Playing the Field

by Janette Rallison

  She came back into the family room, and I said, “You’ll tell me what?” It probably had something to do with the coach wanting to break my other leg.

  “Mr. Manetti said to tell you he’s sorry you got hurt, and he hopes you feel better soon.”

  I guess coaches don’t tell mothers what they’re really thinking.

  “He says if you’re feeling up to it during any of the games, you can still bat and have someone run for you.”

  My outlook immediately brightened. I could still bat, couldn’t I? I had forgotten that was allowed. As long as I could run to first base, I could have a pinch runner go the rest of the way for me. That might be impossible for the next game—it was only a few days away—but the other two games, surely by then I’d be well enough to stagger to first base. “I’ll feel up to it,” I said, and pulled myself up a little on the couch to prove the point.

  Mom looked at me skeptically. “Let’s not rush anything. We’ll see how you’re doing at game time.”

  Mom walked out of the room, and Kirk walked in. He carried a plate and very proudly set it down beside me. “Here, I made you a sandwich to help you feel better.”

  “Thanks.” I picked up the sandwich and looked it over suspiciously. Kirk has never caught onto the fact that not all sandwich contents go together, and he has a habit of making all sorts of peculiar combinations. Then he actually eats them. Things that would make any normal person gag, Kirk wolfs down with glee. I’ve even caught him eating spoonfuls of mayonnaise from the jar. “So what kind of sandwich is it?” I asked.

  “Peanut butter and mustard.”

  “Oh.”

  He watched me expectantly, waiting for me to take a bite. And really, what could I do? When I thought of him on the counter top by himself making a sandwich for me, I knew I had to at least choke down some of it. I took a bite and chewed it quickly. “Mmm. Thanks, Kirk.” It could have been worse, I suppose. It could have been a peanut butter and jelly and mustard sandwich.

  “I’m glad you’re my brother,” I told him, and I meant it. It was nice to know that no matter what kind of stupid things I did in life, Kirk would be there for me. Even if being there only meant he read me stories in the emergency room and then made me sandwiches. He was my brother, and that would never change. “You’re a pretty cool guy,” I added.

  “I know,” he said.

  I put the sandwich back on the plate. “I feel kind of bad making you move into the office.”

  He sat up straighter. “You want to share our room again?”

  “Well, not exactly. I just thought I’d let you keep the old room, and I’ll move into the office. Then every once in a while I’ll come back and visit you.”

  He still smiled over this bit of news. “Can I have the baseball posters too?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I can get some new ones for my room.”

  He jumped up and gave me a hug. He landed a little on my leg, which I’m sure did nothing to help my recovery, but I didn’t complain. Then he got down and headed toward the kitchen. “I’m going to tell Mom I get my room back.” I guess he figured he’d better go make the decision official before I changed my mind.

  A few minutes later the doorbell rang, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was busy wiggling my toes to see if they hurt less now than right after the accident. I was hoping for an improvement. Any improvement.

  Mom came into the family room with Serena behind her.

  “You have a visitor,” Mom said.

  I stopped wiggling my toes. “Uh, hi.”

  Serena looked at my leg propped up on the pillows and the ice pack on my ankle. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s only a sprain,” I said, and then added for Mom’s sake, “And it’s feeling a lot better already.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Serena said. “I was worried about you.”

  I shrugged in what I hoped was a macho cavalier manner. “It was just a little crash. I’ve been in worse.” Right after I said it, I realized this sounded more stupid than macho. Mom was pursing her lips together, probably in an attempt not to laugh. I guess this was for the best though, otherwise she might enforce her threat to make me pay for my medical insurance. I tried to think of something better to say, but didn’t come up with anything.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re all right,” Serena said. She’d been hiding one hand behind her back, and now she brought out a bouquet of yellow lantana and held it out to me. “These are for you. I picked them myself.”

  I took them from her, and a few of the blossoms fell onto my lap.

  “Gee. Thanks. No card?”

  “I couldn’t get past ‘Dear McKay’.”

  Mom looked back and forth between Serena and me like she couldn’t quite decide what to make of us or the bouquet.

  I held the flowers out to her. “Can you put these in water for me?”

  “Sure.” Mom took the bouquet but held it a little ways away from her. She walked out of the family room, leaving a trail of little yellow blossoms as she went.

