Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock , bd

Harvest House Publishers - Ted Kluck

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88 pages

English

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Join Flex on His Quest to Be CoolLike most middle schoolers, Flexs mind is on a million different thingsschool, sports, friends, girls (of course), and yeah, hes thinking about God too. More than any of these thoughts, Flex is obsessed with one thingbeing cool.But how can Flex attain awesomeness when hes so amazingly average at, well...EVERYTHING?!?Football could be his ticket out of seventh-grade obscurity, but then Coach sticks him with a boring jersey number and reassigns him to the most unglamorous position on the entire team.His parents arent helping, either. They wont even let him bring his iPod to school like the other kids do. At least, his parents love him and love the Lord. Thats HUGE.And just when Flex thinks life couldnt any more complicated, he finds himself suddenly drawn to KK, the mysterious drama girl. Shes homeschooled and in ninth grade. KK is totally different...and a little exciting.Will Flex ever be considered cool? In Gods eyes, maybe he already is.

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Children's

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Publié par	Harvest House Publishers
Date de parution	01 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780736971362
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	7 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS
EUGENE, OREGON
Cover design by Kyler Dougherty
Interior design by Chad Dougherty
Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth Associates, Inc.
HARVEST KIDS is a registered trademark of The Hawkins Children s LLC. Harvest House Publishers, Inc., is the exclusive licensee of the federally registered trademark HARVEST KIDS.
The Extraordinary Life of a Mediocre Jock
Copyright 2018 Ted Kluck
Artwork 2018 by Daniel Hawkins
Published by Harvest House Publishers
Eugene, Oregon 97408
www.harvesthousepublishers.com
ISBN 978-0-7369-7135-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7369-7136-2 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kluck, Ted, author. | Hawkins, Daniel, illustrator.
Title: The extraordinary life of a mediocre jock / Ted Kluck; artwork by Daniel Hawkins.
Description: Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, [2018] | Summary: Indiana seventh-grader Flex, average at everything, yearns to be cool, and with help from his parents, his football team, a mysterious girl named KK, and a little faith, he may escape obscurity.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017035992 (print) | LCCN 2017047289 (ebook) | ISBN 9780736971362 (ebook) | ISBN 9780736971355 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Graphic novels. | CYAC: Graphic novels. | Popularity-Fiction. | Middle schools-Fiction. | Schools-Fiction. | Christian life-Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Religious / Christian / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Comics Graphic Novels / General.
Classification: LCC PZ7.7.K63 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.7.K63 Ext 2018 (print) | DDC 741.5/31-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035992
All rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other-without the prior written permission of the publisher. The authorized purchaser has been granted a nontransferable, nonexclusive, and noncommercial right to access and view this electronic publication, and purchaser agrees to do so only in accordance with the terms of use under which it was purchased or transmitted. Participation in or encouragement of piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of author s and publisher s rights is strictly prohibited.
DEDICATION
For Tristan, Maxim, and the real Pops.
CONTENTS
Dedication
1. I Have to Poop (or, What Anxiety Feels Like)
2. Am I Cool?
3. BullyBall: Flex Has an Altercation
4. I Like Your Shoes
5. Pops
6. School the Next Day
7. What s a Reader s Theater?
8. The Carl Sandburg Poetry Book
9. Dreams Go On: Empty Factory Versus Marion
10. Basement Land: Beezer Talks
11. Youth Group: Smells like Teen Awkwardness
12. Transcript of a Text Exchange with Watson from Youth Group, Who Inexplicably Texts Me Sometimes
13. Things Fall Apart
14. Total Eclipse of the Heart
15. Good Game(?): Empty Factory Versus Madison-Grant
16. Pizza King
17. Pops Can t Sleep
18. Songs on KK s Mix CD
19. Vacation Day: Flex Confronts Coach Wood
20. Ladybug Sundress: The KK Story
21. Ride or Die: Empty Factory at Madison-Grant (Playoffs)
About the Author
About the Artist
About the Publisher
1
I HAVE TO POOP (OR, WHAT ANXIETY FEELS LIKE)

F or me it is a rapid flushing of the face.
Meaning that my face gets, like, really, really hot and I feel like I have to poop. I get this anxious feeling several times each day, including (but not limited to) the following three occasions:
1. Right before band practice.
My band teacher is roughly 150 years old, has a face like a basset hound, and hates me. I play saxophone, meaning that for 55 minutes I sit and hold a saxophone and try to look like I know what I m doing.

The people who sit on either side of me are girls who have really hot names like Krissy and Elaine. Names that aren t hot themselves but are made hotter because the girls are in eighth grade.

