I don’t know what it was about hanging out with other kids in school that was so good. I learned as much about the subjects I liked from the apps as I would have sitting in a classroom. But when school actually shut down I felt terrible. Something deep inside of me was going crazy, as if I was having trouble breathing. A friend said it was just because we were getting older, that letting go of being a kid was hard. I don’t know, maybe she was right.

I used to look forward to being seventeen. Now it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. If seventeen happens, it happens.

Excerpt copyright © 2000 by Walter Dean Myers. Published by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

Eddie McCormick was all-world and everybody knew it. While most of the guys on the block played basketball, Mack, which was what everybody called him, played baseball. He played left field for the Ralph Bunche Academy and when they played there would be more scouts in the stands than fans. He was big, a hundred and eighty pounds and six feet one. During the winter he ran track and the track coach thought he could make the Olympics if he stuck with sprinting. The coach kept him on the team even when he wasn’t running, just in case he might show up at a meet. But baseball was Mack’s joint and that was where he figured to be headed. He was eighteen and one newspaper article about him said that he could be in the major leagues by the time he was nineteen. That’s how good he was. Naturally the baseball coach loved him. That was the thing about Mack, the people who liked him usually liked him because he was a star. Mack had an attitude problem. He thought he could just show up and everybody was supposed to fall down and go crazy or something.

He was pretty smart, too, but he made this big show of not caring about grades. He slid into his senior year with a C-minus average.

“If they gave him what he really deserved,” Dottie Lynch said, “he would be getting all P’s. That’s P as in pitiful.”

Well, Dottie had a big mouth but that’s what people thought about Mack. Some of the kids thought that Dottie was sweating Mack and was just mad because he didn’t give her a play. On the other hand everybody thought he was stuck on himself. But during the first week of his senior year everything changed. That’s when he met Kitty.

Kitty was the granddaughter of Duke Wilson, who owned the barbershop on 145th across from Grace Tabernacle Church. Now, anybody who knew Mr. Wilson would expect his granddaughter to be smart, but Kitty was outrageous. Just the way that Mack dealt with baseball and had all the scouts looking at him, Kitty could deal with the books. What’s more, everybody liked Kitty because she had one of those bubbling kind of personalities that soon as you met her you knew she was your flavor. Plus, the girl was fine. Not just kind of fine, not just take another look fine, but, like, take the batteries out of the smoke alarms when she came by fine. Yeah, that’s right. So she’s smart, she’s fine, she’s only sixteen and a senior.