The Only Game Page 3

  There were times during the school year when Jack had thought, They treat me like I’m sick.

  Gus hadn’t ignored him completely when Jack got to school. But he was still mad and making no attempt to hide it. Not that it would have done any good. Gus was worse at hiding his feelings than he was at ice skating.

  Before their first class together, English, Jack had said, “You want to talk about this?”

  “Nothing more to say,” Gus said. “Like you told me last night. If you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s really going on, nope, nothing more to say.”

  Then he sat down.

  T.W. Stanley came up to Jack after English—they had lockers next to each other—and said, “Guess it’s really true, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dude,” T.W. said. “I am so sorry.”

  “Just taking the season off,” Jack said.

  “Well, yeah,” T.W. said, “but it’s, like, your season.”

  Before the morning was out, Jack had talked about it with Andre, and Scott Sutter, and Jerry York, the rightfielder for the Rays who was also going to be the team’s closer. He could tell they were all holding back; all wanted more of an explanation.

  But nobody pressed him, and not just because he was the kid who’d lost his brother last summer. Jack knew it was more than that.

  It was because in their minds he was still the star of the team, and for as long as he could remember, he’d gotten star treatment from the other kids even though he’d never asked for it and didn’t want it. That wasn’t why he loved being a part of the teams he’d played on, in any sport. He loved being on teams—he didn’t have to be the guy, because he loved being one of the guys.

  But he didn’t feel like one of the guys today.

  Gus didn’t sit with Jack for the first time the whole school year, or the one before that, or as far back as Jack could remember. He sat across the room with Gregg Leonard and Hawk, and even though Jack knew he should go over there, not let things get any worse than they were already, he just got the feeling that he wasn’t welcome.

  So Jack took his tray and sat at the end of a long table with a bunch of girls at the other end, one of them Cassie Bennett, as much a star of the girls’ softball team in Walton as Jack was the star of the Rays.

  Until yesterday, anyway.

  Next to Jack was a boy named Teddy, whom Jack liked even though he didn’t know him all that well, probably because Teddy wasn’t much of an athlete. Teddy Madden was the overweight kid in the seventh grade the kids called Teddy Bear, and a lot of other things behind his back.

  And not always behind his back.

  Maybe that was why Jack would find himself looking out for Teddy in gym class when he thought some of the other guys crossed the line, even though they said they were just kidding around. Jack knew that sometimes you couldn’t pick and choose the things you didn’t like about your life. The things that hurt you, whether it was being too heavy, or something a lot worse than that.

  Teddy didn’t bring up baseball at lunch. They just talked with another guy named Jerry about school stuff, starting with an algebra quiz that had been sprung on them right before lunch. It had been as much of a disaster for Teddy as it had been for Jack.

  Mr. Kahn was their algebra teacher. Teddy kept calling him “Genghis Kahn” at the table. Jerry finally asked who Genghis Kahn was.

  Teddy, who could be really funny when you gave him the chance, looked at Jack and said, “Told you I was the only one listening in history.”

  “Little help here, guy,” Jerry said. “That doesn’t tell me who this Genghis guy was.”

  Teddy grinned. “Meanest khan in the world until our Mr. Kahn.”

  Suddenly Gus was at the table.

  “You’ve never been a quitter in your life,” he said to Jack. “You can’t turn into one now.”

  He was talking loudly.

  “I’m not a quitter,” Jack said, keeping his own voice low. “You know that better than anyone.”

  “I thought I knew you,” Gus said. “Guess I was wrong.”

  “That’s wrong,” Jack said. “And this isn’t the right place for this.”

  Gus ignored him.

  “This isn’t just about you,” he said. “It’s about me and Gregg and Hawk and all the other guys on the team.”

  He wasn’t lowering his voice even a little bit. Jack could see past Gus now, could see kids at other tables staring, watching a show Jack didn’t want to be a part of.

  “What you’re doing affects the rest of us,” Gus said. “And that’s not fair.”

  Jack was about to tell him that a lot of things in life weren’t fair. But he didn’t. That wasn’t something you said to a friend, and Gus was his friend, even if he wasn’t acting much like one right now.

  “Are you coming to practice today or not?” Gus said. “And I mean to play.”

  Now there was a voice louder than Gus Morales’s—much—from the other end of the table.

  “How dense are you, Morales?”

  Jack turned, they all turned, and saw Cassie Bennett, standing now, hands on hips, eyes on fire. Maybe her hair was about to be on fire too.

  “He’s not playing,” she said. “What part of that aren’t you getting?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Cassie,” Gus said.

  But with a lot less attitude than he’d been giving to Jack.

  “Well, you’re talking to me now,” Cassie said. “The conversation is over, lunch is over, move on.”

  Jack stared at her, amazed at what was happening, how fast it had all happened. He saw Gus’s twin sister Angela, Cassie’s best friend and one of her teammates on the softball team, staring at Cassie too, eyes big. Angela and Gus were fraternal twins, not identical. But they looked identical enough to Jack.

