Chris Sykes said when I walked into the room after school on Monday. In the same tone of voice he might have used if he had noticed a moth flying out of my ear. “Good to see you,” I said in a weird and confident-sounding voice. Just selling it with a no-doubt-about-it tone, the key to being a good umpire. I’d never pulled that tool out before. But I’d never been told the odds were stacked against me before either. Mr. Donovan started the meeting. “Pretty soon we’re going to need to know how many ads we’ll have so we know how many pages we can afford to print. How’s everyone doing with ad sales?” The whole room turned to look at me. Was I everyone? I guess not, because a girl in the front row by the window said, “I got Luigi’s Pizza to take a quarter page, and my dad said his store will take a full page.” “That’s fantastic,” Chris Sykes said. “Nice work,” Mr. Donovan said. “How’d you do, Snowden?” Sykes said. “I forgot to take that folder of ad-sales information,”
