#i hope yall are having a cooler more tolerable summer!

[timetogoslumming]

sandlot au!

i wrote the pool scene from the sandlot, as newsies. (pls note that i pretty much just stole the sandlot script.)

i might make this a series so if yall want to request specific scenes for me to write, by all means, do!

thanks so much to @fuckin-georg for discussing this with me!

read it on ao3 or under the cut!

After they all ran back to their respective homes to grab towels and change into swim trunks, the boys gathered by the side of the shallow end of the pool, and most of them jumped in together, splashing and yelling as they immediately felt their body temperatures drop by what seemed like about twenty degrees.

Albert hung back, though. He spotted a group of women sunbathing by the side of the pool in bikinis, and decided to make an impression. “I remember you,” he said to one of the women, flirting shamelessly. “Hey, girls. Oh, sexy.” He turned toward the pool, lining up to jump, but turned at last minutes to wink at the girls, blowing them a quick kiss. Then, as loudly as he could, he screeched, voice cracking with every syllable. “Cannonball!” Albert ran towards the pool, jumping and tucking his legs in, and hit the water with a huge splash that hit each of the girls that he had just been flirting with.

On the hottest day all summer, in the beginning of July, JoJo and Race stopped at the drugstore on the way to the sandlot. It was their turn to buy the ball, after the two of them caused it to soar over the fence toward the Beast during an overzealous game of catch the day before. The two of them woke up early that day to dig through couch cushions for spare change, collect aluminum cans to trade in, and scour the streets for dropped money.

They had almost given up hope by the time the sun was high in the sky, until JoJo spotted something glistening next to a storm drain. He drew closer to investigate and found a sparkling quarter, which rounded out the exact amount that they would need to buy a new baseball.

The boys emerged triumphantly from the store, baseball clutched tightly in Race’s hand. JoJo made a lunge for the ball. “Come on, give it to me,” he whined.

“No,” Race snapped. “I want to carry it.”

“Come on,” JoJo argued. “I paid for it!”

“I wanna carry it!” The two boys continued to bicker for some time until something stopped Race dead in his tracks. “Oh. Whoa,” he said in a hushed, reverent tone.  

“Give it to me.” JoJo grabbed the ball from Race’s hand, which had gone limp at his side. Race didn’t even notice.

“Oh, man…” Race muttered.

JoJo looked back at Race, who was no longer walking by his side. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. Race had frozen, slack-jawed, staring down the sidewalk.

Walking in their direction as if he owned the sidewalk was Spot Conlon. Spot was a high schooler, making him way out of Race’s league, which naturally made him all the more desirable. By anyone else’s standards, Spot was shorter than average, but to Race, who was still relatively shrimpy, he was a giant, with tight, flexing muscles and a tan so perfect that it made him want to cry.

“Spot Conlon,” Race whispered involuntarily, like a prayer.

JoJo had to admit- Spot was hot. Beautiful, in a way. But everyone knew that Race had called dibs the first time that he saw the lifeguard, and JoJo was not in the mood to be murdered by one of his best friends.

Spot sauntered past them with the tiniest of smirks on his face, backpack slung casually over one shoulder as he made his way toward the city’s public pool for his shift. As he passed, Race turned, staring after him longingly.

“Okay, come on,” JoJo said, tugging Race’s arm. “We’ve gotta go.”

“No!” Race protested. “I want to go with-”

“We’ve gotta get to the sandlot. Let’s go.”

At the sandlot, the rest of the guys were waiting impatiently in the dugout, sipping sodas from a cooler that Albert’s mom had packed, while Race and JoJo ran across the diamond, sweat dripping from their foreheads and pooling on their shirts.

“Where have you guys been?” Jack asked from the entrance to the dugout where he was impatiently holding his bat, ready to head out into the blazing sun to play. “We’ve been waiting forever.”

JoJo smirked. “We saw Spot Conlon and Race was busy planning their wedding.”

“Shut up,” Race snapped, shoving JoJo. “I was not.”

“Yeah, you were!” JoJo argued, laughing. “Your tongue was hanging out of your head, and you was swooning!” He clasped his hands together and switched his voice, which had begun to crack with the very beginnings of puberty, into a high falsetto. “Oh, Spot Conlon! Marry me and let me touch your muscles!”

