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  “Everyone’s going swimming. Come on.”

  He didn’t know how long she stood out there because he couldn’t hear her leaving, but soon he heard the sound of laughter and hooting from the pool in the courtyard outside his window. He got up and yanked open the curtains. Sunlight flooded in. His former teammates jumped in and out of the water in bright colored bathing suits, splashing and acting ridiculous. Bella lay stretched out in a black tank suit on a lounge chair beside Coach, who wore shorts, a flowery shirt, and a wide straw hat. He sipped a drink that looked like iced tea.

  “That’ll be something stronger next week, Coach,” Brock mumbled as he pulled the curtains shut and returned to the bed. He dozed again, and was awakened again by another knock.

  “Brock? It’s me, Coach. Open up.”

  Brock’s instinct to obey crossed with his determination to be alone.

  “Come on, it’s time for the next game. You’ll be fine.” Coach’s voice stayed patient. “It was just one game.”

  After another minute, he knocked again. “Brock! Answer the door. Let’s go. I’m responsible for you. You don’t have to play, but you have to come with us to the park. I can’t leave you alone.”

  “I’m fine! Leave me!” Brock shouted.

  “Brock, come on. I can’t. Your father wouldn’t want me to just leave you here alone.”

  Brock bit his lip, choking back a sob and clenching his hands until his arms shook. “Leave me! He doesn’t care! He leaves me all the time!

  “That’s my life, Coach! That’s my life!”

  61

  Through the door, Coach said, “Come on, Brock. I can’t let you stay alone. You know that. I told your dad I’d keep an eye on you all the time. Just come with us. You can sit on the bus.”

  Brock ground his teeth, but put his shoes on, grabbed his book, and opened the door. “I’m sitting in the back and I’m not leaving the bus.”

  “That’s fine.” Coach’s eyes looked sad and tired. “Come on, you can get on before I load up everyone else.”

  Brock sat in the back corner and stuck his nose in his book. He tried to ignore the noise around him as the rest of the team loaded up. The seats were high enough so he didn’t have to see anyone, and only Charlie Pellicer poked his head around the corner and said a quick “oops, sorry” before disappearing.

  They reached the ballpark and Brock listened as the team drained from the bus. Brock sat for quite some time, just staring at his hands. He couldn’t hear a thing from the ballpark. He took out his book and began to read, and that was a comfort because he was hungry to be lost in a world that wasn’t his own. Time went by, and the light outside the window had faded out almost completely by the time the bus doors swung open and the team filled it up again. Brock sat, rigid, his teeth clenched as he deciphered the sounds of another losing effort.

  The bus got underway, then stopped before the hotel. Brock looked out the window and saw they were at a Dairy Queen. He didn’t move as the rest of the team laughed and joked with one another and piled off the bus. He wasn’t there ten minutes before Coach appeared and handed Brock a frosty milk shake along with a warm paper bag. Brock’s mouth watered at the smell of the cheeseburger and fries.

  “Lost the second one too.” Coach rested an arm on the back of the seat in front of Brock’s row and squinted out the window before looking down at Brock. “See? It wasn’t your fault.”

  Brock sat up in his seat and dug into the bag. He was famished.

  Juice from the meat and cheese leaked from the corner of his mouth and he wiped it on his sleeve.

  “Easy,” Coach said. “Take a breath. So, two losses, this one is over.”

  Brock didn’t slow down and the food warmed his stomach and his chest swam with delight.

  “We go home now?” Brock said, his mouth full.

  “Nah.” Coach stared out the window at the darkening sky. “I had to book the hotel for two nights anyway. Everyone seems to like the pool. At least we’ll have some fun.”

  The shake was cold and sweet, but couldn’t work its way through the straw fast enough, so he popped the cover and drank it like a glass of water. Brain freeze.

  “Aw!” Brock massaged his temples.

  “Too much of a good thing.” Coach sat down in the empty seat beside Brock.

  “Don’t you care if you win?” Brock asked.

