Boy Toy

by Barry Lyga

  "I know. I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

  "Fuck you!" she says again, this time over her shoulder as she stalks off the mound and heads toward the gate.

  Shit. How did I get into this? Why did I get into this?

  I chase after her, which isn't difficult since I'm running and she's walking—walking with that fast, pissed-off gait people use when they want to get the hell out of the area, but walking nonetheless.

  "Wait, Rache." I grab her arm without realizing what I'm doing.

  "Get the fuck off me!" she spins around, jerking out of my grasp. At least she didn't say, "You freak!" or "You pervert!"

  "God, I'm sorry. I really am. I shouldn't have touched you."

  She crosses her arms over her chest, her glove hanging down. "Why did you have to say that? Huh? Why did you have to be such a dick about it?"

  "I don't know. Stupidity. I'm a fucking imbecile, OK?"

  She glares.

  "But, look, Rache..." God, I don't want to fuck this up. It feels like, for the first time in years, I can actually communicate with someone other than Zik. And maybe even more than Zik. I don't know. If you'd asked me a week ago, I would have told you the odds of me ever speaking to Rachel Madison, much less having an in-depth heart-to-heart with her, were somewhere between zero and none. Of course, I would have given the same odds that she could strike me out.

  Maybe that means something.

  I don't know. It's not the forgiveness. Or at least, it's not just the forgiveness. I'm not sure what it is.

  "Rache, look. You won the bet, OK? Fair and square. You won."

  She narrows her eyes, but she stays put.

  I take in a deep breath, but my lungs won't let me hold it for long, and it all comes dribbling out in a series of weak sighs.

  "You won. I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything."

  But I'm not ready to. Not at all. I'm scared. Not the sort of "Oh, what am I going to do?" scared or the hand-wringing "How do I get out of this?" scared. This is full-on piss-your-pants, shit-your-drawers, "Who do I kill to get out of here?" terror. Sweat's running down my back and gathering under my balls, which have shriveled to tight grapes for protection.

  She has to know. She has to see the fear writ large on my face, because there can't be anything else there right now—there's no room for it...

  And

  —Whoever gets the bottle pointed at them—

  —pouted again, but went ahead and spun the bottle once more—

  I realize that I never

  —The bottle has to spin all the way—

  stood a chance. Not with Rachel.

  "Josh? You OK?"

  "I'm fine."

  "You look like you're"

  —I've been practicing spinning that bottle all week—

  "spacing out again."

  "No." I shake my head, sending flickers off into space. "No, I'm fine."

  Never stood a chance. She's always ten steps ahead of me. Always has been. On the field and off.

  Flashbacks, Not Flickers (I)

  1

  "He's old enough now."

  That's what I remember my mom saying at the time. She and Dad were arguing about her going back to work. She saw an ad on a bulletin board for an assistant to a professor at LEC, and she wanted to go for it.

  "Damn it, Jenna," Dad said. They didn't know I could hear them through the vents. "We agreed that until he goes off to college—"

  "That was a stupid agreement," Mom shot back. Mom was hard-core. Tough. I always thought it was cool, as a kid, that my mother could kick ass. "He's old enough to look after himself for two lousy hours in the afternoons. You think a twelve-year-old can't look after himself for a couple of hours?"

  "What if you have to work late? What if there's an emergency?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, LEC is only twenty minutes away!"

  "Twenty minutes away from here. It's more like forty-five minutes from his school."

  My dad has always been master of the nitpick.

  "How do you plan on paying for college on your salary alone?" I was only twelve, but I recognized that Mom had just scored the verbal equivalent of castration.

  "There are scholarships..." Dad said, but I could tell he was weakening. Money was always tight around the house. Not like we were poor or anything, but just enough that I knew my parents thought about it a lot. College was six years away for me, and I hadn't given it much thought at this point. My dad had always talked about me getting a baseball scholarship somewhere, which never made sense to me. If I was going to play baseball, why not go pro? But he was my dad, and I figured he knew something I didn't, so I would just nod whenever he brought it up.

  "You can't expect him to go four years on scholarships. He could get injured. Or he might lose interest in baseball."

  Mom was nuts. Lose interest in baseball? Impossible. That was like saying someday I would get tired of sneaking peeks at the high school girls who practiced cheerleading at our field. Give me a break!

  They argued for a while longer and I got bored with it when they started tossing numbers out there, because in those days unless it was a batting average, an ERA, or algebra homework, it just didn't interest me. I drifted off to sleep, and at breakfast Mom said, "Honey, would you mind if I wasn't here when you got home from school?"

  I shrugged. "Why?"

  "Well, I might go back to work. So I wouldn't get home until closer to when Dad gets home."

  "Who'll pick me up when baseball starts?" Practice could run until six or so.

  "One of us will. Whoever gets home sooner. Does that sound OK?"

  "I don't care." And I really didn't.

  ***

  Zik lived too far away for us to get together back in those pre-driving days. There were a bunch of kids in the neighborhood I was friends with, but I had hoped that Mom's absence would mean something cool, something new, something forbidden.

  Instead, it just meant that I had to fix my own snack, and then go outside and play with the usual suspects.

