Out of Left Field

by Kris Hui Lee

  “Five-year-olds can hold a grudge longer than I can,” Cody says. He hesitates, throwing me a half grin. That’s all I need to know that we’ll be okay. “And you’re sort of adorable when you’re sorry and self-deprecating.”

  Is he joking with me? Did I somehow manage to spew out a good apology in all that word vomit? Was it really that easy to fix this? And did he just call me adorable?

  Cody continues, “I know that it’s not all your fault.”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

  “The being Santino’s cousin part—not your fault. But the being a liar about it—that’s all you.” He looks down at his bare feet, his face falling into the shadows. “Still, I’m sorry that I yelled at you and that I didn’t let you explain yourself before.”

  Wait. He’s apologizing?

  “But you have to admit, it was a lot to take in.” He looks up at me and meets my eye. “You kind of blindsided me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think that I’ll ever like Santino, whether he’s your cousin or not,” Cody says. “But I don’t want to be mad at you because he’s your cousin…or because you’re friends with him.”

  “Really?” I don’t even try to hide the hope in my voice.

  “You can be friends with whoever you want. I might not understand why you like him, but it’s your choice.”

  The way he says all this, I can tell he’s been thinking about it nonstop for the past two days. Guilt floods me as I realize how much turmoil this must have caused him—and how we could have avoided this if I had told him what was happening from the start.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I don’t hate Santino nearly as much as I like you.” He smiles at me—a real smile, and I’m thinking, This is it. This has to be it.

  I lean toward him a bit.

  “You know,” Cody says, looking down, “you weren’t completely wrong about me being jealous. In the thirty seconds before you told me he was going to be your cousin, I wanted to rip his frigging throat out.”

  My heart does a tiny flip in my chest. I hate how much I enjoy hearing that he was jealous. I also hate how much I enjoy the image of my best friend dismembering my new cousin. But alas, enjoy them I do.

  “I wanted to come to you,” Cody continues. “But I was scared.” He laughs a little. “You can scare the hell out of me sometimes.”

  “I’m not scary.”

  “Not you per se, but the fact that I don’t know really how you feel about me can be pretty unnerving.”

  He looks me straight in the eyes when he says this. Everyone else—Sara, Joey, Carrot, Jiro, even Santino frigging Acardi—seems to know how we feel about each other. How come we are the last to know?

  “I’ve been trying to figure it out these past two days,” he says. “And I finally realized that it’s just been wishful thinking.”

  Wait…what?

  “You were right. We have a lot of history, but that doesn’t entitle me to anything more. And yeah, it hurts to think that someday you’ll be with someone who’s not me, but I can get over it.” He glances at his casted wrist. “I got over this. I’ll figure out how to move on.” His eyes find mine again, and it almost hurts to hold his gaze.

  Is this what he thinks? That I don’t want him? How? Why?

  “Cody…”

  “I’ve always wanted something more,” he says, “but I just need us to be friends, just like we’ve always been.”

  I can’t breathe. I can’t even feel my heart beating in my chest.

  I want to protest, tell him he’s wrong and needs to reconsider immediately, but before I can get a word out, he says, “It’s better this way, right? Things are good the way they are.”

  I swallow hard. I want to cry, but I just stare at him.

  “Marnie?”

  A weak smile and a nod are all I can muster in response.

  Shake it off, Marnie.

  It’s not like I’ve lost him. If anything, we’re sealing the bond of our friendship indefinitely. And how many people can say they’re still best friends with their best friend from first grade?

  So I do what I do best: I nudge him in the shoulder and joke, “So does this mean I’m officially off your list of least favorite people?”

  He brushes a bug off my shoulder. “Marnie,” he says with a small grin. “You’ve always been my favorite.”

  Hell.

  How nice it would be to just kiss him senseless right now, but the equilibrium between us has been reestablished. He thinks this should make us feel better, but I feel so much worse.

  19

  When I walk into the dog shelter the next morning before school, I expect Moose to greet me. He doesn’t, and I’m disappointed. The place seems abnormally quiet. No yipping dogs. No Sara reprimanding the yipping dogs.

  A volunteer behind the counter smiles at me. “Here for Sara?” she asks. Apparently my face isn’t as foreign to the workers as theirs are to me.

  I nod.

  “She’s in the back,” the girl tells me.

  “Thanks,” I say and head through the door.

  I peek into the kennel room. Some dogs perk up at the sight of me, but for the most part, they’re quiet. Sara is not among them. So I move on to the small office next to the kennel room, where I find Sara seated at the desk, scrolling through a website on a computer that’s about a decade old. Moose is sleeping by her feet.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Sara looks up long enough to acknowledge that she heard me and then returns her focus to the screen. Perhaps she is less willing to forgive me than Cody.

  It’s a while before either of us says anything, then she finally goes, “So you’re on an apology crusade?”

  “I guess you could call it that…”

  “I saw Cody this morning. He was happy.” She says this all as matter-of-fact, like she’s telling me that it’s seventy-eight degrees outside and sunny.

  I don’t want to talk about Cody. I want to talk about her.

