The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “You do know …” Kate begins, but then pauses. “We’re out of tape,” she says to April. “Would you mind grabbing some?”

  Looking somewhat annoyed, April disappears into a nearby classroom, and Kate takes a step closer to Ryan. “I just wanted to make sure you realized that Lucy sort of likes him,” she says.

  Ryan swallows hard. “We’re only friends,” she manages to say, even though she wants to ask why?, to say no, to throw her head back and yell of course! Because hadn’t she known, on some level, that this might happen? Hadn’t she learned that things like this only happen to girls like Lucy?

  “Of course,” Kate says, as if Ryan and Nick being anything more than just friends were a notion too ridiculous to consider. “I only wanted to make sure you knew.”

  “Thanks,” Ryan says, forcing a smile.

  Kate hands her a flier for the dance. “And here,” she says. “In case you change your mind about going.”

  Ryan holds the pink piece of paper at arm’s length, staring at the words. She nods to Kate, then backs away, eager to leave. But as soon as she turns the corner, she crumples up the flier and tosses it into the nearest garbage can, pleased to have at least made the shot this time.

  Later, during math class, Nick leans across the aisle while Mr. Davis works out an equation on the board. Ryan tries to ignore him, aware of Sydney and Kate behind her, observing the interaction with keen interest. She can’t help feeling terribly on display.

  “Hey,” Nick says, tapping his pencil on the side of his desk to get her attention. “Ryan.”

  She sighs, keeping one eye on the back of Mr. Davis’s balding head. “What?”

  “The project’s due next week,” he says, laughter behind his eyes.

  Directly behind her, she can sense Sydney listening, and Kate is covering her mouth. Ryan lifts her hands to Nick. “So?”

  “So, I don’t think we can get a good read on the numbers from here.”

  Mr. Davis turns to look for a straightedge, fumbling around on the desk while he continues his discourse on prime numbers. Ryan smiles at Nick, catching on.

  “What’d you have in mind?” she whispers, knowing the Cubs have a home game this weekend against the Cincinnati Reds. Her mind is already springing ahead to the ride downtown and the crowd outside the stadium. She’s suddenly far from the classroom, from the girls leaning forward on the desks behind her, from all the rumors and gossip and talk of school dances.

  Nick winks at her. “I’m thinking we might need to do some fieldwork.”

  “I think you’re right,” she tells him, hiding a smile with her hand. Behind her, the girls begin to whisper, but Ryan doesn’t notice. For her, it is already Saturday, and she is already miles away.

  Chapter Seven

  * * *

  THEY GO FOR PIZZA BEFORE THE GAME AT A NARROW restaurant tucked beneath the Addison Street stop, the whole place shuddering with each train that goes by, a series of miniature earthquakes that cause the framed photos of former athletes and local celebrities to jiggle and dance on the wall. Nick stands ahead of her in line to order, and Ryan scans the menu, wondering whether they’ll share a pizza or each get their own slice. This seems to be a decision of great significance, and she’s relieved when Nick turns around to inquire as to her feelings about pepperoni.

  “In general?” Ryan asks. “Or with respect to pizza?”

  He grins. “Both.”

  “In general, I’m pretty ambivalent.”

  “But on pizza?”

  “Definitely.”

  When it’s their turn at the register, Nick orders for them both, and though Ryan pulls a few dollars from her pocket, he waves her away. She tries not to read too much into this gesture, but her cheeks go hot anyway.

  They find an open table in the back that’s sticky with soda and littered with used napkins, which Ryan relays to Nick, who tosses them into the garbage can. The restaurant is warm and dark, and seems an impossible distance from the crowded streets just outside. Nick sets the plastic number for their order on the table between them, then leans back and yawns. There’s a small television set angled in one corner of the ceiling, tuned to a twenty-four-hour sports station. The commentator is recapping yesterday’s ball games, and when the White Sox score flashes up on the screen, Nick makes a show of wrinkling his nose.

  He leans forward with his elbows on the table and nods at Ryan. “So,” he says, his face utterly serious. “Cubs or Sox?”

  She frowns at him. “What kind of question is that?”

