten Hammarstrom.” Suddenly I felt guilty, as if I’d been caught sneaking a sliver of pie before dinner.
“Your brother’s Johnny Hammarstrom, right?” she said, bending down to my height. Up this close, she was the loveliest person I’d ever met. Creamy white skin, a tiny bridge of freckles spanning her nose. A smile so wide and welcoming, she might have been pictured on a travel brochure.
“Yeah,” I said again, suddenly ashamed of my dirty hands, my teeth sticky with the residue of Coke. “Why?”
She smiled and held out a hand, poised as any church greeter. “I’m Stacy Lemke.”
We shook hands. Nothing drastic happened, no fireworks or a sudden crack of thunder, but somehow the moment felt significant.
Stacy’s hands were cool, her nails painted the softest pink, like cotton candy. If she noticed that my nails were ringed with dirt, she didn’t say anything. “Kirsten. That’s such a pretty name,” she said.
I smiled. “Do you know my brother?”
She laughed. “Everyone knows Johnny Hammarstrom.”
This hadn’t really occurred to me until I heard it said that way, so boldly, like a biblical fact. During wrestling season, Johnny’s name was a regular appearance in the sports section of the Watankee Weekly; whenever I was in town with Dad, someone always approached him to ask about Johnny’s prospects for the fall.
“I go to school with him, but we don’t really know each other,” Stacy said, smiling a little sadly. “I mean, I don’t think he would ever notice someone like me.”
I looked at her more closely. Her tiny freckles glistened under small bubbles of sweat, but I didn’t see any kind of defect—no eyeteeth or harelip or deformed thumbs. If my brother hadn’t noticed Stacy Lemke, he was either blind or stupid or both. “Why not?” I asked, blushing. “I think you’re really pretty.”
“Oh, you’re so sweet!” She gave me a quick touch on the knee and stood up, brushing invisible dirt from her legs.
“I would have noticed you,” I said, swallowing hard.
“Aren’t you just the cutest thing in the world!” She laughed, tossing her head so that her red hair briefly covered her face and then swung free again. “Well—it was nice meeting you.”
She started to walk away. I watched her until she got to the edge of the bleachers, where she stopped and did a little rubbing thing with her shoes in the grass, to toe off the dust. I was still watching her when she turned back to me, and I looked down, embarrassed.
“You
