My own parents weren’t at the game because I’d told them it was a boring double-practice day.
Somehow, I made it to the top of the ninth without incident. My teammates’ uniforms had acquired roughly the same amount of filth as mine, so at last I looked like a member of the group.
The visiting team was leading, 1–0. There were two outs, with no one on base. The batter hit a line drive to center field, which was where I was playing, and I held out my glove to catch the ball. But the ball hit the heel and landed on the grass near my feet. I picked it up and threw it back to the infield as quickly as I could, but not before the runner reached first.
The next batter hit a fly ball to Ryder, who was playing left field. He glided over toward the line and made the catch easily. He and the rest of the guys headed toward the dugout en masse, but I trudged slowly by myself, listening to Coach berate me the whole way.
“What was that?” he called out to me, shaking his head with disgust. “You couldn’t catch a beach ball.” That was unfair and I knew it. In New Mexico, I was a decent player. But you’re only as good as your last game, and in all my games under Coach Tierson I couldn’t do anything right, because I was shaking with fear.
He decided to use our final at-bat for an announcement, which he delivered in a hoarse voice. “All right, listen up. If anyone throws his bat from now on, you’re off the team. Walk off the fucking field and don’t come back. You’re done. You won’t finish the season, you won’t play next year. I’ve had it. If you can’t follow that one simple instruction I’ve got no use for you.”
Everyone knew he was talking about me. I was a pariah. No one sat near me, Contagious Charlie, the freak.
I wasn’t going to have a single friend come fall. I’d just moved here and I was already done.
Then Ryder got up to bat.
It was the bottom of the ninth and we were down a run.
The first pitch came in. Meatball. On a platter. Served up with a big “Hit me!” sign.
Easy home run—well, easy for someone like Ryder.
Yes, he knocked it out of the park.
Tied game, just like that.
All the guys leapt off the bench in a line of whoops, screaming, cheering, waving their caps. We could still win now. The day was saved.
But Ryder didn’t move.
He just stood there and watched the ball fade into the distance.
“Go! Go!” people screamed. The crowd waved their arms frantically, stood up from their seats, called out to him. This was back when his parents were still together, so they were there. So was Griffin.
Ryder looked at the crowd, and then he looked at Coach, and then he slowly wound up and threw his bat in a huge arc, so there was no mistaking it. It smacked against the chain-link fence right near the visiting team’s dugout.
Despite devouring Dad’s comic book collection, I’d never believed in superheroes before, not really, but now I knew. They were rare, but they existed.
Ryder slowly circled the bases, and when he got back to our dugout, he looked Coach dead in the eye, daring him to say something. But Coach’s mouth was open; he was dumbfounded and speechless for once.
Ryder walked casually along the bench to where I sat, by myself. He stopped in front of me. “Are you coming?”
I smiled so hard, I thought my teeth would shatter and puncture my mouth, like clay plates shot into pieces in the air.
We chucked all our gear to the ground: helmets, gloves, protective padding; shed it all right there like we were already at home, and then we took off, walking, not running, walking off the fucking field, the way Coach had told us to. And we never looked back.
THE OTHER MARIA
ON THE WALK BACK TO SCHOOL, MY VISION WAVERED AND I swore I could see little pools of water on the black pavement up ahead, but every time I got close to them, they disappeared. I knew I would never reach them no matter how far or how long I walked.
I passed the Oasis Spa. There was no water in Palm Valley, yet all the businesses had names designed to make you think of life and springs and gardens, instead of rocks or tumbleweeds or dirt and sand and blisters.
Why didn’t those damn European settlers go a little bit farther? I wondered, for what felt like the millionth time. If they’d toughed it out fifty or sixty miles south, maybe I’d be living in Santa Monica right now. Why did they stop here and dig their feet in? Did they convince themselves on a daily basis that the ocean really was just around the corner?
If a mirage makes you see things that aren’t there, in Palm Valley you see things that are really there but shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be a golf course, flowers, or any kind of tree, Joshua or otherwise. Everything shipped in from the outside, from LA or Colorado or wherever, didn’t belong and never would have grown there naturally.
I shoved the school doors open and saw Ellie far down the hallway, looking like a tall drink of water at the end of a long, hot road. I was dying of thirst. I leaned over to drink a gallon from the fountain, but it didn’t put a dent in my need; and when I looked up again, Ellie was gone, and I knew I had to stop. Drinking. If I really wanted to win her back, I had to cut that shit out.
I regretted my liquid lunch, wanted nothing more than to go back in time and have a Coke or a water at Ryder’s instead. My brain was fuzzy and dry like a cactus, and it held things inside I couldn’t access while I was tipsy. I just wanted to be clearheaded again. I wanted to be someone she could love.
I didn’t know what to do about Griffin and his cap. Flynn Scientific was the military supplier where his father used to work. It matched the deputies’ description of the person driving my car, but plenty of people wore a cap like that, and why on earth would Griffin have been at a high school choir party?
