Read Swing State for Free Online

challenges. But before
Love Balloon,
he’d never been able to visualize a show from start to finish. The individual segments in his notebooks, he realized, were standalones. Trying to get them to work together felt forced—when the shows made it to television, he would see their seams grinding against each other. If he was going to be a good game show producer there couldn’t be any seams.
    With
Love Balloon,
his ideas came together.
    Almost.
    Zachariah had never seen or heard of a show that was completed over two seasons—that is, a game show where the end of the first season was the halfway point.
Love Balloon
would be the first. The success of his first televised show would get him out of Armbrister—and out of the voc wing—forever. He’d move to whatever neighborhood in Hollywood housed successful game show producers. For Christmas (and maybe Thanksgiving) he’d visit his dad in a limo. Everyone in Armbrister would know his story: son of a single millworker finds Hollywood success.
    The problem with his show was the second season. He had no idea what to plan for the challenges and speed rounds after the end of the first half—the bachelors and their competitions were no problem. But how could he know what to do after the balloon? In the apartment? Viewers needed some kind of structure to rely on, but he hadn’t figured out what that structure was.
    I hope I can figure out the second season,
he thought.
    He sat for a minute, waiting to see if anything felt different.
    Nothing did.
    That was good, right? When the bleachers had been fit to collapse he hadn’t had any sort of tingle: the pass was picked off—that was all.
    * * *
    Lunchtime was the worst.
    He wished he could eat in the library. Ms. Collmenter and Ms. Petrie, though, rigidly enforced a no food or drink rule, especially in the computer area. He might get away with the Library Lunch Challenge, but at some point they’d catch him and maybe revoke his library privileges. So, his choices were the single-stall handicapped bathroom in the hallway or on the walk to the library. The latter was worse. Last year he started eating rapidly while walking as slowly as possible. No one noticed. Since his weight gain, though, anything involving food gained a negative charge:
Hey, Zits, you’re so hungry you have to eat while you walk? There’s a room for that! Or are you eating on the way to the cafeteria to eat?
    He preferred the handicapped bathroom, but for the past few days Jamie Townes, the wheelchair girl, would be in there at the start of the lunch period. When she came out, fifteen minutes into the twenty-five minute lunch break, the bathroom stunk so bad he couldn’t enter.
    Skipping lunch altogether in favor of going to the library would be easiest, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not eating made him feel woozy. The last thing he needed was more trouble with math and measurements.
    When the lunch bell rang, he went straight outside. There had to be someplace where he could eat his sandwich in seclusion before heading to the library.
    The only spot he could see was a clump of bushes at the far end of the football field, where older kids smoked and made out.
    The cafeteria was out. Sitting by himself was an invitation for trouble.
    Until last year lunch was never a problem. He sat with his soccer friends Rick and Jim and Kenny and Sal. But following his accident, a stream of kids arrived at the table to make fun of him—and, then, him and them—and his friends moved away. First they talked to him less, then not at all.
    He assumed things would go back to normal after a few days and discovered, as days turned to weeks, that the new normal was that his friends had moved to different tables and gave icy, minimal responses to his questions.
    The summer would make everything better, he had thought. When he got back, he’d start playing soccer again and things would be the way they were.