  Serena sat down on our old gray recliner by the couch, and we stared at each other for a moment.

  “I’m sorry about that note to Tony,” I told her. “It really didn’t mean anything. It was just stupid guy talk.”

  “I’m not mad about it anymore. It’s hard to be angry at you when you’re hurt. And I know the only reason you even did that jump was because you wanted to talk to me.” She shrugged, and a section of her hair slid from her shoulders. “I’m sorry Brian was such a jerk to you. I talked to him about it after we took you home.” She tilted her head at me. “It’s funny, but I started off the day angry at you, and now I’m angry at him.”

  “You’re angry at Brian now?”

  Her voice grew soft. “Yeah.” It wasn’t really an answer. It was a question—she wanted some indication of how I felt about her. Only now that she was going out with Brian, it didn’t seem right that I say anything about her and me. In fact the whole thing suddenly seemed liked a soap opera. It seemed like the stuff Tony had been doing the last couple of weeks. I didn’t want to act like he had.

  In that instant I began to understand what Mom had told me about relationships. Everything got more complicated when you started dating. I didn’t want to fight over who I did or didn’t slow dance with or whether it was okay to talk to one girl when you were going out with another. I didn’t want to get stuck in some note-passing, hallway-glaring, second-guessing, junior high melodrama triangle. I wanted things to be the way they were when Serena and I were just goofing around, doing our algebra. I tried to tell Serena this.

  “I think we should just be friends,” I said.

  She blinked at me. “What?”

  “I want to just be friends,” I said again, this time feeling more confident about it.

  Her eyes narrowed at me. “McKay, you are the most aggravating boy I know. We never even went out together and now you’re breaking up with me?”

  “Well, no. I didn’t mean it in the breaking-up sort of way.”

  Until that moment I’d forgotten that’s what people say to each other when they break up. I want to just be friends. It seemed like a really absurd thing to say when usually a person means exactly the opposite. What a person means to say is, “I don’t like you, and I never want to see you again. I realize any time we run into each other, you will glare at me, and every time you are forced to say my name, you will do it as though a lemon just bit your tongue.” People don’t want to say the truth because they want to pretend to be all nice about it, but everyone knows what that, “Let’s just be friends” phrase really means. Everyone, that is, except for me thirty seconds ago when I said it.

  I quickly added, “What I mean is, I really like you, and I want to be your friend. I’m afraid if we try to be anything more than that right now, we’ll mess it up. If you’re friends, you can be friends forever. If you’re dating, you can only be friends until you like somebody else better. I mean, look at Tony and Rachel.”<
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  Serena’s eyes were no longer narrow. I think she was beginning to understand.

  I shifted on the couch so I could face her better. “I’d like to be able to talk to you without worrying about what I’m saying. You can’t do that with a girlfriend.”

  Now Serena smiled. “McKay, did you ever worry about what you were saying?”

  “Yes. That’s why it always came out sounding so stupid.”

  “It didn’t always sound stupid.”

  “I still want to teach you how to hit a ball,” I said.

  “I guess I’d like that.” She smiled over at me. “And I’ll still help you with your math. Although now that we’re just friends, I can tell you that I don’t care about your baseball card collection. It’s just a bunch of guys in uniforms to me.”

  “I think horses are all right,” I said, “but I’ve only ridden a couple of times and both of those were the kind of things where someone leads you around with a rope.”

  “I’ll teach you how to really ride. You’ll love it.”

  “And I’m sure Coach Manetti will love it too. That’s just what my leg needs: horseback riding lessons.”

  And then both of us laughed. I’m not sure at what. I guess at ourselves. She said, “Maybe being friends will be okay.”

  “Better than okay,” I said, I could already see how it would be in the future. I saw us sitting in class and doing homework together. I saw us talking in the school hallways, and I saw her cheering for me at school baseball games. And maybe someday, down the road, we would become boyfriend and girlfriend, and that would be okay too because we’d been friends first.

  Serena and I talked for another half an hour, and then she said she had to go because it was about dinnertime. She smiled when she got up. “I’ll bring you your algebra homework if you want.”

  “Thanks. Are you still going to watch me play baseball?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there for every quarter.”

  “Inning,” I told her. “Football has quarters. Baseball has innings.”

  “Whatever.” She grinned. “I’ll be there for all of them.”

