Team Players

by Mike Lupica

  This book is for Teri Thompson

  BEFORE THE SEASON . . .

  ONE

  It wasn’t as if Cassie Bennett were looking to make any new friends that summer.

  She definitely wasn’t looking to lose any.

  She ended up doing both.

  DURING THE SEASON . . .

  TWO

  As weird as it sounded, sometimes Cassie felt as if managing the friends she had, in school and in sports, were like having a full-time job.

  Cassie had her classmates at Walton Middle, where the school year had ended the previous Friday. She was about to have her softball teammates, as the All-Star League in their part of the state was about to begin.

  Some of her classmates were teammates, but not all.

  On top of all that, she had her best friends in the world, Jack Callahan and Teddy Madden, Gus Morales, and his twin sister, Angela. Though, Angela wasn’t around right now. She’d signed up for Walton’s Teen Abroad program, and was spending most of the next two months staying with a family in Barcelona to study art.

  For now her friendship with Angela involved Skype and FaceTiming. Cassie spent a lot of their conversations offering to pay Angela to stop speaking Spanish as often as she did.

  “I get it,” Cassie had said to her last night on Skype. “You’re not just having an adventure without me. You’re having it in your second language.”

  “Technically,” Angela said, “and as much as I know you hate being corrected, Spanish is my first language.”

  Her parents had been born in the Dominican Republic, and both Gus and Angela had spoken Spanish before they’d spoken English.

  “All I know,” Cassie said, “is that now you’re annoying me in both languages.”

  “De nada,” Angela said, smiling at Cassie through cyberspace, and from across the world, telling Cassie, “You’re welcome.”

  “Cállate,” Cassie said.

  Shut up.

  She’d been saving that one.

  Angela laughed, said they’d talk in a couple of days, and cut the connection.

  Cassie knew she was lucky to have the friends she did. She was even smart enough to know by eighth grade that there was nothing more important—at least outside family—than being a good friend and being able to count on your friends, no matter what. She knew more about that than ever before because of the way her friendship had been tested during the previous basketball season, after Cassie had tried out for, and made, the boys’ town team, the Warriors. Gus hadn’t wanted her on the team at first, and for most of the season. He’d gotten mad at her, she’d gotten mad at him, and they’d both dug in. It had sometimes seemed as if they weren’t going to be able to work through all that, and that the friendship might really be gone. There were times when Cassie was sure she’d lost Gus for good. But they had made it through. They had worked it out, both on and off the court, as stubborn as she was and as stubborn as he was.

  In the end, it was what friends did. They were able to figure things out even when one of them thought the other was being as dumb as a sock drawer.

  But it seriously did feel like too much of a full-time job sometimes, having a lot of friends. Or just too much responsibility. If somebody texted you and you didn’t text them back right away, it could quickly turn into a thing. If one of her girlfriends posted a picture on Instagram and Cassie didn’t immediately slap a like on it, pretty soon that was a thing. Or if she wasn’t involved enough when there was a group chat.

  All sorts of things could be things.

  It made Cassie giggle sometimes when she thought of it that way, as if she were starring in a Dr. Seuss story.

  But Cassie was smart enough to know that a lot of the pressure she was feeling was because of who she was. She was the best girl athlete her age in Walton, maybe any age, and because she’d just shown everybody in town that she could hold her own with the boys, it was as if people were watching her more closely than ever. It put even more pressure on her not to act as if she were big-timing her friends, almost as if there were one set of rules for her and another for everybody else.

  She was trying to explain that to Jack and Teddy and Gus at lunch on Monday, at their favorite pizza place in Walton, Fierro’s.

  “No question,” Teddy said. “It’s hard being you.”

  “Cállate,” she said.

  When you get a good thing, stay with it.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “It means ‘shut it’ in Spanish.”

  Teddy grinned across the table at Jack and Gus. “Help me out here,” he said. “Don’t we talk about how hard it is being her?”

  “I think she just manages by being so cool,” Gus said.

  He was grinning too, but at Cassie.

  She leaned forward across the table and gave him what they all called the Look. “Your sister isn’t around to protect you,” she said. “Keep that in mind.”

  “You know,” Gus said, “that is an excellent point right there. Why don’t I cállate and finish my delicious slice.”

  “I’m actually trying to make a serious point here,” Teddy said. “People wanted to hang with you before the basketball season. But now that you became the Mo’ne Davis of the boys’ team, you’re like a rock star.”

  Mo’ne Davis, they all knew, was the girl from Philadelphia who’d been the star pitcher on a boys’ baseball team that had made it all the way to the Little League World Series a few years ago.

  “Wait,” Jack Callahan said. “You mean Cass wasn’t a rock star already?”

  “I wasn’t trying to prove a point in basketball,” she said. “I just wanted to play point guard.”

  “Yeah,” Teddy said, “go with that.” Then Jack and Gus were trying to make laughs sound like coughs, and Teddy was doing the same thing, and somehow Cassie, being Cassie, was able to give them all a withering glance at the same time.