  Coach frowned. “People used to hate to play my teams. Some people accused me of cheating. That’s how good we were.”

  “What happened?”

  Coach shrugged. “Low on talent. Getting older, I guess.”

  “I didn’t help you in the talent department.” Brock took another bite.

  “You’re good enough to turn this whole thing around,” Coach said. “Next game will be different. You just have to get used to everything That’s all that has to happen.”

  Brock slowed his chewing. “I’ve heard people talk about the mental part of the game.”

  Coach stood and waved a hand in the air. “A coach? You ever heard a coach talking like that? Mental schmental. You got the arm. You look at the catcher’s mitt. You throw the ball. It’s not complicated. Don’t turn this into a therapy session.”

  “Why are you mad?” Brock asked.

  “Because I don’t want to see you pout.” Spit flew from Coach’s mouth and his face was twisted up and red. “Feeling sorry for yourself is no way to go through life.”

  Brock flinched and stared at Coach without speaking.

  Coach’s face softened and he cleared his throat. “That’s the coach in me. I didn’t mean it as harsh as it sounded, but in the morning, make sure you join everyone for breakfast and hit the pool too. Trust me, Brock. If we get things straightened around, this team can really take off. There’s no sense in you alienating everyone. It’ll be more fun when we start to win if you’re part of the group.”

  “You really think I can turn this team around? Me? Just me?” Brock set the last bite of burger on the bag.

  Coach took a step down the aisle, but stopped to look back down over the seat in front of Brock. “I know you can.”

  Then he disappeared.

  62

  When they pulled up to the hotel, Brock waited until the bus was empty before he snuck off to his room and watched a movie. The next morning he got up determined to follow Coach’s advice. He did the walk of shame at breakfast, wading through his teammates to get to the buffet and sitting down with Bella, Coach Centurelli, and Coach at a small table in the corner. When Bella looked up, Brock quietly apologized.

  “For what?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Just . . . wigging out and not talking or anything.”

  “If you weren’t upset, it would mean you don’t care.” She looked around the dining room. “Like some of these other guys.”

  “Bella’s pretty tough,” Coach Centurelli said.

  “They call me a girl?” She pushed the glasses up on her nose, then put some ketchup on her eggs before offering Brock some. “You’ll get them next time. We all know you can throw.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Coach said, taking a sip of coffee.

  After breakfast, Brock changed into his swimsuit and walked with Bella out to the pool. Dylan wasn’t in too good a position to gloat since he hadn’t been able to win either, but that didn’t keep him from casting a nasty look Brock’s way when he passed him at the pool. Brock chose a chair as far from Dylan as possible. As he spread his towel, he couldn’t help noticing Dylan whispering to his buddies until they all broke out laughing.

  “Don’t mind them.” Bella lay down next to him with her eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. “Dylan’s a jerk.”

  Before lunch they checked out and hit the road.

  When they pulled into the school where the parents picked up the players, Bella said maybe she’d see him tomorrow afternoon when she finished her counseling job at the local sports day camp. They said good-bye, and Brock watched her climb into her mom’s SUV.

 
Coach pulled Brock aside. “We need to get ready for next week’s tournament in Princeton. Maybe your dad will let you come by after dinner?”

  Brock nodded, and at dinner that night, his dad asked how things went.

  “We lost.” Brock pushed some corn over the divider into the gravy and mashed potatoes of his frozen dinner.

  “Yeah, I got that from your text.” His father took a drink from his glass of tea and the ice clinked against the glass. “But you didn’t say anything about you.”

  “Well, Coach wants me over to his house after dinner, if it’s okay, to try and work things out, so obviously I didn’t light up the world.” Brock shoveled some food into his mouth.

  “You don’t want a break from baseball?” his father asked.

  “Is there something you want me to do?” Brock asked.

  “Maybe after you practice with Coach, we could go see a movie.”

  Brock tilted his head. They didn’t go see movies. If they saw movies they were rentals or pay-per-view. “With popcorn and stuff?”

