They booed and laughed and then they moved on. Becky took her seat, and Mr. Ladd paused for a second to eye the friendship group around the table, one at a time, hard and critical. Then he looked off, hands clasped behind his back, chin raised.
“Give ’em heck today, Michigan.”
He walked off, and they all burst out laughing.
Becky flicked her glance over to where Cody Hatcher had been sitting yesterday, and saw that neither he nor any of his no-mind friends were in the vicinity. It should have relieved her, but it didn’t somehow. After turning the tables on him, English class had been uncomfortable enough, and lunch was a different animal altogether. It would have been nice to know the new boundaries up-front.
Fluffy was shaking his head back and forth, making the pom-pom tassels of his gray knit hat ‘boink’ on his lips.
“You’re going to get brain bruise,” Beth said.
“He already has brain bruise,” Shane answered. Fluffy stopped, rolled his eyes in the sockets like marbles, and said, “I got an HD TV because I felt the lack of resolution was hurting my ability to solve cases on ‘Law and Order SVU.’”
“Boo,” Jill said. “Try again.”
He closed his eyes, made a face, and said, “I dreamt I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up, my pillow was gone.”
“Boo,” they all said. “Try again.”
He opened his eyes and crossed them.
“A mama tomato, a papa tomato, and a baby tomato were walking down the road, and the baby lagged behind. The papa tomato went back to him, stepped on him, and said, ‘ketch-up.’”
“Boo!” they said louder, “Try again!”
He made a goofy cross of his hands in front of himself at the wrists, grabbed the pom-pom tassels backward, and looked up at the ceiling.
“A boy went to the desk and said to the librarian, ‘Can I have a cheese steak?’ She said to him, ‘This is the library.’ So he goes, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then he whispers, ‘Can I have a cheese steak?”
They all laughed, and Jill gave him a shoulder hug. Then she punched his arm. Becky was playing with a straw.
“Guys,” she said. “You can’t tell my parents about the baseball thing, especially my father.”
“Why?” Shane said.
Suddenly she was afraid she was going to cry. Her shoulders did the quick up-down thing, and Beth bailed her out.
“Because he doesn’t understand her, because he hasn’t a clue about women, because he works too hard, and most of all, he’s a man. Does it matter?” She looked around the table. “Becky says, so that’s good enough. Swear on it. Not a word to the parents, no matter what.”
They all put their hands in.
“Swear,” they all said.
When they withdrew, Becky felt she had to say something. In her head, a clumsy “thanks” formed, but instead, she said, “My parents are a bit off the hook. Just warning you. Don’t let them offend you.”
“No one related to you could ever offend me,” Joey said.
“And all parents are freak-a-zoids,” Jill added. “They just have more practice making it seem normal.”
“No,” Becky said. “They’re…” She frowned. “They’re, well…blunt.” She folded her hands and twirled her thumbs. “They’re—“
“Damaged,” Beth finished.
“Aren’t they all?” Justin added.
“Hear, hear,” Jill said. She raised her carton of one-percent. “And while we’re toasting, here’s to Becky Michigan in the gym this afternoon. To the girl with the rifle connected to her shoulder.”
“To the girl,” they all said, drinks held high.
Becky’s drink, orange juice of course, was raised up with the rest of them. She only wished she shared their confidence in “the girl” who, even to herself of late, seemed a stranger.
Chapter Sixteen
Becky got more and more nervous as the day wore on. She heard there were bets going on, pools, and high odds. She was not the favorite but rather the underdog, the fluke to be exposed. And what if they were right? She was going up against a varsity team, some of them eighteen years old and hunting scholarships, most of whom had been hitting baseballs since they could crawl, and she didn’t know anything about actually playing the sport, not really. Statistics were one thing, but actually working all the intricate mechanics of pitching in a competitive situation was a different thing altogether. What exactly had she done in the cafeteria? She couldn’t even remember what shoulder came first and which arm went where. It had been all instinct and spunk.
