by Tim Green
Bart turned and started away before spinning around and walking backward as he spoke. “Both of you, you better watch your backs.”
Bart kept going, now laughing demonically at them.
Jaden just stood staring and shaking her head. “What a moron.”
When Bart rounded the corner, Josh asked, “You think he’ll do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get us.”
Jaden swatted the air, scooped up her cell phone, and said, “Come on. I don’t want to be late for my dad. If he comes out and I’m not there, he’ll walk home alone.”
Josh hurried to catch up to her.
“He’s not really a cop, too, is he?” Josh asked, falling in alongside her.
Jaden furrowed her brow and glanced at him, shaking her head again.
“No,” she said. “Just a doctor.”
“Well, you sounded pretty good,” Josh said.
“I said you were my boyfriend, too,” Jaden said. “And we both know that’s bologna. Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—my father won’t let me date until I’m sixteen.”
“That’s good,” Josh said, his face suddenly burning. “I don’t mean because of me or anything. I mean that he cares about you like that.”
“Speaking of caring,” Jaden said, “your buddy Benji lit out like a cockroach.”
“He’s a good guy,” Josh said, looking over his shoulder in the direction Benji had disappeared. “He might have gone for help.”
“Well, I sure didn’t hear any cavalry bugles,” Jaden said.
“Does your voice do that a lot?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“You talk kind of southern when you’re excited,” he said.
She shrugged without comment.
They walked for a block in silence before Jaden said, “Don’t you know you could twist that moron up into a pretzel?”
“Who, Bart?”
“Yeah,” Jaden said. “You’d kill him.”
“He’s a lot older than me,” Josh said.
“So he’s older,” Jaden said. “I’m glad you don’t want to fight—that’s for morons. But if it came down to it, you’d kill him, and you don’t even know it.”
“I guess,” Josh said, straightening his back a little.
“But don’t worry,” Jaden said. “I’ve seen the type. He’s all talk. Here it is.”
They had come to the big brick hospital that covered three city blocks. Before them stood the loading docks, a dark cavern of concrete cut into the side of the hill. Enormous garage doors stood in a row deep in the shadows beyond the raised platform, and a handful of Dumpsters had been crowded into the far corner of the blacktop below. Several cars had been nosed up along part of the concrete wall near the Dumpsters. One caught Josh’s eye.
A sliver of light appeared, then grew into a rectangle from which emerged the shadow of a person.
“He always comes out the back,” Jaden said, nodding toward the door.
Josh watched as a second dark figure appeared from the shadows and approached Jaden’s dad.
“Who parks back here?” Josh asked, watching as the second figure melted back into the shadows as if it had never been there at all.
Jaden shrugged. Looking at Josh, she said, “People dropping things off or picking them up, I guess. Why?”
“That’s a nice car,” Josh said, pointing to the small black one in the middle of the others as Jaden’s father jogged down the concrete steps still wearing a long white examination coat.
“That Porsche? It is nice,” Jaden said. “When my dad’s working for the Yankees, I’m hoping he’ll get something like that.”
“Yeah, I know someone who’s got one of those,” Josh said.
“Really? One of the Chiefs?” Jaden asked.
“Coach Valentine,” Josh said, walking toward the car to get a look at the license plate in the shadows, unable to make it out. “But what would he be doing here?”
Jaden kissed her father hello and introduced him to Josh. Josh shook the doctor’s hand, but his eyes were on the black car.
“Better look out,” Jaden’s father said. “Here comes a truck.”
Together, they moved away from the center of the blacktop. As the truck pulled in, its headlights shone on the row of cars. Josh blinked and saw, without a doubt, a license plate that read DOIT2IT.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I THOUGHT WE WERE all running,” Benji said with all the surprise he could muster.
Josh rolled his eyes. Jaden took a bite of her sandwich without saying anything.
“What?” Benji said. “You think I was afraid? I knew you didn’t want to fight that guy, and I figured if I high-tailed it out of there, you’d follow. By the time I turned around, you guys were gone. I sent a text, but glamour boy here had his phone off.”
