A Girl Like Me

by Ginger Scott

  This is going to be hard, and my finger hovers over the END CALL button while the picture jostles, Wes still not in the frame. My hand falls flat the instant his eyes hit mine. It’s like something is missing behind them. The blue just as beautiful as it always is, but the boy I love lost underneath. My lip starts to quiver so I bite down hard on my tongue.

  “Hey,” he says.

  My hands form tight fists, because that small word sounds the way it has over the phone for dozens of late-night calls.

  “Hey,” I say back, smiling tentatively.

  “I’m sorry if this…if this gets weird.” He scrunches his face as he talks, just one more small gesture that’s so familiar I ache to touch the face that’s making it.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Weird’s kinda your thing.”

  He laughs, and I hear the right timber in his chest.

  “TK and Levi have been telling me about your dad…about…Coach,” he says, the word rehearsed, like he’s reading it off a flash card.

  It hurts.

  “He’s doing a lot better,” I say. “I…I don’t know what things you remember, but my dad is sorta stubborn. I’m sorta stubborn,” I pause, drawing my brow in and letting a sad laugh escape. “You always called me stubborn…sorry.”

  “No, that’s good. Things like that…they help,” he says. He leans forward, adjusting the angle of his phone, and I wonder if everyone’s watching us talk on the other side. I don’t like the audience. I feel like there are things I want to remind him of, and I don’t know if I should or not, if someone would stop me. Maybe they should stop me.

  “Anyhow,” I continue. “My dad’s been doing things he’s not supposed to. Today, I caught him hitting a fly ball to Kyle in the street.”

  Wes tilts his head back and smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He doesn’t know who Kyle is.

  “Kyle’s one of our friends. One of my best friends, and you and he…” I stop, knowing in my gut it’s too much. “You guys were friends too, is all.”

  A silence sets in, and we stare at the small images of each other, our eyes darting to other places then coming back. I don’t know how to talk to him, what the rules are and where they start and end. He doesn’t know what to ask. All of the triggers that lead back to us…they’re just…gone.

  “I should probably finish up at work, actually,” I say, sniffling to mask the cracking in my voice. “I’m working the night shift, and Kyle’s going to be here to pick me up soon.”

  Wes nods.

  “Yeah, totally,” he says, looking up at someone on the other side of the phone, probably his brothers. His eyes settle back down on the screen. “You work a lot of night shifts?”

  “A few times a week. It’s peaceful, and it lets me train. I play ball.” I stop there, not knowing how deep to go.

  “Yeah, TK and Levi told me about that. You’re…you’re good,” he smiles.

  “She’s better than you,” I hear TK say in the distance.

  We all laugh.

  “Apparently, you can hit my fastball or whatever,” he says.

  “Change-up,” I correct, the weight of this conversation sitting heavy in my chest. It sinks to my gut when he doesn’t react.

  He shifts again, this time picking the phone up in his palm, and I get my finger ready to end the call again, perhaps even more anxious to close this window so I can hide how much this just feels. Goddamn does it feel.

  “Hey, Joss?” My heart kicks and I focus on the screen.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Maybe we can do this again, like…a few times a week? Maybe during your night shifts or…”

  “I’d like that,” I answer fast. I answer before I’m sure if I really will like that. It’s torture, but maybe I like that, too. I think I need this. Even if nothing comes of it beyond whatever it is now.

  “Good,” he smiles, his mouth straightening just a little. “And be careful. I don’t think I like you working alone at night.”

  My right hand trembles, so I move my phone to my left.

  “Okay,” I smile, holding on for as long as I can, saying goodbye to him, to his brothers, and ending the call just as Kyle taps on the front door. I pretend for about six seconds when I let him in the door, and my friend reads right through it, setting the greasy bag of food down and pulling me into his embrace. I have a feeling he’s going to be doing this a few times every week, after my night shift.

  After Wes calls.

  Twenty-Five

  What I never thought would get easier somehow did. Christmas came, and Bruce and the boys came back to Bakersfield in time for the baseball season. For the last two months, Wes and I have talked by video about three times a week. He’s been continuing his therapy and studying with his mom, almost like being homeschooled, but away from home.

