* * *
Mr. Pfaff wrote their names on the scoring sheet in grease pencil, and the overhead projector at the end of the ball return threw them onto the screen above the lane, ten feet tall and slightly crooked: RUSS, DANNY, DEBBIE, WALLY. Russ had insisted on going first. Russ threw a fourteen-pound ball very hard and very straight, and the pins exploded backwards into the pit, and seven of them went down.
"Easy," he said, blowing on his fingers. "Easy, easy, easy."
He got two more on his second ball. Danny got five. Debbie, who had been to a lot of birthday parties at Pulaski Lanes, rolled a smooth, slow ball that wandered into the pocket like it had all day and took eight pins.
Then it was Wally's turn.
The thing was, he knew how to do it. He knew it the way you know the words to a song you've heard a thousand times from the back seat. Four steps. Push the ball out on the first, let it swing on the second, it comes back on the third, and on the fourth you slide, and the ball comes down past your ankle, and you lift through it, and your hand finishes up by your ear like you're answering a telephone. He had watched his father do it on Tuesday nights for as long as he could remember. He had sat on these same orange benches with a cup of Squirt and a bag of Old Dutch potato chips and watched his father's left foot slide out on that leather sole, smooth as a skater, and his right leg sweep behind him for balance, and the ball roll off his fingers with a sound like a held breath.
Wally took his four steps. On the fourth step he tried to slide. The left shoe, which was made to slide, did slide, but Wally's foot slid inside it, toward the toilet paper, and his ankle went one way and the shoe went the other, and the ball came off his hand early and thumped on the lane like a dropped sack of potatoes and rolled, very slowly, into the left gutter.
"Ohhhh," said Danny Dombrowski.
The ball took a long time to get to the end. Everybody watched it. That was the worst part. A gutter ball at Pulaski Lanes had to travel sixty feet, and it never hurried.
His second ball went into the right gutter.
"Zero!" Russ announced, as Mr. Pfaff drew a little dash on the projector sheet. "Wally Wallflower, ladies and gentlemen. A big goose egg."
"Leave him alone, Russ," Debbie said, without much feeling.
"I'm helping. I'm encouraging. Come on, Wally. Next one."
The second frame was the same. The third was worse, because in the third frame Wally's right shoe came half off on the backswing and he had to stop at the foul line and stand there with the ball in his hand while the heel flapped loose, and then he threw it anyway, sort of, and it bounced. It actually bounced. It hit the lane and hopped once, the way a ball is never supposed to do, and from across the room someone in a Pulaski Lanes polo shirt yelled, "Hey!" and then it went in the gutter.
By the fifth frame Russ had a ninety-one, and he had stopped watching his own bowling at all. He watched Wally. A few kids from lanes eight and ten had started watching too. It had become a thing, the way things became things in seventh grade, all at once and without anyone deciding.