by Barry Lyga
I took a few licks rescuing that hapless new kid, but it was worth it. Given my history and my skills on the field, I get treated with a certain deference at South Brook, a deference bordering on fear, but I'll take what I can get.
Coach's "special attention" turned out to be nothing more and nothing less than a series of concerted efforts to screw up everything I was doing right and replace it with his own half-assed ideas of how to play the game. It was enormously frustrating. He messed up my swing something fierce, and he couldn't understand why I suddenly started hitting only around .300 by the time the season started.
Finally I had to tell him to shove it and I went back to doing things my own way. In our first game of the season, I kicked serious ass, hitting the ball every time at bat for a perfect 1.000 batting average. I drove in two runs with a double and a triple, then hit a home run in the bottom of the seventh, racking up a godlike 3.000 slugging average, all of it by ignoring everything he'd tried to teach me. If there's a better, more effective way of telling someone to fuck off, I have yet to discover it.
It was in that first season that I also managed to get Coach to agree to make me permanent DH. I can't stand playing in the field. I'm a good defensive player, but to me it just ties you into that whole "team" thing and makes you lose focus on what's important: the hitting. Coach didn't know how to deal with me—he was used to dealing with jocks, and I'm not a jock. I guess if you wanted to call me something, you could call me a scholar-athlete, though I hate that term too. It's like a bizarre species of human that only exists, at most, for eight years—high school and college—before vanishing, collapsing like light into one or the other, particle or wave.
Other than having Coach on my ass for four years, constantly trying to get me to change something about my stance or trying to get me to play in the field for a game or two ("Just to see how you do," he says), baseball's been one of my few pleasures in high school. Because I don't let myself fall into that team trap. I don't let myself think of it as a team effort. It's not.
In football or basketball or any of those "bunch of guys try to get a widget to the other end of the field" games, you have to be a team. You have to think like a team and subordinate yourself to the team ethic and structure. It's the only way to accomplish anything.
But in baseball...
In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's it. It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat.
And the ball.
It's the best, most sublime, purest and truest moment in all of sport. There is nothing in this world more impressive than a good hitter in baseball. Pitchers get all sorts of attention when they strike you out, but here's a secret: Pitching is nothing compared to batting. Striking someone out isn't nearly as impressive as getting a hit. Want proof? Tell me how many major leaguers hit the ball more often than not. Don't bother to look it up—I'll tell you. There hasn't been a .400 hitter in more than sixty years, since Ted Williams, much less someone hitting over .500. Hitting the ball is infinitely tougher than pitching it. And as far as getting on base period, Williams was the best ever and even he only did it 48.3 percent of the time. As a pitcher, you have the entire field backing you up, which I guess brings me right back to where I started.
At the end of the day, it's a series of individual challenges played out against a team defense. It's a personal test every time I step into the batter's box: Can I do better than the last time? And that's why I love it.
Chapter 8
Eve
I drive by the Narc on my way home. It's weird to think that I can go there now, even when Rachel's working. For a long time now, it's been like the Narc's a church and I'm a vampire. But now I can go inside. Redeemed. Or something like that.
I pull in to try out my newfound freedom. I'm in the breakfast foods aisle when I see her.
She's at the far end of the aisle, but I would know her anywhere, at any distance. She's wearing a pair of jeans that are loose and baggy, along with a sleeveless blouse. Her hair is shorter and lighter than it used to be.
Eve.
And then I'm suddenly aware of my heart, with Eve standing ten, fifteen feet away and my heart starts to announce itself to me, to the world, pounding like
—Xbox controller vibrates in my hands—
dinosaur footsteps or
—you're good at this one, Josh—
the thunder of big cannons on a gigantic movie screen, in Dolby surround sound
—come here come here—
or ... God! Goddamn it!
I lean against the shelf. My heart won't stop pounding. I can't breathe. I can't focus on the world anymore. The past keeps intruding on the present.
—like this, not like ... yes—
And I notice that she has a kid.
A kid.
A pudgy little boy, maybe three years old,
—do you have any—
—no, not yet, maybe someday—
clings to her right hand, wearing a red and white striped shirt and khaki shorts. His cheeks are shiny, his dark brown hair fastidiously combed back except for a stubborn cowlick that points starward.
Oh my God. Is that...? Could that be my—
No. No. I swallow hard, try to force my breath back into my chest, try to force my heart to stop leaping around like a kitten trapped in a sack. It can't be my son. It can't be. That kid's too young. How the hell did she get pregnant in jail? Is she still married? I never knew. No one would tell me if her husband left her or not. Was he allowed to visit her in jail? Was she raped by a guard? God, why won't my heart stop doing that? Is this a heart attack? Is this what a heart attack feels like? Why can't I catch my breath? What's that ringing in my ears?
I want her not to turn, not to see me. Especially like this, weak. But at the same time, I need her to turn. I need to see her eyes. I need—
And then she turns.
And looks down the aisle.
And I realize, suddenly, that it's all wrong. The shape of her torso, the set of her shoulders. And her eyes—brown, not green.