“I said shut up!” Race protested, pouting. “I’ve got a lot of things on my mind.”

“That’s a first,” Elmer muttered.

Meanwhile, Albert was suffering. His face was red and splotchy, his hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and he had been fanning himself with his hat for the past half hour. “We can’t play baseball today, Jack,” he groaned. “I’m cooking myself over here! It’s just too hot. I mean, it’s like-” he paused, looking around like a temperature reading would suddenly appear in the air. “I don’t know. A hundred fifty degrees out here.” Jack rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to call it for today. We can’t play in this.”

Al was right. It was dangerously hot. All of the news reports that morning had warned people to stay inside, or at the very least, in shaded areas, to avoid heatstroke. The sodas that they were drinking, while cool and refreshing, were doing nothing to help hydrate the boys, and they were all feeling the effects of the sun, although none quite as badly as Al. As they looked out onto the sandlot, the air seemed to shimmer as the heat baked the dirt.

Jack stared around at them all, silently daring anyone to challenge him. It took a moment, but the other boys started to chime in, agreeing with Albert.

“You’ve gotta listen to him.”

“It’s just too hot.”

“I’m dying out here, man.”

“Fine,” Jack snapped angrily. He shouldered his bat. “We’ll vote. Any of you who wants to be a… a can’t-hack-it panty waist who… wears their mama’s bra, raise your hand.”

In unison, every hand, except for Jack’s shot into the air and the boys murmured in agreement.

“Whatever,” Jack grumbled. “So what are we gonna do instead?”

Race was the first to throw out a suggestion, instantly shouting, “Pool! Let’s go to the pool!”

Jack would have played ball all day, all night, rain, shine, tidal wave, whatever. Baseball was all he really cared about. But if he ever had to do anything besides baseball, going to the pool was what he tolerated best.

After they all ran back to their respective homes to grab towels and change into swim trunks, the boys gathered by the side of the pool, and most of them jumped in together, splashing and yelling as they immediately felt their body temperatures drop by what seemed like about twenty degrees.

Albert hung back, though. He spotted a group of women sunbathing by the side of the pool in bikinis, and decided to make an impression. “I remember you,” he said to one of the women, flirting shamelessly. “Hey, girls. Oh, sexy.” He turned toward the pool, lining up to jump, but turned at last minutes to wink at the girls, blowing them a quick kiss. Then, as loudly as he could, he screeched, voice cracking with every syllable. “Cannonball!” Albert ran towards the pool, jumping and tucking his legs in, and hit the water with a huge splash that hit each of the girls that he had just been flirting with.

The boys always said that they went to the pool because of the girls, but if any of those women had actually approached one of them, they probably would have either peed their pants or run screaming for the hills. Really, they all went to the pool because Spot Conlon was the lifeguard.

Just after they got there, Spot switched places with one of the lifeguards, climbing effortlessly onto the lifeguard tower as the boys watched. He put on a pair of dark, mirrored sunglasses that caught the sunlight, glinting spectacularly in the sun.

“Ah, man,” Specs said. “How is he so cool?”

“He don’t know what he’s doing,” Mike said.

Ike, always the echo, repeated him. “He don’t know what he’s doing.”

“Yeah, he does,” Jack said as he lazily floated on his back. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Race gaped up at Spot, watching as he rubbed a bit of suntan lotion into one of his arms. “I’ve swum here every summer of my adult life,” he said. The guys around him suppressed giggles. “And every summer, there he is. Lotioning, oiling. Oiling, lotioning.” And that day, it just became too much for Anthony “Racetrack” Higgins. “I can’t take this no more! Move!”

He shoved the boys in his way aside as he waded his way toward the pool ladder. That day, Race did the most desperate thing that any of those boys had ever seen. Confidently, yet shivering from the sudden breeze against his wet skin, Race strode across the pool deck to the diving board. He waited in line anxiously, then caught Spot’s eye and smiled. Spot gave him a quick, stoic nod back. Race’s expression had taken on a manic quality and he actually shook as he waited for his turn.

“What’s wrong with him?” Davey asked.

“What’s he doing?” Al said at the same time.

Specs shook his head. “Three summers of this, I think he’s finally snapped.”

