Text copyright © 2007 by Weezie Kerr Mackey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s
imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mackey, Weezie Kerr.
Throwing like a girl / by Weezie Kerr Mackey.
p. cm.
Summary: After moving from Chicago to Dallas in the spring of her sophomore year, fifteen-year-old
Ella finds that joining the softball team at her private school not only helps her make friends, it also
provides unexpected opportunities to learn and grow.
ISBN 978-0-7614-5342-0
[1. Softball—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 4.
High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Family life—Texas--Fiction 7. Dallas (Tex.)—Fiction.] I.
Title.
PZ7.M198638Thr 2007
[Fic]—dc22
2006030233
Book design by Alex Ferrari/ferraridesign.com
First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Rob Mackey, my north, my south, my east, my west
* * *
Thank you to Greenhill School in Dallas, Texas, which served unknowingly as the setting for this book. For dramatic purposes, the fictional Spring Valley Day School is not nearly as grand, warm, or spectacular a place as Greenhill. I loved working there and knowing all the great kids, amazing teachers, and generous administration.
To the extraordinary Bill Reiss, my literary agent, and Marilyn Mark, my superb editor: thank you for giving this book a chance.
To my amazing coaches, colleagues, teammates, and players: especially Lee Kennicke, Bonnie Beach, Robin Sheppard, JoAnne DeMartini, Tim Emerson, Sue Zawacki, Sarah Cigliano, Martha Brown, Laney Makin, Annie Farquhar, Lisa Lynch, Suzy Symmons, Liz Valicenti, Sue Fernald, Kathryn Hamm, and Lydia Hemphill—I am forever grateful to all of you.
To Lucy Otto, Candace Martin, and Allie O’Leary for still treating me like the little sister so I don’t have to look far for inspiration and for reading every version of this book and laughing in the right places. To Dawn Pratt, Heather Ford, and Nancy Mackey, for providing last-minute daycare and encouragement so late in the game.
To Anne Otto; Emmy O’Leary; Lindsay Martin; Kate, Jessie, and Lizzie Pratt; and Molly and Teri Ford. For acting as models on some days and readers on others. You’re darlings.
I especially want to thank Michelle Bella, confidante and best friend in the world; my mom, Sue Felt Kerr (artist, writer, illustrator), who has read everything I’ve ever written about a hundred times and still gets excited about it; and my dad, Jamie Hastings Kerr, Jr., for cheering from the sidelines on and off the field.
To Conor and Matty, my shining pennies, thank you for retelling your dreams every morning and reminding me that sometimes going to the park and playing Uno is more important than anything else. And to Rob Mackey, my best pal, you delight and astonish me every day with your insights, encouragement, and good humor.
Contents
PRESEASON
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
REGULAR SEASON
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
CHAMPIONSHIPS
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Preseason
You think turning fifteen will be the best. You’ll take driver’s ed. You’ll stop being a freshman, finally. And maybe, with the help of your three best friends, you’ll learn to talk to boys better. So you spend practically the whole year happy, hopeful even, setting little goals for yourself—until your father tells you he got a promotion. Then everything changes. Then you’re moving to Texas.
There’s talk, for a very short time, of my mom and me staying in Chicago until I finish school. I overhear her on the phone with a friend. She’s sighing a lot, laughing. She’s quick to say, “Oh, we’re not sure exactly. John may go down first for a while.” Then a pause. “I know. It may be better for everyone if Ella finished up here. We just don’t know.”
A moment of indecision is always a good time to put in your two cents. I spend the next few days trying to act troubled, but thoughtful. I bring up meaningful subjects, such as world peace, summer jobs, and the Valentine’s Day dance. I act as agreeable as possible to remind my parents that they’ll want to do everything they can to keep me in this cheerful condition, since they already have experience with adolescence and my three older sisters.
Then one day I’m sitting on the back steps listening to my parents in the kitchen. My father’s just home from work, shaking peanuts from a jar. My mother’s starting dinner. The radio’s on. I’m waiting.
“I think Ella’s really growing up,” my mother begins.
This has real potential. There’s a long pause as my father considers her position.
“What do you mean? You think she can handle the move now?”
“I do,” the traitor says. “Maybe this’ll give her time to adjust, and she won’t spend all summer worried about the new school. She’ll make friends down there. Have some fun.”
“Okay, then,” my father says, not needing any more persuasion.
Of course, no one asks me what I’d like to do. The decision has been made.
