¹     "Hey, battah, battah!" The kid with the bat scrunched his hat down and crouched at the plate. The pitch floated out slow and easy, like a sailboat on a sunny day. The kid swung. Whap! The ball sailed way out past the fence. I shook my head and turned away.
 
²     Better get to work. Nothing to see here. I picked up my bag of papers. My baby sister could throw a ball better than Rusty Johnson. But his dad owned the grocery store. He didn't have to sell papers. I stepped out on the corner. "Get your paper here!" I yelled.
 
³     I said the same thing a million times a day. But it'd be a good hour till I'd have any sort of crowd. I read ads in the store window. Ladies' hose--$1.50 a pair. Pretty lame stuff. Bread—8 cents a loaf. Hamburger—15 cents a pound. I pictured a hot, juicy burger.
 
⁴     Yum, I thought. Why in the world you would buy a buck-fifty pair of fancy socks when you could get—let's see—ten whole pounds of meat for the same price? Didn't make sense to me. It'd been a year or two since I'd even smelled a hamburger.
 
⁵     Things hadn't been so good since my dad left. He'd lost his job a couple of years ago when the mill had fired everybody. Then they'd hired new workers at lower wages. There were lots of guys who'd work for almost nothing.

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