Fragile Beasts (46 page)

On the way home he told me Coach Pankowski’s philosophy was fruity and that he was probably a fag, which is why I liked him so much since I was one, too.

I didn’t like hearing him talk that way about the coach, but considering how weird he’d been lately, I was more relieved than pissed off.

He hardly eats and he never seems to sleep. He never hangs out with his friends. He never kids around with me or fights with me. He won’t have anything to do with Miss Jack even after I told him she never told Mom any of those things and said we could keep living with her.

The only thing he still does is go visit Bill, but even Bill is starting to get freaked out by him. He still just wants to sit on Bill’s porch and stare at our backyard.

He’s losing weight and he has permanent dark shadows under his eyes, but he’s unstoppable at the plate. It’s as if some kind of energy-sucking baseball microbe is devouring him from the inside, taking away his desire to do anything else and putting it into his swing.

Tyler’s noticed and asked me what I thought was going on and I told him I didn’t know. Coach Hill hasn’t talked to me but Tyler said at an away game last week, he took Klint out during the fourth inning and made him eat a sandwich.

I take a final look around the stands for Shelby before I sit down next to Bill.

I don’t see her.

“He doesn’t look good,” Bill says and takes a long drag from the straw stuck into his beer Slurpee.

The announcer has just called Klint’s name and he’s jogging onto the field while the fans hoot and holler.

“Your hot streak’s over, Hayes!” someone yells at him. “No one can hit Tussey’s curveball!”

Reid Tussey is the Laurel Falls pitcher who probably still has bad dreams involving the clang of a golf ball hitting the side of a soup can.

There are a lot of Laurel Falls fans here. It’s going to be a rowdy game.

Our own pitcher, Joe Farnsworth, takes to the mound. He throws one of the best fastballs in the state, but he’s got his work cut out for him.

The team he’s facing today isn’t hampered by stress. When they step up to the plate, they’re not thinking about possible college scholarships or multimillion-dollar pro contracts in their futures. They’re playing for bragging rights in the present.

I reach for a handful of Bill’s chips and when I do, I see a flash of coppery-brown down on the ground not far from the fence behind the dugout. I’d recognize Shelby’s hair anywhere.

She’s peering up into the stands. I’m stupid enough to hope she’s looking for me and when her glance comes around my way, I wave at her.

She doesn’t smile. She stares back at me with an expression I can’t define, but I know it’s not happiness over seeing me.

As long as I’ve known Shelby, she’s always greeted me with one of her great smiles. I never realized until this moment how much I counted on it.

I get up and start down the bleacher stairs. She turns and starts heading back to the parking lot. She was looking for me but only so she could avoid me.

“Hey, Shelby,” I call to her.

She doesn’t stop walking.

“Hey.”

I jog to catch up to her and reach out and grab her by the arm.

“Shelby, come on.”

She stops and faces me. I’ve never seen her angry before. Her pale skin is tinged pink with passion, and her brown eyes have a feline greenish glow to
them. Her long, loose, dark hair full of red-gold glints falls messily around her face. I can’t help thinking that this is what she’d look like if we were in the middle of having sex.

“On top of everything else, you’re a liar, too,” she spits at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Does Klint really want me here? Or was that just a lie to get me to come to the game?”

She puts her hands on her hips and stares me down. I thought since I’m a man now with some sexual experience, I’d have more confidence around her but I’m as intimidated as ever.

“Yeah, I lied. Klint could care less if you’re here or anybody else. But what about how you’ve been treating me? You’ve been blowing me off for almost a month. And now today you’re only going to show up because you think Klint wants to see you. What about that?”

She doesn’t answer me.

“This was the only way I could think of to get to see you,” I explain.

“I don’t want to see you.”

“Why? What did I do?”

“You know exactly what you did.”

She takes off again.

“If this is about Starr,” I call after her departing back, “I don’t love her. I love you.”

