Lights Out Read Online Free PDF

looping around on Glenwood Road and back to Flatlands on Seventy-ninth Street, just to avoid it. He managed not to turn his head for most of the way, but then he stopped in traffic, and he noticed the back of the car in front of him and the BROOKLYN LOVES JAKE bumper sticker.
    ‘Shit,’ he said. Then, looking away from the car in disgust, he turned toward the field and saw himself on the mound, on that raw April day, pitching against Wingate.
    When the game started there’d been a small crowd, maybe twenty people, watching. Later, when word got around the school and the neighborhood that Ryan Rossetti had a perfect game going, more people showed, and by the last two innings there must’ve been a hundred fans there. Jake had hit two monstrous solo homers, giving Ryan all of the run support he needed. He had awesome command of his pitches, striking out practically every batter he faced. In the last inning there were two outs, and Ryan was pitching to Wingate’s cleanup hitter. It was a three-two count, and Ryan didn’t want to walk him and ruin the perfect game, bringing the tying run to the plate. He also knew the guy was expecting a fastball so he threw him a sharp breaking curve, which sliced the outside corner for the final out.
    Ryan remembered how great it had felt being mobbed by his teammates, getting carried off the field on Jake’s and the catcher’s shoulders. A short article in the
Daily News
the next day said it was probably one of the best games ever pitched in Brooklyn high school history. Ryan had struck out seventeen of the twenty-one batters he had faced, and the other four outs had been on weak ground balls.
    At the time Ryan had thought that the perfect game would be the beginning of a perfect career. Although he’d always been shorter and skinnier than other kids his age, he’d worked his ass off to get where he was. Most kids played baseball only in the spring and summer, then turned their attention to other sports, but Ryan was different. Ryan played some basketball and roller hockey to stay in shape, but he focused on baseball year-round. If he couldn’t get into a game or find somebody to have a catch with, he’d go to Canarsie Park and self-hit a bucket of balls, or he’d go to a schoolyard with a rubber baseball and pitch to a spray-painted box against the side of the wall. In the dead of winter, while other kids were playing in the snow or sitting home watching football or basketball on TV, he’d shovel out a big area in a parking lot or a schoolyard or a dead end, and pitch to a backstop. Instead of blowing his allowance on video games and comic books, he used his money for baseball equipment and sessions in the Gateway batting range on Flatbush.
    When he wasn’t playing baseball, Ryan was usually thinking about it. Sometimes he lay awake at night, or stared out the window in school in a daze, imagining pitching in the World Series at Yankee Stadium. He had a perfect game going, and when he blew away the last hitter - usually Mark McGwire - with a blazing fastball, his teammates mobbed him and carried him off the field on their shoulders. He took baseball cards of Ryan Klesko, and old ones of Ryan Sandberg and Nolan Ryan, and whited-out the Kleskos, Sandbergs, and Nolans, and wrote in
Rossetti.
Then he pasted the cards onto the wall next to his bed and stared at them every night before he went to sleep.
    Ryan was the superstar of his team in the Joe Torre Little League. He was a good hitter, but his pitching stood out. When he was eleven years old he had better poise on the mound than most high school kids, and he had great movement and outstanding control. But Ryan knew that if he wanted to pitch in the big leagues, his height would be a major obstacle. Most big-league pitchers were at least six feet, and most successful ones were taller than that. The tallest person in Ryan’s family, his uncle Stan, was five-ten, and Ryan’s father was only five-eight. Ryan’s Little League coach