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though. They liked to take long walks after dinner, and both Nick and his dad liked to take bike rides together. That was when the two of them seemed to do their best talking. And sometimes when there was a baseball game on television that Nick wanted to watch and his dad wasn’t doing anything, Paul Crandall the English professor would sit on the couch with Nick and ask him questions.
    Just the fact that he was making the effort meant a lot to Nick.
    It was why Nick would try to act interested when Paul Crandall would start talking about books, like reading wasn’t his job but his favorite sport. Nick didn’t even try to explain that the only books he really cared about were his comic books.
    Comic books were about adventure and about heroes who weren’t afraid of danger or anything else, superheroes who could overcome anything and anybody, no matter where they came fromor what bad things had happened to them in their lives. They could beat the odds and the bad guys and always end up feeling like winners.
    Sometimes Nick wished he were living in a comic book world, even now that he had parents.
    They weren’t exactly the parents he’d always imagined for himself. Nick had to be honest about that, at least with himself. It wasn’t so much with his mom as with his dad. In Nick’s dreams, his happy-ending dreams, he’d always imagined himself being adopted by a dad who wanted to go outside and throw a ball around with him, who wanted to take him to ballgames and maybe coach him in Little League and watch baseball on television—for fun, not because he felt he had to.
    Now he had Paul Crandall, who would rather talk about books than baseball but would shake his head when he’d see Nick with his head buried in one of his comic books.
    So this was one more thing for Nick to worry about, that maybe his dad had imagined a different kind of son for himself, one who wasn’t into sports the way Nick was, one who didn’t come home covered with dirt and bumps and bruises.
    Things definitely weren’t great right now with his dad, no getting around that. Nick was doing worse in school than he ever had. And the more he struggled in class, the more he only wanted to read comic books, not schoolbooks.
    He could see all this making his dad more and more disappointed with him, as angry about Nick’s study habits and his grades as he ever got about anything, especially as Nick got closer to the end of the school year and his final grades.
    “We’re not going to threaten you with taking away school baseball,” Paul Crandall had said the other day. “You’ve only got so many baseball seasons to play, and we’ve only got so many to watch you play. But you have to do better in school, and not just in English. Your work in math, let’s face it, has been even worse this year.”
    His mother the math teacher wasn’t there at the time, so Nick wasn’t afraid to say, “The only thing I hate more than math is math
homework.
”
    Paul Crandall almost managed a smile. “Nobody except your mother loves math,” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that you can do better in it with some effort. Ask yourself a question,Nick: How can you memorize all those baseball stats and figure out someone’s batting average yet
not
be able to solve simple equations?”
    “I love baseball, that’s why, more than I’ll ever love school,” he said. “And that’s another thing about me that’s never going to change, no matter how hard you try.”
    Saying that even though Paul and Brenda Crandall had devoted their whole lives to school.
    “That’s not the point,” Paul Crandall said. “School is about results the same as baseball is. And if we don’t see some with your final grades, I’m not making any promises about summer baseball this year.”
    “It’s not going to make me care more about school,” Nick said, digging in.
    “Fine,” Paul Crandall said. “But your mother and I do care.”
    They’d been having the