The minute these words are out of my mouth, I know they’re a mistake. I didn’t think. I spontaneously put forth the only thoughts in my head that mattered as far as I was concerned. They were true, heartfelt words that explained and justified everything and should’ve been enough to smooth things out between the two of us.

But Shelby is a girl. If I thought girls were confusing before I had sex with one, it’s nothing compared to what I think about them now. I don’t understand anything about them except for one thing I’ve figured out for certain: anything a guy thinks about love and sex, a girl thinks exactly the opposite.

She stops dead in her tracks and gives me a furious look.

“You love me?” she shouts at me. “You’re going to tell me you love me? After you had sex with my sister?”

“I would’ve rather had sex with you but you’re not interested.”

Again, I’ve said something that makes perfect sense to me, but her face turns practically purple with rage.

“Okay, are you interested?” I plead with her. “Do you love me? Do you want to do it with me?”

“No!” she screams at me. “And no!”

“I don’t get it. Your sister comes on to me and then she tells you about it, knowing it will make you feel bad and you get mad at
me
?”

“She did it to show me that all guys are pigs. Even the ones you think are nice.”

“Why am I a pig?”

“Because you had sex with my sister!” she screams again.

“Is it because she’s your sister? Would you be just as mad at me if I’d done it with someone you’re not related to?”

She takes off again.

I go after her.

“So let me see if I get this straight,” I say, panting as I jog alongside her. “I’m supposed to never have sex with anyone ever in my life because I had the bad luck to fall in love with a girl who doesn’t love me back?”

She slows down and then stops.

The crowd erupts into cheers and applause. We both look back at the stands filled with happy people.

“Do you love Starr?” she asks me.

“No. I already told you that. I’m afraid of Starr.”

“But you had sex with her.”

I shrug.

“You don’t have to be in love with someone to have sex with them.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because sex is the most intimate, spiritual, beautiful act possible between two people.”

Spoken like a girl who’s never had sex, I think to myself.

“I guess that’s true and I hope someday I’ll get to have sex with someone I love, but in the meantime I’m not going to turn down having sex with someone I think is hot.”

“That’s so disgusting.”

“What’s with you, Shelby? Did you find religion or something?”

She’s joined the church of the fairy-tale love story. Why not? After all, religion is just blind faith in something that common sense says can’t be true. There’s no reason why Shelby can’t be worshipping at the altar of “love and sex without pain and suffering.”

“You don’t have to be religious to think it’s wrong to have sex with someone you’re not in love with,” she tells me in a snooty tone. “It’s a moral question.”

“Would you have sex with Klint?”

She doesn’t answer my question. Instead she says, “I love him.”

“You don’t love him. You don’t know anything about him. You’ve probably never exchanged more than three complete sentences with him. You think he’s good-looking the same way I thought Starr was good-looking. That’s all.”

I wonder what she’d think if she knew Starr tried to do it with her precious Klint, too.

She starts walking again. We’re almost to her shiny little red sports car. It’s easy to spot parked in the midst of all the beat-up pickups and SUVs, most of them badly in need of a wash.

“You want to compare morals?” I go on. “You think it’s okay for you to sleep with my brother but it’s not okay for me to sleep with your sister?

“The moral difference isn’t that you love Klint so it’s okay and I don’t love Starr so it’s not okay. The moral difference is you don’t love me, you don’t care about me at all, so how does it hurt you if I screw your sister or anybody else? But I do love you so it would really hurt me if you screwed my brother. But you don’t care about that.”

She takes her keys out of her purse and presses the button to unlock her car from a distance. I hear a muted beep and its headlights flash once.

I realize this is it. I’m probably never going to see her again. Watching her open the door to her $60,000 car that she didn’t pay for and flipping open her frosted ice blue BlackBerry that no sixteen-year-old on the planet needs to have, I’ve never felt more alienated from her.

In her mind, she’ll be able to tell herself that I betrayed her and that’s why the friendship ended. Being able to justify her actions and still come out seeming like a nice, decent person is all that matters to her.

