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help thinking, as he caught one hard strike after another, that Gary was the best pitcher he’d caught in his life.
    But he didn’t say a word to Gary the whole time, and Gary didn’t say a word to him.
    The only sound on this side of the field was the pop of the ball, exploding, the unmistakable sound of a good fastball, in Nick’s glove.
    Usually a baseball field was the place where Nick felt most sure of himself, where he felt as if he was the one in control of things. When he’d get down behind home plate and look around, everybody was where they were supposed to be, things actually made sense.
    Maybe not in the whole world—just the one spread out in front of him in the infield and outfield.
    It had been that way from the first day he’d put on his mask and chest protector and knee pads.
    Nick especially liked the mask. It wasn’t just that it made him feel a little bit like a superhero from one of his comic books. The mask made him feel as if he could hide in plain sight, looking at everybody else’s face on the field without them seeing his. After all the times when he’d worried about people looking at him, wondering if they were seeing the boy who didn’t have real parents, wondering how many people really knew he was in foster care or adopted, Nick thought a mask wasn’t such a bad thing to have handy.
    Yet even his trusty mask couldn’t help him today.
    It was as if he’d forgotten how to catch or throw.
    At one point his buddy Jack Elmore, the backup second baseman on the team, came up and whispered, “Is this your first day of varsity baseball or just your first day of baseball
period
?”
    Jack wasn’t as funny as Gracie, who seemed to Nick to have more of a grown-up sense of humor than a kid sense of humor. Still, Jack was pretty funny. Nick just didn’t need him to be funny today, mostly because Nick’s baseball was funny enough. The kid who didn’t want other kids looking at him was making it almost impossible for them to look anywhere else.
    Nick whispered back to Jack, “Is that your idea of having my back?”
    Jack said, “Dude, I gotta be honest with you: You need more than me today.”
    Jack was right. Even before they had started scrimmaging, as Nick was trying to catch batting practice from Coach Williams, with Coach just grooving fat pitches for the hitters, the ball kept ticking off Nick’s glove when guys would swing and miss. Or low pitches would skip through his legs no matter how hard he tried to block them, as if the space between his pads was suddenly as wide as the space between first base and third.
    It grew even worse from there.
    Because now he couldn’t even throw.
    It wasn’t that he was throwing too far, the wayhe had in front of the coach yesterday, when he’d uncorked the throw that looked as if it belonged in one of those Pass, Punt and Kick contests where guys would try to heave a football as far as they could. Nick
wished
it were only that.
    No.
    Today he was doing the worst thing you could do in sports—he was trying to be too careful. Because he was too afraid to make a mistake. And when you did that in sports, any sport, all you
did
was make mistakes. So on his first throw down to second, trying to get the guy stealing on him, he bounced the ball about ten feet in front of Joey Johnson, their shortstop, covering the base. When the runner, Chris Galuccio, decided to steal third on the next pitch, Nick tried to snap off a throw from his crouch, and the ball sailed so wide that even somebody standing in the third-base coach’s box would have had a hard time making a play on it.
    Gary Watson happened to be the batter. Now he said something loud enough for only Nick to hear, like it was just the two of them in the back of a class: “When you master throwing standing up, maybe then you can try it sitting down.”
    Nick ignored him, just took a couple of steps toward third base and yelled to Conor Bell, the team’s third baseman, “My bad.”
    It made Gary