I made it through the end of the school day, and I even made it through practice without feeling too sick. I focused on my footwork, practiced headers, and kept to myself. I couldn’t look a single one of my teammates in the eyes—not after I’d been approached to the throw the game. They had a potential traitor in their midst and they didn’t even know it. The worst part was, I was actually considering it. What was one game, in the grand scheme of things? One game to help Ryder leave behind a miserable life? I told myself it wasn’t about lining my pockets, but I didn’t believe me.
As practice wore on, and I saw Patrick diving and throwing himself into amazing deflections and saves, I changed my mind again. There was no way I could betray him like that. He was a great keeper who deserved a scholarship. My college future was all set—but he needed this, and it was my job to defend him. He should be able to count on me to try, at the very least.
I called my parents and left a message reminding them I’d be visiting Granddad, and then I took the bus over to the hospital in Lancaster. I was, apparently, all about the bus these days. The city bus was even worse than Palm Valley High’s. It bounced and jangled and clanked over every pothole, shooting sparks of pain up my spine. The driver had long since stopped caring. Maybe his seat was more cushioned than the rest of ours, or at least his ass was.
I signed in at the visitors’ station. Granddad was slowly getting over his pneumonia, so he was trapped in the sick ward of the hospital, but once he got better he’d be moving to a room at the active seniors’ residence in the building next door.
He’d lived his whole life in nearby Quartz Hill, where he raised my dad.
Quartz Hill. Now, there was a town that knew when to fold. Back in the 1970s, Granddad inherited his parents’ almond farm, just in time for the water source from LA to dry up completely. Everyone’s crops died, Quartz Hill gave up, and all the farmers there decided to work for Lockheed Martin aerospace instead, Granddad included. The only acknowledgment of Quartz Hill’s past was its annual Almond Blossom Festival. I’d taken Ellie to it last year.
At least Quartz Hill acted like a desert. Palm Valley still had blinders on.
Granddad’s house was now up for sale, and most of his possessions were in our garage
. My parents had offered to put him up at Chez Dixon while he fielded offers on his place, but like me, he liked his autonomy, or at least the illusion of it. And besides, there were no offers yet to field.
The “active seniors” Granddad would be cavorting with after his release from the hospital were 80 percent women, which I guess he liked, but I couldn’t help thinking they were all widows, and how sad that was.
Conversation overheard in the waiting area of the hospital:
“My doctor says never to eat popcorn or peanuts because it’s murder on the digestive system, just makes tiny cuts all the way down.”
“That’s appetizing. Of course, if you chew before swallowing—”
“My dog eats peanuts and he’s all right.”
“Yeah, well, dogs’ll eat anything.”
“Remember that dog that ate that knife? It was up on the table and it ate the whole birthday cake and then it ate the knife next to it that was used to cut the slices.”
I was thinking of eating a knife right about then. No wonder Granddad drank, if that was the level of conversation he was subjected to.
He had other ways of coping besides drinking. Today he decided to share with me a box of vintage porn, which one of his buddies had brought over. The magazines had names like Ace and Bachelor.
“I tried the Internet the other day,” Granddad admitted. “Before I got sick. Typed in ‘nude beauties.’ Not only could you see all there was to see, but it wasn’t worth seeing. Harsh lighting, no mystery. No real curves, either.” He smoothed out one of his magazines. “This is much sexier. I feel bad for you kids today. Twenty years ago you still had to work a little if you wanted to catch a peek; and the women were beautiful. Now you just turn on the computer and you can see people doing terrible things to each other right off the bat. There’s nothing to it. Where’s the mystery? Where’s the anticipation? At least the lingerie catalogs still cover ’em up.”
He had a point, I guess. But it’s not like the Internet was a box you could close or a light you could turn off. It was always going to be there.
He smiled, adjusted his glasses. “I guess it sounds like I’m preaching. Laughing at your old fool of a grandpa?”
“No, it’s just … Ellie would probably agree with you.”
“Ellie’s a smart girl. How’d she like the almond festival? I meant to ask.”
“She gave it an 8.5.”
“She rated your date?”
“Yep.”
“You ever get a 10?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Gotta have something to aim for, right?”
Granddad gave me a long look. “If you say so.”
He pulled a bottle of Jameson out from the box. The magazines had been used to smuggle it in. “Need a fill-up?”
“I’m okay today—I gotta keep my head about me,” I said.
“What’s on your mind?”
I slouched in my seat. “I don’t even know where to start.” The party? Ryder and the history window? The soccer match? The girl? Always, the girl?
“School got you down? Tough to be back after that long vacation?” he asked gently.
“I guess I feel like I’m running out of time. I graduate in a few months, and then I have to decide how I want to spend the rest of my life. How am I supposed to know? The only thing I was ever sure about was Ellie—and I thought—I really thought the rest of it would fall into place if she was with me. But she doesn’t feel the same way.” Suddenly I did want a fill-up.
“Why should you know what you’re going to do at age eighteen? Why should you know how you want to spend the next fifty years of your life when you haven’t known anything but schooling? And why should you know who you want to be with?”
“But I do know. That’s the problem.”
It was nice telling him all that, even if he didn’t have a solution. It was his lack of solutions that proved he’d been listening.