  “A dumb one,” he admits. “But I’m just warming up.”

  “To what?”

  “Coke or Pepsi?”

  “You had to warm up to that?”

  “You can’t start cold with this game,” he tells her, shaking his head in mock disappointment at her ignorance of these sorts of things. “You have to throw a gimme in there to kick things off.”

  “Okay,” she says, playing along. “Diet Coke, then.”

  “Interesting,” he says, rubbing his chin.

  “How’s that?”

  He shakes a finger at her. “I know your type, Walsh,” he says. “Not much of a rule-follower, kind of a rebel.”

  “Well, I didn’t like either of the options,” she says. “Try me again.”

  “Black or blue?”

  “A bruise?”

  He narrows his eyes at her. “Very funny,” he says, tapping the plastic number against the table and looking pleased with himself. “That was a trick question anyhow. To see if you’re really a Cubs fan. If you’d said black”—and here, he runs a finger along his throat—“it would have been a red flag. White Sox colors.”

  Ryan rolls her eyes. “How come you never had to answer the first one?”

  “Cubs,” he says.

  “No,” she says with a laugh. “Coke or Pepsi?”

  “Pepsi.”

  She points to the counter. “You just ordered a Coke.”

  “I’m trying to keep you on your toes,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows. “I’m being unpredictable.”

  They both sit back as their pizza arrives, the cheese still bubbling so that each time they reach for it, they’re forced to draw back, laughing. Ryan burns her mouth on a piece, then finishes off her glass of water.

  “You don’t seem that way,” she says, eyeing Nick across the table. He folds a slice of pizza in half, then tilts his head sideways to take a bite.

  “What way?” he asks around a mouthful of cheese.

  “Unpredictable.”

  He lowers his pizza, and Ryan looks on absently as he busies himself unwrapping a straw. When he’s torn off half of the paper wrapping, he brings the straw to his mouth and blows the other half across the table, where it hits Ryan squarely on the forehead.

  “Bet you couldn’t predict I’d do that,” he says, grinning.

  Ryan balls up her napkin underneath the table, then raises a hand to launch it at him. It glances off his shoulder, but he only smiles at her.

  “That,” he says, “I could have predicted.”

  “We should really try to get actual tickets sometime,” Nick says later, as they make their way down Sheffield, past the rows of vendors. He hangs back every few steps to make sure she hasn’t gotten lost, and Ryan elbows her way through the throngs of people to keep up.

  “Definitely,” she says, watching a father with three kids try to get chocolate ice cream off a brand-new Cubs jersey. “This summer for sure.”

  A four-man jazz band in blue top hats have set themselves up outside the back entrance to the stadium, and the brassy sound of their instruments rings out brightly in the cool spring air. Ryan gets squeezed back in the crowd by a couple with oversized blow-up bats, which they’re thrusting in the air as they march toward the stadium as if about to wage battle with the Reds themselves. Ahead, she can see Nick scanning the crowd for her worriedly, and when he spots her, his face slackens with relief. Wordlessly, he reaches for her hand when she catches up, and she follows
him, his grip heavy and certain, her hand folded into his.

  They pass the knothole—a gated opening where people gather for an outside view of the field—but it’s already thick with layers of people, and so they continue to walk around until they come to the spot where they’d sat on Opening Day. The first notes of the national anthem are already playing, and the motion outside the stadium slows until the song is over. A man selling Cubs pennants strolls by, and Nick raises a hand, then pulls out two crumpled bills and hands them over.

  “Here,” he says, handing her the flag, and Ryan stammers out a thank-you. She holds the thin wooden rod so tightly that she worries she might break it.

  At the end of the third inning, Ryan offers to get them bags of peanuts, but Nick, shifting around on the curb, puts a hand on her arm.

  “Wait a sec,” he says, avoiding her eyes.

  “Not a fan of peanuts?” she jokes, but he seems to have lost his usual composure, and only shrugs. It occurs to her that maybe he wants to ask her to the dance, but she tries to ignore the tiny flip of her stomach, reminding herself that things like that don’t happen to her, and especially not with someone like Nick.