  I’ve taken less shifts at the Jungle Gym, instead spending most of my extra hours working with my dad and Rebecca on the field.

  The Girl Strong magazine story came out two weeks ago, and the attention from it has been a little overwhelming. I don’t have the news trucks Wes had when he came home after going missing, but I’ve had a lot of phone calls from sports journalists wanting to tell my story their way. I’ve shared with a few, because…ESPN, and I’m not stupid. I’ve gotten a lot of calls from colleges, too. It was hard for me to hear, but my dad was right when he said a lot of them were just interested in me as human-interest piece.

  I’m not a sideshow.

  I’m more than that.

  Chico thinks I’m more than that.

  The most recent call, however, came from Stanford, which of course made me think of Wes and his ability to see the future.

  Fuck ‘em, and go play for Stanford.

  I don’t talk to him about his special skills. I’ve asked Levi and TK, though, and they both say that those parts of Wes seem to have disappeared with his memory. As special as they were, they weren’t what made him special.

  I’ve started to have dinner with the Stokes once a week. Sometimes my dad comes, and sometimes we even bring Grace. She’s stayed, and I don’t really see her going back to Tucson anytime soon, if ever. She’s found a place I think—maybe she longed for with my mom, only with me—and I crave a mother like her. She’s talked about finding a place nearby, maybe a condo, but my dad doesn’t rush her. She’s moved into the living room permanently, insisting he take his room when he was recovering. The sofa has been exchanged for a pull-out, and she seems fine with it.

  I’m fine with it. If I get a legit offer from a college to play ball, I’ll suggest she takes my room when I’m gone. I’m keeping this plan to myself for now, but I think everyone will like it.

  The men who held us hostage were just one link in a long chain of people who passed money down the coast and across the border in exchange for drugs. When the man my dad trusted broke that link, getting lost in Mexico with what ended up being nearly a million from various drug runners, the really bad guys started to notice. My family’s trauma is now documented in several pages of a DEA file that spans nearly a decade, and while we’ve been told that a trial will come and we will need to cooperate, I have this feeling that in the drug world, the bad guys vastly outnumber the good ones. The only silver lining is our debt is now considered extortion, like the drug lords committed fraud by not counting the money my father had paid. The only amount we can prove is what Grace lent us, because of the bank records.

  Shawn called me the day after New Year’s. For the first time since I’ve known him, there was nothing cryptic in his words. He was, instead, rather direct. He told me never to tell Wes about him. To never remind him, and if he started to feel like there was something there, a memory that was foggy about a man in a wheelchair, an uncle—a father, Shawn wanted us all never to nurture it along. He said the same words to Bruce, to Maggie, and to TK and Levi.

  I was angry at first, and I never promised. He didn’t ask for one though. He knew I’d follow his wishes. He knew he was going to die. And on a Tuesday i
n the middle of January, in a small apartment just on the border of Texas and Oklahoma, he did just that. The notice in the paper was small, almost invisible. Bruce assumed a neighbor must have submitted the obituary because he never did. He got the call that his brother had passed from a sudden cardiac arrest. It was deemed natural even though we all know there was nothing natural about Shawn at all. He left his brother everything left to his name—a red cape once worn by Christopher Reeve, and a 1991 Chevy van. Bruce sold both for four hundred and twenty dollars combined. TK and Levi spent it on catcher’s gear and a new bat.

  I’m three months away from graduating. I’m going to graduate, and that alone, as Taryn keeps reminding me, is a miracle. My GPA is pitiful, but so far this spring, I’m hitting the ball hard. It isn’t fair, but I’m getting noticed more than those kids buried in books every morning at the library.

  It’s my first weekend completely off from everything. My dad’s too. Finally back to work fulltime, he decided to spend his day napping, and I’m beginning to think he’s onto something as I unlace my running shoe from my good leg. I get the knot halfway untied when I hear a gentle knock at the screen door. I glance out my window and recognize TK’s shoulder, so I start to put my shoe back on as Grace answers the door.

