But also yes.
So I shrugged, the universal gesture for when the answer to something is yes and no. “It’s just different,” I said.
Dad nodded, getting it. “You’ve always had a place and then you didn’t, huh?”
“I guess. And things were going so great at Luther and it all got taken away,” I said.
“You know, you can just tell me these things, even when life is busy.” He let out a sigh and smiled a little. “And it doesn’t seem like you’re doing SO bad. You’ve seemed happy, even after that loss.” (I never wrote about it but I did have my parents come to the last field hockey game because I figured why not? And we lost, of course, but it hadn’t bothered me because I’d been so fired up to write poetry. For the talent showcase, which they DON’T know about.) I’d have to tell him about the talent showcase. And the playoff game. But later. First, I needed to check on my friend.
“Is Dumpster going to be okay?”
Dad nodded. “They caught it in time. But you still need to apologize to the Collinses. I thought about making them some cookies. You can bring them when you go talk to them.”
“None for Dumpster.”
“No, we’ll whip up some doggie biscuits when he’s better.”
“I’ll help,” I said. I knew I had a lot to do but making cookies couldn’t hurt, right?
“You bet you will.” Dad grinned. “And you can tell me what else is going on with you.”
As we set to work on the cookies for the Collinses, I told Dad everything. About baseball and the weird field hockey team and the real reasons why I started to write poetry.
“And here I thought you were just taking up my wordsmith genius,” Dad said.
“Well, I do like it. I’m just not a genius at it,” I said. “But the team, and the talent show, I like doing that. It’s just, I really want to pitch this game.”
My dad nodded. “Of course you do,” he said. “And it sounds like even if you left the baseball team for the wrong reasons, you wound up with the right friends.”
“They’re not my friends anymore,” I said, thinking of how angry Katy and Molly had been.
“You’d be surprised what people will forgive you for if you’re just honest,” Dad said. “And bring cookies.”
There were two pans of cookies in the oven and four more ready for the stove by the time I told him the full, full story. And once they were all baked, we went outside so I could practice my pitching for tomorrow.
It wasn’t right away, but around my third or fourth pitch, when I went into my windup, that I could almost FEEL all the ickiness sort of fall away from me. I was calm. As I let go of the ball and threw a fast one to my dad’s waiting glove, it was almost as though all the little Gabbys came together into one Gabby again and the yips and the panic and the sick feeling just stopped. I was just me again.
“What are you thinking, kid?” my dad asked, tossing the ball back to me.
“That the problem is, I can’t be everything at once. And I can’t do everything at once. But I want to,” I said.
“Well, Gabs, when you can’t do everything, you do what you can.”
And I decided, for the right reasons, that I wasn’t going to keep score on my life anymore, as long as I was just being me.
May 24, Later
Small Ball
No set goal, no set strategy, but a SERIES of things.
Whew. I think I have a plan. And I haven’t given up on the playbook. Not at all, but until tomorrow, I think I just need to play things as they go along. (And record them, of course. Posterity!)
So a lot of people think baseball is all about home runs.
And a lot of it is. Because home runs are fun and exciting and they put points on the board right away.
They’re a big deal.
But small ball is different.
Instead of getting the big hits to round the bases all at once, teams try to get runners on and move them, batter by batter. Because not every team has a power hitter like Mario Salamida (who, again, can’t get a hit off me).
But small ball just shows that it’s not always big things that accomplish a lot. Sometimes, it’s moving things in the right direction little by little.
Kind of like apologizing to a group of people you let down.
I’m writing this before bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep, after realizing there’s no home run of apologies I can give the talent squad. I can’t parachute out of the sky onto the stage and say sorry and make everyone vote for them and have them all be grateful to me. I can’t clone myself so one Gabby can play in the baseball game while one shows up at the talent showcase. And I can’t say no to pitching this game. I just can’t. Someday, I’ll get my friends to understand that.
But I can at least get on base, from an apology standpoint.
Haikus are my base hit.
Haikus are three-line poems that are only seventeen syllables—five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third.
Maybe they’re the small ball of poetry.
Well, not exactly, but they’re short and have a form I can follow. Already followed, actually. I wrote these for the team and I’m going to leave them backstage tomorrow, with cookies—they really do work wonders; I’ve eaten six tonight—to show that I may not be able to be there for them but I’m there for them.
They’re small starts but they’re something. And if things were reversed, and someone wrote one for me, it would help. At least a little.
Little by little is way better than nothing at all.
I hope.
THE NO “I” IN TEAM
Goal: Win! (I think.)
Action: Be true to myself. Which is harder than it sounds. It turns out, my self has a lot of sides. Plus, there are people besides myself to think about. I haven’t always been good at that. Life is kind of like a team sport. You can’t just have one happy player. I’m definitely getting away from the action part of this play. But it’s my playbook and one thing I know for sure now is that some plays aren’t clear-cut. And being myself isn’t always clear-cut but it’s the most important play I’ve got. And, whew, well, time to see what happens.
Pre-Game Analysis:
May 25
I got to Piper Bell more than an hour before the game. The school was quiet.