  He opens and then closes his mouth. “I was just wondering,” he begins, his words muddled. “If maybe, if you’re not already …”

  A peanut vendor passes through the crowd in front of them with the effortless ease of a salesman, tossing a giant blue bag from hand to hand and calling out the price. Nick hesitates, and then—looking somewhat relieved—stands up and flags him down.

  “We’ll take two,” he says, and Ryan—realizing she’d been holding her breath—exhales. While Nick fishes a few dollars from his pocket, the vendor, a grizzled man with a reddish beard, hands her a bag of peanuts, then winks.

  “This a date?” he asks, and without looking at Nick, Ryan quickly shakes her head, anxious to prove that she has no such expectations. She stares hard at the ground, and the vendor grins. “Sure looks like one to me.”

  When he leaves, they fall silent once more, concentrating on the stubborn peanut shells. After a few minutes, Ryan turns back to Nick.

  “What were you going to say before?” she asks, but he only shrugs and claims he doesn’t remember.

  Sometime in the seventh inning, a group of visiting fans wanders over to their area. There are four of them, college kids with Cincinnati caps and brown paper bags, and their eyes are already rimmed with red, their faces heavy with alcohol and confidence. Their team is up by six, and their lips curl with this knowledge as they weave their way through the many Cubs fans that sit just outside the stadium, rooting hard, unwilling to give up on their team just yet.

  They drop to the curb a few feet away from where Ryan and Nick sit pressed close to each other with a pile of peanut shells at their feet, and begin to cheer loudly for their team. There’s a small radio propped in their midst, tuned to the national broadcast rather than the local one that every other radio is playing.

  Nick jerks his head at them. “Typical Reds fans,” he says, tossing a peanut shell in their general direction. “Assholes.”

  “Who cares?” Ryan says. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

  A few plays later, the Cubs leadoff man is up with two men on base, and they can hear the announcer on someone’s radio proclaim that it’s now or never for the Cubs to stage a comeback.

  “So much for small ball,” Ryan says.

  The first two pitches are balls; the third, a swinging strike. Ryan’s and Nick’s eyes are on the stadium wall, but their ears are cocked toward the radio. A half beat later, they hear a loud cheer, and the commentators’ voices go up several octaves as they yell—It’s going back, back!—until the crowd outside the park gets to its feet to watch the ball sailing up and over the wall.

  “It’s right there,” Ryan says breathlessly, and Nick jogs to the left, zigzagging along with the rest of the mob as they all try to gauge where the ball might meet the ground. He darts over near the Reds fans, his heavy cast swaying, his eyes to the sky. A moment later, the ball lands in the center of the pack, a scrambling pile of grown men and older boys pawing at the ground. Ryan stands on her tiptoes on the curb, craning her neck to spot Nick amid the flurry of fists and elbows.

  The brawl widens out along the street, rings of red-faced souvenir hunters scraping at the ground in a tangle of limbs, shoving one another to get to the little white ball in the center of it all. Ryan backs away as a few people jump in to break it up, and a man backs out of the scuffle with a sharp yell, clapping a hand over his eye and limping off. When the rest of the crowd begins to disperse, she sees a guy in a jersey emerge with the ball. Bruised and grinning, he dusts himself off, then trots over to his buddies to display his prize, and when Ryan looks back over, she sees Nick holding one of the Reds fans in a headlock with his one good arm.

  “Hey,” she yells, running over to where a new sort of crowd has arranged itself around them, a few boys excitedly chanting fight! around its edges. Ryan pushes through the gathering of eager spectators, her eyes widening at the scene before her. The three other Reds fans are staring menacingly, unsure what to do, and the guy Nick has pinned to the ground glances at them with wild eyes, his teeth bared.

  “Get him the hell off me!” he shouts, and his friends look to one another.

  “You want us to hit a kid with a broken arm?” one says.

  Ryan stands frozen, staring at Nick’s face. His eyes are focused and stony, and he’s trembling with a kind of fury Ryan hasn’t before seen in him, as if it comes from somewhere deep inside, all the way down in his bones. His eyes are on the guy, his arm tight around his neck, but whatever is boiling up inside him has given him a faraway look, like an anger without end. Ryan takes a small step toward him.

