Read Online Sweetie by Ellen Miles - Free Book Online

CHAPTER ONE
    “Brike five! You’re bonked,” Charles Peterson shouted at his best friend, Sammy.
    “That was no brike. That was a stall!” Sammy yelled back. “Come on.” He waved the Wiffle blat over his head and swung at an imaginary boodja. “One more. I’m gonna hit a bipple!”
    “Just try!” David was way back in the boutfield, by the rowing machine. He crouched down and jiggled from foot to foot on his tiptoes. He looked ready for anything.
    Charles shrugged happily and leaned back to throw. Base-boodja. Did it get any better than this? So what if it was a gloomy Monday in February? Sure, it was cold and gray outside. It wasn’t baseball season yet, but it was definitelytime for some indoor base-boodja, which was a brand-new game never before played in the history of the world.
    Charles was glad that he and Sammy had gotten to know David. When David had first moved to Littleton, not that long ago, he’d seemed really shy. He was still pretty quiet at school, where all three boys were in the same class: Mr. Mason’s, Room 2B. David didn’t like big groups. But after he and Charles had found a stray dog — and helped it find its way home — David had gotten used to being around Charles. It took a little longer for David to get used to Sammy, because Sammy was, as Charles’s dad sometimes said, “a real character” who loved to tell jokes and come up with crazy ideas.
    Anyway, now David wasn’t shy at all with Charles and Sammy. In fact, sometimes you couldn’t get him to
stop
talking. He liked to tell long, detailed stories about things he and his parents had done, like camping out in YellowstoneNational Park and seeing a grizzly bear there. Charles loved David’s stories, even though Sammy didn’t always believe them.
    Base-boodja was invented one day when the boys were all over at David’s house. David dug out a yellow Wiffle bat and a big purple Nerf ball. “Mom says we can play in the basement,” he reported. “We can make all the noise we want down there.”
    Charles and Sammy looked at each other. Charles wasn’t so sure he liked that idea, and he could tell that Sammy felt the same way. The basement at Charles’s house was cold and clammy, with a scary toilet (it made weird gurgling noises) in one corner and the washer and dryer in another. A big clanking furnace was always roaring to life when you least expected it, and there was a permanently moist area on the floor by the outside door.
    But David’s basement turned out to be different. It was brightly lit and warm and dry, with agiant mirror that took up one whole wall. The best part was that just about the entire floor was covered in thick, spongy blue mats like the ones in the gym at school, so you could jump around, fall down, do somersaults — anything! — without getting hurt. David’s mom and dad used the basement as a workout room. The people who had lived in the house before had left behind all sorts of gym equipment. Besides the rowing machine, there was also a treadmill, and some kind of bench with weights you could pull down, and an exercise bike that looked like fun but turned out to be really boring to ride.
    Soon the boys took the place over. They played down there on weekends and almost every day after school. David’s mom was always popping down the stairs to make sure the boys weren’t getting themselves in trouble, and they weren’t allowed to play on any of the equipment unless an adult was in the basement with them. But besides that they were pretty muchfree to do whatever they wanted in that big, safe, padded room.
    They were never sure who had actually invented base-boodja. Sammy said he had come up with the name, and David said he was the one who’d thought of the basic rules. It was all so new that the boys were still figuring the game out.
    “Okay, instead of three strikes, you get five brikes when you’re up at blat,” Charles said one day, after his third brike.
    “Fine, but if you get five,