I headed to the school auditorium, where the talent squad would perform and be filmed. On a table backstage, right under the bulletin board with the showcase lineup where I knew they’d see them, I set up my haikus (folded, with each squad member’s name on it) and a platter of cookies, my apology starter. It was a stretch to hope that they’d LIKE the haikus. The cookies should help.
Only feeling the tiniest bit better, I went to the locker room to dress for the game.
Even though I was still shaky about all this life stuff, I felt that same calm I had pitching with my dad. After the last couple days, I finally understood something: it was only a game. It was a huge game and an exciting game and one I wanted to play. And to win.
But the big deal was that I was going to get to play again.
Plus, I was finally getting that I could only win so much. Sometimes things were going to get in the way of it. Things like asbestos. Or the yips. Or even sometimes just plain screwing up and throwing the wrong pitch at the wrong time. Trying so hard to make everything perfect for myself had only made things HARD.
I was having an epiphany.
I read about them, and the definition is long and full of words like “manifestation,” but the simple version is this:
Epiphanies are basically lightning bolts of feeling that just shoot from the sky and make everything clear.
I couldn’t decide if having an epiphany was good or bad right before a huge game with the Penguins.
Deep breath.
I just needed to pitch this game.
I needed—okay, wanted—to win this game. (Even though it is not important from an epiphany standpoint, it was still the right thing to aim for, correct
?)
Then I needed to make a grand gesture to the talent squad to make sure they know how important they are to me. (I mean, the haikus were a gesture but they’re only seventeen syllables. Hardly grand. Especially from a bad poet like me.) I wasn’t going to go to New York with them if I wasn’t in the showcase, but that didn’t matter as much.
Prizes and glory are just little things.
I wondered if I could lead them in some group epiphany that came with a balloon and confetti drop? An “I’m sorry” epiphany.
I was imagining what that might look like when Devon came into the locker room.
“Hi,” she said. Blink blink blink. “You’re here early.”
“Hey,” I said.
We were quiet for a minute. Maybe not even a whole minute but long enough that it felt like a long time. Especially because Devon kept doing the blinking thing.
“So, I’ve been wanting to ask, did you quit just ’cause I called you a jinx?” Blink blink blink. “That was kinda weird.”
“No,” I said. “It was part of it, I guess. But it was more complicated than that.”
“Hmm,” she said as she slowly put her screwed-up arm through the sleeve in her jersey. “I might have quit, too. I always want to be the best. My mom says it’s because I’m the oldest child but I say it’s because I’m the best child.”
I laughed. She was kind of funny. And she smiled and looked less like a tough cowboy for a change.
“Why wouldn’t you want to be the best?” I asked. “It’s kind of the best, right?”
Now she laughed. “I don’t think Coach Hollylighter will tell anyone they’re the best, ever.” Devon smirked.
“I know!” I said. “It’s extra-hard because my old coach always did. I was the Golden Child.”
“That’s pretty fancy,” she said. “I should probably take back that I asked you to pitch for me today.”
She stared at me like I was a batter she had to strike out, and for a second, I thought she was going to take off her wrist brace and say, “Yeah, so forget it! I healed faster just to keep you out of the game!”
But then she smiled again. “But I want to win, so I guess I had to ask a Golden Child. That’s kinda weird, though. Sounds like a shiny baby.”
“Yeah, if I were really golden, it’d be hard to move my arms,” I said.
We were cracking up together as the rest of the girls on the team started to funnel in. Madeleine just shot us a look and said, “Laugh all you want, but watch my nose today.”
“And get the win,” Devon added, suddenly serious.
“I will,” I said. If they only knew how many things I had to make happen today . . .
Well, it would be more epiphanies than anyone could handle. And with that, I’m tucking this playbook away to join the rest of the team on the field. Oh boy . . .
REPLAY: GAME DAY
We were playing the Franklin Middle Firecrackers.
They were good. Obviously; they were in the playoffs with us. I’d always wanted to play them when I was at Luther but they weren’t in our conference.
But I was a Penguin now.
The rest of the Penguins were nervous. Not about me, even though Madeleine seemed to subconsciously touch her nose every time I got within five feet of her. But there were definitely some big-game jitters. Ryder Mills was gulping water noisily and then chewing on the edge of the paper cup. Samuel Jinkins kept wiping his palms on his uniform. Mario was picking up bat after bat as if testing them but grunting at each one like he was upset with them. Madeleine was kicking the chain-link front of the dugout with her cleats as Danny Pettuci told her again and again to stop doing that. Even Devon, who wasn’t playing, flipped a mitt over in her lap like a coin she was playing heads-or-tails with. Johnny, who I still hadn’t spoken to, kept ruffling the pages of his stats log.
But I was calm. There were no Gabby-yips. Plus, Bob and Judy were on a lunch break or something because my mind was clear.
Even calm, I couldn’t help but get a charge from the excitement of the stands filling with people. I saw my dad and Louie and Peter close to the front of our bleachers. The sky was cloudless and the breeze was light.
