“It’s a rocket to short—OOHH! Jeter makes the diving stab going away from first, then throws from his knees and nails the runner! What a play! That’s one for the ages, folks! Let’s watch it one more time, in slow motion.… ”

“Derek! Are you with us?”

Derek Jeter snapped to attention, his beautiful daydream gone in an instant. The whole class full of sixth graders laughed.

“Yes, Ms. Terrapin, I’m listening. Sorry.”

“Summer is over, everyone,” said the teacher. “I know it’s still early September, and it’s warm and sunny and beautiful outside—but we’ve got a lot of work to cover, and I need your attention.”

The trouble was, summer was over. It felt like a million years since Derek was up at his grandparents’ place in Greenwood Lake, New Jersey.

It had been the best summer ever! Derek’s best friend Dave Hennum had come for a week to join him. They had played baseball with a bunch of city kids in the Bronx, who would have all been Little League all-stars—if only they’d had a league of their own.

After playing ball with them, Derek’s game was better than ever. He couldn’t wait to play again! In fact, he’d just gotten caught daydreaming about it.

Too bad his next chance was seven months away. In the meantime, all he could do was play pickup games on Jeter’s Hill—the sloping patch of grass in Mount Royal Townhouses, where Derek spent so much of his time that the other kids had named it after him.

In a month or so, cold weather would force everyone else indoors—but not Derek. From October through March, the only kid in Kalamazoo who thought it was warm enough to play baseball was Derek.

He would go to the batting cages with his dad every once in a while, of course, but that was about it. And Derek could feel already that it wouldn’t be nearly enough to see him through till spring. No, he was going to have to find something else to do until then.

But what?

“Class,” said Ms. Terrapin, interrupting his train of thought, “in a couple of weeks we will be moving forward into the wild worlds of algebra, chemistry, biology, and earth science.”

There were murmurings from all around the room. “Ugh. Sounds hard,” Derek heard Sam Rockman mutter behind him.

“Don’t be a wuss,” Gary Parnell whispered back to the complainer.

“Lay off him, Gary,” Derek said.

Sam shot Derek a silent Thank you with his eyes.

Sam Rockman was always scuffling to get a passing grade. He was very nice, but some things took him a little longer to understand—like math. And science.

Gary Parnell, on the other hand, was the class brainiac—which would have been fine, except that he loved to brag about it. Especially to Derek, whom Gary considered his biggest rival.