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Gus said, but the fight was going out of him now, because of who he was up against. Nobody in the seventh grade wanted to tangle with Cassie Bennett.

  Boy or girl.

  “Are you serious?” she said now. “You and your big mouth have made it about everybody in the room, and maybe upstairs in the teachers’ lounge.”

  The bell rang then, sounding to Jack like the bell you’d hear ending a round in the prizefights he watched with his grandfather sometimes.

  Gus started to say one last thing to Jack but didn’t. He just shook his head and walked away.

  Cassie walked down to Jack, leaned over, and said, “If you don’t want to play, don’t play,” and went out the double doors, heading for her one o’clock class.

  Teddy watched her go the way Jack did, until she was down the hall and out of sight.

  “You know all those books and movies where kids end up battling to save all of mankind?” Teddy said. “Well, if we ever end up in that situation and have to pick our team, I’m choosing Cassie first.”

  “I hear you,” Jack said.

  FIVE

  Jack was walking home from school that day, having cleared it with his mom before he’d left the house in the morning. He had this feeling he’d want to be alone later.

  Now he was sure of it.

  He was tired of answering questions, feeling almost like he’d been on trial since he’d told Coach he was leaving the team after just one practice. He wished now that he hadn’t even gone to tryouts, hadn’t made Coach waste his first pick on him. But back in February he hadn’t decided what he was going to do—what he had to do.

  Jack knew there was a part of him wanting to tell everybody, even the ones on the team who said they understood, or that they respected his decision even if they didn’t understand, how they were missing the point. But he knew there was no sense in doing that. It wasn’t going to change his situation, or theirs.

  He was going to do what Brad used to talk about doing, when he was in trouble for something. Brad never blamed anybody else for his problems, never pointed a finger at anybody except himself. Their dad always talked about being accountable. Brad was t
he most accountable person Jack had ever known. So if he got grounded, or lost privileges of some kind, or had his phone taken away for a week or two, he’d always say the same thing to Jack: I’m gonna wear it.

  Jack was gonna wear this, that was exactly what he was going to do.

  What he wasn’t doing, as it turned out, was walking home alone. Cassie Bennett took care of that, at his locker after their last class.

  “Busing or riding a bike or walking?” she said.

  “Walking.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m on your way. We can walk together.”

  Not even bothering to give Jack a vote.

  “You live near me?” Jack said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “A lot you don’t know.”

  “You got me there,” he said, “now that I’ve admitted I don’t even know where your house is.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean there’s a lot you don’t know, period. And not just because you’re a guy.”

  He felt himself smiling again for the first time in a while.

  “Got me there, too,” he said.

  They both had backpacks with them. Cassie wore shorts and a blue T-shirt with a little crocodile on the front and these canvas Converse sneakers almost the same color as her shirt, the kind with no laces. She had long hair Jack thought was more red than brown. She was shorter than he was, not by much. But it was like they always said in sports: Cassie Bennett played bigger.

  He’d gone to a few of her softball games last year—that’s how good she was, even boys went to watch her—and couldn’t believe how good she really was. She looked like she belonged with the college girls you saw playing big-time softball on ESPN. When she’d go into her windmill windup and then underhand the ball to the plate, Cassie looked like she could strike out the world.

  They walked away from school now, on Elm Street, on their way to Main, where they’d take a right before they hit town. Then it was a long, straight shot to Jack’s street, Running Brook Lane. Cassie said she was one block before that, on Head of the Pond.

  “I can’t believe we only live a block apart,” Jack said.

  “Callahan?” she said. “You gotta move past the whole geography thing.”

  Cassie was the one who finally brought up what had happened at lunch. She said she had always liked Gus, but that she hated bullies more, and he was acting like one in front of their whole class. And when she couldn’t take it any longer, she’d stood up.

  Jack said, “I hate when people are mean too.”

  “I’d never seen anybody ever call you out like that before,” she said. She grinned. “You being the golden boy.”

  “Not feeling too golden today,” he said. “Mostly I’m feeling like I let a whole bunch of people down.”

  “I didn’t allow you to walk me home from school so I could listen to you feel sorry for yourself,” she said.

  “Is that how I sound?”

  “Little bit.”

  But she was smiling when she said it.

  They made the turn off Main, neither one of them walking very fast, neither one acting as if they were in any big hurry to get home.

  Cassie said, “I’m just going to say this one time, just because I feel I know you well enough even though we’ve never spent much time together. Maybe that’s because I think we have something in common, us being the two best baseball players in town.”

  She didn’t act even a little embarrassed or self-conscious putting it out there that way, like what she’d just said was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “It’s about your brother,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I was at the funeral, not because I knew him, because I didn’t. I’d just see him goofing around with his buddies in town sometimes. I was there because I felt so bad for you—and in a way, even for me, just trying to imagine what it would be like to lose my own big brother that way. I couldn’t imagine what that would do to me in a million years.”

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  “You weren’t seeing anything that day,” she said. “I was off to the side, watching you the whole time.”

  He turned to look at her and saw she was looking back at him, her face serious. And sad. Not the tough girl he’d seen in the cafeteria, the one who’d faced down Gus Morales, who was as tough as any guy Jack knew.

  This was a different Cassie.

  A new one.

  A friend, maybe.

  “My point being,” she said, “that none of the people who think you should play, who act like you owe it to them to play, have any idea what it’s like to be you. So don’t listen to them. Listen to me: If you don’t want to play, don’t play, just like I told you at lunch. If this is some kind of delayed reaction or whatever to your brother, that’s up to you to figure out, in your own way. Not them.”

  “Wow,” he said in a low voice.

  “Wow what?”

  “Not only do you know me better than you think you do,” Jack said, “I’m pretty sure you might know me better than I know myself.”

  She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk now. “You gotta be anywhere?”

  “Not practice,” he said. “But my mom’s gonna be expecting me at a certain time. She knows pretty much to the minute how long it usually takes me to walk home.”

  Jack was about to stop himself there but didn’t.

  “She never used to worry about stuff like that,” he said, “you know, before. But now she pretty much always wants to know where I am.”

  “Got it,” Cassie said. “You got your phone? Call her and tell her I kidnapped you as you were leaving school and you’re gonna be late.”

  “Doesn’t feel like I got kidnapped.”

  “Blah, blah, blah. Call her.”

  He did. Told her he was walking home with Cassie Bennett. His mom said, “The softball girl?” And Jack said, “One and the same.”

  “Have fun,” his mom said. “See you in a bit.”

  He stuck his phone in the back pocket of his shorts and said, “So where we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The reason Jack’s street was called Running Brook was that there was a brook running behind his house, one that fed into the Walton River, which ran all the way past the downtown area, behind the library and police station and firehouse.

  Cassie led the way, down to the end of a street before hers called Journey’s End, then down a narrow path through a small wooded area behind the last house on the street.

  When they came out of the woods, Jack was standing in front of a pond that he’d never seen before.

  “I didn’t even know this was here!” he said.

  Cassie made a motion in the air, like she was checking something off.

  “One more thing you don’t know,” she said. “The list keeps getting longer and longer.”

  She smiled again. “The dock belongs to the Connors family,” she said. “That was their house we just walked behind. You know Brooke Connors, from school? She’s the catcher on our team.”

  Jack said that he did know Brooke. She could really hit. “I came to a few games last year,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I saw you.”

  “You make it sound like you caught me watching you.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “Whatever.”

  Now she said, “I come here to fish, by myself.”

  “You like to fish?”

  “Not only like it, I can catch stuff like a champ. My dad taught me.” She set her backpack down on the dock, and Jack did the same. Then Cassie walked back toward shore, reached down into the rocky stretch that passed for a beach, and grabbed a handful of smooth stones.

  “But what I really like to do here is this,” she said.

  She walked to the end of the dock, faced the water, and took a deep breath that was more for show than anything else, Jack was sure of that. For his benefit.

  Then she went into that fla
shy windmill softball windup of hers, Cassie the softball girl, and underhanded a stone that somehow skipped perfectly across the water.

  Jack said, “Nobody can do that underhand.”

  “Said the boy pitcher to the girl pitcher,” she said. “Well, I just did.”

  “If you can do it, I can do it.”

  Cassie motioned him to the end of the dock, reached into her pocket, came out with a stone, and handed it to him when he got to her.

  “Should be no problem for you. This baby is much bigger than the one I skipped at least five times across the water.”

  “I can usually do this sidearm, no problem,” Jack said, taking the stone from her.

  “So can anybody.”

  He tried to imitate her motion, practicing it a few times, ignoring her giggles as he did. Then he took a deep breath of his own, went into his version of her windup, and watched as the stone landed barely ten yards in front of him and disappeared.

  “I hate to say it,” Cassie said, “but that thing dropped like, well, a rock.”

  Even Jack had to laugh.

  She asked him if he had to be anywhere soon. He said no. She said, “C’mon,” and led him through the woods as if she were some kind of guide, or had walked the path they were on a lot. Jack asked if he was allowed to know where they were going. She said no, but that he was going to be happy when they got to their destination.

  “So there is a destination?” he said. “And we don’t need to leave bread crumbs to find our way back?”

  She said, “More walking, less talking.”

  Finally they came into a clearing, and Jack realized where they were. She had taken him all the way to the highest point in Walton, and maybe the prettiest. It was the area called Small Falls, with an old suspension bridge that connected one side of Walton to the other and gave you a spectacular view of the waterfalls and the rocks below them, water spilling out in the distance into the Walton River.

  Jack remembered his dad taking him and Brad on walks there when he was little. The three of them would make their way across the bridge and over the falls, which didn’t look so small to him when he was four years old. Jack had been afraid to look down, not only scared by the drop but by how loud the water sounded. Brad, of course, had talked about how he couldn’t wait to go over those falls in a raft someday.