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  They waved and went their separate ways. Brock didn’t look back, but instead raised a hand out in front of his face to watch it tremble.

  26

  When the last bell rang, Brock started around the side of the school toward the ball fields, but stopped before he rounded the final corner.

  “Stupid!” He hit himself on the forehead with an open hand. He knew better than to get close to someone so fast. He knew from experience to take things slow. He had to take his time, feel people out, make sure they were like Allie and Luke, kids who were private themselves and not prone to wagging their tongues with gossip.

  “I can’t do this,” he mumbled, and instead of sticking around, Brock turned and did what he knew his father would expect. He headed home, avoiding the smart and curious girl and all her questions. He was halfway up the driveway when he heard someone shout his name. It didn’t surprise him to see Nagel shuffling toward him from between two of the neighbors’ houses across the street. Brock turned and went into the garage through the side door, knowing Nagel would follow.

  Nagel stepped inside. “What’s up?”

  “What’s that mean?” Brock glared at him.

  Nagel chewed on a nail, then examined his fingers. “You rat me out?”

  Brock stared. “You think I ratted you out?”

  Nagel glared for half a minute, then burst out into a grin. “Naw, I knew you were solid. But what the heck happened? Did he call the cops, or just your dad?”

  “He turned me loose,” Brock said, “or she did.”

  “She?”

  “Coach’s wife. Did you know they had a kid who died?”

  “What?”

  “A kid. Our age. Must’ve been a while ago, right?”

  “I never heard about a kid. What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind. He asked me to play on his team.” Brock let that settle in.

  Nagel wrinkled his face. “You bust the guy’s window and he asks you to play on his team? I heard about his team. They stink.”

  “I didn’t bust anyone’s window.”

  Nagel snickered. “How awesome was that? Pow.”

  “He asked me who was with me.” Brock wanted Nagel to know how close he’d come to taking a fall.

  “And you didn’t tell, right?”

  “Does it look like I told? Did the cops show up at your door?”

  Nagel held out his hand. “You’re the man.”

  Brock shook it, glaring at him.

  Nagel snorted. “His baseball team? Ha! That is so hilarious. Can you imagine that drunk? I knew a kid who lived in the apartments who was this killer baseball player, right? So, he joins Huggy’s travel team because he can’t afford to play for the Syracuse Titans.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Like, the best travel team in the state. So this kid goes down to Florida for some big tournament and they can’t win a game. Not one. Then, on the morning of the last day, Coach Huggy passes out in his bathroom and they ship the whole team home, pronto. Ha ha! What a clown!”

  Brock frowned. “Man, that’s cold.”

  “What’s cold?”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “Oh, I get it.” Nagel scowled at him. “Go ahead. Go play for the drunk. See if I care.”

  “I have to play.” Brock glared right back. “He said he knows who I was with.”

  Nagel’s eyes widened. “You said you didn’t tell.”

  “I didn’t. He said he knew though. Maybe he saw you. Anyway, don’t give me any junk about playing for him. He said he’d drop the whole thing, but who knows what he’ll do if I don’t play. You should want me to play. Now all I gotta do is get my dad to say yes.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  Brock just stood there, and then suddenly, the springs on the garage door jumped and groaned and the door rattled up.

  “Oh, no! Hurry! This way!” Brock grabbed Nagel’s arm and dragged him into the house.

  27

  Brock shoved Nagel out the back door, instructing him to go through the bushes and around the other side of the house.

  “Do not let him see you!” The desperation in Brock’s voice made it hiss and crackle much louder than the whisper he intended. “Go!”

  Brock spun around just as the door leading to the garage flung open. His father stood there, studying him.

  “You’re early.” Brock walked away from the door.

  “What were you doing?” His father peered through the sliding glass, searching the bushes with his eyes.

  “Just checking out the backyard.” Brock shrugged and kept his voice even. “What happened that let you get back early?”

