Team Players

by Mike Lupica

  She saw her dad grinning. “I’m not sure I caught that.”

  “Dad, after all this time you really don’t know a lot about girls, do you?” Cassie said.

  “I’d dispute that,” he said, “even though I’m pretty sure you’re mother would concur with you.”

  “If you say something, it will only make things worse.”

  “And you honestly think that they aren’t going to change the way they’re acting toward you before the end of the season?”

  “Gotta hand it to them, Dad,” she said. “They’re as stubborn as I am.”

  Chris Bennett laughed. “Good Lord,” he said. “The situation is far worse than I imagined!”

  Jack and Teddy and Gus had already taken their seats in the top row of the bleachers behind the Sox bench when Cassie and her dad got to the field. Cassie went up and sat with them. It was one of the times when she wanted to hug them. Not just because they were here. But because they were always there for her.

  Teddy said, “Amy Lewis. Your nemesis.”

  “She’s really not my nemesis,” Cassie said. “I really like her. And I’ve always loved pitching against her.”

  “Is the new girl gonna keep catching?” Gus said.

  “Maria,” Cassie said. “Yeah.”

  “She’s good,” Gus said.

  “He meant to say ‘cute,’ ” Teddy said.

  “First of all, I don’t think she’s cute,” Gus said. “And second of all, even if she did happen to be cute, she’s not talking to Cassie.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Cassie said. “She’s just going along.”

  Jack said, “When guys were bullying Teddy, the ones that bothered me the most were the ones who just went along.”

  “I know,” Cassie said. “But can we talk about this later? I’ve got to go deal with my nemesis.”

  “You said she wasn’t.”

  “I might’ve lied,” Cassie said, smiling at all of them.

  She bumped fists with them, one after another. Those were like hugs too. The guys just didn’t know it.

  • • •

  Cassie pitched the way she had in the first game of the season, except this time she had a no-hitter going through five innings. If she missed having Brooke behind the plate, she wasn’t showing it.

  Amy had given up just two hits, one to Cassie and one to Sarah, in the first inning, but none since. The score was still 0–0. The only base runners after the first had come on walks, one by Cassie, one by Amy Lewis.

  After Cassie had struck out the side in the top of the fifth, Lizzie walked off the field with her.

  “This is the best I’ve ever seen you pitch in your life,” Lizzie said. “And I’ve watched you do a lot of pitching. Even Kathleen and Greta said so.”

  “But they wouldn’t say it to me.”

  “That would be against the code,” Lizzie said. “They still all agree your stuff is stupid today.”

  “As stupid as they’ve been acting?” Cassie said.

  Amy blew through the bottom of the Red Sox order in the bottom of the inning. The game stayed scoreless. Cassie managed to get three outs on just five pitches in the top of the sixth, keeping her pitch count down. Then, with two outs in the bottom of the inning, she doubled to left-center, the hardest hit ball of the game by far.

  Sarah was up now.

  Cassie watched from second as Sarah went through her routine, all her various tugs and taps, always in the exact same order. One time Cassie had walked into the living room as her dad, who loved tennis, was watching Rafael Nadal. He’d made her watch as Nadal seemed to go through his own checklist of tics before every single point.

  “Obsessive-compulsive,” Cassie’s dad had explained. By now Cassie knew that a lot of people with Asperger’s were the same way.

  When Sarah was ready to hit, she took ball one. Then ball two. From second base Cassie was trying to think along with Amy. Having played against her since they were both nine, Cassie knew how confident Amy was in her own ability, almost to the point of cockiness.

  Was she pitching around Sarah, even though Sarah had had just the one base hit back in the first inning? No, Cassie thought. Amy had just missed with the first two pitches, and not by very much.

  Cassie didn’t want Sarah to take a walk. Greta was coming up next. She was a decent hitter. But she wasn’t Sarah.

  Cassie thought: If you’re gonna be a hitter, be one now.

  Sarah hit the next pitch over the second baseman’s head and into right field. Cassie was already at full speed by the time she was halfway to third, and the right fielder knew there was no point in throwing home. Sarah would take second, and the Sox would have another runner in scoring position.

  Red Sox 1, Astros 0.

  Greta was next. Maybe Amy was still thinking about Sarah’s hit, and how it had broken the tie. But the first pitch she threw to Greta was right down the middle, and Greta lined the ball over the shortstop’s head and into left-center.

  This time, Cassie could see, there was going to be a play at the plate, even with the jump Sarah had gotten.

  Cassie had a perfect angle on the play from where she was kneeling in front of the Sox bench. Saw the left fielder reach down, in stride, and cleanly field the ball. Saw the clean transfer of the ball from glove to throwing hand. And saw the ball practically explode out of her hand, on its way toward home plate.

  Allie, who’d been in the on-deck circle, was telling Sarah to slide. Sarah did.

  But Cassie could see that the throw had her.

  She didn’t come in with cleats high, the way Sam Anthony had come into Teddy that day at practice. She hit the ground exactly where she should have, and went into a neat hook slide, angling her body into the right-handed batter’s box, her left leg going for home plate.

