Read Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) for Free Online

fault.”
    I reached for the mouse, then clicked down through the photos on screen until we got to the ones we’d taken by the window. “Maybe you had better luck with the brighter light,” I said. But if anything, the brighter shots were worse. They were so overexposed I looked like a ghost. Or a perfectly white mannequin with a deep-black wig. I kept clicking until the last few frames were up. I looked really closely at those, partly because I wanted to see how horrible my elbow looked, and partly because I wanted to see whether Angelika had focused in on it. But the shots were so washed-out you couldn’t really even tell that my arm was an arm.
    Angelika sighed, said, “I give up,” clicked out of the screen, and ejected the memory card. Then she flipped the card into my hands, slung the camera into my lap, and said, “Your turn, Pete. Make me a star!”
    I know this isn’t going to make sense to anyone who isn’t a camera nerd like I am, but I couldn’t even stand the thought of using such inferior equipment for anything I was being graded on. After my grandfather’s stuff, this was like asking a fighter pilot to fly a hot-air balloon. As Angelika tried sitting at different angles on the stool by the window, I tried to find some decent menu options for programming the camera, but there were huge gaps between the available shutter speeds, the maximum aperture of the lens was pathetic, and the ISOs only went up to 800, instead of the 25,600 on Grampa’s Nikons. Put into simple English, what this meant was that there was no way I could get any kind of decent shot.
    That’s why I said what I said next. Even if it came out sounding totally wrong, I was just trying to put some effort into the first graded project of my high school career. “Listen, Angelika, why don’t we meet up at my house to work on this? I, um, I have much nicer equipment.”
    Oh, God , I thought as soon as it was too late. That sounded wildly inappropriate. Angelika pushed herglasses down her nose a bit, peered over them at me, and said, “Ooh, I’d love to come to your house and check out your equipment.” Then she laughed and added, “But don’t you think you’re moving a little fast?”
    Why is it that every single desirable female I’ve ever met can make me feel like an idiot in five seconds flat?

A few days later, AJ invited himself over to my house to shoot baskets. He only lives a couple of blocks away, and he used to have to walk right past my door to get to middle school, so we’ve probably spent five hundred hours playing basketball in my driveway. Now, you’re probably thinking, “How can you shoot baskets if you’re not medically cleared to play sports?” The answer is that I can’t. Which leads to the next logical question: “What kind of insensitive weenie would invite himself over to his best friend’s house to do something his friend would totally kill to do, but isn’t allowed to?”
    I find myself having those kinds of thoughts all the time, but that’s just AJ. I love the guy, but he barely seems to notice that other human beings have emotions, so he says and does completely offensive stuff at random moments without a shred of explanation. Once, in seventh grade, I had a huge argument with AJ because he wouldn’t stop saying my sister was “suh-mokin’ hottt!” I ended up storming out of his house. When I got home, I was so mad that I told Samantha what had happened, and she said, “Ooh, that’s so cute! You have to understand, Petey, your friend AJ is essentially a caveman. He only has three feelings: hungry, hyper, and horny. He’s a great kid if you can just resign yourself to that. And maybe throw him some chunks of raw meat or something once in a while to keep him happy.”
    My sister is a genius judge of character.
    So there I was, sitting on my butt, cooking