  “Maybe,” she said, “instead of managing all the friends I have in my life, I just could lose three right now.”

  “You know that is a big old no-can-do,” Jack said. “We’re a team.”

  They’d always called themselves the “Home Team.” And they had been through a lot together, over the past year or so. The rest of them had helped Jack through the death of his older brother, Brad, who’d died in a dirt-bike accident. They’d all helped Teddy get into shape and overcome obesity, and also deal with his divorced dad coming back into his life unannounced. Then all four of them had survived what had happened between Gus and Cassie during the basketball season. It really was a lot. But they were a team.

  More important, they were friends.

  “You know what they say in sports every time a coach or manager gets fired,” Teddy said. “You can’t fire the whole team.”

  She leaned forward again and said, “Watch me, funny man.”

  “You know,” Teddy said, and not for the first time, “that look doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it used to.”

  “But it still scares you,” Jack said.

  “Oh, totally,” Teddy said.

  “You know what your problem is?” Cassie said. “You just have no idea what it’s like to be a girl, do you?”

  Jack looked at Gus. “Is there really a good answer to that question?”

  Gus, mouth full of pizza, slowly shook his head from side to side.

  “Wait a second,” Jack said. “Aren’t you the one always telling us that girls are smarter and cooler than boys?”

  “I am,” Cassie said. “Just not all girls. It’s just that sometimes they can act dumber than, well, boys.”

  “Hey,” Teddy said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s kind of sad.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Jack said. “When you
do have girls acting even dumber than guys, when they’re worrying about stuff you don’t worry about, why do you worry about that?”

  Teddy, frowning, turned to Gus and said, “You know, I think I actually followed that.”

  “When you’re a guy and a girl doesn’t talk to you, it might upset you, but you deal with it,” Cassie said. “But sometimes with other girls, you just can’t avoid the drama, even if it’s something as small as not talking or even not nodding to one of them when I pass them in the hall at school. Or if one of them or all of them has decided that I’ve spent too many days in a row sitting with you guys at lunch and not them. I mean, like, get over it!”

  “I get it,” Jack said.

  “Like I said,” she said, “it’s not all girls. Just a small group of them.”

  “But they’re still your friends,” Jack said.

  “And if they are, they shouldn’t have to worry about me being there for them if they need me.”

  Gus said, “Heck, I know that better than anybody now, even if I had to find out the hard way.”

  She leaned over and pinched the upper part of his arm.

  “I hate when you do that,” Gus said.

  “If you didn’t hate it,” she said, “what fun would it be to do that?”

  She took a bite of her own slice of pizza, then washed it down with some water. Then she frowned and shook her head.

  “You know that expression our parents are always using about not sweating the small stuff?” she said. “I think they should change it to not sweating the stupid stuff. Girls or boys.”

  She had no way of knowing at lunch that day how much truly stupid stuff she was about to encounter.

  She had absolutely no idea that she was about to learn more about friendship—and who her friends really were—than she ever had before.

  THREE

  Her name was Sarah, and right away Cassie knew there was something different about her. But that was before anybody saw her run down a ball in the outfield, or throw, or swing a bat.

  “She’s special,” Cassie’s dad told her before softball tryouts began that night.

  “Are you talking about special needs, Dad?” Cassie said. “We’ve had a bunch of special-needs kids at school.”

  “Just special,” her dad said. “Think of her that way, same as her parents do. You’ll see.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I met her parents and Sarah at the field yesterday,” her dad said, “and worked her out a little bit, and tried to get to know her.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Cassie said.

  Her dad grinned. “Must’ve slipped my mind.”

  “Dad,” Cassie said, “nothing ever slips your mind.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “You’re gonna be happy she’s on our team. You and the other girls are just going to have to give her a little room at first.”

  Cassie was sure that nothing, not even a new girl, was going to change how happy she was to be back on a baseball field again. She loved soccer and loved basketball, girls’ or boys’ basketball. She had always loved competing. And loved to win, whatever the sport. There was just something about softball, whether she was pitching or hitting or playing shortstop, that she loved most of all.

  But it was hard not to notice the new girl, who’d been standing alone in the outfield, glove on her left hand, from the moment she’d taken the field, waiting for batting practice to begin.

  She hadn’t spoken to any of the other girls yet. As far as Cassie could tell, she hadn’t even looked at any of them. Cassie wasn’t watching her every minute, but when she did look out there, Sarah was simply staring down at the outfield grass.

  Until the first ball was hit in her direction.

  Lizzie Hartong, who’d been the third baseman on last year’s team, the Orioles, and was expected to play the same position this year, was the first batter of the night. Cassie’s dad was pitching to her.

  “Heads up, everybody. Good hitter,” Chris Bennett yelled.

  Cassie saw Sarah pick her head up then, still in the same spot in right-center field, saw her react to the ball coming off Lizzie’s bat like a rocket, Lizzie’s first big swing of the summer, the ball looking as if it were on its way toward the wall in left-center, or maybe over it.

