it onto my back while I was sleeping. I try to scrape off what I can before the next period, but I spend the rest of the day with a huge red stain on my back. It looks like someone stabbed me in the back.
I’m at the grocery store with my mom, and the woman at the checkout stand closes her aisle when we get in it. It’s my fault her son won’t be on a winning team. They start to open up another lane, but my mom is too ashamed and we leave the cart in the middle of the store. She goes back to shop alone the next day at a store two towns over.
Even though I don’t drive my truck, the tires are slashed by the end of the week. It sits sagging on its rims like a sad reminder that I’ve got nowhere to go.
I have to delete my Facebook because it gets too tiresome to remove all the insults from my wall.
My chemistry partner complains to the teacher that I’m not doing my fair share of the work. I suppose he’s right, but it never bothered him before. My grades fall.
At home, my parents have stopped speaking. My mom has been sleeping on the couch at night. I know this because I hear her pacing sometimes when I can’t sleep either. She leaves before I “wake up” in the morning, and she’s talking to me less and less in the evenings. She has stopped defending me in her fights with my father. Now she simply says, “Well, Henry, what did you expect? What did you expect?”
Time passes in slow drips.
I am miserable. I get used to being miserable.
Finally, the night before the big game comes, like a train pulling into the station in slow motion. My dad insists that we practice in the backyard, and the hopeful tension in the air manages to pull back the hazy veil of insomnia. A full moon shines in the sky, making all the blue-black trees and blades of grass in our yard gleam with silver edges.
I realize that if I do well tomorrow, things might go back to the way they were.
I might get to be myself again. That is, who I was.
I put all my effort into catching and throwing the ball, and it encourages my dad. He wants this just as much as I do. He even makes a joke that he’ll have to borrow the Sheriff’s radar gun to measure my fastball, that it might set a new Guinness record.
And then I hear something that places me squarely in the moment for the first time in weeks. It’s like being dunked in a tub of ice water. I have just caught the ball, and from the backyard, I hear muffled voices in our front yard. Muffled voices, and cruel laughter.
My head turns and I snarl. I don’t know where the anger comes from, but it’s alive and intense in a flash.
“What’s wrong?” my dad asks, and he has enough sense to keep his voice low.
“Someone’s out front,” I say, and start creeping toward the house. He follows me, and inside we find my mom at the living room window, peering out through the curtains of our front window.
She turns to us and holds up a finger to her lips. We have vertical blinds, and the one she has pulled aside with her finger lets in a band of light from the streetlamp. The light cuts down the side of her face, thin as a razor blade, and reflects in her left eye like a star.
My dad and I creep forward and join her. My dad looks through the same crack in the blinds as her. I pull aside a new blind and look out.
There’s a big tree in our front yard, and I see a white streamer fall from a branch. A body is there to catch it, and then he throws the roll of toilet paper back up over another branch. There are other bodies. In the darkness I recognize them as guys from my team. I see Duko. I see Manning. I see our entire outfield including alternates. They have a car parked on the curb across the street. Aaron Johnson is there, keeping the engine running so they can have a quick escape. It’s a nice car. A BMW.
My family watches in silence as they TP our yard. When they pull a can of spray paint out from a sack, I make a move to the door.
“No,” my dad says. It’s a whisper, but there’s
Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat