Becky's Kiss (13 page)

Becky stuffed her jeans, blouse, and ballet shoes into her book bag, zipped it up, and put it in one of the gym lockers. The door was bent and dented, and she had to use a hip to get her padlock through the hole. When it clicked, there was a finality somehow, a feeling of inevitability. Becky adjusted her sweat pants, checked the string just to be sure, and put on her hat.

It was supposed to make her feel confident, but it didn’t. She just felt odd and, like in the lunchroom today, absolutely surreal.

She got to the door by the gym office and realized she’d neglected to go buy a glove. Her stomach turned over. Now she’d have to borrow, and she didn’t know how to catch a ball in the first place. She pushed out into the hall, face pale and heart pounding. She wasn’t ready for this, and she wanted to turn back.

But there was no turning back at this point, and she knew it. Certain things couldn’t be reversed once set in motion, and Becky Michigan, heart in her throat, walked slowly, numbly, past the trophy cases and made the slight right. She grabbed the gym door handle. Paused there. Pulled. Walked through the archway.

The sound struck her like a wall. She had expected the hard, flat ‘whapping’ of baseballs smacking into leather gloves, the ‘toink’ of bats connecting, the taunts and rally-cries of jocks who clearly commanded the territory, and maybe the murmur of a healthy set of on-lookers gathered to the side.

But the gym was jam-packed, a rock concert, a humongous, raucous pep-rally, two thousand kids at least, crammed into the bleachers across the near side of both gymnasiums usually split by a red, heavy-duty, accordianed partition. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood, and there were many sitting on the floor in ‘foul territory’ behind the make-shift field in the middle of the basketball court, the hoops cranked up to their positions parallel to the ceiling. There was a netting set up in back of home plate to protect those sitting directly behind, and the team was throwing the ball around hard, all in full uniform. Cody Hatcher was in his position at the hot corner. Becky wanted desperately to retreat, or scream, or both, but Coach Rivers had seen her and was jogging over now, all bow-legged, wearing his black baseball sweats, a collared coach’s jersey, knee pads, and a chest protector. He took his place beside her and nodded toward the playing area.

“It’s a beautiful thing, ain’t it, Michigan?”

In a dumb sort of stupor, she shook her head ‘no,’ and he misread it altogether.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. The Plexiglas mound is always a pain, but we just installed new artificial turf grass on there, no slipping, I promise.” He took a broad look around. “You ready for this or what?”

Becky didn’t answer. Behind her, a group of boys high up in the seats started chanting a version of the school fight song with nasty words mixed into it, and a teacher with a dress shirt and khakis scrambled between students to go up and stop it. Kids were hooting, howling, finding seats, razzing, joking, some close-by trying to catch Becky’s eye to cheer her on, make fun, make her laugh, the works. Both she and the coach looked back at each other and shared a tight grin.

“This is crazy,” Becky said.

“Yeah. If I could get even a small portion of this crowd out to home games, we’d have somewhat of a home field advantage for once. So, what are your pitches and signals?”

“My what?”

“Your signals, your pitches. I’m going to catch you, because I don’t want any of these knuckleheads giving away your next move to the batters. So what do you like? One finger straight down for that four seam fastball?”

Becky got it, of course. They had to be on the same page when he squatted and stuck down fingers representing pitches she’d either shake off or nod, ‘yes’ to. One finger for fastball, right, that was pretty basic.

“Uhh, yeah coach,” she said, her voice small against all the background noise. “One through eight: four seam, cutter, slider, curve, Vulcan change, sinker, splitter, slurve.”

“Got it,” he said. “Let’s make it easy then. The final three will start the series over, one finger flashed twice and so on. It’s an awesome repertoire, kid. Let’s give ‘em a show.”

“Wait!” Becky said, panic rising up in her throat. While she was thankful he’d come up with a way to get past the only five fingers available with the double-down at the end of the set, she suddenly forgot what number six was. So the index finger flashed twice was the sinker? The Vulcan Change? She was bad at math under pressure, her mind was totally blanking, and she’d never thrown seven of these eight pitches to begin with.