  “And a couple of those drinks that look like paint buckets,” his father said. “There’s that . . . I don’t know, some blow-up movie with Denzel Washington. It’s showing at the mall. There’s one at nine.”

  “I heard some guys talking about that one at the pool.” Brock shoveled in more food, eager to finish, then get his work with Coach done so they’d be able to make a nine o’clock show. “Cool.”

  “Good.” His father smiled and dug into his food. “We’ll have fun.”

  63

  Brock helped clean up after dinner, grabbed his glove, and headed over to Coach’s house, where Mrs. Hudgens let him in. A carved-up roasted chicken rested on the kitchen table, filling the air with a smell that made Brock’s own frozen dinner chicken feel like a blob of slime in his belly.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Brock said. “I can come back. I just . . . my dad’s taking me to a movie, so I wanted to get right to work.”

  Coach drained the last bit from his bottle of beer, stood up, and patted his stomach. “No. I’m ready. All fueled up, and now you’ve given me an excuse to dodge the cleanup.”

  “Suddenly you need an excuse?” Mrs. Hudgens wadded up her napkin and tossed it at Coach.

  “I’ll be out back, Margaret,” he said, halfway to the sliding door. “Come on, Brock.”

  Brock followed Coach outside. Coach picked his glove off a deck table, slipped it on, and grabbed the bucket of baseballs before walking out into the yard toward the pitching rubber, where he already had a lawn chair set up next to a foam cooler resting in the grass.

  “Full windup. Watch.” Coach put his heels on the rubber, looked over his shoulder where first base would be, slid his right foot sideways and off the rubber, then reared back into a windup and threw at the chalk square on the fence, thumping it. “See that?”

  “Sure,” Brock said. “But I thought the stretch windup is all I need.”

  “The stretch windup is simpler. Gives you less to think about.” Coach tossed Brock a ball from the bucket. “I think you need more to think about.”

  “More?”

  “You’re thinking about the batter and the plate and the ump and who knows what else. I think maybe if you’re thinking about the mechanics of a full windup, you might just throw the ball.”

  “When I said mental, you said—”

  “Mental schmental.” Coach waved a hand like he was swatting away a mosquito. “This isn’t mental. It’s physical. We’re changing your windup and your timing.”

  “I like the stretch,” Brock said.

  “Well, I’m not sure if the stretch likes you.” Coach stepped back and sat down with a groan on the lawn chair before reaching into the cooler and cracking open a bottle of beer. “It’s worth a try, anyway, but I want you to practice with me here before I just have you do it with the team. Go ahead.”

  Brock did his best to mimic Coach. It was a bit awkward and the pitch went right over the top of the fence.

  Coach laughed out loud. “Try it again. I’ve got plenty of baseballs.”

  Brock smiled and tried again. This time, he hit the fence. Four pitches later, he was nailing the strike zone.

  “I feel like I can throw it harder this way too.”

  Coach nodded. “Lots of guys do.”

  He threw and threw and threw, and the light began to fade.

  Coach slapped his knees from his spot in the chair. “How about we reload the bucket one more time?”

  Brock removed the phone from his pocket. “I don’t know, Coach. I think I better get going. The movie, you know?”

  “Oh? Right, your movie.”

  “Sorry, Coach.” Brock headed toward the fence and began scooping up balls and depositing them into the bucket which he placed at Coach’s feet.

  Coach looked like he was going to say something, but then stopped and reached into the cooler for a fresh beer. “No problem. You go. I’ll just sit here for a bit.”

  Brock felt bad, but he went to the house and shouted a good-bye to Mrs. Hudgens, then hurried off down the street.

  Brock had only been to one movie before in his life. It was Allie Bergman’s birthday party. Her mom told everyone to get whatever they wanted at the concession stand. Brock got Swedish Fish, a Coke, and a bucket of popcorn. He could still taste the butter, or whatever that stuff was they put on, like salty liquid gold.

  When he entered through the living room, he gave his dad a holler. “Ready? I’m back!”