Mom and Dad would’ve gotten out the Lambert College course catalog and made me walk through it like it was all an exciting quest: The Mystery of Charlie’s Future. Like I’d literally meant I needed help deciding how to spend my life, so now we were sitting down as a family and figuring it out before dinner; they’d have had at me until I’d given them a false smile.
They wanted so badly for me to be okay, so they could be okay. The pressure of it was enough to crack concrete.
I hung around for another hour, learning gin rummy and watching Granddad’s hands, gnarled but steady, deal the cards. He always gave the cards a little topspin and flip as he tossed them in my direction. He looked pretty wiped out, though, and my homework wasn’t going to write itself, so with reluctance I said good-bye, picked up my backpack (now containing an issue of Ace), and headed out to the hallway.
When I passed by the last room on the right, I heard someone crying and moaning. I crept closer and peeked through the door to make sure a nurse or doctor was tending to the patient.
The patient was Maria Salvador, in the throes of hallucination, rocking back and forth at the edge of her bed, holding a nurse’s hand.
Her head wobbled around like it was off its hinges. She was wild-eyed, swiveling; part of her face looked like it wanted to get away from the other part.
I remembered her sad, hollow eyes from the party on Sunday. She was a pretty Hispanic girl with thick hair, small, chapped lips, and gorgeous eyelashes. In the hospital light, I vaguely recognized her from the caf, from songbird events, from a solo last year. She didn’t belong here, tripping her brains out.
“The walls,” she moaned, slapping her hand against the wall closest to her bed. She was looking at me but seeing God only knows what. “They’re breathing. They always breathed, didn’t they? I just never noticed before.”
“She hasn’t had too many visitors, just her family,” said the nurse holding her hand. “Do you go to school with her?”
“Yeah. Thought I’d stop in.”
The poor girl was clutching something in her hand and murmuring to herself. “The kiss,” she said. “In exile. In exile.”
I was stuck in quicksand, rooted to the spot, like all the people who hadn’t meant to but found themselves in Palm Valley, California. I couldn’t lift my feet again to keep heading west. I don’t care what people say; it’s as hard to leave misery as it is to leave happiness.
Why had no one from school visited her yet?
“What’s in her hand?” I said in order to say something. Anything.
“A key chain. She won’t let go of it,” the nurse said. “I think it comforts her, but it’s leaving a mark in her palm.”
“Sugar. Bup bup bup bup bup bup. Oh, honey, honey. You are my candy girl,” Maria sang, woeful and warbled.
“Is she ever going to stop hallucinating?” I asked. How much had she taken?
“We’re keeping her hydrated and safe, and hoping for the best for now,” said the nurse, though I wasn’t sure what the nurse meant by “her.”
Because there was no “her” left. Whoever Maria Salvador used to be, she was gone.
THE COUNTEROFFER
WHEN I GOT HOME, ALL THE WINDOWS IN ALL THE HOUSES on my block had their lights on. Every rectangle and square glowed, both floors, top to bottom. It was the opposite of the school at night, and combated some of my gloom. I stared, mesmerized and comforted, until I realized the uniform golden blaze lighting up every window was nothing more than a reflection from the fading sun, about to disappear.
I did my homework for a couple hours, then changed for bed and emptied my pockets.
Out came the folded note written on Ellie’s stationery.
Out came the message I’d ripped from the school newspaper. “To ChD. If you find it, don’t give it to her. I’ll pay more. IM 10 2nite.”
It was 9:45. I turned on my computer and logged on to my IM account.
I knew what I had to do.
Whoever this guy was, he assumed Bridget was paying me to find the drive, or he wouldn’t have offered to beat the pr
ice. I could shake him down for anything, since he didn’t know money had never been part of the equation. I could walk away from Bridget and Ryder, win Ellie back for doing so, and just report to this mystery guy from now on for one big payoff.
At 9:59, my computer beeped. BM has sent you a message. Do you accept?
I clicked Yes and when the chat window opened, I cut to the chase:
Charlie: Who is this?
BM: Do you have the flash drive?
Charlie: Not yet, but I’m close.
BM: How close?
Charlie: Who is this?
BM: Not so fast.
Charlie: You’ll have to tell me eventually.
No reply. Thirty, forty, fifty seconds went by.
Charlie: How much money are we talking about?
BM: Double whatever she’s paying.
It was my turn to pause. Ryder had offered to pay me five hundred bucks for fouling Steve at the soccer game and giving him a penalty kick. Why not start there? Before I could type $250 so BM would double it to $500, BM panicked, apparently believing I was stalling as some kind of negotiating tactic. I hate to brag, but I’m not that smart.
BM: I’ll give you as much as I can.
Charlie: $1,000
BM: She’s paying you $1,000? That’s all?
(Dammit, dammit, I’d lowballed.)
Charlie: Yeah, so double is $2,000.
BM: I can multiply.
Charlie: Don’t get snippy.
BM: How close are you really?
Charlie: I’m getting there. Eliminating suspects.
BM: You know about the lady with the dog?
Charlie: Who’s that?
BM: I thought you worked at the library.
Charlie: I do.
BM: Look, no more games. I’m good for the money. Just don’t give it to her, okay? You can’t give it to her.
Charlie: No worries. I’m done dealing with Bridget.
BM: ??
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