The Girl Who Threw Butterflies

by Mick Cochrane

  This was fun. Molly loved Celia's goofy riffs and hated to cut her off. She would have loved to linger. But she had to get moving. She lifted her bag from the bottom of her locker. In half an hour she was supposed to be on the practice field.

  “Here,” Celia said. “Take this.”

  She put something into Molly's hand. It was a small clear stone, like an ice chip.

  “It's beryl,” Celia said. “Or maybe bauxite. Or maybe something else. I'm not sure. But it's definitely a mineral that starts with a B. And it's definitely lucky.”

  “You stole it,” Molly said. She knew Celia had a study hall in the earth science classroom.

  Celia wrapped Molly's fingers around the stone, the way your grandmother gives you money for ice cream, making a tight little package for safety, giving her hand a squeeze.

  “For luck,” Celia said. “Put it in your shoe, hide it in your glove.”

  4. WELCOME TO BASEBALL

  or the first half hour, all they did was stretch. Arranged in a huge circle around Coach Morales, Molly and nearly thirty boys slowly and systematically worked the muscles in their shoulders, backs, arms, and legs. They rotated their necks, spun circles with their arms, rolled their wrists, yanked their elbows above their heads, twisted their trunks; they got down, extended their legs, and tugged at their toes.

  Morales positioned himself in the center of the circle and exercised right along with them. In school he seemed slightly geeky, a tall guy with thinning hair, dressed in a yellow short-sleeved shirt and striped tie. He seemed awkward patrolling the cafeteria. But on the field, in sweats, with a ball cap on his head, sunglasses perched on the brim, he looked lithe and supple. He moved like an athlete, like a ballplayer. Here, he looked so much more natural than he did in the cafeteria, so much more at ease. This was apparently his element, his real home turf.

  Morales gave instructions and counted off repetitions. His voice was insistent but patient, calmly demanding they contort and twist their limbs beyond any reasonable limit. He sounded like a drill instructor who'd studied Zen, or maybe hypnotism, like one of those perky TV fitness gurus but heavily tranquilized.

  Molly was self-conscious at first. She could just imagine how foolish she looked. But before too long, she lost herself in the sheer physical effort involved. She could feel the muscles in her back and upper arms, muscles she seldom used, and the sting wasn't completely unpleasant. It reminded her that she had muscles. She felt like she was getting acquainted with the complex machinery of her own body, all her moving parts.

  Molly had arrived on the field just a few minutes before Morales had blown his whistle and, without any formal welcome or introduction, started them off stretching. There'd been a big group of boys gathered around the third-base bench. She recognized most of them. Ryan Vogel, the BO king, her saxophone partner, was there. Lloyd Coleman, Mario Coppola, Grady Johnston. They were boys she knew by reputation to be the jocks, the alpha males. In school they wore sports jerseys and expensive sneakers, ate lunch together, all members of the same exclusive club. Next year, when they moved on to high school, they'd become the varsity lettermen; they'd take cheerleaders to homecoming. They lived at the top of the food chain.

  They were chewing gum and spitting sunflower seeds, pushing and pawing each other and kicking up dirt, knocking off each other's caps. They were tall as men, some of them, had ropey muscles in their arms, but they still acted like little boys. The whole scene at the bench looked a lot like fourth-grade recess.

  She had lingered behind the backstop, maybe ten yards away, and pretended to adjust her cleats. She untied and retied each a couple of times. Then somebody must have noticed her, because the hubbub suddenly ceased. Molly was afraid to look up. She tied her right shoe one more time, as slowly and as deliberately as she could. There was the sound of some whispering. Then Morales had blown his whistle.

  Before long, Molly heard some grumbling from around the circle. “What is this?” someone to her left said. “Yoga?”

  “If I wanted to do ballet,” someone else muttered, “I would have worn my tutu.”

  The trouble with boys and sports, it seemed to Molly, was that it was all about them. The good ones figured they already knew it all; they just knew they were headed to the varsity and then the big leagues. All their lives they'd been told how wonderful they were. She'd watched them on the playground, the hotdog, hothead stars, cheered by their doting dads. They'd been told they could do no wrong. If they struck out, it was the umpire's fault. If they lost, it was because somebody else blew it.