  “There’s someone here for you,” she says, meeting me in the hallway on my way out.

  “I saw. They probably want to watch movies here or something,” I say, moving past her. Her hand grasps my shoulder, and she turns me just enough that I stop. My eyes meet hers, and all she does is shake her head and smile.

  It had gotten easier, because it was distant. He was in Texas. I was in California. It was like nightly interviews that sometimes turned into me telling him about my day, him telling me about his. I labeled it long-distance friends finally, but now someone is here to see me.

  My hands instinctively move to my hair, sweeping it up into a knot. I cut it recently, wanting to keep it out of my eyes when I ran. I hadn’t cut it in years, and the ends were starting to look shaggy. Wes won’t remember anyhow, but for some reason I wish my blonde waves fell further than my shoulders.

  He’s standing behind his brothers as I approach the open door, maybe nervous too. I push open the screen and invite them inside.

  “We were actually thinking maybe you could come hit some balls with us,” Levi says.

  My gaze shifts from him to his brother behind him, and I wait for his blue eyes to flit up under the shadow of his hat. His mouth is flat, his hands in the pockets of a pair of black shorts that fall just above his knees. His body is so mature, and as grown up as I thought he was before he left for Texas, there are phases I’ve clearly missed. He’s an inch taller.

  “Let me get my stuff,” I say, closing the door behind me and rushing out to the garage.

  Grace opens the door just as I push the garage button, and her eyes glance out to the driveway, seeing the legs of the Stokes boys standing out front waiting for me.

  “Tell Dad where I went, if he wakes up while I’m gone,” I say.

  “I will,” she says, her eyes soft on mine. She doesn’t want me to get hurt. I feel her message in my heart.

  “Give ’em, hell,” she winks as I back out under the door as it’s closing.

  The truck running by the curb, Levi jumps in the driver’s side and TK hops in the back.

  “You should sit up front, Joss,” he says, making obvious eye contact with me that makes me blush.

  I hand him my gear and slide in to the middle of the seat as Wes climbs in on the other side. When he shuts the door, his knee brushes against mine. I stare at the place we touch until we reach the end of the block, but Wes doesn’t look at it once. I dare myself not to look at our knees again—sitting so closely—for the remainder of the trip.

  “When did you get in? Or…are you and your mom just visiting?” I stare straight ahead as I wait for his response.

  “It’s been a couple days. And yeah, we’re back for good. I’m starting on Monday,” he says.

  Monday. So soon.

  “Funny thing, Joss,” Levi cuts in, smirking as he looks sideways to me. “Seems the one thing that Wes can remember about you is the fact that you hit his slider out of the park when we first met.”

  “Change-up,” I deadpan, glancing to the side at Levi, catching the way his lip raises a little higher. “And I didn’t hit it out of the park, just hard and down the line.”

  “Now see, Wes here thinks it was a slider,” he says, his voice clearly taunting his brother.

  “It doesn’t matter what he thinks it was, Levi,” I say, biting the tip of my tongue and turning to my right to look at Wes’s profile. His lips are forming a tight line, holding back a smile, and his eyes refuse to look at me. “And it doesn’t matter what he pitches to me. I’ll hit it. Because he still hasn’t learned how to hide his pitch.”

  I cock my head a hint and pucker my lips, which finally gets Wes to look sideways with his eyes.

  “Or did I?” he says, slowly.

  There’s a familiar fire in my belly, and I’m careful not to make more of it than it is, but it feels good. It’s that competitive edge I love, but it’s also that small piece of us—perhaps my favorite piece.

  Levi drives us right up to the fence for the field, and we slip through the space where the gate is locked poorly, the gap wide. We spend a few minutes throwing balls around, warming up our arms, and I continue to remind myself that this is just one more day, in a series of days, where my friends and I are doing something we love.

