Infinity

1.

Willy Shinn stood outside a classroom and for the life of him he couldn’t remember where his locker was. He was at the center of three converging hallways—each absolutely identical, and each lined with a bank of red metal lockers as far as he could see.

He looked at his watch. Great. Ten minutes late for Geology and he had to get to his locker first to grab his report on plate tectonics. If he showed up late and didn’t turn in his paper, Mr. Jelsofski was sure to go ballistic. Plate tectonics was the study of the shifting ground underneath the earth, and Willy was expert at being on shaky ground.

Willy looked at the locker across from him, at the number 157 stamped into the chipped and faded black plate on the metal door.

Okay, good start. 157. All he had to do was count from here to his own locker, which was number ….

“Ah geez …” Willy muttered.

Sweat poured down his face and the back of his neck. He could feel it snaking between his shoulder blades and coating the back of his shirt. What the heck was wrong with his brain?

Think, idiot!

A sudden memory cut through the fog. At the beginning of the year, he’d written his locker number and combination on a sheet of paper, which he then stuffed into an inside backpack pocket in case he needed it later. Relieved, Willy reached around to pull off his backpack but his groping fingers came up empty. He wasn’t wearing his backpack.

Oh yeah. His backpack was in his locker.

Willy slapped his forehead with a sweaty palm and continued on to smooth back his dark, curly hair. He looked around frantically. Was he losing his mind? Everything seemed so odd and unfamiliar. And why was it so quiet? There were always a couple of kids running through the halls, late for class, or on their way to the admin office or the school nurse. Right now, the place was as empty as his feeble brain. No kids, no teachers, no hall monitors, not even the janitor. Had he somehow screwed up and come here on a Saturday?

In frustration, Willy thrust his hands into his pants pockets. Actually, that wasn’t exactly true. He made the motion of thrusting his hands into his pants pockets, but a quick glance down confirmed that he didn’t have any pants pockets to thrust his hands into. In fact, he wouldn’t have minded the missing pants pockets so much if it weren’t for the disturbing fact that he was also missing pants!

Willy Shinn stood in the school hallway wearing nothing but purple boxer shorts covered with large, pink flowers. He looked back up and to his further horror the halls were suddenly jammed wall-to-wall with hundreds of his classmates, jeering, laughing and pointing at the dumb goof who’d come to school in his undies.

And right in the middle of the mob, his arms crossed over his jiggling belly, stood Willy’s grandfather, laughing louder and longer than the rest.

2.

Willy jerked open his eyes. He stared at the ceiling, completely disoriented. The sweat that coursed down his face in his dream was nothing compared to that which now soaked his T-shirt and the bed sheets underneath him. He sat up straight and whipped back the covers. No purple boxers. No pink flowers. Only the familiar pattern of simple stripes on his pajama pants.

He closed his eyes and lay down again. What a whacky dream! The strangest thing was how real it had all seemed, and his heart hammered in his chest at the anxiety and embarrassment he still felt.

Actually, he’d had the dream before—or something like it. Sometimes it was the first day of school and he hadn’t a clue what his schedule was or where to find his first class. Sometimes he was in the school play and was pushed onstage, though he couldn’t remember any of the lines. And in almost every one of these nightmares he ended up in his underwear with his fellow students laughing at him.

But this was the first time his grandfather had appeared in one of his dreams. The significance of this fact was flashed out of his brain by a shaft of blinding, early morning sun streaming through the window. Willy rolled onto his stomach to avoid the light and noticed the stacks of unpacked boxes all over his disheveled room. He groaned and shut his eyes, hoping to block out the light and what those boxes meant, at least for a few moments longer.

Okay, think about the positives. Think about today.

Today was Willy’s favorite day of the year. Today was better than almost every day of the year, even Christmas, which was saying a lot. Christmas in the Shinn household was usually tinged with disappointment, because it seemed that no matter how hard he wished, Willy never got the toy or game he’d asked for. Or he got the cheap, knock-off version, which usually broke after a few rounds of play.

His father was a college professor and his modest income was just barely enough to cover the daily expenses of a family of four, let alone any extravagance. His mother didn’t work, and Willy and his brother, Bucky, were too young for any serious paying jobs. In the Shinn family, Santa wasn’t rich.

Which was why today was the happiest of days for Willy. Today was never a disappointment. It was freedom. It was hope. 

Today was the first day of summer vacation!

If there were ever more beautiful words in the English language, Willy had never heard them. Summer vacation meant sleeping in, swimming, sunny days, ice cream and backyard barbecues. It meant hiking in the woods, canoeing on a lake and, of course, baseball!

Willy possessed a deep and abiding love affair with baseball, formed at six-years-old when he received a T-ball set for Christmas (a cheaply made knock-off, of course, though he didn’t care at the time). He collected baseball cards, knew almost all the players’ names by heart and thought maybe he’d like to be a professional player when he grew up. In fact, the intramural team he started on that year—the Pirates—had just won the championship that spring with an unprecedented 15-and-1 season. True, Willy hadn’t played as much as the older kids on the team—his contribution was limited to only three runs scored and maybe three or four right-field catches the entire season. But the coach told him that he had talent, and he’d definitely be a starter next year.

This last thought shocked Willy back into stark reality. He wouldn’t be starting for the Pirates next year. He wouldn’t be starting for any team, for that matter.

And he owed it all to his grandfather.

Maybe that was why the old man was in his dream, laughing and mocking him. It was because of Grandpa Shinn that Willy was stuck in the middle of nowhere, on a hundred-acre farm in upstate New York, fifty miles from the nearest town that nobody had ever heard of. It was his grandfather’s fault that there was no one to so much as toss a ball with, let alone a whole baseball team to play on. It was Grandpa Shinn who had ruined Willy’s favorite day of the year.

And right that minute, Willy didn’t give a damn that the old man was dead.