A Hilariously True Story of Childhood Cancer and Olympic Greatness: Just Don’t Fall (Adapted for Young Readers)

I have always been fast. I have never met any kid who is faster than me in a race if we race from my mailbox to their mailbox. That’s why I’m good at soccer. But even though I’ve been practicing soccer with the other homeschool kids since I was six—three whole years now—there are no other homeschool teams to play against, so I’ve never played in a real game. Then one Sunday morning I walk into Sunday school class and see Aaron, a homeschool friend who goes to my church, wearing green shorts, a matching jersey, and knee-high socks. I have on my white collared shirt and scratchy dress pants. “I can’t believe your parents let you wear that to church!” I say. “Well, my travel soccer team has a game right after Sunday school,” Aaron says. “And I won’t have time to change clothes before it starts.” A travel soccer team! They play games . . . against other teams! They wear uniforms . . . to church! And homeschoolers are allowed to play! As soon as Sunday school finishes, I run down all three flights of stairs to the hall outside adult Sunday school. I wait while the adults have a final prayer that lasts almost three hours, and then I jump in front of Mom as she walks out the door. “Mommy!” I say. “Can I please, please, please play on a travel soccer team?” She gives her standard response: “We’ll have to think about it”—which really means “We’ll have to think about reasons you can’t do it,” which really means “No.” But I want that uniform. I want those shiny shorts and bright socks to wear in games against other soccer teams in other cities around Virginia. I want it more than anything I have ever wanted. So I keep asking Mom. This is one of the advantages of homeschooling. You are with your mom all day, every day, so if there’s something you want, you can ask her over and over again. Of course, you don’t want to ask her so much that she gets annoyed—just enough so she doesn’t forget. That’s why I only ask every fifteen minutes. I did this the time Luke took his first steps and Mom said that he had figured out how to walk because he’d seen us walking all the time. So I asked Mom, “If we all flew around in jet packs all the time, would Luke figure out how to fly?” She said no, he wouldn’t, but I thought it would be really, really cool if Luke could learn how to fly, so I kept asking every fifteen minutes for several weeks, hoping she would say yes. But she never did. The soccer-team question turns out differently than the jet-pack question, though. I ask Mom about the soccer team all week, and after just five days of asking every fifteen minutes—“No,” “We’ll think about it,” “Maybe”—Mom agrees—“but you can’t wear your uniform to church”—to let me play. Awesome! But tryouts aren’t for a few weeks, so I will use those weeks to practice and get good. I will start tomorrow, on Saturday. ••• It’s Saturday morning, and I just woke up. I look at my alarm clock: 7:03. I do a quick calculation: an hour and fifty-seven minutes left. Less than two hours. I feel something warm under my foot. I pull back the covers and see Mom’s heating pad, the piece of fabric that heats up when you plug it into the wall. I’ve been using it for almost four months. I like to put it on my leg to help the growing pains when I am trying to go to sleep. I must have rolled around and pushed it down to my foot while I was asleep. I switch it off and climb down the ladder. Matthew, sleeping in the bottom bunk—he gets the bottom because he is seven and I am nine—feels the bed move and wakes up. “Is it Saturday?” he whispers, like there are other people in the room who might wake up if he talks too loud. “Yeah,” I whisper back. “Yessss!” he says, scrunching his eyes together and smiling so I can see the gap where his adult teeth haven’t poked through yet. “Sweet cereal!” (Thweetthereal.) Matthew jumps out of bed, but I am already halfway down the hall to the kitchen. I beat him there because I have always been fast, and when I stop running, I slide several inches on my socks across the kitchen floor. I see it on the table: Honey O’s, which you will love if you like Honey Nut Cheerios, trademark General Mills. It contains nine essential vitamins and is a good source of— But while I am still reading the box, Matthew grabs it off the table. He lifts it with two hands and shakes it over his bowl. A couple of Honey O’s land in the bottom.Plink, plink. He shakes the box a few more times, and the cereal comes out like an avalanche into his bowl and pieces are rolling off the table and onto the floor. “Awwwwwwwwww !” I say, which is what you say when you see someone break a rule and they are going to be in trouble. The “awwww” starts out in a low voice and then you get higher and higher until you are saying the “wwwwww ” part. “Oops,” Matthew says. “That’s more than a half bowl of sweet cereal!” I say. “I’m gonna tell Mom.” “No, please”—pleath—“don’t tell Mom,” he says. “Watch.” He grabs a fistful of Honey O’s from the table and returns them to the box. Twelve more fistfuls, and now the bowl is only half-full, and the pieces from the table and on the floor are back in the box. “There, see?” Matthew says. 7:34 a.m. “An hour and twenty-six minutes left,” I say. “Yeah,” Matthew says. Saturday is the best day because you don’t have to vacuum or wash clothes or mop or dust or sweep or shake out the rugs. We watch Saturday-morning cartoons instead—the old kind, like Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, because we are allowed to watch them even though we are not allowed to watch most things. Our TV has a special machine in it that reads the CC (which stands for “closed-captioning”) so it can substitute for bad words. For example, if someone says a bad word like “butt,” the machine replaces it with “toe,” so people on our TV say things like “I want to kick your toe.” After cartoons, Matthew and I run down the hall and wait at the door until my watch reads nine o’clock exactly. Then we push it open so fast, it swings around on its hinges and slams against the wall. We run across the bedroom and jump on Dad. “Wake up! Wake up!” “It’s Saturday morning, Daddy!” Dad groans. “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.” I always jump on his stomach when he starts groaning like this because it pushes all the air out of his lungs and sounds funny. “Uuuuu—HUMPH!