  She said good-bye, and I watched her leave. You know, it’s strange how your mood can change so easily. I never would have thought that a peanut butter and mustard sandwich and bouquet of lantana would have made me so happy, but they did. Even though my ankle was still swollen, hurting, and purple and green, I felt better. So I guess, in a way, my miracle happened after all.

  * * *

  I sat out for game five, but I could hobble around well enough when it was time for game six that Coach Manetti said I could bat. Serena was there watching. In fact, she’d dragged Brian along with her. As I recall, he never cheered very loudly. He also wished me good luck with a stiff and pained smile on his face. I would have liked to think this was because he was tormented with guilt for his part in my injury, but he was probably just mad Serena had made him come to watch me.

  Anna also came to the game, although she didn’t sit anywhere near Serena. She brought another one of her friends, Krissy, and they sat up front and completely ignored the game except for when Tony went to bat. Then they clapped and hollered. Krissy clapped especially loud, and I wondered if she was a fan of the game, or just a fan of Tony’s. Then I wondered why in the world Anna would bring Krissy with her to watch the game, given Tony’s track record with his girlfriend’s friends.

  I could only bat once, late in the inning, because after the pinch runner replaced me, I wasn't allowed back in the game. But I hit the tying run in, and my replacement ended up scoring to put us ahead. It felt odd to see someone else running over home plate in my place, and even odder to sit out during my team’s turn in the outfield, but it was better than sitting in the bleachers with my parents, so I didn’t complain. I was still part of the team. That was enough.

  We won that game, and the last tournament game too. We were undefeated. When the final inning was up, and we were officially the district winners, everyone on my team rushed onto the field screaming and jumping around. I ran onto the field much slower, and I jumped a lot less, but I still screamed just as loud. We’d done it. We’d all done it.

  Tony and I gave each other our high fives and yelled, “Who the champion? You the champion! No, you the champion!” until we were almost hoarse.

  After a while my parents made it through the throng to congratulate me. “You did wonderfully,” Mom said, and gave me a hug. “How’s your ankle feeling?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Do you think you’re up to attending the victory party?” Every season, whether we had a winning record or not, Coach Manetti held a victory party for the team at his house.

  “Sure.” I wasn’t about to turn down an afternoon of junk food and bragging with the rest of the team just because my ankle hurt a little. I only worried about one thing. Family and friends of the team members were also invited, and I knew I ought to ask Serena if she wanted to come. I wanted her to come, but I wasn’t so thrilled about having Brian hanging around scowling somewhere while I was trying to celebrate.

  My parents congratulated me again, then told me they’d be ready to leave in just a minute, because they had to go and talk to some of the other kids’ parents. My parents like to talk, so I knew it would be a little while until they were ready to go. Tony went off to talk to Anna and Krissy. I didn’t want to have to stand there and be a spectator in their flirt-fest, so I headed back to where most of the team was still gathered. Serena intercepted me along the way.

  “Hey, you’re the winner!” she said.

  “You never doubted that, did you?” I looked around her and noticed she was alone. “Where’s Brian?”

  “He didn’t come today.”

  It’s true, I hadn’t seen him in the crowd, but I assumed he was just lurking somewhere unseen. Sort of like bacteria. “He missed a good game,” I said.

  “I’ll tell him about it.”

  “Don’t leave out the part where I lead the team to victory with my fabulously amazing hits.”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “You want to come to the team’s victory party?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  We walked together over to where the team was. I took a deep breath of the cool afternoon air and smiled just because life was so great. All in all, it was a pretty good ending to the game.

  The End

  ###

  Janette Rallison (who is also sometimes CJ Hill when the mood strikes her) writes books because writing is much more fun than cleaning bathrooms. Her avoidance of housework has led her to writing 12 young adult novels, which have sold over 1,000,000 copies and have been on the IRA Young Adults’ Choices lists, Popular Picks, and many state reading lists. She would name them all but knows your eyes would gloss over if she did, so you will just have to trust her that she has lots of books and they are all awesome! Most of her books are romantic comedies because hey, there is enough angst in real life, but there’s a drastic shortage on both humor and romance. She lives in Arizona with her husband, five kids, and enough cats to classify her as eccentric.

  Contact me on-line at my website,

  JanetteRallison.com (email: jrallisonfans@yahoo.com)

  Or CJHillbooks.com