“What’d you do?” Jaden said. “Run till you hit the Canadian border?”
“Now, that’s the kind of thing that makes it hard to be your friend,” Benji said, scolding her with his index finger.
“I’m so upset, I’m going to have to stop eating,” Jaden said, taking a huge bite of her sandwich and chewing wildly.
“Don’t worry, Lido,” Josh said through a mouthful of lettuce and bologna on white bread. “I know you got my back if I need you.”
“Yeah, you know that, dude,” Benji said with a defiant nod at Jaden.
Jaden just closed her eyes.
The rest of the school day went as well as school can go, with no pop quizzes and not a lot of homework. Josh had to dodge the other kids on the team and their questions as best he could, and to those he couldn’t dodge he’d just shrug and say he couldn’t do anything about it. His dad needed him.
At two-twenty, those who didn’t believe him had the chance to see him run down the front steps of the school, pass the buses, and jump into his dad’s waiting car, which sped all the way to the Mount Olympus Sports Complex.
When they arrived, Josh and his dad saw cars, trucks, and SUVs racing in and out of the circle in front of the giant bubble. It reminded Josh of a pit stop, with each player jumping from his parents’ vehicle and sprinting for the door.
Josh’s dad wished him good luck and told him he’d be back to watch the end of practice. Josh got out of the car and, caught up in the atmosphere, hurried inside like the others. He changed into workout shorts and a T-shirt in the locker room, then followed the stream of players into the weight room.
Stacks of metal plates clapped together intermittently, making the whole place sound like a construction site. The smell of rubber mats and stale sweat filled the air, along with the grunts, shouts, and angry cries of the lifters. Josh looked around, blinking, before the young assistant named Moose took him by the arm and showed him to the counter where the workout cards waited for the players in a plastic file box.
“Here’s yours,” Moose said. “I filled in the weights you should use, just guessing. I’ll go around with you today, show you the circuit, and we’ll adjust the weights up or down depending on how you do. You ready?”
“Sure,” Josh said. He looked around at the other players. None of them spoke to one another. They trudged from machine to machine with the urgency of firefighters at a blaze.
Moose showed Josh the two sides of his card, one for leg days, one for upper body.
“We split the team in half,” Moose said. “You’re in the upper-body group for today, so you’ll do seven sets of bench presses and all the upper-body machines in between. Wednesday, we do plyometrics—jumping exercises. Thursday, you’ll do legs. Friday, back to upper, then legs again on Monday. Got it?”
Josh examined the 8 x 10 lime green card and nodded.
“Here we go,” Moose said, looking around the room. “You start where you can. There, biceps.”
Josh wedged himself into a padded machine and gripped a scored bar.
“You go till failure, plus two,” Moose said. “Today, I’ll show you what that means. Tomorrow, you’re on your
own, and you just get anyone you can to spot you and push you past failure.”
“Failure?”
“Till you can’t do any more,” Moose said. “Then your spotter helps you do two more beyond that, but he makes you do the work. That’s how you get stronger.”
Josh glanced at Jones as he pushed past the machine where Josh sat. To Moose, Josh said, “I don’t know if these guys are going to want to help me.”
“Oh, they’ll help,” Moose growled. “This is my weight room. Someone doesn’t help a teammate in here and they’re gone. We already lost one guy that way. Rocky won’t have it, and neither will I. Go ahead, get started. I put fifty on here for you. Do as many as you can.”
After the eighth repetition Josh’s arms began to tremble, and he got the handles only halfway up.
“Finish!” Moose screamed, helping him just a bit as Josh struggled to bring up the bar.
“Now down slow,” Moose said, pushing on the weights as Josh let the bar down.
Josh did his best to keep it from dropping, but Moose pushed it down and said, “That stinks. You gotta be tougher than that. Come on, two more now, up fast and down slow.”