  There was no reply, except the sound of someone softly thumping around on the floor upstairs. Brock went through the kitchen and climbed the stairs. When he pushed open the bedroom door, his father was stuffing some clothes into a bag. He passed by Brock in a blur, grabbing his leather shaving kit from the bathroom before blowing past Brock again.

  “Dad?”

  Brock followed him into the kitchen, watching as his father packed his computer before he did a quick check of the contents in his briefcase, then snapped it shut and looked up at Brock.

  “Sorry, buddy. Gotta go.”

  Brock wanted to remind his father about the movie they were supposed to watch, but he kept his mouth shut. It would only make him sound like a whiner. Instead, he bit his lower lip and nodded his head and plunked himself down on a chair at the table. His father put a hand behind Brock’s head and kissed his forehead at the hairline. Brock just sat and watched as he disappeared in a flash out the door.

  64

  He found Coach where he’d left him, sitting in the complete dark now. Only the glow from the lights inside the house allowed Brock to see him raise a bottle to his mouth.

  “You’re back.” Coach’s words staggered out of his mouth and fell flat in the night air.

  “I . . . my dad.”

  “Have a seat.” Coach wrangled the cooler around.

  Brock sat down in the cool grass and rested his chin in his knees. “You shouldn’t sit out here by yourself, Coach.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, well, Nagel told me his brother has been shooting his mouth off.”

  Coach snorted. “That wouldn’t be the thing to worry me.”

  “He’s kind of crazy. Nagel says he wants to get you back for beaning him before he leaves to go in the army.”

  “I’m crazy too, but you already know that.” Coach raised his bottle and then took a swig. “I’m not afraid of anything, Brock. There’s nothing that can be done to me worse than what has already happened.”

  They sat for a bit. Brock swatted at a bug on his neck. “Does it get better?”

  “Does it?” Coach asked the question quietly to himself. “No, I guess it doesn’t. I guess you get older and more worn down and so a lot of other things begin to ache, but right there in the middle of it all is this . . . like a rusty knife in your heart that makes it so you can’t even speak.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d say this, though,” Coach said. “It’s like any pain in that the best th
ing to do is distract yourself. It’s worse when you contemplate it, just sitting and thinking. You’ve been a help in that way.”

  “Me?”

  “I find myself imagining the things you can do. The places you can go, and that I can maybe help you get there. Guide you.”

  “Like Barrett Malone?”

  “Yes, but even more. I didn’t even know what I had with Barrett, and it didn’t mean as much to me, to be honest. Oh, I’m proud, and it’s nice the way he’s remembered me, sponsoring the team and all. But I had . . . I had my own boy back then.” Coach’s voice broke and he sniffed and hiccuped.

  Brock pretended not to hear.

  Coach cleared his throat and coughed and took another drink. “You’re like a combination of them both, and that keeps my mind busy.”

  Brock felt a sudden chill. “We move a lot, Coach. My dad’s job . . . I don’t know. We just don’t ever stay too long.”

  “The world could end tomorrow too. You know that?”

  “I guess.”

  “It could.” Coach struggled up out of his chair. “And, if it does, then it won’t matter anyway, but if it doesn’t? Then I’m going to turn you into a monster pitcher. And people are going to notice you, Brock. They will.”

  Brock stood up too. He knew being noticed was the last thing his father would want, but he couldn’t think of a way to explain that to Coach.

  65

  The full windup seemed to be just the thing.

  All week, Brock got better and better in practice, and even though Dylan was slated as the starting pitcher for their first game at Princeton, everyone knew Brock was the one who would get them a trophy . . . if he didn’t have another meltdown.

  Brock went about his business at home, doing his chores, checking them off the list, and eating frozen dinners by himself. Bella showed up every afternoon when she finished her own job at the camp. They would read without really talking, then Bella would head off to dinner at her house before they met up again at practice in the evening. There was a rhythm to it all that Brock enjoyed, even though his heart would skip a beat every time he walked into the empty garage.