—uuuuuuh . . .” We shake him until he opens his eyes. “Come on, Dad. It’s nine. You said we could wake you up now,” I say. “We are going to play soccer together today, remember?” “Yes, I know . . . okay, okay, I’m awake,” he says. “Daddy, guess what,” Matthew says. “What?” Dad asks. “The sweet cereal is Honey O’s!” Matthew says. He says it like oath. After Dad and I practice soccer Saturday afternoon, Mom makes me take a shower. She always makes me take a shower when I get sweaty, even if I just took one the day before. So I take my shower, and Dad takes his, and then we all go out to Country Cookin, where the vegetable buffet is free for kids under ten and only $3.99 for adults unless they order steak. “And for you, sir?” the waitress says to Dad. Dad likes to read name tags so he can use people’s names at least once in every sentence. “Well, Sheri,” he says, “I’ll have a six-ounce steak, please.” “How would you like that coo—” “Paaaul,” Mom interrupts. She gives Dad the same frown she gives me when I finish my homeschool assignments for the day in twenty minutes and she knows I rushed through and probably made lots of mistakes on my math problems. The side of her lip sinks inside her left cheek, and she leans her head slightly in the same direction. “Ummm, actually, Sheri,” Dad says, “I will just go with the buffet tonight.” “Okay,” Sheri says, stacking our menus. “I’ll be right back with those waters.” Matthew asks why Dad didn’t get a steak. Mom answers before Dad can. “Well, we are trying to save money right now,” she says. “Do you mean there is going to be less money in the entertainment budget?” “Maybe.” “But—no fair!” “Yeah,” I say. “No fair!” “Why are we trying to save money?” Matthew asks. “So we can have more savings.” “I know, but whyyyyyyyyy?” Dad looks at Mom. “Now’s a good time,” he says. She nods. “Boys,” Dad says, “we’re going to move in a few months, and after we move, I’m not going to have a job anymore.” “Move! Where?” “What about soccer?” “Why won’t you have a job?” “Is there a travel soccer team where we’re going?” Matthew and I are asking the questions, and Luke starts crying in his high chair. Mom takes a deep breath and breathes it out. “I’ll go get him some food,” she says. Dad slides out of the booth to let her stand up, and then he sits back down and starts talking again. “Pastor Smuland has asked me to come work for the church,” Dad says. “Why? Is he leaving?” Matthew asks. “No, our church is getting so big, the elders think we need two pastors.” “And they want you to be the other one?” “Uh-huh.” “So why do we have to move?” “Well . . . to be a pastor, you have to go to seminary—do you boys know what seminary is? It’s like a school for people who want to be pastors. So we’re going to move to Florida for two years . . . so I can go to seminary there.” “Cool!” Matthew says. “Can we go to Disney World?” “We can probably do that, maybe once.” “Yeeesss!” Matthew says. He reaches up his hand so I will give him a high five, but I am not sure whether I should give it to him because I don’t want to go to Florida. All my friends like Aaron and the other homeschool boys from church are here, and I have known all of them my whole entire life, and we race against each other during homeschool potlucks. Every summer, when I have a birthday, I invite all the homeschool boys to our house for a sleepover. This year, since I will turn ten, Mom and Dad were going to let me invite ten boys. If I’m in Florida for my birthday, I probably won’t evenknow ten boys I can invite. And the worst part about moving is that soccer tryouts are soon, so I will miss most of the season. But maybe I should give Matthew a high five anyway because he is my very best friend, an even better friend than the homeschool boys because I have known him longer. So I lift my hand in front of his, but I do it slowly, like I am volunteering to be the one to wash the dishes after dinner. “Well . . .” I say. “Can I play on a travel soccer team in Florida?” “We’ll have to think about it,” Dad says. The next day is Sunday and we go to church, like always. Soon, Dad will stand up front and give sermons. That’s the only good thing about moving to Florida—when we come back to Harrisonburg and Dad is Pastor Sundquist, our whole family will become famous because he will tell stories about us in his sermons. ••• On Sunday night, I can’t sleep because my leg hurts and I have the heating pad turned up to high and I still can’t sleep. I sit on the top bunk, staring at the ceiling. I’m tired of thinking about soccer. I’ve thought about the uniform I want to wear, the goals I want to score, the position I want to play, and how much everyone in Sunday school will want to talk to me when they find out how good I am. I’ve thought about all those things at least three times already. So I try thinking about when I grow up and become a computer programmer. I’ll program video games and know all the cheat codes because I made them myself. Thinking about this normally makes me feel happy but not tonight because I’m so tired and I can’t sleep since my leg hurts and the heating pad doesn’t help. “Good morning,” Mom says the next day. I frown and don’t say anything so she will know it’s not a good morning. “What’s wrong?” “I barely slept. It took for-ev-er to fall asleep,” I say. “I’m sorry, pumpkin. Were you worried about something?” “No, it was the growing pains,” I say. “Did you try the heating pad?” “Yes, but my skin gets so hot on my thigh, so sometimes I have to turn it off.” Mom squeezes her eyebrows together. “You always have it on your thigh?” she says. “Yeah . . .” “On both thighs?” “No, just my left.” Mom starts talking faster. “Only your left leg? Your left thigh is the only place it hurts?” “Yes, it’s the only place that hurts. I told you that like a century ago.” “I don’t think so.” “I did.” “I would’ve remembered.” “I told you.” “Okay, well, we are going to the doctor.” “Why?” “To find out what is wrong with your leg.” “When?” “Today. Right now.”