  But the Astros catcher had set up perfectly to take the throw on one hop, and put a shin guard down between Sarah’s front foot and the plate, and reached down to put the tag on her.

  All good, at least from the catcher’s point of view.

  No, the problem was that as Sarah went sliding through the tag, the catcher’s mitt caught her right in the face.

  Cassie was already up, off her knees, and running for the plate herself, because she knew that as much as Sarah Milligan hated loud noises, she hated being touched even more.

  Before Cassie could get to her, Sarah was already on her feet, coming for the Astros catcher, who was just getting up herself. But Cassie wasn’t focused on the catcher. She was focused on Sarah, who had her fists clenched and was in the process of raising her right hand.

  “You hit me!” she shouted. “You hit me in the head!”

  Cassie didn’t know if Sarah was going to take a swing at the girl. But she wasn’t taking any chances, so at the last second, Cassie launched herself through the air like a football player trying to make a diving tackle on a ballcarrier.

  Right play, she thought later, just the wrong sport.

  Sarah was so startled that somehow she’d ended up underneath Cassie that she just lay there for a second, before she was shouting at Cassie to get off her.

  The umpire totally got what had just happened. She came over, after Cassie and Sarah were untangled, and the umpire was the one helping Sarah up.

  “It was an accident, is all,” the umpire said.

  Sarah’s face was red, and her chest was heaving. But she stayed where she was, the umpire’s arm around her shoulders as the umpire walked her back toward the Red Sox bench. When she got there, head down, Cassie’s dad told her that he was moving Kathleen to center and putting Hallie Sands in left for the bottom of the seventh. Neither one of them had to worry about making any plays out there, because Cassie struck out the side. Red Sox 1, Astros 0. Final.

  They’d made it to first place the hard way. When Cassie thought about it, it was as if she’d gotten a save—on Sarah—for her own complete game.

  When the game was over, Sarah’s parents came over and told Cassie’s dad that Sarah had de
cided to quit the team.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sometimes I’m the one who feels like quitting,” Cassie said.

  “You know you don’t mean that,” Jack said.

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  It was the next afternoon. The Cubs had a game in a few hours. Cassie and Jack and Teddy and Gus were on the dock behind Brooke Connors’s house. The Connorses were away, having taken a trip to Cape Cod as a way of getting Brooke out of Walton for a couple of weeks, having seen how hard it was for her to be around the Red Sox now that she couldn’t play.

  She’d told Cassie that getting a chance to take a step back and see from the sidelines what it was like around their team had made it even harder.

  “Everybody seems to have forgotten what it was like at the start of the season and all we wanted to do was talk about making it to Fenway,” Brooke said before she left. “But I haven’t.”

  “Remember something, though. If we go, you still go with us.”

  “It won’t be the same.”

  And Cassie said, “Hardly anything is the same as it used to be.”

  She reminded Cassie again to go hang out on the dock whenever she and the guys wanted to. Now here they were. There were a few places in Walton where they liked to come and just talk about things. Chop things up, as Teddy said. Other than sitting above Small Falls, this was the place they liked the best, especially on a summer day like this, with the sun high in the sky and no wind to speak of and the water completely calm.

  Except, Cassie thought, nothing was calm for long this summer, even when both their teams, Cubs and Red Sox, were winning. And both teams were winning.

  “Well, one thing I know,” Cassie said. “I can’t let Sarah quit.”

  “Not your decision, Cass,” Gus said.

  “Not saying it is,” she said. “But I’m not going down without a fight.” She look over at Teddy. “I wouldn’t have if you’d gone ahead and quit your team.”

  “That wasn’t the same,” Teddy said.

  “Oh, like you not wanting Sam on your team is supposed to be different from Kathleen and the other girls not wanting Sarah?”

  “But,” Teddy said, “those other girls didn’t make Sarah quit. She did that on her own.”

  “It’s not like she didn’t have help,” Cassie said. “It’s like that thing you always hear about in sports, how even one big play at the end isn’t the reason you won or lost. A whole lot of stuff had to happen before that. Well, guess what? A whole lot of stuff happened with Sarah—and to Sarah—before that play at home plate.”

  “Gotta say,” Gus said, “your play was better.”

  “Heck of a tackle,” Teddy said.

  “This isn’t funny,” she said.

  “Come on,” Teddy said. “I’m just trying to lighten the mood, Miss Dark Cloud.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She rolled over onto her back and looked straight into what was pretty much a cloudless sky.

  “Explain to me again,” she said, almost as if talking to the sky, “how come my team is winning and I feel like we’re losing.”

  Jack said, “Because sometimes it takes more than winning for sports to make us feel the way they’re supposed to.”

  “You guys seem to have figured it all out now that you’re coaching,” she said to him.

  “Figured it out for now,” Jack said. “But we’ve still got our own stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I need for Sam to start pitching good,” he said. “Because if he doesn’t, I won’t be able to explain to the other guys why I keep starting him and not J.B. or Jerry.”

  “How do you explain it now?” she said.

  “When somebody asks, I just tell them to pay attention to when Sam does pitch good for an inning or two, because he’s got really good stuff sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well the stuff I’ve got going on around my team is never good,” Cassie said.

  “Gotta admit,” Jack said. “You got me there.”