  Brock’s dad brushed past him and made for the stairs. “I’m going to shower. We’ll get hot dogs for dinner.”

  “Okay.” Brock read his book and halfheartedly did some homework until they went to eat. But he waited until after their dinner was nothing but crumbs on their paper plates before he brought up the travel team. They sat in a red booth, looking out at the evening traffic. His father took the last bite of a fist-sized pickle and puckered his lips.

  “The gym coach asked me to play on some baseball team he coaches over the summer.” Brock let the words hang between them.

  His father watched the cars go by and sipped some soda through his straw. “You can play some baseball. That’s fine.”

  “It’s a travel team.” Brock met his father’s cold green eyes as they darted his way.

  “That you can’t do.” His father held his gaze for a moment, then looked away and sighed impatiently. “You know that.”

  “Guess I didn’t.” Brock knew he was on dangerous ground, but all the secrecy made him furious. He thought of Bella and wondered what she thought when he didn’t arrive at practice to walk her home.

  “Guess you didn’t?” Brock’s father pounded a fist on the table, so that the napkin dispenser did a little jig and people around them got quiet.

  His father leaned forward and lowered his voice. “What’s wrong with you? What if you’re in another state, and we need to disappear within the hour?”

  Brock stared at him, strangely unafraid. Still, he couldn’t speak, and that’s how they left it and how it stayed all night. Brock put himself to bed. He knew the drill.

  The next day Brock’s father acted like nothing was wrong and Brock played along, rinsing out his cereal bowl, saying good-bye, and heading out the door for school. When he saw Bella in homeroom, she ignored him completely and it made it seem like he might have imagined everything from yesterday. But he hadn’t imagined it, and he wanted to say he was sorry, but now he realized that behind her glasses and those braids she was quite pretty and that scared him into silence.

  After third period, he arrived at gym class early and found coach in his office hunched down over some paperwork. Brock swallowed hard, knocked on the open door, and went in. Coach looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes.

  “Brock. What?”

  Brock pleaded with his eyes. “Coach, my father won’t let me play.”

  “What? Why?” Coach had some reading glasses on his nose and he whipped them off and tossed them onto the desk.

  “It’s the travel. He won’t let me go. He . . . I . . . have lots to do around the house, and he travels sometimes so . . . he wants me home at night.”

  “So, no mom?”

  “No.”

  Coach blinked at him and rubbed his jaw.

  Brock had a sinking feeling. “I swear I didn’t break your window, Coach. I can pay for it.”

  “How about I talk to your father,” Coach said. “Not about the window, but about the team.”

  “No, Coach!” Brock shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable in the silence following his outburst and speaking rapidly. “He . . . please, don’t. My father’s not like that. Don’t.”

  Coach picked his glasses off the desk and began twirling them around in one hand, thinking. “Look, Brock, I want to work with you. Let’s just agree to do that,
and see what happens. Maybe your father will . . . I don’t know. We’ve got a couple tournaments that are right around here and you wouldn’t have to stay overnight. Let’s do some work and see where this goes. Meet me tonight after dinner. I can set something up in my backyard. Can you do that?”

  “I think. I can’t promise. My dad, he . . .”

  Coach held up a hand impatiently. “You just meet me if you can.”

  “And, you won’t call the police?”

  Coach smiled, exposing a row of slightly crooked and yellowing teeth.

  Brock held his breath.

  28

  “You know how many times a kid like Barrett Malone comes along?” Coach’s eyes drilled into Brock.

  Behind him, the class filtered into the gym, filling it with echoes of laughter and random shouts.

  “Not many?” Brock said.

  Coach shook his head. “I’ve been coaching baseball for forty years. All the tournaments and camps, I must’ve seen a million kids, all of them dying to be a Yankee or a Cardinal or a Red Sock, and I only ever saw one Barrett Malone.”

  Coach stared at Brock, his smile fading. “Now, two.”

  His words jolted Brock. Two in a million. Really?

  His insides quivered.