  “I’m sorry I brought you into that mess on Friday,” I say. Somehow saying sorry is easier now that I’ve had the practice with Cody. “I shouldn’t have blurted out your problems.”

  “I know you shouldn’t have,” she says. Then she sighs and closes the browser, turning the chair to face me. “But it’s done. It was a bad night to pick a fight with me anyway.” She stands and stretches her arms over her head. Moose, always following her every move, gets on his feet too. “I wouldn’t have gotten mad so easily if I hadn’t already fought with mom and then had Joey show up unexpectedly.”

  I want to hear more about what’s going on with her college plans, with Joey. But I’ve already made a mess of things, so she can tell me when she’s ready.

  “I suppose I’ve got to air it all out now,” she says, reading my mind.

  I don’t want to look too desperate for answers, so I just shrug.

  Sara drops herself on the sofa against the wall, and Moose jumps up next to her. “Well…I guess Joey already announced that we were hooking up.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” I say. “I just can’t for the life of me figure out why or when.”

  “The why is easy—making out is fun.”

  Not that I would know.

  “The when is the complicated part.”

  “He said he cheated on Brie with you. Which I find extremely difficult to believe.”

  “We were kinda drunk. Not that it changes how wrong it was.”

  Curiosity takes control of my tongue. “Can I get the whole story?”

  “I suppose there’s more on the table now than not.”

  I sit down in the spinny chair by the computer.

  “So, last year, you remember how Brie and Joey went to winter formal, and you, me, and Cody went ice-skating? I came home dead tired and just wanted to
sleep. But as I was about to crawl into bed, Joey rang the doorbell dressed up in his button-down shirt. So I asked him why he was there and not getting in Brie’s pants. He looked all distraught, so I let him in. Mind you, my mom was out of town that weekend for a friend’s funeral or something. So it was just me and the three dogs. And he told me that Brie told him at the dance that she’s not sure she’s straight, but she wanted to be with him until she figures herself out. So I asked him why he was telling me this, and he said it was ’cause he wants to ask me about sexuality and stuff because I’m not straight, and he wants to know what that’s like and if maybe Brie could be bisexual and if that would mean they could still be together.

  “So he was, like, freaking out, so I offered him some of my mom’s wine to calm him down, and he was all for it. So I grabbed some glasses, and we sacked out on the living room floor. And I did my best to explain to him that there’s no way for me to know who Brie’s into, and that if she’s not into guys like she thought she was, there’s nothing he can do about it. Of course, after I did my best to console him, he was pretty shit-housed, and I was a little shit-housed, and he was cursing himself for falling in love with a lesbian who didn’t love him back. And then, well, you know. Wine, no parents, sexual frustration…I don’t know who started it. We keep blaming each other.”

  “So you just made out?”

  “We did…stuff.”

  I raise my eyebrows at her.

  “Stuff that involved no clothes and is too embarrassing to say out loud, so don’t ask for details, because you won’t get them.”

  I don’t know what to say. Although I’ve had my suspicions, it still hits me hard. Sara and Joey. Hooking up and keeping it hidden from both me and Cody all this time.

  “Do you like him?” I ask.

  Sara leans backs and sighs. “Yeah, as a friend. But I wouldn’t want to go out with him. It’s all lust, to be honest. On both sides.”

  “You’re sure he’s not looking for more?”

  “Trust me. He’s made it very clear he’s not. In fact, we both agreed that we were done for good. Until the other night when he came over and said he was bored, which is his code for ‘Hey, let’s have a drink and go to bed.’ I put my foot down, and he got mad. But really, I think he was more mad at himself for succumbing to the temptation.” She laughs a little. “We’re a mess.”

  I’m not sure if she’s talking about only her and Joey or all four of us. I suppose it’s the inevitable mess that everyone has to muddle through on their way to adulthood. A rite of passage or whatever.

  “Anyway.” Sara gets up and grabs her backpack from the floor. “Shall we?”

  I nod. “What about college?” I ask as we head out to my car.

  “I told my mom I would look into some schools, and I have been, but the more I research, the more I don’t want to go. The closest thing to a degree in professional dog loving is veterinary school, but I don’t want to be a vet. I just want to take care of dogs and help them find homes.” She gets into the passenger seat as I get into the driver side. “I’d rather work three shitty jobs in retail and stay home with my mom and the dogs than go into debt trying to get a degree that I don’t want at some school that’s hours or entire states away from here.”

  “And what does your mom say about all this?”

  “She’ll keep trying to convince me to get a degree. Maybe she’ll succeed. Maybe she won’t. I don’t know. But my mom and I always find a way to make things work. We’re quite the duo.”

  “Why haven’t you talked about this before?” I ask as I turn onto the main street. I’ve always considered the two of us a dynamic duo as well, and I can’t help wishing she felt she could confide in me about all of this.

  “I don’t know. We’re always joking around, and I love that, don’t get me wrong. But it’s hard, not being able to laugh off problems like we’re used to doing. Sometimes it’s weird to imagine that we’re almost adults with real life decisions to make. We’re not innocent, little eight-year-olds anymore. Maybe it seems easier to pretend that we still are instead of recognizing that we have to deal with stuff—and that we’ve got the brains to really help each other.”