  But then Wes makes his way to the mound and turns his hat, lowering it just a little on the right, the shadow drawing a dark line across his cheeks and nose. I get lost in his routine while I unpack my bat and slip on my hitting gloves. He digs the metal of his cleats into the dirt, kicking out the edge of the rubber, where my father told him to. He swings his glove loose on his wrist, adjusting the tightness, then feels the ball in his mitt, compressing it with his hand, forming his fingers to the threads and finding the right touch.

  It’s all familiar, but it’s also what every pitcher does. I write it off as coincidence and nothing more. And then he bends down, and with his thumb, he wipes away the dirt from the tops of his shoes, until the white curves at the front of his feet are no longer covered in dust.

  “You’re home,” I hum to myself.

  I’m breaking Grace’s rule. This may hurt. I won’t care.

  Levi pounds his glove, urging Wes to throw, and I study him carefully, watching as he works the ball and presents it before delivering snap after snap to his brother’s mitt. He throws seven or eight fastballs, and I count at least two curves. But there are no sliders, and he hasn’t shown me his change-up.

  “Batter up!” TK shouts from the other dugout.

  I push my helmet tighter and step up to the plate, tapping my bat on the end of Levi’s glove.

  “No catcher interference now, you hear?” I say.

  “No ma’am,” he responds.

  I find my footing, feeling the weight even out on my blade and my front foot, my bat ready to strike just off my shoulder. Wes pulls his hat lower and brings the ball to his glove in front of his face. He thinks he’s hiding it, but I can see everything in the way his arm flexes. His forearm is turned in slightly, which means he’s feeling for laces, so it’s a fast ball. It takes him almost a full rotation, so my guess is four-seam instead of two. I adjust my weight, so my attack will be fast but level, and I see things in slow motion as his leg lifts, his elbow flexes and his wrist flicks, sending the ball soaring seam over seam toward me. I’m a little early, so this line drive shoots right over the third base line and into the weeds.

  “You sure you still don’t want to marry me?” Levi says, chuckling and tapping his glove into my leg.

  “Better luck next time, Wes!” he shouts to his brother.

  Wes shakes his head, but as he turns, I catch the smirk on his lips as the sun unmasks him from the shadow of his hat. TK tosses him another ball from
the dugout, and he starts his routine again. So do I.

  I watch his hands work, his arm turn, the inside of his arm showing me more. His grip comes fast, but he continues to pretend. My father taught him this, but he still needs work. I see it coming, and he’s going to say it’s a slider, but it’s not.

  It’s not, because it’s about eleven miles per hour slower, and that time feels like forever as I wait. I keep my bat back, letting the ball travel right to the sweet spot, releasing my arms and casting them through my zone knowing that sweet feeling of perfect contact is coming.

  Until it doesn’t.

  The ball drops fast, Levi blocking it at the edge of the plate, his laughter breaking through in an instant. I swung and I missed because that shit was a slider. My chest beats fast with my pulse, my arms tighten with the rush from the adrenaline I get when I’m mad. I am mad. I pound my bat on the plate then point it at Wes, holding it out like the end of a rifle. His smirk grows bigger, spreading from cheek to cheek, and lighting up his eyes.

  “Slider,” he says, winking.

  My expression softens fast.

  He remembers. If he can remember something like this…maybe he can remember more someday. Maybe…I can make him.

  Afraid of making a slip, of saying the wrong thing, of doing something that will chase this away, I keep up my act and I drum up my emotions to make myself feel the fire of competition again. It comes naturally, but this time it battles with something else. I want this to be real; I want him to remember this. If he remembers this…

  Wes pitches to me for nearly an hour, taking time between each one, and fooling me about half of the time. He’s gotten stronger, and his speed is up. I can keep up with it, but it’s not as easy as it was. I’m almost proud, but I also take it as a sign that I need to work harder.

  As the afternoon sun starts to bake us from the west, we slow down, and soon we’ve piled back in the truck, in the same spots we came in. The drive back to my house feels fast, and I waste that time not speaking to Wes. My mind pretends we’re having conversations—meaningful ones—but it’s all pretend in my head. Whatever this was, this last hour, I’m not going to make it more than it was. I’m also not going to make it less.