  For them, it wasn't about the team, and it wasn't about the game. It was as if baseball existed just so they could be good at it, so they could show off. They really weren't all that different from the dance girls who lived for the sparkling outfits: Look at me, look at me. Molly wondered if these boys really loved baseball, the sound and smell of it, the rhythm of it, the leather and wood, the grass and dirt, the story and surprise in a good game.

  Morales put them in lines to do some running, but not the usual sprints. First they ran lifting their knees as high as they could, which you can't do fast. Then he asked them to skip—skip! There was practically a mutiny right then and there among the boys. “This is stupid.” “I'm not skipping.” But they all did, or at least tried.

  Molly took an early turn and remembered the carefree joy of skipping, the happy exuberance of it. It made her remember what it felt like to be five years old. She jogged back to her place in line and watched the others take their turns. The sight of a tough guy like Lloyd Coleman trying to skip, and doing it badly, all the while looking over his shoulder to see who might be watching—it was delicious. On videotape it would have been blackmail quality. It was something Molly wanted to remember so she could tell Celia about it the next day at lunch. It would be good for some laughs.

  After everyone took a few turns skipping, they ran backward, and then sideways, crossing one leg over the other. It was hard not to get tangled up, but Molly concentrated, and by her second time through the line, she'd gotten the hang of it.

  Finally, Morales called them in and told them to take a knee. Molly was breathing hard now but seemed no more winded than any of the boys. A couple of them were wheezing pretty radically. They sounded like two-pack-a-day men.

  “Okay,” Morales said. “Welcome to baseball.”

  He told them that in the next week, they would get to know each other.

  He wanted to see what they could do. He hoped to teach them some things.

  His voice was so soft, Molly had to lean forward in or-der to catch what he was saying. In Molly's experience, gym teachers and coaches were holler guys, human bullhorns. But not Morales.

  “Baseball is all about doing little things right,” he said. “That's what we're going to work on.” Molly liked the way he talked. Calm and thoughtful. She liked his message, too. She wanted to believe that little things could make a big difference. It was corny, but when Morales said it, it sounded true.

  “So let's begin at the beginning,” he said. He produced a baseball from his back pocket. The boy next to Molly groaned. What followed was a brief introductory lesson on the art of throw and catch: grip, angle of the arm, release point, spin, lots of attention to footwork.

  It felt oddly like being in school, but Molly, who was a good student, didn't mind. She was near the front and enjoyed watching Morales's slow-motion demonstrations. He was a kind of baseball mime, moving with a smooth, practiced authority she couldn't help but envy.

  Molly found herself trying to remember all of this, to find words for it, so that she could turn it into a story. It was what she did. She'd give Celia the story about Lloyd Coleman trying to skip. But this story, Morales and his base-ball, which he produced from his pocket like a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat or a silk scarf from his sleeve, this one, Molly realized, would have been for her dad. She would have told him in the backyard as they tossed a ball back and forth. Celia wouldn't get it. Her mom wouldn't care. N
ow this story would stay untold. It would be a tree that falls in the forest, unheard.

  “All right,” Morales said. “Grab a ball and find a partner.”

  This was the moment she'd been dreading. Up to now it had been okay for the boys just to treat her as invisible, to act as if she really weren't there. She'd been expecting abuse and resistance and instead simply got ignored. The boys apparently didn't know what to say to her, so they hadn't said anything. Maybe back in T-ball or peewee soccer they'd had a girl teammate, but not since then. They didn't know what to make of her, perhaps, so they just didn't see her. It was fine by Molly—it made things easy. Invisible wasn't all that bad.

  But now she needed a partner. How do you find a partner if you're invisible? She'd survived the buddy-up traumas of elementary-school field trips, mainly thanks to Celia. She'd endured the humiliations involved in sixth-grade boy-girl dance instruction, watching the boys edging away from her and jockeying for turns with the glamour girls. But this was worse. All of a sudden, as if on some secret signal, every boy on the field seemed matched up. They were pointing at each other, nodding, moving off quickly to as-sume positions across from one another. Only Molly seemed to be standing in place. Everyone else was moving away from her, fast. It was like some playground game, and she was obviously “it.” Here, she was some kind of leper, a base-ball untouchable.