And she’d never thrown to a catcher. She’d also never thrown a baseball, thank you very much, and though Horseshoe-Head, Coach Rivers, and Principal McGovern were confident in the similarities and minimal differentials between hardballs and oranges, any fool could see this was a long shot.
And then there was the real issue.
What if her feet got tangled up and she stumbled? What if she stepped on a bat and fell on her bum? What if she tripped over a bucket of hardballs and did a face-plant right there on the gym floor?
Becky stuffed her jeans, blouse, and ballet shoes into her book bag, zipped it up, and put it in one of the gym lockers. The door was bent and dented, and she had to use a hip to get her padlock through the hole. When it clicked, there was a finality somehow, a feeling of inevitability. Becky adjusted her sweat pants, checked the string just to be sure, and put on her hat.
It was supposed to make her feel confident, but it didn’t. She just felt odd and, like in the lunchroom today, absolutely surreal.
She got to the door by the gym office and realized she’d neglected to go buy a glove. Her stomach turned over. Now she’d have to borrow, and she didn’t know how to catch a ball in the first place. She pushed out into the hall, face pale and heart pounding. She wasn’t ready for this, and she wanted to turn back.
But there was no turning back at this point, and she knew it. Certain things couldn’t be reversed once set in motion, and Becky Michigan, heart in her throat, walked slowly, numbly, past the trophy cases and made the slight right. She grabbed the gym door handle. Paused there. Pulled. Walked through the archway.
The sound struck her like a wall. She had expected the hard, flat ‘whapping’ of baseballs smacking into leather gloves, the ‘toink’ of bats connecting, the taunts and rally-cries of jocks who clearly commanded the territory, and maybe the murmur of a healthy set of on-lookers gathered to the side.
But the gym was jam-packed, a rock concert, a humongous, raucous pep-rally, two thousand kids at least, crammed into the bleachers across the near side of both gymnasiums usually split by a red, heavy-duty, accordianed partition. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood, and there were many sitting on the floor in ‘foul territory’ behind the make-shift field in the middle of the basketball court, the hoops cranked up to their positions parallel to the ceiling. There was a netting set up in back of home plate to protect those sitting directly behind, and the team was throwing the ball around hard, all in full uniform. Cody Hatcher was in his position at the hot corner. Becky wanted desperately to retreat, or scream, or both, but Coach Rivers had seen her and was jogging over now, all bow-legged, wearing his black baseball sweats, a collared coach’s jersey, knee pads, and a chest protector. He took his place beside her and nodded toward the playing area.
“It’s a beautiful thing, ain’t it, Michigan?”
In a dumb sort of stupor, she shook her head ‘no,’ and he misread it altogether.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. The Plexiglas mound is always a pain, but we just installed new artificial turf grass on there, no slipping, I promise.” He took a broad look around. “You ready for this or what?”
Becky didn’t answer. Behind her, a group of boys high up in the seats started chanting a version of the school fight song with nasty words mixed into it, and a teacher with a dress shirt and khakis scrambled between students to go up and stop it. Kids were hooting, howling, finding seats, razzing, joking, some close
-by trying to catch Becky’s eye to cheer her on, make fun, make her laugh, the works. Both she and the coach looked back at each other and shared a tight grin.
“This is crazy,” Becky said.
“Yeah. If I could get even a small portion of this crowd out to home games, we’d have somewhat of a home field advantage for once. So, what are your pitches and signals?”
“My what?”
“Your signals, your pitches. I’m going to catch you, because I don’t want any of these knuckleheads giving away your next move to the batters. So what do you like? One finger straight down for that four seam fastball?”
Becky got it, of course. They had to be on the same page when he squatted and stuck down fingers representing pitches she’d either shake off or nod, ‘yes’ to. One finger for fastball, right, that was pretty basic.
“Uhh, yeah coach,” she said, her voice small against all the background noise. “One through eight: four seam, cutter, slider, curve, Vulcan change, sinker, splitter, slurve.”
“Got it,” he said. “Let’s make it easy then. The final three will start the series over, one finger flashed twice and so on. It’s an awesome repertoire, kid. Let’s give ‘em a show.”