Josh’s arms trembled and ached, and he fought to get the bar back up two more times, then hold it on the way down. By the time Moose let him off the machine, his head pounded and his brow dripped with sweat.
“Next,” Moose said, pointing to a bench press. “Let’s go. You only got an hour.”
Moose dragged Josh through the weight room, yelling and screaming and urging him on. By the time Josh walked out, his muscles quivered like Jell-O and his arms felt heavier than lead. He returned to the locker room and slowly changed into fresh clothes, then jogged out with the others under the echoes of Rocky’s blasting whistle. Agility drills and stretching wore him down even more, and he felt half a step slow in the fielding drills. His throws to first base made it, but as the session wore on, he had to put an arc on the ball to get it there.
Rocky’s whistle sounded three shrill blasts in a row, and everything stopped. From behind home plate, he screamed at Josh.
“You throw like that and I got a troop of Girl Scouts who could make it safe to first base running backward!” Rocky said. “That’s crap! Total crap! Make the throw or get out of there!”
Josh’s eyes felt hot with tears. Jones smirked at him from his position on first, and Jones’s buddy Tucker snorted with quiet laughter from behind him in right field. The drill started up again. Josh kept his head up, took the next grounder, and rifled it. He felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, but the ball smacked Jones’s glove, wiping the smile off Jones’s face.
“That’s better!” Rocky shouted.
Josh wanted to grab his shoulder, but he forced himself not to, hoping and praying that he’d have a rest before the next grounder came his way. He did, and by the time he had to make another play, the pain had subsided to a dull ache. With the throw came the bolt of pain, but instead of flinching, Josh growled with anger. He set his teeth and ground his way through practice, letting the pain in his arm fuel his rage and his determination not to quit.
As the minutes of practice ticked by, his shoulder grew sorer and sorer. He kept on, part of him wishing time could speed up. The other part of him wanted time to stop because he knew every minute also brought him closer to hitting practice.
And Josh had no idea how he’d swing a bat.
When his turn came to enter the batting cage, Josh took a deep breath and ducked inside.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JONES BUMPED INTO HIM hard, striking Josh’s sore shoulder and knocking him back.
“Let me get out, will you?” Jones said.
“Sorry,” Josh said, sidestepping the older player and tugging on his batting gloves. He hefted a bat, but it didn’t sit right in his hands. Even a slow swing sent shards of pain down his arm.
“Let’s go,” the young coach behind the pitching machine said. “I don’t have all night here.”
Josh stepped up to the plate, and the first pitch came at him like a shot; the yellow rubber baseball from the machine was a blur. He swung and missed, and the coach fired another. Josh barely had his bat back in place. He swung again and missed, his shoulder on fire. Tucker chortled from outside the net.
Josh heard Tucker say under his breath, “Thinks he can bat both sides of the plate.”
Besides the pain, Josh’s arms felt as they had the time he’d fallen into the deep end of his friend’s pool in Manchester with his clothes on—sluggish and slow.
Another pitch came and another miss.
“Three strikes, you’re out,” Tucker said.
Josh saw the coach make a check on his clipboard, then feed another ball into the machine. Another whiff.
Josh stepped back and held up one hand.
“What now?” the coach asked. “You wanna change to righty?”
Josh turned to the bat rack and found the shortest bat they had. He picked it up and felt the lightness. Maybe he couldn’t blast line drives and homers, but he’d be darned if he’d let any more pitches by him. His shoulder might hurt and his arms might be exhausted, but he could still see the ball and read its path.
He gritted his teeth, swung the new bat three times, and stepped up to the plate, still as a lefty. He narrowed his eyes and focused on the tube that launched the balls.
The pitch came.
He swung, more with his wrists than his arms.
Crack.
A grounder through the hole between first and second. The next pitch came. Crack. Another grounder. Another pitch. Crack. Another. Crack.
Josh missed only two of the remaining sixteen swings as a lefty, then hit every one from the other side of the plate. None of the hits had any power, but Josh knew the coach couldn’t do anything but mark them down as hits. He went to his next station, then joined the entire team for sprints before Rocky called them in.