  “I’ll work with you, however.” Coach perched the glasses back on his nose and turned his attention to the papers. “You talk to your dad, or not. You give me whatever time you can. If all you can do is practice for the next two years before you get to high school, well . . . so be it. Baseball will wait for an arm like yours, and I’m not calling the police. I said I wouldn’t. Go ahead. Get out there. We’re playing badminton today.”

  Brock almost ended up on Bella’s team, but, without looking at him, she used some silent signal to trade spots with a girl on the other side of the gym.

  29

  That night after dinner Brock asked his father if he could go outside.

  “Where you going?” his father asked.

  Brock shrugged. “My gym teacher, you know, the baseball coach? He lives down the street at 23 Mallard. He knows I can’t be on his travel team, but he said he’d work with me on my pitching anyway. He saw me throwing in gym. We were playing dodgeball. He thinks I’ve got an arm.”

  “Well, you do,” his father said. “Okay, if you go right there, and then come right back here, you can go.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Brock retrieved the baseball mitt from his bedroom and slipped out into the warm evening air. The sun hadn’t set, but it hung low in the sky and Brock had to block its rays as he marched up Coach Hudgens’s driveway. He took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. Inside he heard the muffled chime, then muted talking and footsteps. His heart began to pound. Mrs. Hudgens welcomed him with a smile and asked him to come in.

  “We just finished eating.”

  Brock could smell the food—maybe pot roast? Even though he’d had his fill of the fried chicken his father had brought home in a box, Brock’s mouth watered at the rich smell of the Hudgenses’ dinner.

  Mrs. Hudgens led him into the kitchen. “How about a cookie?”

  Brock nodded and took a warm molasses cookie from the stainless steel tray she offered him.

  “Sit down and I’ll pour you some milk,” she said. “Coach will be right down. He didn’t think you were coming.”

  Brock’s teeth sank into the thick cookie and the word “cookie” suddenly took on a brand-new meaning. Warmth and velvety spices filled his mouth and the cold milk washed it down cleanly, letting him do it all over again with every bite.

  Coach appeared wearing a sweat jacket and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.

  “Is that real?” Brock motioned to the hat, then wiped his mouth on a napkin Mrs. Hudgens had put down.

  Coach took the hat off his head and studied it. “Barrett wore it when they won the ALCS.”

  “Wow.” Brock stood up from the table. “Thanks for the cookies, Mrs. Hudgens. They’re like heaven.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed them. They’re Coach’s favorite.” Mrs. Hudgens began to clear the table.

  “Come on, Brock. Let’s get to work.” Coach smacked a fist into his worn-out glove. He took a thermos off the counter, tucked it under his arm, and marched toward the sliding door that led to the back deck. “Glad you could make it.”

  On the deck was a bucket of baseballs and a rubber home plate. Coach grabbed the bucket and stepped down off the deck into the grass. Across the widest part of the back lawn, a single narrow swatch of grass had been cut lower than the rest. On one end, Coach had pounded a rubber pitcher’s mound into the ground. On the other end, he flopped down the home plate. Behind that, a small square had been marked off on the stockade fence in white chalk that reminded Brock of the rectangle Coach had drawn on the school’s back wall.

  Coach returned to the middle of the yard and led Brock to the rubber mound, tossing him a ball from the bucket before he set the thermos down in the grass close to the fence. “You like a two seam or four?”

  Brock averted his eyes from the thermos and wrinkled his forehead. “A what?”

  “How have you been holding the ball?” Coach asked.

  Brock shrugged.

  “Here.” Coach took the ball and laid it in his own hand, placing his first two fingers over the narrowest part of the seams. “Use a two seam, like this. That’s a fast ball. Lots of spin. Make sure you hold it like this every time, but I don’t want you squeezing the ball. Just hold it loose with the fingers across the stitches.”

  Brock took the ball and did as he was told.

  “Okay, good.” Coach nodded. “Now, let’s see what you’ve got. Give me a windup and throw for that square on the fence.”