  Cassie, waiting to hit after Lizzie, watched Sarah take off to her right, covering an amazing amount of ground on her long legs even though she didn’t seem to be running her hardest, her eyes tracking the ball, focused only on that. But even with the great jump she’d gotten, Cassie thought there was no way she could outrun Lizzie’s ball.

  But she did.

  She didn’t put up her glove hand, reaching across her body, until the last possible second, maybe ten feet away from the Dunkin’ Donuts sign on the wall in left-center. She stretched across her body, and reached for the sky with her glove, made the backhand catch, stopped herself a few feet short of the wall, pivoted, and made a perfect throw to Allie Gordon at second base.

  As soon as Sarah had made the throw, she ran back to the exact same spot in right-center, head back down.

  Cassie felt her dad looking at her from the pitcher’s mound. He was smiling as he mouthed the words, Told you.

  Cassie smiled back at him, and nodded.

  They’d talk later, at home, about autism and about Asperger’s syndrome, the developmental disorder on the autism spectrum—the disorder with which Sarah Milligan had been born.

  For now, though, on the field at Highland Park, Cassie understood what her father had meant when he’d called Sarah special.

  • • •

  She could hit, too.

  And she could pitch.

  She couldn’t pitch as fast, or as well, as Cassie Bennett could. But when Cassie’s dad went behind the plate and got into a catcher’s crouch and told Sarah to cut loose, Cassie saw the way the ball exploded out of her right hand, and how natural her windmill motion looked. Cassie heard the sound the softball made in her dad’s old catcher’s mitt.

  “She’s weird, but she’s really good,” Kathleen Timmins, their left fielder last season, said to Cassie.

  Cassie grinned. “Wait,” she said, “that sounds exactly like you.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I can’t help myself.”

  “Is she really going to play on our team?” Nell Green said.

  “You’ve been watching tryouts,” Cassie said to her. “What do you think?”

  Kathleen said, “She doesn’t talk.”

  Cassie said, “With the way our team talked last year, that’s probably a good thing. A blessing, even.”

  They were halfway through tryouts. Everybody had batted by now and gone through some basic baserunning drills. Cassie’s dad and Allie’s dad were about to separate the outfielders from the infielders and have them all take the field. Cassie was a shortstop when she wasn’t pitching, but before the fielding drills began, she ran out to where Sarah was standing in right-center, alone. Cassie’s dad hadn’t told the other girls what he’d told Cassie, about giving Sarah room.

  But the other outfielders were doing just that, almost as if they were afraid to approach her, like there was some sort of force field around her, less than an hour into the new season.

  Cassie ran straight to where Sarah was standing, the exact same spot to which she returned every time after she had caught a fly ball during batting practice.

  “I’m Cassie,” she said, and put out her hand.

  Cassie couldn’t tell whether Sarah looked startled or just plain frightened at first. But she finally put out her own right hand, just the way you would if you were afraid you might be touching a hot plate.

  She didn’t look at Cassie as she did, staring past her, like she was fixed on some spot in the infield.

  “Sarah,” she said.

  “That was some catch you made at the start of tryouts,” Cassie said.

  She was looking right at Sarah. Sarah was still looking in the direction of
home plate, or maybe downtown Walton.

  Sarah didn’t respond, just kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

  Cassie wasn’t giving up.

  “How long have you been playing?” she said.

  “I never played,” she said.

  Then she was running again, not after a ball in the air this time, just running toward first base, then past first base. Cassie was afraid she might be running right off the field, like she might be thinking about running all the way home. But when she got to the bench, she suddenly sat at the end of it, head still down, alone.

  Cassie wasn’t sure if she understood. No, she was sure she didn’t understand Sarah, at least not yet, and maybe not ever. But it wasn’t as if Sarah didn’t want to be around other people. It just seemed that she didn’t know how to act when she was.

  She didn’t want to be alone. But didn’t know how not to be.

  FOUR

  When they got home, Cassie’s dad told her as much as he said he knew about Asperger’s, at least for now.

  “You remember back in fifth grade,” Chris Bennett said to his daughter, “that boy Peter Rizzo, who had autism?”

  “Peter didn’t speak at all,” Cassie said. “But the thing I remember best is how smart he was, especially in math. I used to wish I was nearly as good at math as he was.”

  They were in the living room. Cassie’s mom was out to dinner with Jack’s mom, and Teddy’s.

  “I was trying to explain to you before,” her dad said, “about the autism spectrum. The higher you are on it, the better able you are to function in school, or really in the world.”

  Cassie had only had a couple of classes with Peter Rizzo that year, before he and his family had moved to Texas. Something else she remembered about him—when he’d get frustrated with something in class, even in math, he would just suddenly get up and leave the classroom. And she remembered how frustrated that had made her feel. She’d felt as if there ought to be something she could do to help him, or reach him, make him feel more accepted. Or safe, even. She would try to sit with him sometimes at lunch, because she felt bad when she saw him eating alone, but even that was awkward, because she felt as if she were talking to herself.