As Race stepped up for his turn at the diving board, walking slowly to the end, JoJo remembered a crucial detail. “I don’t know, but that’s the deep end and Race can’t swim!”

Race waved again to Spot, who was not paying him any attention, focusing on the busy pool full of kids. The gravity of the situation hit all of the boys at once, and they started swimming and shoving their way to the ladder, yelling. “Race!” Someone yelled. “Get down!”

Race took a huge breath, plugged his nose, and stepped off the diving board into the pool, creating almost no splash. “No!” the boys shouted simultaneously. They ran across the pool deck, ignoring the warnings of the lifeguards, toward the deep end, where Race still had not surfaced.

Spot Conlon noticed the boys’ panic and turned his attention toward the deep end, where Race had settled on the pool floor, nine feet below the surface. Spot blew a long blast on his whistle and jumped from the lifeguard tower into the pool, where he dove quickly, grabbed Race beneath the arms, and kicked off the ground to propel them both back to the surface.

The boys clustered by the side of the pool, yelling Race’s name. JoJo looked like might cry. Ike was already in tears. Spot’s head broke the surface of the water as he swam toward the edge of the pool.

“Move back,” a lifeguard said, shoving his way toward the pool. Another lifeguard was already kneeling at the edge. Spot passed Race over to the lifeguards out of the water. As soon as Race was out of the way, Spot hauled himself out of the pool.

The lifeguards spoke quietly to each other as they checked Race over, but Spot decided that there wasn’t any time to waste on discussion. “Nevermind!” he snapped. “Move over.” He pressed an ear to Race’s chest, listening for any sign of life, and immediately started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Spot plugged Race’s nose and gave two quick breaths before moving down, once again listening at Race’s chest. He repeated this several times as the boys watched.

“Come on, Race,” Albert muttered anxiously.

“Race, come on.”

“Race!”

“Come on, Race. Come on, Race.”

Specs had been holding his breath by accident. “Breathe, would you?” he whispered.

“Come on, Race!” Davey urged. “You can do it- pull through!”

JoJo bit his lip. “He looks pretty crappy.”

All the while, Spot kept administering breaths as Race laid lifelessly on the pool deck.

“Oh, God,” Elmer said with horrifying realization. “He looks like a dead fish.”

As Spot moved down again to listen at Race’s chest, Race’s eyes flashed open for just a second as he shot his friends a brief, shit-eating grin, which immediately composed itself back to its previous dead state.

“What?” the boys gasped together, drawing back in surprise.

As Spot Conlon came back up to administer another breath, like a shot, Race reached up and grabbed the lifeguard’s face, kissing him for what had to be a solid four seconds- longer than any of them had ever kissed anyone before.

Spot yanked back in furious shock. “You little pervert!” he yelled. Spot leapt up from where he had been kneeling at Race’s side and grabbed Race by the arm, dragging him into a standing position.

“Oh, man! He’s in deep shit!” Mike yelled.

Spot Conlon dragged Race forcefully to the exit of the pool as the boys trailed behind, chattering amongst themselves and laughing so hard that they thought they might wet themselves. Spot shoved Race out of the fence that separated the pool from the rest of the world, and motioned for the other boys to get out, as well. “And stay out!” Spot shouted.

Their clothes and towels were tossed to them from the locker room, and the boys hurried away from the pool, all of them giving Race high fives and pats on the back. “Here’s your towel,” Albert said, passing it over. “Did you plan that?”

Race smirked. “Of course I did. Been planning it for years.”

“You guys,” Al yelled gleefully. “He planned that! He knew what he was doing!”

Anthony “Racetrack” Higgins walked a little taller that day. The boys had to tip our hats to him. He was lucky that Spot hadn’t beaten the crap out of him. No one would have blamed him. What Race had done was sneaky, rotten… and cool. Not one of those boys would have ever in a million years, for a million dollars, had the guts to put the move on the lifeguard. Race did. He had kissed a man, and he had kissed him long and good.

They got banned from the pool forever that day. But every time they walked by after that, the lifeguard looked down from his tower and smiled, right over at Race.

#newsies #racetrack higgins #spot conlon #sandlot au #spot is wendy pefferman #myfics