Boy Toy (26 page)

"He's the guy at Stanford who holds your balls and your future in the palm of his hand. And guess what, Mendel? Over the weekend, he handed them over to me."

Coach grins an evil grin. "Graves is on the fence about you. Called me to ask some questions."

Oh, shit. There goes Stanford.

"They're impressed with you, Mendel. But they haven't made up their minds about an athletic scholarship. Because they've heard stories. Now..." He stretches and yawns as if bored with the whole thing. "Now I'm supposed to get back to him. Tell him what I think of you as a player. I can tell him a bunch of things, Mendel. I could tell him you're the best natural hitter I've ever seen. Or I can tell him that you like using your coaches like speed bags."

The water pelting me is hot, but my whole body's gone cold. "What do you want, Coach?"

He pretends to think about it for a second, but the bastard has known all along, of course. "You're playing shortstop again. Starting this week."

"What?" I would rather he pound the shit out of me! "We had a deal! I don't play in the field! I'm the DH!"

"Not for the rest of the season, Mendel. You're my bitch and I want you in the field. I need you in the field. You're a goddamn good fielder."

"So? There's ten other guys who can—"

"I need you in the field. But I'll leave it up to you—you can play in the field or not. But if you don't, then not only will I give a crappy report back to Graves, but we'll also damn sure never get top seed in the playoffs. Against the Sledgehammers. And Fieser."

Reggie Fieser. "The Heat," as he's known throughout Lowe County. He transferred in from some school in Texas right after Christmas break and promptly starting breaking school, then county, then state records left and right.

Oh, and he's a
sophomore.
He's the most feared arm in the state.

"Now I
really
got your attention, don't I?" Coach laughs. "You want a crack at him, don't you?"

"Maybe." But I have to admit, my hands are trembling a little bit. I figured I'd never get a shot at Fieser before I graduated. We already played Canterstown once this year before the Heat arrived. But in this state,
every
team goes to the first round of playoffs. And if we do well enough the rest of the season, we're guaranteed a seed that puts us against the Sledgehammers—the only way I'll get a chance to go up against the Heat.

"Here's the surprise part, Mendel. Are you ready for it?"

There's more?

"There's gonna be a scout in the crowd that day."

Holy shit! I try to keep the surprise off my face, but I fail dramatically and Coach laughs. A scout? In fucking
Brookdale?

"For Canterstown, yeah, there'll be a scout," he says in answer to my unasked question. "So we have to get that seed position. He's here to see Fieser, but if you want a chance to show a scout what you've got, this is it."

There are
never
scouts in Brookdale.

"You could put Brookdale on the map," Coach goes on. "I get something and
you
get something. Like an athletic scholarship. How about it, Mendel? We got a deal?"

I offer him a slick, soapy hand. "Deal."

By the time I get home from practice, Dad is home from work, so we have one of our deep bonding conversations.

"Where's Mom?"

"She said she had to go to the mall after work. Probably still there. How was practice?"

"Not bad. I went five for five at the plate with two doubles."

"Who was pitching?"

"Grady."

"Oh." And he shrugs as if to say,
Big deal. Your grandmother could go five for five against Grady.
Which, you know, she probably could.

I check the pile of mail before going to my room. Nothing from the Holy Trinity. I'm getting antsy, I admit. Stanford won't base their admission decision on Coach's report to Coach Graves, but the all-important athletic scholarship hinges on that weaselly bastard.

Then again, maybe I won't get into one of the top schools. Maybe I won't get the scholarship or the financial aid. Just because I've got straight A's at South Brook High doesn't mean the world's going to drop to its knees in front of me.

I take my mind off it with my homework and catch-up work until my parents go to bed. As I'm noodling around on the Internet, the phone rings. Caller ID isn't helpful; I pounce on the phone before it can ring a second time.

"So are you planning on coming by or what?" Rachel asks.

"Rache, God! You can't call this late. My parents are in bed."

"You need to get a cell."

"Yeah, well..." There's no money for that, I know.

"You should come over to the Narc. I'm closing in a little while."

"I have a game tomorrow. I have to get some sleep."

"I have a game, too. I just miss you."

I don't know what to say to that. I lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling.

"Do you miss me, Josh?"

The ceiling. Staring. Patterns in the stucco. Chaos theory in action.

"Josh? Are you there? I have to go soon. My manager is—"

"OK," I tell her.

"OK, what?"

"I'll come over."

I get to the Narc with fifteen minutes to go before closing. I scout from the parking lot quickly. There are only a couple of cars in the lot and neither of them is Eve's.

Of course, she could have gotten a new car, right? It's been five years. Would she have kept the old car all that time? Where would it be while she was in prison?

I give myself five minutes in the car, then get out and head inside.

Rachel's packing away deli meats and breads at the lunch counter. She smiles when she sees me and gives me a little wave—the tips of her fingers jiggling in the air. I don't know how she manages all this; work, school, softball. I do some Web programming over the summer and that keeps my car insurance paid up, but that's about it.

I look around the store, just in case Eve's here. It occurs to me that if I were a famous registered sex offender, I'd probably do my shopping late at night when no one else was around.

But she's not here. Rachel finishes up and emerges from the swinging double doors behind the lunch counter, untying her stubby ponytail to let her hair down over her ears. She flashes another smile at me and holds up a paper bag. "I made us some sandwiches."

Soon we're sitting out on the hood of her car in the parking lot, eating corned beef on rye with hot mustard.

