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fastballs away, am I right?”
    “It’s not that simple,” Gary said.
    Not letting it go.
    Like he wanted to make an issue out of it.
    Gary looked at Nick and then back at his coach and finally said, “He’s a seventh-grader, Coach.”
    Nick thought, He makes it sound like a dirty word.
    “And,” Gary continued, “look at him. He might not be small for his age, but he’s too small to catch for varsity. The first time there’s a collision at home plate, somebody on the other team is going to knock him all the way to the backstop.”
    “Or through it,” somebody said from behind Nick.
    Another voice that Nick didn’t recognize said, “His chest protector is almost as big as he is.”
    One more voice said, “Fits him like a dress.”
    There were some giggles.
    “Any other equipment humor?” Coach Williams said, looking around.
    It got their attention.
    “Now I have something to say,” he said. “If I didn’t think this particular seventh-grader was big enough or good enough to play up and good enough to catch you and our other pitchers, he wouldn’t be here even for one game.”
    Coach was still grinning as he said it. But his tone had changed. He was letting them all know who the coach was and who the players were, whether they were star players or not.
    Now the biggest kid on the team raised his hand. Nick knew this was Steve Carberry, the team’s first baseman. He wasn’t just the biggest kid on the team, he was the biggest kid in the ninth grade at Hayworth.
    “I used to catch in Little League,” Steve said.
    Coach Williams nodded. “Apparently,” he saidto Steve, “that fact slipped your mind yesterday when I asked for volunteers to replace Bobby.”
    “But, Coach, I didn’t know when you asked that—”
    “Didn’t know what?”
    Steve looked uncomfortable—everybody was staring at him.
    At least they’ve stopped staring at me for a second, Nick thought.
    “Didn’t know that you were gonna bring somebody up from JV.”
    JV
, Nick thought. Another dirty word to these guys.
    “And you have a problem with that?” Coach Williams said.
    Steve looked down at his baseball shoes, which seemed huge to Nick, like man shoes. When he looked up again he said, “None of us got the chance to play up.”
    “None of you got to play up before
I
got here,” Coach Williams said. “And if something like this had happened
after
I became the head coach here, it would have been you or Gary orsomebody else I was walking over here from the JV field.”
    He looked to his left now, then his right, making it clear that he was about to address all of them at once. “We need to get to work,” he said. “But if anybody else has any other objections to Nick being our catcher—any that make sense, anyway—let’s hear them right now. Because this is the last time we’re going to have this conversation as a group.”
    Nobody said anything.
    Coach Williams turned to Nick. “Anything you’d like to say, Nick?” he said.
    “I’ll do my best” was the best he could do at the moment, in a voice small enough to fit in the pocket of his mitt.
    “That’s all we ask of anybody around here,” the coach said. “Now, Gary, you and Nick go do some throwing on the side while we start infield.”
    The rest of the Hayworth Tigers went one way. Gary and Nick went another, though Nick could see Gary wasn’t any happier about that than he was with Nick being on this field with him in the first place.
    While infield practice went on, Gary pitchedto Nick, not putting anything on the ball at first, gradually letting his pitches pick up steam, until by the end he was bringing it with everything he had, almost as if he was hoping he could throw one fastball hard enough to knock Nick over.
    If it had been one of the JV pitchers throwing this hard and this well, Nick would have been up every few pitches, even on the side, cheering him on.
    Even though Gary Watson had made it clear he didn’t want Nick here, Nick couldn’t