JASON
BELL'S LESSON
by Max Reif
continued from page 1
"Wait a
minute," I announced to everyone on the field as I finally stood
up. "You all think I'm Edward, and he's Jason.
But I'm not really Edward, I'm him." And I pointed
at Jason in front of me.
"Huh?" Jason taunted further.
"Have you gone crazy now , too?" Everybody
laughed. They laughed at me! Nobody had ever laughed at me before.
Then the bell rang and we all had to
go back to class. I went "home" to Edward's house after
school that day, and I knew that "Edward" went to my house.
Don't ask me how I knew where
Edward lived. I didn't know. But my feet, somehow,
they did.
Why did I follow them? Well, for one
thing, I wanted my dinner, and I had
nowhere else to go! Mom and Dad weren't going to believe
that Edward and I had switched bodies. Nobody would believe
that!
Edward's
house was in the poor part of town, down across Olive
Street , where the old tenements were.
I found myself treading up the walkway of an unkempt, one-story frame
house that stood between two ancient, crumbling apartment buildings
. Wild grass and weeds grew in clumps here and there in an otherwise
dirt-bare front yard.
An old, white-haired woman was standing
on the front porch.
"Edward, where you been?" she asked
in a thick accent as I came up the walk. "Grandma's been worried!"
So Edward lived here with his grandma.
What happened to his parents, I wondered? It must be hard being taken
care of by someone so old, and who wasn't even used to being in this
country herself . She couldn’t show you how to do stuff
you needed to learn. Could she take you to the ball game? The
video arcade?
Entering the house, I had a big surprise!
It wasn’t the nice, wooden table in the dining room, or the neatness
of the simple living room with its sofa and breakfront displaying
vases and fancy dishes. Nothing like that. Those were little
surprises . The big one was that as I walked through that front doorway
into the house, for a minuteI cared! I forgot to think
of Edward—oops, I mean of myself—as a geek! It was a nice, soft feeling.
It caught me by surprise. After a minute, though, I recovered my usual
attitude.
The house smelled good. Dinner was
on the table: a big bowl of soup with fresh vegetables and meat, and
big hunks of homemade bread. Grandma wasn't much in the landscaping
or house repair departments, but she sure could cook!
After dinner I did my homework at the
dining room table with a laptop computer. Now, I don't exactly know
how to say this. Myself, I'm an ok student. I might be better if I
wasn't waiting all day every day at school to get out to the playing
field.
But when I started to do Edward's
homework, I found that there were, like, extra rooms in my mindnice,
bright ones! The math homework was not just easier. I could almost
do it in my sleep! And when I finished it, I found myself playing
number games he had on his computer, ones far more advanced than I'd
ever seen, just for the fun of it! Fun and numbers? Those two
things had definitely not gone together for Jason Bell!
I read a story from our story book,
because we were supposed to answer a page of questions. The
story was about a boy in Africa going on a hunt with his father
to save his village from starving.
When I started to read, right
away I started seeing the story, like I was the
boy. In my mind I lived through the whole thing in full colortrekking
through the parched land; waiting in the bushes with my father for
days; and finally, watching Father lunge at the zebra with his spear.
I helped Father cut up the meat. We
carried it back to our village together on a kind of sled.
Wait a minute, I suddenly thought.
I don’t read, except to get finished! Jason
Bell doesn’t see stories like he’s
living them. That must be part of Edward’s mind!
Could it be that Edward’s really more
than a geek? Why, becoming that story was as good as a trip around
the bases with a winning run!
I went into the kitchen, opened the
refrigerator, and had some milk and cookies. Grandma had gone to sleep.
I sat there alone for a long time, the refrigerator humming in the
background. I was thinking about the fact that this fat jerk I’d become
seemed to have as rich a life as me— the former me
. I mean, as the best athlete in the school! That was something
to think about! But then an even
bigger surprise came. I went into Edward's room to get ready
for bed. Turning the light on, I jumped! Hanging from the ceiling
were big models of each planet in the solar system. Rocket ships were
flying between them. Big dragons and other space monsters lurked in
the deeper reaches of space. On every shelf and the dressing-table
were little clay , painted models of circus animals and acrobats and
clowns !
Edward made these things? I
felt practically like I was in a museum! If it’d been my roomI
mean if I really had made all this stuff with my ownhands—I’d feel
proud!
Well, I thought about the whole thing
some more, lying there in Edward's bed. The last thought I remember
is imagining myself landing on his big model of Jupiter. Then I fell
asleep and dreamed about an Interplanetary Baseball League where Edward
and Jason Peter and the other kids at school joined together and beat
a team of 3-headed fire-breathing lizards from a distant star, who
were going to gobble up the earth if team lost .