“Look out!” someone shouted, “Heads!” and both Becky and Coach Rivers covered up, hearing the clap of a ball bouncing at them fast along the hard wood. Something struck her right in the back of the knee, and it smarted pretty good. Someone had hit her with a ball! She looked out onto the playing area and Cody Hatcher was looking all around, face twisted in like a screw, arms out, like, ‘Really? Who me?’ Someone from the crowd tossed the ball back, and Coach Rivers rubbed it hard with both palms, face grim. Hatcher came over to them, uniform flap untucked on the right side, face red.

“Knickerbacher should have scooped it on the short-hop. Slipped out of my hand, coach, honest.”

“Right,” he said back. “And you only spit on a player because there’s dirt in your mouth. I’ve heard them all. You could have hurt someone, Hatcher. Go hit the showers. You’ve lost your chance at redemption.”

“No,” Becky said, and it was suddenly kind of loud, because the room had quieted to an anxious hush. She stuck out her hand. “Give me the ball.” Coach Rivers handed her the baseball, and she looked at the team out on the playing floor.

“Call the boys in,” she said.

“But who’s going to field…”

“I don’t need fielders.”

“But wait, where’s your glove?”

“I don’t need that either.” She looked at Hatcher. “You, little boy…go grab your bat. Mama’s going to teach you a lesson.”

The crowd roared. Coach waved the team in, and Hatcher stared at her for a moment with slitted eyes before going to put on his helmet. Purposely then, Becky waited right there until the coach had settled in his position behind home plate to put on his mask and Cody Hatcher had taken a few swings off to the side. His bat was a silver one that said ‘Easton Omen’ on it. He looked like he knew how to use it, and in pure defiance, Becky put the ball on the back of her knuckles. For a second she thought of herself trying to do this with a rock and almost getting hit by a bus for her trouble, but the sight of Cody Hatcher, all cocky and in his element, made her burn with a fierce, sort of do-or-die confidence. She started her walk to the mound and, while doing so, never released Hatcher from her icy stare.

Her hand started working as if on its own, flicking the ball an inch or two in the air to next be clutched in a particular grip, one after the other, and between each, she rolled it back to her knuckles in rhythm, showing off all her pitches to come, each grip perfect without even looking,
four seam, cutter, slider, curve…Vulcan change, sinker, splitter, slurve,
and Cody Hatcher stopped taking mighty practice swings and watched the circus trick with his mouth open. The rhythm of it matched her steps and the crowd picked up on it, clapping on each new grip as she ran through the series. Finally, she took the mound and she waited there, up on the hill, throwing hand dangling down, itching and ready.

The place quieted again, and Coach Rivers squatted.

“Throw a few warm-ups,” he said.

“I don’t need warm-ups,” Becky said. She looked over at Hatcher. “Get in the box.”

That got a huge “Ohhh” and “Ahhh” from everyone, and Hatcher looked around uncertainly. Suddenly, she knew she had taken a huge part of his game away, more so than the damage her little ‘grip-show’ had done to his mo-jo in terms of pure fear-factor. Of course, Hatcher always studied the warm-up pitches. To get his timing down. And now he was stalling, so Becky raised the stakes as high as they could possibly go, not knowing where her courage was coming from but riding the surge anyway. She took a deep breath and let her voice ring out—to the coach, to Hatcher, to the crowd.

“I’m going to go through your starting nine in twenty-eight pitches. Coach, you can double as the ump and call ’em as you see ’em. And I don’t need fielders, because no one’s gonna get wood. Not even a foul tip.”

More murmurs rippled through the crowd and quickly abated. Cody Hatcher looked so mad he could have just burst.

“You’re gonna strike out nine batters?” he spouted. “Absolute minimum pitches?”

Coach agreed.

“Uh…yeah, Becky. Let’s be realistic. You have to throw a few pops, a few grounders, lessen your pitch count.”

“Really?” she said. “In a game, you need twenty-seven outs. Eighty-one pitches is reasonable.”

“But your math is off here. You said you were going to go through my starting nine in twenty-
eight
pitches.”

Becky’s face was a mask.

“I am going to pitch one, and only one, out of the strike zone.” She looked at Cody Hatcher. “Now, get in the box, creep-o, before we die of old age out here.”