“Wait!” Becky said, panic rising up in her throat. While she was thankful he’d come up with a way to get past the only five fingers available with the double-down at the end of the set, she suddenly forgot what number six was. So the index finger flashed twice was the sinker? The Vulcan Change? She was bad at math under pressure, her mind was totally blanking, and she’d never thrown seven of these eight pitches to begin with.
“Look out!” someone shouted, “Heads!” and both Becky and Coach Rivers covered up, hearing the clap of a ball bouncing at them fast along the hard wood. Something struck her right in the back of the knee, and it smarted pretty good. Someone had hit her with a ball! She looked out onto the playing area and Cody Hatcher was looking all around, face twisted in like a screw, arms out, like, ‘Really? Who me?’ Someone from the crowd tossed the ball back, and Coach Rivers rubbed it hard with both palms, face grim. Hatcher came over to them, uniform flap untucked on the right side, face red.
“Knickerbacher should have scooped it on the short-hop. Slipped out of my hand, coach, honest.”
“Right,” he said back. “And you only spit on a player because there’s dirt in your mouth. I’ve heard them all. You could have hurt someone, Hatcher. Go hit the showers. You’ve lost your chance at redemption.”
“No,” Becky said, and it was suddenly kind of loud, because the room had quieted to an anxious hush. She stuck out her hand. “Give me the ball.” Coach Rivers handed her the baseball, and she looked at the team out on the playing floor.
“Call the boys in,” she said.
“But who’s going to field…”
“I don’t need fielders.”
“But wait, where’s your glove?”
“I don’t need that either.” She looked at Hatcher. “You, little boy…go grab your bat. Mama’s going to teach you a lesson.”
The crowd roared. Coach waved the team in, and Hatcher stared at her for a moment with slitted eyes before going to put on his helmet. Purposely then, Becky waited right there until the coach had settled in his position behind home plate to put on his mask and Cody Hatcher had taken a few swings off to the side. His bat was a silver one that said ‘Easton Omen’ on it. He looked like he knew how to use it, and in pure defiance, Becky put the ball on the back of her knuckles. For a second she thought of herself trying to do this with a rock and almost getting hit by a bus for her trouble, but the sight of Cody Hatcher, all cocky and in his element, made her burn with a fierce, sort of do-or-die confidence. She started her walk to the mound and, while doing so, never released Hatcher from her icy stare.
Her hand started working as if on its own, flicking the ball an inch or two in the air to next be clutched in a particular grip, one after the other, and between each, she rolled it back to her knuckles in rhythm, showing off all her pitches to come, each grip perfect without even looking, four seam, cutter, slider, curve…Vulcan change, sinker, splitter, slurve, and Cody Hatcher stopped taking mighty practice swings and watched the circus trick with his mouth open. The rhythm of it matched her steps and the crowd picked up on it, clapping on each new grip as she ran through the series. Finally, she took the mound and she waited there, up on the hill, throwing hand dangling down, itching and ready.
The place quieted again, and Coach Rivers squatted.
“Throw a few warm-ups,” he said.
“I don’t need warm-ups,” Becky said. She looked over at Hatcher. “Get in the box.”
That got a huge “Ohhh” and “Ahhh” from everyone, and Hatcher looked around uncertainly. Suddenly, she knew she had taken a huge part of his game away, more so than the damage her little ‘grip-show’ had done to his mo-jo in terms of pure fear-factor. Of course, Hatcher always studied the warm-up pitches. To get his timing down. And now he was stalling, so Becky raised the stakes as high as they could possibly go, not knowing where her courage was coming from but riding the surge anyway. She took a deep breath and let her voice ring out—to the coach, to Hatcher, to the crowd.
“I’m going to go through your starting nine in twenty-eight pitches. Coach, you can double as the ump and call ’em as you see ’em. And I don’t need fielders, because no one’s gonna get wood. Not even a foul tip.”
More murmurs rippled through the crowd and quickly abated. Cody Hatcher looked so mad he could have just burst.