Things that don't change even after five years in prison. It's not Eve. It's just some cute twenty-something mom with a brat tagging along.
My heart, my lungs, my ears, my brain—they all start to come online and cooperate again. I take a deep, shaky breath and push myself from the shelf to stand unaided again. She looks at me strangely, so I offer her what's intended to be a reassuring smile, but I think it comes out creepy instead because she suddenly hauls her kid up onto her hip like a sack of laundry and says, "Come on, sweetie," and ducks around the corner to the next aisle.
The Narc is dangerous ground, still. Rachel's forgiveness notwithstanding.
I thought it was over, but it's not. She's out now. She could be here.
And then it hits me: She could be anywhere.
The realization almost drives me to my knees. I feel like gagging right here in the store, right here in the breakfast food aisle, next to the Count Chocula and the Honey Grahams. She could be
—over here—
—move there—
anywhere at all. And I have no way of knowing. I don't know where she is. I don't know how to find her.
—here—
—here—
—here here here—
Damnit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
Almost as soon as the flickers overwhelm me, they're gone again, and I'm just an idiot in the cereal aisle, wiping sweat from his forehead and praying that there are no security cameras trained on me right now.
I make my way to the front of the store. The Not-Eve is nowhere in sight, having no doubt taken her child and ducked out a back door, to where it's safe from random, spastic teenagers.
Still, I find myself loo
king around everywhere, as I walk through the automatic doors, as I cross the parking lot to my car. She's out. She could be everywhere and anywhere.
I stop for gas on the way home and sit like a scared kid in my car as the pump chugs away. She could be filling up at the next tank. She could be inside the convenience store, buying orange juice, and walk through the door any minute...
—come here—
Any minute...
—I want to see you in the light—
Right now
—to the left—
or now
—over more—
or now.
The gas pump thunks to a stop, shaking the car, and I almost leap through the roof.
Everywhere I go—she could be there. At a stoplight. She has to drive places, right? Fast food joints. Stores. She could come to my baseball games, right? Or is she allowed near the school at all? Probably not. But what if it's an away game?
Like next week's game. We play a team from Finn's Cross ing. They're 2–6 and their starting pitcher was busted a week ago for smoking pot at a party, so they're like a winged duck on open water. We'll mop them up no problem. But despite the court order, what's to stop Eve from sitting at the top of the bleachers, or maybe way out in left field? That would be far enough, I think. And she'd still be there, right?
My palms are slick on the steering wheel. I'm glad it's early in the day; everyone's at work, the roads are nearly empty, and there's less of a chance of me accidentally killing someone. I don't even know if she's in the state anymore, remember? She could be long gone. That's what I would have done—I would have left as soon as I got paroled.
Hell, that's what I am planning. It's just that it's taken five years because there's that whole "turning eighteen and graduating from high school" thing to deal with. I would have run like hell from this town when I was thirteen if I could have. I begged my parents to move us away. I couldn't stand walking down the street or the bus aisle or the school hallways, feeling people's eyes on me, knowing what they were thinking, knowing that they knew everything. I wanted to yell at them, to hit them, to beat them, to run away screaming...
Mom and Dad tried a bunch of things. There were the regular sessions with Dr. Kennedy, but also some New Age woman who explained to me that virginity was a state of mind and that if I didn't think of myself as "violated," then I wouldn't be. Um, OK.
In the end, it was Dr. Kennedy who helped. And even then, I couldn't tell him everything. I couldn't get him to understand all of it.
Session Transcript: #155
Dr. Kennedy: How are you doing, Josh?
J. Mendel: OK.
Kennedy: That's a nice shiner you've got there. Care to tell me how you got it?
Mendel: You already know.
Kennedy: What makes you think that?
Mendel: You get reports. You talk to people. You know everything before I even come in here.
Kennedy: That's true, in some cases. You're still getting into a lot of fights, aren't you? Why don't you tell me about it in your words.
Mendel: I don't feel like telling it in my words, OK?
Kennedy: You're translating your mischanneled erotic feelings into rage and—
Mendel: I hate that. I hate that shit.
Kennedy: What's that?
Mendel: That psychological bullshit. It's all a bunch of crap.
Kennedy: To be fair, some of it is. Tell you what—if you catch me slipping into psychobabble, I'll give you a buck. How about that?
Mendel: Seriously?
Kennedy: Seriously.
Mendel: It's your money.
Kennedy: OK. Let me try to explain this: Sometimes, when children are sexually abused, they become incapable of what's considered a "normal" sexual response. Make sense so far?
Mendel: You mean they can only have sex with the person who abused them?
Kennedy: Well, no. But close. Look, as people grow older, they come to develop responses for situations, including sex, OK? But if you're abused when you're young, sometimes those responses can be twisted or changed. It could make it difficult for you to respond sexually to someone your own age, for example.
Mendel: This is bull. I don't go crazy for every woman who's older than me.
Kennedy: Do you have a girlfriend, Josh?
Mendel: No. I don't. OK?