"I can never sleep after work," she tells me, then lays back and gazes up at the stars. "I always have too much energy. Takes me an hour or more to get rested enough to sleep."

"How do you go on so little sleep? I was like a zombie the other day." It's true—I'm a total sleep wuss. I need my pathetic eight hours or I feel like a slug. I already know I will pay for this little encounter tomorrow at school.

She shrugs. "I don't know. I just do. I need to work. I need to go to school. We can't all be super-geniuses with full rides to College Park."

I don't say anything. She sits up. "Oh, come on, Josh. It was a joke. I didn't mean anything by it."

"OK."

She grabs my shoulders and starts massaging them. It feels good. "You're so serious. It's like you're a thousand years old. And Jesus! Your shoulders feel like stone! Relax."

"It's tough for me, Rache."

"I thought we went over this. There was forgiveness and apologies and—"

"I don't mean that. I mean ... this." I gesture to the sky, the surrounding parking lot, the car. "All of this. Being out like this ... I usually stay in when I can. I don't like being out in public."

"Shy?"

"No. It's just ... everyone
knows,
Rachel. My name wasn't in the papers, but that didn't matter. Everyone knows. And they watch me. And
she's
out there now. She could be anywhere." Her fingers dig deeper into my shoulders, or maybe my shoulders are just bunching up more or maybe it's both. "She could be anywhere I turn."

Rachel stops kneading my shoulders and leans in against me. She drapes an arm around my chest from behind and rests her chin on my shoulder. I find myself holding her other hand.

"Are you afraid of her?" she whispers.

I can't answer. I can barely breathe. I'm fighting against a flicker, struggling to stay in the present. There should be something sexual about this, about Rachel draping herself over me like this, but there isn't, somehow. It's just warm and cozy and
safe.
Maybe it's because my back's turned. Or maybe it's that she doesn't have these gigantic breasts to push against me. Whatever it is, I feel myself relax against her and then it's just amazing because we're leaning on each other, holding each other up, like cards tilted against each other on a table.

"Are you afraid of her?" she whispers again. "You can tell me."

And I can. I realize in that moment that I
can
tell Rachel, that I can tell her anything.

"I'm not afraid of her," I say, and it's true.

"I'm afraid of me. I'm afraid of what I'll do if I see her."

I spend an hour like that with Rachel, just entwined with her on the hood of her car, lit by the stars and the lampposts of the Narc's parking lot.

We talk. Nothing important. Just meaningless little things. Teachers we like or don't like. Crazy tests. Whether Zik and Michelle are having sex
right now.

I ask her why she gave up baseball for softball in seventh grade. There's a girls' Little League and ladies' baseball teams at South Brook Middle and South Brook High.

"Because there's no career path in it." She's snuggled up tight to me from behind, lightly stroking my arm. It feels good; there's a little chill in the air. "No matter how well I played, I'd never get to play professionally in the majors. In softball, at least I can play at the top of the game."

I think about that.

I think about how shitty the world is to her. She's one of the best pitchers I ever faced, and there's no room for her in a major league dugout.

But mostly I think about how good I feel right now, how for the first time in five years I'm touching and being touched by a woman and not wondering what she's going to do next.

Or what I'm going to do.

In the game against East Brook, I go 3 for 3 with a double, a walk, and two RBIs. I'd say I'm on fire, but the fact is that East Brook's pathetic. They're 2 and 10 before we play, 2 and 11 by the time they limp off the field. We take them for 15 embarrassing runs and even Grady, our worst pitcher, almost shuts them out. He pitches six innings, walks five, but strikes out ten. It's the best game of his life.

My average is now an unreal .550, and my on base percentage is up to .620. In the field for the first time in a long time, I don't see much action given the quality of East Brook's hitting, so it's not too bad.

Zik kicks all sorts of ass. He hits two homers, one of which drives me in and one of which brings in two more runs. His isolated power average is .667, making him Zeus, Lord of Thunder and Lightning. He goes 2 for 4, which is the best he's done all season—he usually goes 1 for 3, something like that. He's a power hitter—if he can manage to get a piece of the ball, you'll never see it again, but he has trouble getting that piece sometimes. If he could settle down in the batter's box, he'd be a better overall player than I am.

Behind the plate, he catches well, calls good pitches that are executed with borderline competence by Grady. He gets a moment of rare attention when a pop fly is lost in the sun—no one in the infield can see it, but Zik somehow finds it and runs halfway to the mound, throwing his mask in the air and making the catch. In a tight or challenging game, it would be heroic. Instead, it's just ... fun to watch.

I race through my shower and throw on my clothes as fast as I can, my shirt clinging to my still-wet torso. Rachel's softball game started thirty minutes after our game, up in Canterstown. If I hurry, I might make the last inning.

I break the speed limit on Route 54 on the way to Canterstown, but by the time I get there, I know I'm too late. The field is emptying out and there's a snarl of cars honking and inching around, trying to get onto the road. I park in a now-abandoned spot and make my way to the field, where some obnoxious Sledgehammers are chanting:

There ain't no brook!

There ain't no dale!

There's just fucking Brookdale!

The worst part of the chant is that you really can't argue with it. There
is
no brook or dale in Brookdale. I don't know where the name came from.

I wait outside the visitor's locker room for a while, watching South Brook girls come out in little clusters and pairs. The scoreboard tells the tale: Visitors 2, Lady Sledgehammers 3.

Rachel drags her duffel bag out. I've never seen her so dejected and hurt. She doesn't realize I'm there as she trudges up the path toward the bus.