I suddenly understand that what’s happening between Shelby and me doesn’t have anything to do with Starr and me fooling around. It just provided Shelby with a convenient excuse to get rid of me.

She puts her BlackBerry away, opens the door to her car, and starts to get in.

The old me, the scared kid, would’ve let her drive away without saying anything else, but the new me, the disillusioned man, needs to further explain himself.

“I always thought you were kind and caring,” I tell her. “Now I realize you’re just as selfish as everybody else. You’re only kind and caring when it’s easy.”

She looks startled but not hurt, another sign that she doesn’t care about me or what I think.

“Look at everything I did for you,” she replies, turning bitchy. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d be living with that horrible witch mother of yours and her awful boyfriend in Arizona somewhere.”

“You did it for Klint. Not me. I was stupid enough to think it was for me, too, but now I know better.”

She slams the door on me and peels out.

“Este toro no tiene casta,” I yell after her.

I’m not in the best of moods by the time I return to my seat next to Bill.

We’re at bat.

“No score,” he informs me as he holds out the bag of chips.

I wave it away.

I zone out. I’m not paying any attention to the game when Bill nudges me with his elbow.

“Klint’s up,” he tells me. “What’s with you?”

“Nothing,” I say.

The applause dies down and Klint steps into the box.

He gets into his stance.

Reid Tussey bends over with the ball clasped behind his back to read the catcher’s signs.

He nods, stands up, winds up, and Klint steps out of the box.

Players and fans alike start yelling at him.

He drops the bat to the ground. He takes off his hat and wipes his face off in the crook of his arm like he’s sweating a lot. I notice the back of his jersey is drenched. It shouldn’t be. The day isn’t that hot, and the game’s just started.

He puts his hat back on and stands there, not moving, and not picking up the bat.

The crowd grows louder. A few of his teammates come out of the dugout but don’t get too close to him.

The home plate ump starts walking toward him from one direction, and Coach Hill comes at him from the other direction, shouting and waving his arms.

He looks from one to the other and then takes off running.

“Holy shit!” Bill cries, jumping to his feet. “What the hell is he doing?”

I don’t stop to ask myself the same question. I react. I scramble down the bleachers and start running after him.

He has a head start on me, plus Klint’s wicked fast when he wants to be. He’s pumping his arms and legs like he’s the winning run trying to outrun a throw to home.

The baseball field isn’t near the high school. It’s in a park in the middle of town. He’s left the park and now he’s running past houses, his cleats clicking on the sidewalk.

I do my best to catch him but it’s impossible. I’m ready to quit when he suddenly collapses in somebody’s front yard.

I pick up my pace and finally reach him.

He’s kneeling on the grass, his face covered with his hands, his body shuddering with ugly, wrenching sobs.

I fall to the ground next to him breathing so hard I feel like I’m going to pass out.

“Klint. What is it? What’s happened?”

He keeps crying. I’m afraid to touch him.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I, I, I,” he stutters. “I can’t live with her.”

I know immediately who he must be talking about.

“We don’t have to,” I assure him. “Remember? Miss Jack said we could keep living with her.”

“Screw Miss Jack. We, we don’t know. We can’t trust her.”

“Sure we can.”

“I can’t live with her,” he tells me again.

This time he looks at me, and his eyes are filled with terror.

“We don’t have to live with her. I promise.”

“I, I, I don’t …” His words dissolve into more sobs. “I don’t want her here. I don’t want to see her.”

“You don’t have to see her.”

“She touched me,” he says in a whisper so low I have to lean forward until our heads are almost together in order to hear him.

“What?”

“She used to touch me.”

“Who? Mom?”

He nods.

“She’s your mom. Moms touch their kids.”

“No!” he screams at me.

I jerk back.

He starts sobbing again.

A clammy fear begins in my stomach and spreads to all my nerve endings, making my skin feel cold and alive with something damp and sticky crawling all over it. My mouth fills with a sour metallic taste.

“Where did she touch you?” I ask slowly.

He starts breathing wildly, panting like a whipped dog.

“You know,” he says.