Before I know it, it’s Valentine’s Day. None of us get invited to the Hearts Afire dance, so Christine, Amy, and Jen throw a little going-away party for me at Christine’s house. We have the best time listening to music, dancing, and watching movies. Her mom bakes this huge chocolate chip, heart-shaped cookie with M&M’S and butterscotch chips, and we pretty much eat the whole thing, even though we ate half the dough already. Lying on the floor, all of us feeling totally sick, my friends invent stories for me about what they think will happen in Dallas and what it’ll be like at my new school. They tell me I’ll suddenly be this new person, more attractive, smart, and witty, and everyone will love me, which is the hardest part to believe.
After they fall asleep I lie there with my eyes wide
open, trying not to cry. The sleeping bag smells like David, Christine’s older brother, and it’s not a bad smell, kind of like the beach during winter. This is about as close to a boy as I’ve ever been, except in eighth grade when Sarah McNamara had a kissing party in her basement, and I got stuck with Jeff Melanowski, who everyone called Melon Head. We only kissed once, but it didn’t really count because it was so dark and not quite on the lips.
I wonder if the boys in Texas wear cowboy hats and boots.
I’m sure I don’t know how to do any of this—how to move and make new friends. How to get ready for something so foreign when everything I know and everything I remember will be in Chicago. Without me.
In Dallas, everything comes across new and clean. Shiny. The neighborhoods look like suburbs instead of part of a city, like Lake View, where I used to live, where trains and buses took you anywhere you wanted to go, and the stores were only a few blocks away. Here, people drive. And everything feels far away.
Our ten-year-old house is brick with glossy black shutters and a curving front walk, edged by a weedless yard. There’s no paint chipping anywhere. It’s a little overconfident for my liking, with its central air and a stainless-steel refrigerator that doesn’t hold magnets. My old house, on the other hand, was a rambling bungalow, and Becky and I shared a room on the third floor, which had slanted ceilings and radiators that thumped and hissed. There was something comforting about living right under the roof. Something safe.
This neighborhood is swept and mowed and clipped. “Manicured,” my mother gushes.
“And the roads don’t have potholes,” my father adds, like we’re in a commercial for how great Texas is.
I have to start my new school in two days, and each one of my older sisters calls to talk to me, which never happens. I think my parents put them up to it. Becky, who’s in college in Boston, says she can’t wait to come home this summer, that we can check out Dallas together. Janie ends up telling me about her new job at the ad agency since I don’t say anything when she asks what’s up. But Liz is pretty cool about it; she’s getting married this summer so she has temporary moments of sensitivity. She says, “Are you nervous about starting your new school?”
Mom and Dad have enrolled me at Spring Valley Day School, where a coworker of my father’s sends his kids.
I try to respond casually. “Not really nervous, no.” Even though I am.
“What’re you gonna wear the first day?”
“I’m not sure. Mom’s taking me shopping.”
“Don’t let her talk you into something babyish.”
“I won’t. They actually wanted me to wear a sweatshirt they bought for me when I interviewed at the school.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah. And it’s purple and green.”
“Purple and green?”
“School colors.”
“Oh, my.”
On Monday morning, my first day, I throw up and have to change the new shirt I bought the day before. I tell my mom I decided to wear something else, and she gets mad because we took a long time at the mall to find my outfit. I can hardly talk the whole drive to school, and when we get there it’s jam-packed with cars going every which way. Mom’s trying not to act annoyed, but I can tell by her mouth all straight and tight that she is.
I can’t see one other person my age getting dropped off by a parent. Meanwhile, we have this hideous blue station wagon that’s been the family car since before I was born, practically. Each of my sisters drove it in high school, and when Becky suddenly needed a car up at college, my parents gave her the Volvo, the good car. Don’t ask me why. She bugged out about it, as if they should’ve given her a new car or something. And now, like some bad dream, I’ll be stuck with the Blue Bomber, which I swore I’d never drive in public, even with my learner’s permit.
To make this moment worse, my mother actually leans over like she’s planning to kiss me good-bye, and I say, “Mom,” with a very firm look, so she backs off.
“Remember,” she tells me, putting on a brave face, “bloom where you’re planted.”
Luckily no one’s near enough to hear this.
I give her a weak smile, climb out of the car, and feel for the first time how out of place I am in Texas. Is it my imagination or is everyone staring at me? At my short brown, curly hair. My pale skin. My clunky, winter, midwestern shoes. My camouflage backpack, which was cool back home, now clearly stands out as some kind of fashion emergency. Most of the girls are wearing short skirts and color-coordinated sandals, with painted toenails and silver toe rings. They have highlights in their hair and complicated updos that look casual but may actually require another person to perfect. I can’t believe how underdressed I am.