  Rachel was one of the regulars, though we were getting to the point where a lot of the guys had decided that it wasn't cool to play with a girl anymore, especially one who could strike out just about everyone and also run a football at the speed of sound. I used to worry about hurting

  Rachel when we played football (we played tackle), but it was never an issue—if she had the pigskin, none of us could catch her.

  That fall introduced me to the wonders of being completely alone, if I wanted.

  It also introduced me to Evelyn Sherman.

  2

  Mrs. Sherman was my history teacher that year. It was her second year as a teacher, I learned later, and her first year at South Brook Middle. She had been at the high school the previous year and transferred when the history position opened up at South Brook Middle.

  It's difficult, now, to describe her as I first saw her. How to recapture that initial blend of adolescent lust and childlike innocence, that mixture of "God, she's hot!" and "Look at the pretty lady!" and "I think I'm in love," the same combination of emotions that hit all of the boys in her history class. With the perspective of six years and a relationship that went far beyond teacher/pupil, it would be easy to give a certain picture of her. But that wouldn't explain the impact she had on me at that moment, right then.

  So I'll do my best.

  I guess the first thing that I noticed, really, was her hair. It was black. Jet black. So black that it shone like onyx under the fluorescent lights of the classroom. It was long, tumbling over her shoulders. I wanted to run my fingers through it. Somehow I thought it would be warm to the touch, like cookies just out of the oven.

  I noticed her hair first only because she was sitting down at her desk, bent over a book, making a tick mark occasionally. As we filed into the room, she glanced up, but then went back to her book, so all I saw at first was that lustrous hair.

  When we were all sitting down and the bell to start class rang, she
looked up from her work and smiled. I noticed the smile third because in looking up, she straightened and her chest came into view, tight against her blouse, and that's when a sort of sigh went up from the male contingent.

  It wasn't that she had enormous breasts or that they were perfectly formed or anything like that. It's that they were just a little bit too big for her frame, just slightly out of proportion, so that no matter how much you wanted to, you couldn't stop yourself from looking at them over and over, thinking, "I must have seen them wrong," and going back to them to make sure.

  I was glad she wasn't my math teacher; in history, I wouldn't have to get up and go to the blackboard, which would have been beyond mortifying.

  But, third, that smile...

  Red lips, full and soft-looking, revealing bright white teeth. She had one dimple when she smiled, on the left cheek only, and it made her somehow imperfect and more beautiful for it. Her eyes were a bright green, smoky under the slim black arches of her eyebrows. They seemed to glow.

  "Good morning," she said, and smiled even more broadly, and then took roll. When she got to me, I responded "Here" and dutifully raised my hand. She hesitated, then went on to the next person.

  By the time she stood up and went to the overhead projector to start explaining what this class would be about this year, I was pretty sure I'd fallen in love. Her blouse was a creamy white and very loose, though it seemed to cling every time she moved. Her skirt was straight and black, hitting just about the knee, with no slit, but it clung to her so that you could see her legs moving beneath, see the swell of her hips, which I'd never, ever noticed in a woman before. I was a typical American adolescent male—I had zeroed in on any number of chests and rear ends in my life, but Mrs. Sherman's were the first hips to make me go, Wow!

  3

  Seventh grade was a good year for me, a year when I really came into my own on the ball field. I went 16 for 32 at the plate for a flat .500 batting average, but my on-base percentage was even higher—.754. I think I would have done even better if I'd had more playing time, but there were always more kids who wanted to play than time and positions and our league emphasized participation over victory, so I ended up playing half games most of the time.

  In the field, I played shortstop, like Cal Ripken had for most of his career. I did well there, though I didn't like it. I threw ten outs at first, four at second, and assisted on two double plays. It should have been four double plays, but the first baseman dropped the ball once and got knocked over by the runner the second time.

  But the big thing about Fall Ball that year was, well, big. And that was me. I had always been a small guy, but as seventh grade kicked off, I had just experienced a massive summer growth spurt. I looked more like a high school freshman than a seventh-grader, towering over most of the kids in my class, with shoulders as broad as a kindergartener was tall. My voice cracked on occasion, but since I tended to think things through before speaking, it wasn't that much of a problem; I knew where the danger syllables were, and I could compensate for them.

  I'd always possessed the skills and, I suppose, a certain level of natural talent, but now I could actually get decent pitches in or near the strike zone, and I took them into the bushes a good deal of the time.

  I never played baseball for ego stroking, but I have to admit that when I started knocking the horsehide all over creation, it gave me a good feeling. After all, this is what I'd been training for ever since my dad handed me a Wiffle ball bat and pitched me my first little blooper back when I was a little kid. Now I was finally using the skills I'd developed, and it felt great.

  Just as great was having my best friends around me while it happened. Zik was coming along as a catcher, making some decent plays at the plate. He was sort of fearless in a way that marveled me. A kid twice his size could be barreling down the base path from third toward home, murder in his eyes, and Zik would set his feet in front of the plate, clutching the ball like it was his own child, and let the kid plow right into him and never, ever lose the ball. He got the out every time, along with a reputation for being willing to get the shit knocked out of him as long as it meant a win for the team.

