The Art of Fielding: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

worth asking. Honey, just because people have more money than you doesn’t mean you have to conform to their ideas about fitting in. You have to be your own person. Are we understood?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Good. I want you to tell Owen thank you very much, but you cannot under any circumstances accept his gifts. You’re not poor, and you don’t have to accept charity from strangers.”
    “He’s not a stranger. And I already wore them. He can’t take them back.”
    “Then he can wear them himself.”
    “He’s taller than me.”
    “Then he can donate them to someone in need. I don’t want to discuss this anymore, Henry. Are we understood?”
    He didn’t want to discuss it anymore either. It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.

4

     
    I t was nearly midnight. Henry pressed his ear to the door. The noises that came from within were sweaty and breathy, loud enough to be heard above the pulse of the music. He knew what was happening in there, however vaguely. It sounded painful, at least for one of the parties involved.
    “Uhh. Uhh. Uhhh.”
    “Come on, baby. Come on—”
    “Ooohhh—”
    “That’s it, baby. All night long.”
    “—uuhnghrrrrnnrh—”
    “Slow down, now. Slow, slow, slow. Yeah, baby. Just like that.”
    “—ooohhhrrrrgghhh—”
    “You’re big! You’re fucking huge!”
    “—rrrrooaarhrraaaah—”
    “Give it to me! Come on! Finish it!”
    “— rhaa… rhaa… ARH—”
    “Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes!”
    “—RRHNAAAAAAAAAGHGHHHH!”
    The door swung open from within. Henry, who’d been leaning against it, staggered into the room and smacked against the sweat-drenched chest of Mike Schwartz.
    “Skrimmer, you’re late.” Schwartz wrenched Henry’s red Cardinals cap around so the brim faced backward. “Welcome to the weight room.”
    After hanging up with his parents, Henry had put on his coat and wandered out into the dark of the campus. Everything was impossibly quiet. He sat at the base of the Melville statue and looked out at the water. When he got home the answering machine was blinking. His parents, probably—they’d thought it over and decided it was time for him to come home.
    Skrimmer! Football is over. Baseball starts now. Meet us at the VAC in half an hour. The side door by the dumpster will be open. Don’t be late.
    Henry put on shorts, grabbed Zero from the closet shelf, and ran through the mild night toward the VAC. He’d been waiting three months for Schwartz to call. Halfway there, already winded, he slowed to a walk. In those three months he’d done nothing more strenuous than washing dishes in the dining hall. He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember more often that life was lived in four dimensions. Maybe they could teach you to build your own dorm furniture or grow your own food. Instead everyone kept talking about the life of the mind—a concept, like many he had recently encountered, that seemed both appealing and beyond his grasp.
    “Skrimmer, this is Adam Starblind,” Schwartz said now. “Starblind, Skrimmer.”
    “So you’re the guy Schwartz keeps talking about.” Starblind wiped his palm on his shorts so they could shake. “The baseball messiah.” He was much smaller than Schwartz but much larger than Henry, as became apparent when he peeled off his shimmery silver warm-up jacket. Two Asian pictographs adorned his right deltoid. Henry, who didn’t have deltoids, glanced nervously around the room. Ominous machines crouched in the half-dark. Bringing Zero had been a grave mistake. He tried to hide it behind his back.
    Starblind tossed his jacket aside. “Adam,” Schwartz remarked, “you have the smoothest back of any man I’ve ever met.”
    “I