  “But you’d never quit in a thousand million years,” Teddy said.

  “No,” she said, “I would not. But I still can’t let Sarah quit. It wouldn’t just be bad for our team. It would be really bad for her.”

  “How would it be for you?” Jack said.

  “It’s not about me,” Cassie said.

  “Really?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Cassie said.

  “It means,” he said, “that sometimes I get the feeling that you think that somehow if Sarah fails, you lose.”

  Jack was sitting cross-legged. Cassie sat up so she was doing the same, and so she could look right at him.

  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  “Don’t get mad,” Jack said.

  “I’m not mad.”

  “I meant don’t get mad when you hear what I’m about to say.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You swear?”

  “No,” she said. “But man up and tell me anyway.”

  “What I think,” Jack said, “is that you’re still trying to do right by Sarah and still trying to get her to fit in. But what I don’t get is why that’s been so important to you from the start. And why somebody you still hardly know is more important to you than a lot of people you do know.”

  Cassie swiveled her head so she could see Teddy’s and Gus’s reactions to that. They were both shaking their heads. It meant that for now they were sitting this one out.

  Then she turned back to Jack.

  “What, you’re saying that the other girls are right and I’m wrong?” she said. “Tell me you’re not saying that, Callahan.”

  “I’m not saying that at all,” Jack said. “What I’m saying, and maybe should have said before this, is that you’ve been acting like Sarah was some game you were trying to win.”

  Cassie started to answer. Before she could, Jack put out a hand to stop her. “Only, it’s not a game with her. And even if things work out the way you want them to, she’s still going to have issues. So as much as you like winning, there may not be any winning here in the end.”

  “Can I say something?” Gus said.

  “You don’t have to ask permission,” she said.

  He grinned. “Well, sometimes I do with you.”

  “Guy makes a good point,” Teddy said.

  Gus said, “You told us that Angela told you that maybe the best thing would be to let Sarah feel like she was the one in charge.”

  “And I’ve been doing that!” Cassie said.

  In a quiet voice Jack said, “Like when you tackled her?”

  “She was about to hit that girl!”

  His voice still quiet, Jack said, “Are you sure?”

  Cassie took a long time before she answered, and then finally said, “No.”

  She moved herself back, so that she could face all of them at once.

  “You guys think she might have stopped herself?” she asked them.

  “Would’ve been kind of a cool thing for her if she had, right?” Jack said. “Maybe then she would have been the one feeling as if she’d won something.”

  Cassie hadn’t thought about it that way for one second. Hadn’t even considered it. In the moment, she’d just made up her mind about what she thought Sarah was going to do and then reacted.

  When she had done that, she’d been doing exactly what Angela had accused her of doing:

  Trying to be her hero.

  “I didn’t think,” she said.

  “Hey,” Teddy said. “Happens to the best of us.”

  “So if you guys are so brilliant, what do I do now?”

  “Now, you’re probably going to hate what I’m going to say next,” Jack said.

  “Try me.”

  “How about you apologize?” he said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Cassie rode her bike over to Sarah’s house later, timing it out so she could go from there to the Cubs’ game at Highland Park.

  It’s funny, she thought on the
way over. Even though she knew all the different ways to get to Sarah’s street, she ended up taking the exact route Sarah had described that day in Cassie’s room. She could almost hear Sarah reciting the streets like she was the voice of the GPS woman on a phone.

  Cassie thought about calling first. But if she did that, she risked Sarah telling her not to come. And if there was no one home, Cassie had decided she’d ride into town, grab a slice of pizza at Fierro’s, and wait until it was time for the Cubs to play the Greenacres Giants.

  But when she got to the house, there was the Milligans’ car parked in the driveway.

  After Cassie rang the bell, Mrs. Milligan opened the front door.

  “Hey, Mrs. Milligan,” Cassie said. “Sorry to just drop by this way. But I was wondering if Sarah’s home.”

  Kari Milligan smiled. “Soon,” she said. “She and her dad are over at the park playing catch.”

  “Didn’t even think to check there.”

  “She hadn’t touched a ball or bat or her glove since the game ended the way it did. But about an hour ago she asked Jim—my husband—if he wanted to go over there. He’d taken the afternoon off from work.”

  “Well, the way that game ended for Sarah is why I’m here,” Cassie said. “I wanted to apologize for what I did. I just assumed . . .”

  Mrs. Milligan smiled again. “The worst,” she said.

  “Kind of.”

  “Would you like to come in and wait for her?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t.”

  Cassie didn’t want to put this off. The things she wanted to say to Sarah, she wanted to say today. She didn’t think they would keep. The way Cassie had worked it out, if she could get Sarah to change her mind before the Red Sox played another game, then her quitting the team really didn’t count.

  And maybe the fact that she even wanted to have a game of catch with her dad today was a good sign.

  They sat in the living room. Mrs. Milligan asked Cassie if she wanted something to drink. Cassie said she was fine.

  “Is there any way I can help you?” Mrs. Milligan said.

  “I just don’t feel as if I can do anything right with Sarah,” Cassie said. “And then even when I feel like I’m doing something right, it goes all stupidly wrong.”