  She considered her options. She could just stand there, like a pathetic dork, until maybe Morales told her what to do. Or she could, she could—what? She tried to think.

  Just then she felt a tap on her arm. It was Lonnie House, the boy from her English class. Molly hadn't seen him on the field, or maybe hadn't recognized him. He was wearing a dusty Buffalo Bisons cap at a peculiar angle, his hair sticking out from beneath it in unexpected places.

  “Molly,” he said. “Play catch?”

  “Play catch,” she said. It was a little miracle. She felt like kissing Lonnie, her unlikely savior. But she didn't give anything away. “Sure,” she said.

  They positioned themselves across from each other and waited for Morales's instruction. Molly felt a great surge of emotion, relief and gratitude. This disheveled boy had seen her, he had spoken her name.

  While they were playing catch, Morales moved down the line with a clipboard, asking for names and positions.

  “Molly Williams,” she said—and then pulled a low throw from Lonnie out of the grass on one hop. He had a funny sidearm delivery. He was fast but wild.

  “Nice scoop,” Morales said. “Where do you wanna play?”

  “Pitcher,” she said.

  “Okay,” Morales said. He made a note on his board and moved on down the line.

  Molly liked that he didn't seem especially shocked, or outraged or excited, or even all that interested in the fact that on a team of Gradys and Lloyds, Matthews and Zachs, she was sure to be the one and only Molly. To him, apparently, she wasn't a girl, she was a ballplayer.

  Near the very end of practice, while the infielders and outfielders threw each other grounders and fly balls, Morales asked the pitchers and catchers to join him on the mound.

  Mostly it was the thoroughbreds, Lloyd and Grady and Desmond Davis, the boy stars. Lonnie came along, too, and stood next to Molly, while Morales described a good delivery. “It's all about balance,” he said.

  “I'm a catcher,” Lonnie said, half to himself, half to Molly. Though he didn't seem like the type. Catchers were the squatters, guys named Pudge, with gnarly hands, who barked like bulldogs at their teammates. Was Lonnie telling Molly or trying to convince himself? Molly hoped he wasn't following her around because he felt sorry for her. But it occurred to Molly that maybe he needed a buddy, too.

  Time was short, but Morales wanted to see them pitch. He paired them up, each pitcher with a catcher, Molly with Lonnie—the two of them already like some kind of couple. Grady Johnston was first and threw a rocket. But Morales didn't like his release point, or what he was doing with his left arm, and told him so, while Grady looked decidedly displeased.

  A couple of other boys threw, and then at last it was Molly's turn. She started her windup, and her motion felt perfect, smooth and sure. She knew how to do this. Except this time the ball didn't do what it was supposed to do. It did not travel on a line into her partner's mitt. It sailed over his head. Way over his head. Like into outer space. Molly just stared. It was spectacular and horrifying, like a car accident.

  There was some snickering from down the line. “That's what I'm talking about,” somebody said.

  While Lonnie was chasing down her wild pitch and the boys were hooting it up, Molly could have made her exit. Turned then and there and walked off the field. “Cut your losses” was an expression her mother sometimes used, and this was Molly's opportunity to do just that.

  No one would have blamed her. Her softball friends would have welcomed her back. But she didn't do it. Maybe just because she couldn't imagine telling Celia about it without using the word “quit.” She could feel her friend's lucky stone, or mineral, or whatever it was, tucked in her left sock. She made herself look attentive as Morales, who seemed oblivious to where the pitch actually went, praised her mechanics, her rock-solid balance.

  Her dad had an expression that he sometimes used, too. “Gut check.” When a pitcher was in a jam, when things looked bad, the bases loaded, say, nobody out, late in the game, when the pressure was on, that was a gut check. It's the moment you find out what somebody is made of.

  So she'd launched her first pitch into the stratosphere. It was embarrassing. Big deal. Lloyd Coleman could laugh himself silly. Molly had had worse moments, much worse. These guys had no idea. This was nothing.

