Batmen Don't Cry

         When you’re trying to draw Batman’s arm, it’s very important to make sure that you stress the muscle structure in his bicep and tricep. He may be just a normal human who’s very well trained, but you still have to give him unusually great strength. Or else, what kind of superhero is he? I always had trouble with that when I was younger. I could never get the proportions right; so I had to keep erasing. And since mom always bought me the cheap sketchpad instead of the one with nice thick paper that I asked for, I could only erase so much before the paper started to fray. So Batman always ended up with out of proportion, fuzzy arms.
         The sun shining over the corner of the school building cast a long shadow across the playground and over my sketchpad. From my spot, squatting up against the building, so as not to sit in the snow, I could see half a dozen red rubber kickballs soaring through the air, then disappearing behind the slope of the hill; I never saw their take off or landing. The game never made any sense to me, even in the fourth grade, when it should have. There was no real score kept, people kept switching teams, and the “rules” were never enforced. Let’s kick the ball as high, as far, and as hard as we can and see if the other team can catch it. That was the brilliant thought that birthed air kickball.
         Batman’s body was cut off abruptly at his utility belt when another shadow crept up from the bottom of my paper. Miss Hurley stood over my shoulder looking at my recess activity. I thought maybe if I just kept drawing, her shadow would move away.
         “What’re you drawing, Adam?” she asked. I turned, squinting in the sunlight, and held up the pad for her to see. She smiled. “Batman, huh?”
         “Yeah,” I said, turning back to my Dark Knight.
         “You know, Batman probably got his muscles so big by running around and exercising with his friends.”
         “No, he does tae kwon do and does a lot of pull-ups.”
         “I bet he’d be good at kickball. How come you never want to play with everyone else?”
         “Air kickball’s retarded.”
         She reached over me and tried to flip the cover of the pad over to cover my drawing. “What about air kickball in the snow? You can slide all over and dive to catch the ball without getting grass stains. It’s fun.” I could tell that she wasn’t going to leave me alone. Teachers never did. They always wanted me to go play with all the other boys. I didn’t realize then that they were worried about my lack of friends; I just thought they were being jerks by stopping me from doing what I wanted during recess. I didn’t want to run around. I wanted my pad of paper. I wonder if Miss Hurley would have minded as much if I was drawing at recess with other people.
         “I’ll hold your pad for you if you want, while you go play.” I wanted to say no. I had to finish. But in the end I always did what Miss Hurley asked. I don’t know why. Maybe she was just nicer than Mrs. Fitzgerald, Ms. Price, and Mrs. Anderson had been. They were old and didn’t think bringing my pad to school was “appropriate.” Miss Hurley’s hair wasn’t gray yet, and she said she liked my pictures.
         “Okay,” I said. “Here.” I handed her my pad and mechanical pencil. She smiled at me and I trudged off through the ankle deep snow, up the hill to the field where the battle was going on. The shouts and mild curses of 10 and 11 year olds got louder as I got closer. I tried stepping in the footprints that were already in the snow. I figured that mine would be less noticeable if I did that. Plenty of times people had looked at my feet and asked why I couldn’t walk with my feet straight. When I tried to walk in front of the mirror, I kind of looked like a duck. I would find out years later that my parents had noticed early on that my feet angled outwards; they tried to fix it with little booties attached by a steel rod that kept them straight. The first week I had them on I cried all night because of the pain. I kept trying to get out of them, but when I kicked my feet, I tended to bend over so far that I kept hitting my forehead with the bar. By the end of the week, my parents had decided that I could deal with a slight angle in my feet for the rest of my life, rather than keep bashing my soft head with a piece of metal.
         The game looked like a Civil War movie. Teams were distinctly separated, about 30 yards between them, facing each other, yelling and taunting the punting and catching skills of one another. Rubber cannonballs launched from behind the front lines into the divisions of the other side. Sometimes the bombs would be caught – one point for the catcher. Sometimes they would bounce off someone’s arms land with a big kick up of snow– a point for the kicker. The scores were probably on the order of 585 to 607 by the end of recess, but no one would ever know.
         I stepped towards one team, not really caring if they would win or not, and tried to stay around the outskirts of the fracas, not wanting to get so involved so as to be noticed. For a while the other team was catching a whole lot of the balls that ours sent over, and theirs were landing dead in the snow, out of our reaches. A handful of defectors from our lines ran to the other side and started kicking balls at their former teammates. At one point all six or so of the balls in play were on the other side; I could see what was about to happen, so I stepped even further back from the front lines of my team than I already was. All of a sudden, all of the red balls, including two of the giant sized one were cutting through the air towards our players. People were diving across the snow to get their hand under the balls, to no avail; a couple hit people in the shoulders or bounced off their legs. One kid had to dive out of the way of one of the giant ones heading for his face.
         Soon enough, however, the bandwagon for the winning team had gotten too big, and the clutter of people on their side started working against them. People started fighting for the same balls, grabbing them from one another, and getting in one another’s way, which caused more and more kickballs to explode in the snow.
         The school bell rang, signifying the end of recess, and as usual, everyone tried to ignore it for a while, especially now that our team had been coming back. We could hear Miss Hurley shouting for us to line up from the back door to the building. On the other side, Chris Chase held one of the larger balls in his hands and yelled, “Last ball! Next point wins!” Chris was the man-child of the fourth grade. He played linebacker on his pop warner football team, and was a good two heads taller than everyone else. I watched him toss the red ball up right in front of him, wind up his right leg, and smash the instep of his foot into the ball, rocketing it high into the air towards us. A cold winter wind swept across the field, keeping the ball aloft a little bit longer, flying over heads of the boys in the front, past the outstretched hand of a group in the middle, and towards the very back of the ranks. Towards me, the only person there.
         Everyone turned to watch where the ball would land, and grimaced when they saw that I was standing there. The frame of a comic book I had read that morning flashed in my head—Batman had leapt from the top of a skyscraper to catch a bomb the Joker had dropped onto Gotham City from his private helicopter. Without a thought or a hesitation, I took a step forward and dove towards the spot in the snow where the ball was about to thump. For a moment, I didn’t think air kickball was so retarded any more. I landed in the snow, my arms outstretched in front of me, and just as I opened my eyes to see the ball cradled in my hands, I felt a thud right in my side. The ball bounced right off me and stopped in the snow by my feet.
         “Let’s go boys!” Miss Hurley had walked up the hill to fetch us, which meant she was serious. The boys on Chris’s team were cheering and laughing, while those on mine were letting loose with their aww’s and their not fair’s and “Adam doesn’t really count as a player!” I got up and waddled slowly towards the door where we lined up. Miss Hurley saw me as I walked past her.
         “See, Adam, I told you diving in the snow would be fun.”
         I looked up at her smile and tried to swallow, tears welling up in my eyes. Bruce Wayne didn’t cry, I thought. He kept it in, or else it would distract him from catching the bad guys. “Can I please just have my sketchpad back?”