For a split second, I want to whip back into the car, duck down, and tell my mom to put the pedal to the metal. But I don’t. I swallow the bubble in my throat and walk across the quad to the headmaster’s office like I’m supposed to. His nice secretary hands me a schedule and escorts me to my first class—geometry, which is actually one of my better subjects.
The teacher, Mr. Milauskas, seems fine, geeky in that math-teacher way, but nice enough to smile when I sit down in the only open seat, smack dab in front of him, to start my new life.
The rest of the day goes along. I get introduced in every class; faces turn to stare, but that’s it. Nobody leans across the aisle to make friends with me. It’s March; they already have friends.
At dinner my father asks, “Did you make any new friends?”
I try not to roll my eyes. “Dad, it’s my first day.”
“Maybe you could join a club.”
“Great idea,” my mom chimes in.
Parents are so out of touch.
“It’s March.” I state the obvious, the same thing I’ve been telling myself over and over. “Everything’s already decided.”
“Everything?”
“It’s practically summer, Dad. No one does anything now.”
And hello, I’ve never in the history of my life been a club-joining type of person.
“What about a spring musical? Do they have something like that?” my mom says, as she passes me the salad.
There’s really no response necessary.
At my old school you just had one big four-story building. There was the principal’s office, gym and auditorium, smoking area in the teachers’ parking lot. Simple. The classrooms had numbers, not names, and bells rang when the period was over. The lockers lining the hallways defined you: freshmen on the fourth floor, seniors on the first, like that. You had a place in the order of things. You knew where you belonged.
But Spring Valley Day School makes me feel lost from myself. For starters, it’s a campus with lots of low, modern buildings, gathered in a skinny oval: library at the top, athletic fields at the bottom, with the football stadium across the street. (The stadium has a parking lot, a snack bar, bathrooms, and lights for night games. It looks like it belongs at a college or something.) In the middle of the oval, the grassy, tree-lined quad is dissected by sidewalks that connect the separate buildings: lower, middle, and upper schools; arts and sciences; cafeteria; gyms. But the campus is top-heavy with its spectacular library, which overlooks a sweeping front lawn. When prospective parents like mine approach the campus from the long driveway, they gasp at the superior academic possibilities exhibited not only in test scores, but in the architecture as well.
The upper school classrooms don’t have walls, just dividers, and you can hear French during Spanish and world history during geometry. The headmaster’s secretary explained to me that it’s a progressive way of educating, so I nodded my approval, even though it’s totally distracting. Also, forget about lockers defining the internal hierarchy. Here, in the “progressive” upper school, you get cubbies painted in primary colors, like when you were in kindergarten, with all your private things on display and your lunch right out there for everyone to smell.
And then there are the peacocks, which happen to be the
school mascot. Apparently the property used to be part of a peacock farm and real-live peacocks still roam the campus. The students seem to ignore them because they’ve been there forever. After my first few days, I’m starting to feel like a peacock myself—there, but not noticed, not yet. Which in some ways is a good thing.
By Friday, I’ve got a routine going. I don’t ride the bus or car pool with my nonexistent friends. No, not the new girl. I still get driven by my mother, who has been instructed to wait in the drop-off lane by the lower school for “vehicle flow” purposes. At least this way the only people staring at me are less than four feet tall and I can completely ignore them. Who’s the peacock now?
In P. E., my last class of the day, it’s just me and a few other girls who never change clothes because they’ve got some medical excuse for not having to sweat off their makeup. One girl has an inner-ear imbalance and hands the coach a note. Another has her period. The others, I’ve no idea what their excuses are. But since they’re off the hook, and the athletes at Spring Valley are exempt from P. E., I’m left with a group of boys who are in no way connected to sports or teams. And do not fit any mental image I have of boys in Texas.
They’re just like boys I knew in Chicago, funny and self-conscious, smart and socially challenged, like me. We’re supposed to be in week four of something called lifetime sports—things like golf and archery and tennis—but the teacher, Coach Dixon, has us playing basketball, instead. We pound up and down the court, exhausting ourselves, while Dixon calls out corrections and the girls in the bleachers look at their nails or chitchat. It makes it easier for me to participate.
Dixon blows her whistle and we break. She walks up to me. “Hey, Chicago,” she says. “Where’d you learn to shoot hoops?”
I’m panting. “Uh, nowhere?”
Everyone stares at me, even the girls in the bleachers.
Coach sets up a jump ball. “You play on any team?”
I must’ve blushed because everyone’s still looking at me, and also this is about the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone since I’ve been here.
“No.” I shake my head. “I didn’t play sports at my school.” In a gym full of nonathletes, this makes me proud.
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