The crowd gave a resounding cheer for that little zinger, and Cody Hatcher stepped up to the plate, going through his ritual, all cutesy, tapping one toe then the other, pushing the bat around in little windmills. When he settled in, Coach Rivers dropped one finger, and that was fine with Becky Michigan. Just from Hatcher’s stance, his leaning a bit over the plate to over-compensate for the imperfect angle of his front foot matching the hip, she suddenly knew he’d been stepping away instead of straight into the swing his whole career, living on the pitch middle-in and slapping it to the opposite field. Her head was filled with crazy physics, and she blanked it. She didn’t need crazy physics for this pitch.

She wound up, arched her back deep, cocked it, and threw.

The ball whistled in the air and shot straight for Hatcher’s head. He didn’t seem to see it at first, and by the time he started to bail, the ball was already on him, coming a hair from the tip of his nose. At the same time, Coach Rivers caught it with a massive ‘ka-pow!’ in the glove. Cody Hatcher’s hands flew over his head, the bat flying upward, his feet kicking out from under him. He fell to the deck and the bat clanked next to him. Coach Rivers had taken the glove off and was shaking his hand violently.

“Caught me right in the palm.” He winced, but no one but Becky really noticed this. Some kid behind the netting right in back of the plate was freaking out over the speed gun he had in his hand, and that had everyone’s undivided attention.

“That pitch was ninety!” he said. “Ninety miles an hour! Oh my
goodness
!”

Everyone was talking—commotion, crowd movement all around—and Becky silenced everyone pretty quickly.

“Ball,” she said. The coach tossed her the baseball and she caught it bare-handed.

“Thanks,” she said, “but that’s not what I meant. What I mean, is ‘ball one.’ And it’s the only one outside the zone any of these posers are going to see. That was the twenty-eighth pitch. The rest will be strikes.” She looked at Hatcher. “Get up. And don’t lean across the plate like a wuss, or you’ll get it in your ear.”

He pushed to his feet and picked up his bat. He went through his ritual in there again, but it was subdued. Coach put down one finger, and Becky nodded. Then she looked straight at Hatcher.

“It’s going to be a fastball. Try to keep up.”

She wound up, kicked and fired hard, outside corner, thigh high.

Hatcher stepped away instead of into it, swung, and missed by a foot. It corkscrewed him around and dropped him to a knee.

“Ninety-two!” the kid with the speed gun shouted.

The crowd burst into a long cheer, through which Becky could see Hatcher mouthing desperately to one of his team mates on the side, ‘
I can’t
see
it!’

Then he was up again, face full of fear, with no little rituals, the fabric of his jersey at the front shoulder inside of his mouth now, teeth clenched hard so the appendage would stay in place and keep him on the ball. Coach squatted and dropped down four fingers: curve.

Becky nodded. Still, she was at a disadvantage here without a glove, and she didn’t have to have had pitching experience to know this. Wouldn’t Hatcher see that she changed grips?

She put the ball in her fastball grip and went into her wind-up. Angles and sightlines and proportions were racing through her mind as she imagined the way Cody Hatcher was seeing her, and right after she kicked up her front knee and spread her hands, she changed the grip in her throwing hand by feel, first two fingers together on one side of the ball, the thumb on the other, like holding a drinking cup. She stepped into it deep, came forward and fired, same arm slot as the fastball, illusion prefect-o. She snapped down her wrist and let it fly.

The ball soared out of her hand, aimed right at Cody Hatcher’s nose. Again. This time he
did
see it coming, and by the time he realized the only reason he saw it coming so clear was that it was twenty miles an hour slower, he’d already bailed, tilting backward, bat clanking down to the deck once again.

He’d fallen to this awkward crab-walk position, and at about six feet from him, the ball seemed to turn on mid-air, change direction, and drop right through the zone.

“Strike two,” the coach called after it ‘whapped’ flush into his glove.

“Com’on, Hatcher!” one of the players called from the side. “At least stick in there and hold your ground!” Hatcher scrambled ungracefully to his feet, both shirt-flaps untucked now, face red with embarrassment blotches.

“Did you see the late movement on that thing?” he pleaded. “It cut a foot over and two feet down on a dime!”

“Cut it out,” Coach Rivers said. “Quit complaining.”

“But she was taunting me!” Hatcher said, voice cracking.

“Use her for an excuse for poor batting, and you’ll ride the bench, bank on it. Now it’s strike two. Get in the box.”

Hatcher stared for a second, and someone started a new chant. It began with the group surrounding the kid with the speed gun and then spread around the bleachers in a slow, growing rumble.