Kennedy: Why not?
Mendel: I was ... I was supposed to go out on this date. A double date. With my friend Zik.
Kennedy: This is Zik who's dating ... Melissa?
Mendel: Michelle.
Kennedy: Right. I'm sorry. And Michelle is best friends with—
Mendel: Rachel.
Kennedy: The girl you—
Mendel: Right. Anyway, we were supposed to go out. It was going to be Zik and Michelle and me and this girl, Lisa Carter.
Kennedy: Why didn't you go?
Mendel: Zik told me ... Zik told me that he was going to sit apart from us. With Michelle, you know? So that they could be alone and, you know, kiss and stuff. So I would be with Lisa. And he told me that Lisa thought I was cute.
Kennedy: And?
Mendel: And then he ... He didn't mean anything by it. He's my best friend. He was just trying to help. He told me that Lisa was really nervous and I should just be cool.
Kennedy: Was it her first date?
Mendel: No—don't you get it? It wasn't that she was nervous because it was a date! It was me. She knew about Rachel and the closet and E—Mrs. Sherman and all of it. Everyone knew. Everyone in town.
Kennedy: Your name wasn't in the paper.
Mendel: So what? Everyone knows anyway. That's what I'm trying to explain to you. Rachel's parents told people about what happened in the closet, and then the word got out why things happened in the closet, and then the trial and everything. And Lisa Carter was afraid.
Kennedy: You did nothing wrong. In this whole ... this whole thing—you're the one person who never did anything wrong.
Mendel: No. That's not true. I shouldn't have touched Rachel like that. I shouldn't have—
Kennedy: Have you ever talked to Rachel about this? Have you ever apologized to her?
Mendel: She doesn't want an apology. She hates me. She's afraid of me.
Kennedy: And you think Lisa Carter is afraid of you, too?
Mendel: Wouldn't you be?
Kennedy: I think you're assuming that everyone knows—
Mendel: There's this website. I found it one day. It has scans of all these public documents, you know? For big cases, for anything that hits the news. It has all these scans about Mrs. Sherman and me. From her allocution. And because I'm under eighteen, my name is blocked out, but it doesn't matter. Because everyone knows it's me, so it doesn't matter. And everyone knows everything. How can I kiss a girl? How can I touch a girl? What are they expecting? What do they know? How—
Kennedy: There's no question ... Look, I need you to take a moment, OK? There's tissues in the ... Right. Do you want some water?
Mendel: No.
Kennedy: OK, just ... That's it. Deep breaths, like we talked about. What are you doing in your head right now?
Mendel: Figuring out Zik's IPA.
Kennedy: Which is...?
Mendel: Isolated power average.
Kennedy: And that helps calm you down?
Mendel: Sometimes.
Kennedy: I'm not going to lie to you. You've got a tough road ahead of you. But you've got a tough road behind you, too. You've come so far in the past couple of years, Josh. The road doesn't go on forever, and you've already made a lot of headway.
Mendel: I feel like I'll never be normal.
Kennedy: It's perfectly natural for you to feel like you're always going to feel this way. That's part of being a teenager, and it's particularly strong for you, given the circumstances. But you'll date girls, Josh. Yes, some of them may react strangely. Some of them will break your heart. But not all of them. You'll go to college someday and there will be people who've never even hea
rd of Brookdale, much less Evelyn Sherman.
Mendel: God, that sounds good.
Chapter 9
Michelle's Perfect World
Around five, I go to pick up Zik from practice. He looks at me expectantly, then settles back and says nothing, alternating between looking out the window and looking over at me. So we go that way for a little bit.
"How was practice?"
He just shrugs. "You know."
He looks over at me again like he's expecting some great wisdom, some epiphany or sermon. What's with him?
"Dude, you feelin' all right?"
"Yeah. How 'bout you?"
"Yeah, I'm good."
"Huh." He settles back again and looks out the window.
We're almost at my house by the time the silence drives me completely insane. "So, I, uh, saw Rachel yesterday."
Which, y'know, is the kind of thing that should spontaneously shoot Zik through the roof like an ejector seat. Instead, he just sits up straight and grins. "Oh, yeah? Really? How was that?"
He already knew. Of course—I'm an idiot. Michelle and Rachel are still best friends, after all. That's why I don't hang out with Zik when Michelle's around, because Rachel would usually be a step behind.
"Shit, Zik! Why didn't you say something to me?" He looks wounded. "I was waiting for you to tell me, J. I don't push you, man. So," he goes on, grinning, "how'd it go?"
"What do you mean?"
"What did you guys talk about? How did you end up talking to her?"
"Oh, come on. Michelle must've told you—"
"No, seriously. She just said that Rachel IM'd her late last night and said that she talked to you. That's it."
I can't believe that they didn't exchange any more information during school today. Rachel and Michelle are, according to Zik, world-class experts at texting each other between classes—they can communicate entire bibles in the four-minute commute. Exactly what they need to say in those four minutes is beyond me, but teenage girls have always been something of a mystery to me.