  She’s put into words exactly how I’ve been feeling. Why it was so hard for me to confront Cody and Santino and to cope with a problem that involved more than someone violating the dib rule on the last chocolate chip cookie. Why it’s so hard to admit what I actually feel about Cody, which I still can’t seem to fully admit.

  “So what are you going to do?” I ask her.

  Sara shrugs. “I’m gonna go with my gut. Stick by my doggies. My mom has always been a good adapter. She’s resistant when things don’t go the way she wants at first, but she gets used to it way faster than she ever thinks she will.”

  Resilient Sara. Steadfast Sara.

  She looks out the window. “Things are changing.”

  Things could mean anything, but I know exactly what she’s talking about. “Yeah,” I say, “they are.”

  She gives me a weak smile. “I guess we just keep playing.”

  I nod. “I guess so.”

  We’re silent the rest of the drive. It could be any other day, me and her on our way to school.

  But today, everything feels different.

  20

  The semifinals are played on neutral territory, which means I’ve got an hour-long bus ride to Armstrong High to dwell on what may or may not happen during this game against Charing East. It also means I have to spend sixty minutes in a vehicle with fourteen obnoxious guys, all buzzing with adrenaline and excitement, who are also slightly ticked at me.

  My attempts to smuggle Sara on the bus failed (thank you, Chizz), so my only comfort are my headphones and a long playlist of pump-up music. I take a seat near the front. Not the front-front, because that’s where Chizz is sitting, and I’m not in the mood to engage in conversation with him, so I take a seat about three rows behind him. This leaves a bunch of seats piled with baseball gear between me and the rest of the guys.

  After we’ve been bumping along for a good fifteen minutes, someone starts calling my name. At first I think I’m imagining it, but then I hear it again:

  “Lockster?! LOCKSTER?! LOCKSTER MONSTER, WAKE UP!”

  I peek my head over the back of the seat. About half the team stares back at me, all with amused smirks on their faces. This throws me. Aren’t they mad at me for betraying their brotherhood? Aren’t they still shunning me?

  “What are you doing all the way up there?” Carrot shouts as if we’re miles and miles away.

  “It’s team bonding time, and you’re not bonding with us!” Jiro shouts.

  I find Cody’s face among the bunch. He grins at me, and I know—he’s given them the okay to stop hating me.

  All of them are welcoming except Joey, who seems content maintaining the boycott against me, as evidenced by his focus on his phone screen rather than what’s going on around him.

  I lower myself back in my seat and turn up my music. I’m glad the team is willing to include me in their bonding time, but it doesn’t feel right when Joey is still upset. I know—since when have I ever needed Joey’s approval? But after hearing exactly what happened between him and Sara, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve labeled Joey as the immature pain in everyone’s ass who is sometimes good for a laugh, while forgetting he’s got his own stuff he’s working through. I’ve spent my whole life thinking he’s the one who unfairly begrudges me, but maybe he’s been thinking the same thing, only the other way around.

  Before I can start to regret all the annoying things I’ve done to him, whistling, cheering, and clapping break my thoughts. Cody drops himself in the empty space beside me, and Carrot shouts, “Get it!”

  I pull out one earphone as Cody pulls a giant pack of Swedish Fish out of his pocket. “I have to open this up here,” he says, “or else they’ll attack
me, and I won’t get to eat any.”

  “They’d attack an injured person?”

  “For these, they would.”

  I eye the candy greedily. “How do you know I won’t attack you?”

  “I’m willing to share with you.” He holds the pack so I can take some.

  I smile at him, and he smiles back. My heart cracks as I remember the night on his porch, how close we sat, how close I was to telling him how I really feel. But then I remind myself: I need to be grateful that we’re friends. That we’ve been friends for this long and that we’ll be friends for a long time to come. Never mind that I’ll probably never get to know how good of a kisser he is. (He has to be a good kisser. Someone with a face like his can’t be anything else.) At least we can share Swedish Fish and a seat on the bus.

  As we munch, Cody asks if he can listen to my music, so I give him an earbud. And then I do the boldest thing I’ve done in recent memory—I rest my head on his shoulder, and stomach pleased with our snack, my mind consumed with the music, I sleep away the remaining miles.

  • • •

  It’s clear from the start that Charing East has their shit together.

  We get off our bus as they’re getting off of theirs, but whereas we’re loud and disorganized, they’re disciplined and uniform. It’s like their coach could be a drill sergeant instead of a high school baseball coach. Their team is matching in every way, from their blue-and-white team jackets to their caps to their duffel bags, right down to the way they walk.

  None of them smile as they walk (or more accurately, march) off the bus.

  “Why do they have to look like that?” I ask Cody.

  “They’re spawns of the devil,” he says.

  Jiro comes up next to me, his eyes following the blue-and-white Parade of Death. “They’ve got the worst reputation in the state for playing dirty,” Jiro whispers.

  “That’s encouraging,” I say. “What are our odds?”

  “We’re pretty evenly matched,” Cody says. “But like Jiro said, they’re known for playing cheap, which will tip the scale in their favor.”