  Rachel was playing softball now, and for the first time the Three Musketeers were divided. (We called ourselves the Four Musketeers when Michelle was around, but by unspoken agreement between the athletes, we shifted to Three when discussing sports, which Michelle avoided.) The girls' softball field was near our practice field, though, so Zik and I would sneak over whenever we could to watch. We'd tease Rachel about her bizarre (to us) underhanded wind-up and delivery, but in pri vate we agreed that she was the best of the players we'd seen. We missed having her play baseball—even though she'd usually ended up on an opposing team, she was fun to practice with and play against.

  Now, her reassignment to the depths of girls' softball was as much evidence as my sudden growth spurt that we were, inevitably, growing up.

  4

  History was my favorite subject that year, and not just because Mrs. Sherman was so much fun to look at. We were being taught all kinds of cool stuff—the Black Plague, the Crusades, stuff like that. Disease, death, brutal warfare—throw in some sex and music and you would have hit the jackpot.

  Mrs. Sherman had, two weeks into the year, suddenly dowdied herself down. Zik and I talked about it on the bus for a while, trying to figure out why she'd foregone the clingy skirts and filmy blouses for heavier dresses and slacks and sweaters. Sure, it was getting cooler out, but it wasn't cold yet. She was still beautiful, her eyes warm and almost too intense for her face, her single dimple showing up whenever she smiled, and those lips...

  But her body was becoming more and more of a mystery.

  "Maybe she's pregnant," Zik said one day on the bus.

  I hadn't even thought of that. I didn't even realize she was married. Or, rather, it hadn't firmly locked into my brain that she was married. We called her "Mrs. Sherman," so of course we knew that she was married, but the home lives of teachers were, at our age, purely theoretical constructs. Evidence pointed to their existence, but we had no concrete proof.

  "Maybe." For some reason, I didn't like the idea of her being pregnant. I couldn't explain it, so I didn't say it.

  "That would be awesome," Zik said. "I remember when my aunt was pregnant." He cupped his hands in front of his chest. "Huge, man! Huge!"

  We laughed over that until some eighth-grader behind us told us to shut up, and then we just reduced ourselves to giggles.

  As Fall Ball wrapped up, parent-teacher conferences kicked in. Mom and Dad went together back then. I had to go, too, since there would be no one to watch me at home. By now Mom had been working at Lake Eliot College for two months, but they weren't about to give me free rein in the house all day, so I ended up grumbling and complaining in the back seat on the way to school on a day that was supposed to be a vacation for me.

  I sat in the back of each classroom as Mom and Dad held hushed conversations with my teachers up at their desks. Mom did most of the talking.

  They spent the most time with Mrs. Sherman, who had dressed up that day, wearing a sleek gray skirt suit. From my position in the back of the room, I had a terrific view of her legs. It was intoxicating; I thought I might pass out.

  On the way home, while Dad drove, Mom turned to me. "All of your teachers say you're doing very well."

  "I know." And I did. I couldn't figure out the point of these conferences; I had an A in every class. The Streak was only three years old at that point, but I was still pretty confident.

  "I don't know about these things," Mom said to Dad, echoing my thoughts. "They never have anything to say except, 'He's a great student. He's a good kid.' I'm starting to feel weird about it."

  "You feel weird hearing good things about your kid?" Dad asked.

  Mom sighed. "No. Don't you notice how they look at you? Like 'Are you so egotistical you have to come here to hear me gush about your son?'"

  "I think you're overthinking t
his."

  "Maybe you're underthinking it," Mom said.

  Dad grunted. Mom turned back to me. "So, josh, who's your favorite teacher?"

  It was no contest; history was just too cool a class. "Mrs. Sherman."

  Mom laughed. "Yeah, I bet," she said.

  Dad chuckled like he knew a secret. "Well, that's one thing we don't have to worry about, I guess," and Mom snorted more laughter.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Nothing, honey. Don't worry about it."

  Seventh grade was also the year I got really sick and tired of stuff like that from my parents. "No." I leaned forward, straining against the seat belt. "Come on, Mom. What did he mean?"

  "Nothing."

  "Dad?"

  "It's an adult thing." One of Dad's favorite phrases back then.

  "Come on, you guys!" My voice cracked there, which ruined what I was about to say, which was "I'm almost an adult!" So I tried a different tactic instead. "It's not nice to talk about me like that while I'm right here."

  Mom and Dad shared a glance.

  "We just..." Mom hesitated, thinking. "All we meant was that it makes sense that you like Mrs. Sherman, because she likes you."

  Huh? In a kid's lexicon, like can mean many things and is used as a substitute for lust after and love, as in: "I like her. I mean, I like like her." Even suffering from a brand of puppy love, I knew that Mrs. Sherman didn't like like me.

  "She said that you're her best student, but she was worried at first because you look so much older and more mature than most of the other kids. She thought you had been held back a year and she couldn't figure out why you were in the advanced class. So she was relieved when you turned out to be a smart kid. What did she call him, Bill?"

  "'My little historian,'" Dad said, without missing a beat.

  Her little historian? From their reactions, my parents clearly thought it was cute, but I was horrified. It sounded like I was a doll or an action figure.