“A crap practice today,” Rocky said, glowering. “You want to do it to it? You gotta work harder than this. I don’t have anything else to say other than if you do this to me tomorrow, you better tell your mommies and daddies to find you girls a new coach.”
Rocky turned abruptly and stormed off the field.
“Okay,” Moose said, picking up the slack and raising a hand that the rest of them rallied around. “‘Do it to it’ on three. One, two, three.”
“DO IT TO IT!”
Josh dragged himself back to the locker room, arriving last. The other players dug into their lockers, pulling out gym bags, some of them changing into dry clothes. At first, Josh attributed the quiet to Rocky chewing them out, but when he reached into his gym bag, he recoiled.
“Yuck!” he said.
The rest of the players burst into laughter and applause.
Josh looked around at their laughing faces and then down at the slippery goo all over his hands and inside his bag.
From the back, someone shouted, “We figured you could use it, to butter up the coach!”
Josh looked at the yellow mess, half of him ashamed and angry, the other half glad that it was only butter.
“Or save it for yourself, since you’re gonna be toast!”
Josh looked for the source of the voice, a stubby kid named Perkins, the team’s backup second baseman. Perkins stared at Josh from beneath an eave of blunt-cut blond bangs and grinned with a set of buckteeth that many kids would be ashamed of. Without thinking, Josh walked over to Perkins and stood toe-to-toe, looking down.
“What are you gonna do, you little twelve-year-old sissy?” Perkins snarled. “Butter me up, too?”
Jaden—and Bart Wilson—flashed across Josh’s mind, and without thinking, Josh grabbed a handful of Perkins’s T-shirt and slammed him into the lockers with a crash.
“Fight. Fight. Fight,” the others chanted.
Perkins’s eyes went wide. He staggered sideways, slapping Josh’s hands off him. Perkins snarled and charged with his head down. Josh sidestepped Perkins, grabbed the back of hi
s collar in one hand and the waist of his pants in the other, and hurled Perkins like a battering ram into the opposite lockers.
The lockers shook under the bang, and Perkins crumpled to his knees, pawing at his bloody head.
The locker-room door thundered open.
“What the heck is going on in here!”
Josh whirled and stared into the sweaty purple face of Rocky Valentine.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“NOTHING, COACH,” JONES SAID, stepping in front of the fallen Perkins. “We’re just fooling around.”
“Fooling around?” Rocky said, glaring at Josh. “LeBlanc, you fooling around?”
Josh opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“Well?” Rocky said.
Josh nodded his head. “A little, Coach.”
“You think that’s what we do around here?” Rocky asked, his jaw snapping as he worked it back and forth.
“No, Coach,” Josh said.
“Do you?” Rocky asked Jones.
“No, Coach.”
“Perkins,” Rocky said, looking around Jones. “Get up and get out of here. I don’t want to see any of you anymore. Go on! Get out!”
Josh grabbed his bag and scrambled out of the locker room with the rest of them. His dad met him with a somber face in the lobby, put an arm around his shoulder, and guided him outside toward their car. Josh climbed in and tucked the slimy bag under his legs.
When they were under way, Josh’s father said, “That was some pretty weak batting in the cage.”
Josh rubbed his shoulder. “I never lifted weights before.”
“Well, you’ll get used to it,” his father said. “That’s part of it. You gotta toughen up a little bit. That’s one thing for me with having two older brothers—I didn’t need to toughen up. They did it for me.”
Josh’s father grinned at him.
“How’s the job going?” Josh asked.
“Not bad,” his father said. “Getting into it a little. Rocky wants to start expanding his baseball teams—you know, a U12 and a U16—so I’ll get involved with that a little. Sell it a little. Get some coaches lined up, some players, maybe. Do it to it. We’ve got the Super Stax franchise for the area, so I’m starting to set up meetings with the different coaches and trainers at the universities around here.”
