Shug looked at him then. Really looked, maybe for the first time in seven years. Then he turned and walked toward the bus without another word, and Garrick followed twenty steps behind, and on the bus Shug sat in the front seat, the way he always did, and Garrick sat in the back, the way he always did, and the bus rolled north out of Fort Madison along the river with the sun going down orange behind the trees on the Illinois side, and everything looked the same as it had that morning.
It was not the same.
Coach Amundsen's warning about the Hy-Vee and the barbershop was a nice idea, and it lasted about as long as it took the bus to get back to Keokuk.
By Friday morning everybody at Keokuk High knew that Garrick Thiel, the boy in right field nobody could describe, had stood up in the dugout and told Shug Kettleman "not anymore" and then wrestled him for a bat. The story got bigger every time it went around. By second period, Garrick had shoved Shug into the fence. By lunch, he had shoved him into the fence and called him a thief in front of the umpire. By sixth period a sophomore girl Garrick had never spoken to stopped him outside the chemistry lab and asked if it was true that he had broken Shug Kettleman's nose, and he said no, and she looked disappointed and said, "Oh. Well. Good for you anyway," and walked off.
He did not like it. He had spent seven years being invisible and he had gotten good at it, and now people looked at him in the hall, and he could feel them looking the way you feel sun on the back of your neck. Some of the looks were admiring. Some were curious. A few were not friendly at all, because Shug Kettleman was popular and good-looking and called the lunch ladies ma'am, and there were people at Keokuk High who thought that a nobody from Concert Street had no business putting his hands on him.
Rene Paquette found him at his locker before the last bell. Rene was the catcher, short and thick and freckled, with a laugh like a goose and a habit of wearing his chest protector on the bus for no reason. He had sat two spots down from Garrick in the dugout for two years and they had probably exchanged a hundred words in that time.
"Hey," Rene said. "So. Poles, huh?"
"Thirty."
"With Shug."
"Yeah."