“You’re gonna strike out nine batters?” he spouted. “Absolute minimum pitches?”
Coach agreed.
“Uh…yeah, Becky. Let’s be realistic. You have to throw a few pops, a few grounders, lessen your pitch count.”
“Really?” she said. “In a game, you need twenty-seven outs. Eighty-one pitches is reasonable.”
“But your math is off here. You said you were going to go through my starting nine in twenty-eight pitches.”
Becky’s face was a mask.
“I am going to pitch one, and only one, out of the strike zone.” She looked at Cody Hatcher. “Now, get in the box, creep-o, before we die of old age out here.”
The crowd gave a resounding cheer for that little zinger, and Cody Hatcher stepped up to the plate, going through his ritual, all cutesy, tapping one toe then the other, pushing the bat around in little windmills. When he settled in, Coach Rivers dropped one finger, and that was fine with Becky Michigan. Just from Hatcher’s stance, his leaning a bit over the plate to over-compensate for the imperfect angle of his front foot matching the hip, she suddenly knew he’d been stepping away instead of straight into the swing his whole career, living on the pitch middle-in and slapping it to the opposite field. Her head was filled with crazy physics, and she blanked it. She didn’t need crazy physics for this pitch.
She wound up, arched her back deep, cocked it, and threw.
The ball whistled in the air and shot straight for Hatcher’s head. He didn’t seem to see it at first, and by the time he started to bail, the ball was already on him, coming a hair from the tip of his nose. At the same time, Coach Rivers caught it with a massive ‘ka-pow!’ in the glove. Cody Hatcher’s hands flew over his head, the bat flying upward, his feet kicking out from under him. He fell to the deck and the bat clanked next to him. Coach Rivers had taken the glove off and was shaking his hand violently.
“Caught me right in the palm.” He winced, but no one but Becky really noticed this. Some kid behind the netting right in back of the plate was freaking out over the speed gun he had in his hand, and that had everyone’s undivided attention.
“That pitch was ninety!” he said. “Ninety miles an hour! Oh my goodness!”
Everyone was talking—commotion, crowd movement all around—and Becky silenced everyone pretty quickly.
“Ball,” she said. The coach tossed her the baseball and she caught it bare-handed.
“Thanks,” she said, “but that’s not
what I meant. What I mean, is ‘ball one.’ And it’s the only one outside the zone any of these posers are going to see. That was the twenty-eighth pitch. The rest will be strikes.” She looked at Hatcher. “Get up. And don’t lean across the plate like a wuss, or you’ll get it in your ear.”
He pushed to his feet and picked up his bat. He went through his ritual in there again, but it was subdued. Coach put down one finger, and Becky nodded. Then she looked straight at Hatcher.
“It’s going to be a fastball. Try to keep up.”
She wound up, kicked and fired hard, outside corner, thigh high.
Hatcher stepped away instead of into it, swung, and missed by a foot. It corkscrewed him around and dropped him to a knee.
“Ninety-two!” the kid with the speed gun shouted.
The crowd burst into a long cheer, through which Becky could see Hatcher mouthing desperately to one of his team mates on the side, ‘I can’t see it!’
Then he was up again, face full of fear, with no little rituals, the fabric of his jersey at the front shoulder inside of his mouth now, teeth clenched hard so the appendage would stay in place and keep him on the ball. Coach squatted and dropped down four fingers: curve.
Becky nodded. Still, she was at a disadvantage here without a glove, and she didn’t have to have had pitching experience to know this. Wouldn’t Hatcher see that she changed grips?
She put the ball in her fastball grip and went into her wind-up. Angles and sightlines and proportions were racing through her mind as she imagined the way Cody Hatcher was seeing her, and right after she kicked up her front knee and spread her hands, she changed the grip in her throwing hand by feel, first two fingers together on one side of the ball, the thumb on the other, like holding a drinking cup. She stepped into it deep, came forward and fired, same arm slot as the fastball, illusion prefect-o. She snapped down her wrist and let it fly.
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