They smell like hair spray and lip gloss, and I find that really intoxicating. To date, I have said zero words to Krissy because another thing happens when I get super nervous-my mouth gets dry and I have trouble making words. So, yeah, some challenges there.
My mom put me in the band because in Empty Factory, Indiana (that s my town), the good kids take band and get into classes with other good kids and good teachers. Everybody else is a bad kid. I m not sure this is true, but it s the prevailing wisdom in Empty Factory.
Aside: I m Flex. I m in seventh grade. I don t really know where the nickname Flex came from.

Actually, I do. I m sorry I lied just then.
It came a year ago when I discovered push-ups and started doing hundreds of them (along with sit-ups) in my room each morning and night.
Full disclosure: I struggle with chin-ups because I m a bigger guy. I can only do three.
Anyway. I started with push-ups, and apparently, according to my friend Doug Smith (nickname: Dougie Fresh), every time I walked by a mirror, a window, a shiny piece of metal, or anything else that could reflect an image, I would flex (like, my biceps or triceps) a little.

Middle school kids can be ruthless when it comes to nicknames. Do I love the nickname? I should probably say no-because saying no would be the humble, self-effacing, and right thing to do-except that I kind of like it.
Empty Factory is in the middle of nowhere, in Indiana. It s about 90 minutes by car north of Indianapolis (where the rich kids shop) and about 30 minutes north of Muncie (where the regular kids shop). We shop at Murphy s, which is a department store in downtown Empty Factory. Sometimes we make it to the Muncie Mall, where I m mortified if anyone I know sees me with my mom (see: anxiety).

As you can imagine, Empty Factory got its name because of all the empty factories we have in town.

If we had more hipsters in our town, these buildings would be repurposed as coffee shops or gastropubs, which is just a gross-sounding name for a restaurant. We have three stoplights, a public pool, and lots of tanning parlors. Our chief export is super-tan girls who go to college at Ball State in Muncie.
Everybody wants to get out of Empty Factory. My way out is going to be football. I m probably going to play in the NFL.

Playing in the NBA is my fallback, with baseball a distant third.
2
AM I COOL?
W ell, I m 12 years old and writing a memoir, so that right there probably disqualifies me from being cool.
I ve always liked reading and writing. What can I say?

In the pantheon of Nerdy Kids Who Write Books, everybody is doing apocalyptic fiction or trying to write their own versions of The Hobbit. But I m not a nerd-in either the cool or uncool sense of the word. Cool nerds listen to bands you ve never heard of and obsess about video games. Uncool nerds are like cool nerds except that they skip the bands and just obsess about the video games.

That about sums up the nerd situation.
But what I really love is football (and to a lesser degree, basketball and baseball and track and professional wrestling-which I don t admit to in mixed company). I live for football, which brings me to Anxious Have-to-Poop Scenario number two:
2. Right before football practice.
Our locker room at Empty Factory Middle School is actually in the boiler room. We put on our shoulder pads underneath asbestos pipes that will probably one day kill us.

In fact, I think I feel a cough coming on (coughs). This doesn t seem to bother anyone except me, and I don t say anything about it out loud.
Two people who are cooler than me are our star running back, Scottie (nickname: Maverick, or Mav) and our quarterback, Fordo.

Scottie has great shoes, wears a gold chain and totally pulls it off, and is dating Krissy from band.
When you re a seventh grader dating an eighth grader, you re automatically cool. You re, like, grandfathered into being cool forever. Our kids will tell our grandkids about you. That s how cool you are.
But football really stresses me out, even though it s the thing I love more than any other thing in the world. I know I should say I love God more than football and I do. I mean, I do. Except that football is the thing I think about and dream about. When I get home from practice, I lay out my jersey on the floor and put on my headphones and just dream about football. About what I ll do in the jersey.

Regarding the jersey: I was assigned number 82, which is a really uncool number, but I traded with my buddy Carl Hoppe (pronounced Hoppy ) on the bus and got number 88, which is much cooler. 88 is a number you can do something with.

Coach has a perpetually red face, but not because he s nervous. It s because he s Intense. In Coach Wood s world, there are two kinds of people-people who are Intense and have Pride, and people who lack Intensity and Pride. (Spoiler alert: You don t want to be the second kind of person.)
I m the first kind, or at least I m trying to be. I m always fully dressed in my uniform 15 minutes before practice because I have both Intensity and Pride. I study the playbook at home. I usually ask for it really early, like in March.
I m not the most athletic guy, but I work really, really hard. There are some guys like this in the NFL, and not surprisingly, they are my favorite players. I m a starter at tight end and outside linebacker.

Why am I this nervous before an average Thursday practice? I have no idea. The cool kids (like Mav and Fordo) aren t like this.