  “Isn’t this too far for a pitch?” Brock asked.

  “You’re thinking Little League. This is U13. Mound is at sixty. The bases are ninety. Don’t worry about that. You’ve got plenty of arm.”

  “I never did a windup before,” Brock said.

  “You’ve seen pitchers wind up, though. Just show me what you’ve got. Don’t worry. We’ll fix whatever we have to.”

  Brock ran through it in his mind, shrugged, and stepped up onto the rubber.

  “No, put your left foot in front of the rubber, right up tight. I don’t want you worrying about a full windup, so we’ll work on a stretch. Don’t worry about what I call it, just start with your foot against the rubber. That’s it. Go ahead.”

  Brock wedged his left foot up tight, raised his right leg, reared back, stepped forward, and threw.

  30

  CRACK!

  The ball echoed off the fence like a gunshot.

  “Nice. Strike. We gotta tone down the windup,” Coach said, “but it’s easier to tone down than the other way and you put that baby right down the pipe. Okay, raise the leg, but not as far, just so it’s parallel to the ground. Here, watch me. Like this.”

  Coach took a ball from the bucket, wedged his foot against the rubber, and went into a windup.

  CRACK!

  Dead center in the chalk square.

  Brock’s jaw went slack. “That’s awesome.”

  “Not really.” Coach dusted off his hands and bent down to retrieve his thermos and fill its plastic green top. “Trust me, the fastest ball I ever threw was eighty-two miles an hour.”

  “That’s killer!”

  “For a kid, but not a full-grown man.” Coach raised his plastic cup and drank. “If you do what I tell you and grow the way I think you will, you’ll be up close to a hundred.”

  “A hundred!” Brock’s skin tingled. He couldn’t help wonder what the Coach was drinking and if that might be doing the talking.

  “We’re a long way from that, though, but it’s out there. Come on, let’s see you do it with the leg parallel.”

  Brock did, but this time his pitch went wide left of the chalk square even though it sounded like another shot.

  “Don’t worry about that. You’ll be off this way and that while you’re th
inking about these other things, but they’re important. Once we get them all down and it’s second nature, your accuracy will be right where we need it.”

  They continued to work. Coach patiently instructed him and praised Brock as a natural every few minutes as he discreetly emptied the thermos. Brock didn’t care about that. It felt like Christmas and his birthday and Halloween rolled up into one. The sun turned red, the grass cooled, and the shadows grew long. After a time, Coach’s wife flicked on a spotlight mounted on the back corner of the house and they threw until Brock saw the smiling moon rise above the trees.

  “Okay, that’s it for now.” Coach tucked the thermos under his arm and started across the lawn with the empty bucket. “You can help me pick these up.”

  “Can’t we keep going?” Brock asked eagerly.

  “We need to get your arm strong. Last thing I want to do is get you hurt. It takes time. Be patient. You’ll thank me tomorrow. You did real good.”

  They began picking up the balls, plunking them into the bucket in silence, when something abruptly banged the fence. Brock’s eye caught the tail end of a shadow darting into the grass. Both of them stood.

  Thud.

  A rock bounced off the ground fifteen feet away.

  “What?” Coach’s voice turned furious.

  Another rock sailed over the trees, and came pelting down, banging the bucket like a drum.

  Coach roared and headed for the back of the fence where shouts from the apartment side cried out for everyone to run.

  31

  Keys jangled from Coach Hudgens’s pocket as he lurched toward the fence. As Brock followed the older man through the dark trees, he saw a gate he hadn’t noticed before. Coach grabbed the thick padlock and jammed home the key, twisting it so the lock popped open. Coach rattled it free and dropped the lock to the grass, flinging open the door, and stepping through the fence into the world he worked hard to keep from mixing with his own.

  “Get back here!” Coach howled and took off after them, moving with a side-winding gait that told of past injuries and menacing them with nothing more than one of the baseballs he still clutched in one twisted hand.