It was the perfect day for a baseball game.
Coach Hollylighter read the lineup with me at starting pitcher. When she said my name, Mario groaned. Madeleine gave me a weird look out of the corner of her eye. Lailah Howard, another pitcher who was not as good as Devon, kind of side-eyed me. I didn’t exactly feel welcomed by the team, but then again, I had been the one to quit. So I smelled the air, that before-the-game grass, and told myself to be good enough that they’d be glad to have me.
Ryder and Devon were the only ones who gave me five. Over the top of his log, Johnny made a shy thumbs-up. I returned it, still not knowing how to say sorry to someone who seemed to have known where I was supposed to be all along. I’d been kind of mean to him.
Turning to look out at the crowd again, I smashed right into Coach Hollylighter. She looked at me for a second like she wasn’t sure what I was doing there, even though she’d just read my name.
“I just wanted to say thanks for giving me a chance,” I told her, fumbling over the words.
She nodded with none of yesterday’s smiles. “Sure,” she said. “We needed a good fill-in and I know you were Luther’s star. So let’s see if you can.”
Let’s see? Really, would it kill her to say “I know you can do it!”? But maybe she was nervous. And maybe not every coach I met was going to be exactly how I wanted them to be.
We took the field first. And the sensation I had on the mound was nothing like my jinx game. Maybe it was because I was thinking about winning differently, but I didn’t have all that knotty energy bundled up in my belly. I just felt right.
In the first inning, I pitched to three batters—the top of the batting order—and struck them all out. My arm was on fire, in a good way.
We didn’t score any runs but I held the score to zero in the second inning—still with no one on base!—and then Mario drove in Ryder for our first run.
1–0.
I’m not sure if it was the good feelings I had, or because I missed playing so much, or if it was because I wanted to show the team I was worth having around, but I kept throwing stuff like I couldn’t miss. So all the Firecrackers batters could do was miss.
And by the sixth inning, I was on track for a no-hitter. My third unicorn of the year and my first as a Penguin!!!
In the dugout before our at bat, Mario handed me a cup of water from the cooler. “Great game . . . Gabby.” Not Gaggy.
I squinted at him and looked at the water to see if his fingernail clippings were floating in it.
It looked like plain old water.
“Did you spit in this?”
“No. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re going to be pitching, I’m glad it’s to my opponent and not to me.”
I took a cautious sip. It tasted like normal water. “Well, thanks, Mario.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t get used to it. Just, you know, get us the win.”
I had a feeling I would—in the last inning, we’d scored several runs and were up 5–0—but I wasn’t getting that excited “I’m gonna win!” feeling. I wasn’t unhappy, at all, but my energy was somewhere else.
Another epiphany struck.
I thought that maybe I wasn’t so afraid of failing this time because my mind was on the talent showcase. I was wondering how my friends were doing. I wanted to cheer them on.
But then I realized there was a second true-to-me thing I had to be, besides a baseball player: a friend. Epiphanies were really hard to schedule! But I couldn’t ignore it.
“Coach, I think you should put in a reliever,” I said suddenly to Coach Hollylighter. I just blurted it out like that.
She raised an eyebrow. “Is something wrong? Your arm looks great.”
It was the nicest thing she’d ever said to me. And it was true. I was on the verge of a UNICORN.
<
br /> It was hard to say the words, but I did: “It feels great, but there’s another team that needs me.”
Coach Hollylighter stared at me so long that I wondered if she was Devon’s opposite: a non-blinker.
“Hmm,” she said. “I think I understand. I think you’re making the right choice, and I respect it. And you got us a nice lead. Great game, Garcia. Go get ’em.” Multiple compliments! Whoa. And she patted my shoulder supportively!
“Thanks, Coach!” I yelled, already on my way to the bleachers where, before I said a word, Louie piped up.
“Do you want us to stay here or go with you?” My dad had filled her in the night before and now she must have been reading my mind. ESP finally worked!
“You stay and cheer them on,” I said. “I just know where I need to be now.”
I stopped for a second and looked from Louie to my dad. “Or should I stay?”
My dad smiled. “When you can’t do everything, you do what you can.”
I knew he was right and I just hoped there was time.
Johnny jogged up alongside me as I headed off the field. For such an academic guy, he could really run. Even in a tie. “What are you doing? This is one of the best games in school history!”
“It is?” Of course it was. It was a unicorn—what was I thinking? How many unicorns did a school get in its life?
But there were things more magical than unicorns. The talent squad had welcomed me just for being me. Or at least the me I was pretending to be. They encouraged my poetry, even when it was bad, and they appreciated me even when no one else seemed to. It seemed wrong to let them down when I didn’t have to.
“Yeah, the game is awesome,” Johnny said. “I knew you were great. I mean, are great. Would be great . . .”
He looked down at his shoes like he was embarrassed, even though he was saying such nice things.
“Thanks for, um, thanks for . . .” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to. “Thanks for pestering me all the time about playing baseball.”
Gabby Garcia's Ultimate Playbook Page 14