  5. GEOGRAPHY LESSON

  olly had gone to bed early that night in October. In order to have time to shower before school in the morning, to eat some breakfast and catch the bus, she had to be up and moving by six-thirty. That night, though, she'd set her alarm for five-thirty, so she'd also have time to study. There was going to be a map quiz in social studies, and she wanted to have one more look at her notes.

  She had always liked geography, had always liked maps. She loved her dad's old-fashioned light-up globe. When she was a little girl, she'd give it a spin, close her eyes, and point, and where her finger landed, that was a place she was going to visit someday: Fiji, Cameroon, the Marshall Islands. She loved saying the names of faraway places. Her dad, who could be Mr. Let's-Look-It-Up, had a huge Rand McNally atlas on his desk that he would consult with the least provocation.

  Molly liked the irregular shapes of the land masses. She could stare at them the way some people did at clouds, the crazy puzzle pieces of the continents, every map an abstract work of art. But as she tested herself on the Mediterranean, she kept confusing the Ionian and Aegean seas, the islands of Crete and Cyprus. She was always muzzy-headed at night, at her best early in the day. With a few minutes of study in the morning, Molly was confident she'd nail it. Acing a quiz, getting an A, earning good grades like merit badges—back then, it had seemed so important. Back then, if she'd blown a test, that was a bad day. If she'd made a stupid calculation in math, if she'd accidentally skipped an essay question in English, that would be a tragedy. What did she know about tragedy?

  When she flicked off her bedside lamp that night, Molly could have drawn a perfectly accurate map of her own world. Her mother was downstairs in the family room, half watching something on television, looking through some work papers. She'd stay up for the news—she made fun of the local anchors but watched anyway. She'd maybe watch a little bit of Nightline, then come up to bed.

  Her dad was downtown, working the graveyard shift at the newspaper. He was in the big newsroom she'd visited many times over the years, perched on the chair she used to spin and roll around in, staring into his computer screen, a framed picture of her next to his cup of pencils.

  He'd always wanted to be a sportswriter. His heroes were those old-time, cigar-sucking, typewriter-pounding fellows. Guys named Red and Lefty.
At the college where he'd met Molly's mother, he'd studied journalism and even had his own column in the school newspaper. Molly knew this because she'd discovered copies of it stashed in the attic: There was a grainy photo of her young dad and his byline.

  But somehow he ended up on the copydesk of the Buffalo News, where he didn't actually write much of anything except headlines and captions, the sentences under pictures that hardly anybody even read. Kimberly Royce of West Seneca enjoys a sunny afternoon in Delaware Park with her four-legged friend. Will McMaster of Cheektowaga bows his head in prayer Sunday during the opening of Kingdom Bound. He cut out extra words and fixed other people's mistakes, put commas in all the right places, made sure that everyone's name was spelled correctly and that the names of federal agencies were appropriately capitalized. He used to joke about irate local bowlers calling him to complain if he misspelled one of their names in the weekly scores. But he rarely talked about what he did at work anymore. When asked, he made a backhand gesture, a bored, wordless dismissal.

  Molly sometimes wondered if his work, all the repetition and all the attention he was forced to pay to such trivial things, made him sad. She worried that his job was taking the starch out of him. He seemed grayer lately, slumped. It occurred to Molly that her father needed some kind of project to cheer him up, something he could throw himself into. He'd never been much of a tool guy; he didn't do birdhouses. She decided that he ought to write a book. It was something she intended to mention to him, but she hadn't gotten around to it. She was waiting for the right moment.

  Molly was beat; she fell asleep right away. Sometime during the night she heard something, or rather, later, she remembered hearing things, half hearing, really. Some kind of minor commotion downstairs. Voices, the telephone, the doorbell? It seemed remotely dramatic, urgent but distant and muted, like a television show from another room.

  At five-thirty her alarm buzzed. Molly tapped it and got right up. Her mom was a big fan of the snooze alarm, but it didn't work for Molly. She hated the feeling of bobbing along half asleep, getting buzzed every five minutes. If you have to get up, get up—that was her theory. She went through her morning routine—shower, hair drying, getting dressed, making her bed—crisply and quickly. What had she been thinking about? It was hard to remember, it seemed so long ago. It was another lifetime. Was she thinking about Mediterranean islands? Was she worrying about her grades? Hoping that her friends would notice her new sweater?