  “Nick?” she says. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see some kids motioning to the two police officers posted near one of the gates, and she lays a hand on his arm. “Nick,” she says again, more urgently, and she feels his muscle relax. “Let go.”

  He blinks at her, and his face changes. When he releases his grip, the guy in the Reds hat coughs and spits, then gets to his feet. The crowd has begun to pull back now that the show has ended, and the guy rubs at his neck, at a loss for words. He spits once more, and it lands near Nick’s foot, but then he turns and walks off with his friends, shaking his head and grumbling under his breath. Ryan grabs Nick’s arm and pulls him away before the police officers can pick him out of the crowd, and they’re all the way to the ‘L’ stop before he says anything.

  “I’m sorry,” he mutters, not sounding at all sorry. “That guy pummeled me in there. It was a cheap shot …”

  He trails off, and she looks at him sideways. He’s still breathing jaggedly, but there’s something sorrowful in his eyes now, and Ryan’s suddenly sorry not to know him better, not to be able to understand the way he ticks, what awful reasons or frightened impulses might have caused him to fight like that, as if out of sheer panic, as if for his life.

  “What’re you so angry about?” she asks, almost to herself, as they sit down together on a bench. Nick doesn’t say anything; he just leans forward to peer down the empty track, his mouth set and his eyes lowered as they sit waiting for the train that will take them home.

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY IS EMILY’S NINTH BIRTHDAY, AND RYAN has been drafted to help out with her party at the local bowling alley. She and Kevin carry the balloons from the car, while inside, Mom spreads a plastic tablecloth out onto the card tables in the party room and lines up the goody bags.

  “How’s that math project going?” Kevin asks as he struggles to wrangle the helium-filled balloons from the back seat. Ryan stands a few feet away, playing with the edges of her fleece jacket. When she doesn’t answer, Kevin hands her a bunch of balloons and pushes at his glasses. “We can still get you a tutor, you know.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says with a sigh big enough to leave no question of her a
nnoyance at the conversation. She tucks a wrapped gift under her arm and heads inside.

  Discussions about math and grades—anything of importance, really—are supposed to be Mom’s territory. It’s not that Ryan has a problem with Kevin, who’s been unfailingly nice to her since he joined their family. But though Mom loves him, and Emily adores him, to Ryan, he’ll never be more than a stand-in, an actor struggling with the part of her dad. When he’d first moved in after the wedding, Ryan made a point of offering him her usual seat at the dinner table. Mom’s eyes watered at the significance of the gesture—how kindly her daughter had welcomed her new husband into their home—but the truth is, Ryan only did it out of selfishness.

  She didn’t think she could bear seeing him sit in her dad’s old spot.

  At three, the kids begin showing up for the party, twelve third graders who sprint between lanes and climb over the scoring machines and giggle at Kevin’s attempts to show them the right way to roll the ball. Emily asks Ryan if she wants to be on a team, and when she says she’d prefer to just watch, Emily frowns.

  “Why didn’t you invite a friend?” she says. “Mom said you could.”

  “It’s not my birthday,” Ryan snaps. “Go play.”

  She wanders back to where Mom is counting out the tiny wax candles. Her growing stomach has just recently started to show, and Ryan watches with fascination as she moves around the tables, straightening plates and smoothing out napkins. Despite all the chaos of the party, she looks relatively peaceful, and it occurs to Ryan that maybe she’s imagining future birthday parties for the new baby growing inside her.

  “Mom,” Ryan says, and her mother pauses, candles in hand, and smiles. “Do you need any help?”

  She scans the room. “I think we’re okay,” she says. “I’ll go back out with you.”

  Kevin is monitoring the kids, pacing back and forth to make sure nobody drops a ball on any toes or goes sliding up the greased lanes. Emily has just managed to down six pins, her ball zigzagging off the bumpers at least a dozen times as if that were the point of the game. She jumps up and down and raises her fists in the air. Ryan and Mom sit down just behind the scoring area.