Page 3 of The Way We Swing

“Why do you always turn away from me when we’re changing, Quinn?” Ricky asked from behind me. “Is there a reason you don’t want me to see that beautiful body of yours?”

“What is wrong with you?” I asked as I pulled up my trunks. Ricky’s preferred state of being was awkwardness. He was an acquired taste.

“Nearly everything,” he said.

We walked onto our deck, which Dad and I had built together the year I turned twelve. Next to it on the right was the Christmas present the three of us had gotten the same year—a batting cage, the only toy we needed.

Ricky and I took a seat in the deck chairs and watched the others. The sun beat down on my bare chest as I tried to look anywhere but at Easton in my pool. The smell of chlorine filled the air; it was my second favorite of summer—the first being the smell of a freshly cut baseball field.

“Throw the ball!” Gavin shouted. He was the only other one out of the water, knees bent at the edge of the deck, ready to launch.

“Three. Two. One!” Zach shouted, chucking the ball in a lazy arc.

The ball glanced off Gavin’s hands as he dove in with a splash.

“You call yourself a baseball player?” Easton teased, water splashing as he swam to Gavin. Easton had the same farmer’s tan that I did, the white of his chest and biceps resembling a T-shirt.

I forced myself to look away before I could see if he had a four-pack or a six-pack, then turned back, unable to resist.

He wrapped Gavin’s wrists in his hands. “These? If it hits these, you catch it. Simple.” Then he dunked Gavin into the water.

Gavin popped up laughing and lunged at him, but Easton shoved him aside with little effort.

“Try harder than that,” Easton said.

He climbed out of the pool, ready to try what Gavin had just failed at. He wore what looked like a pair of Zach’s old swimming trunks; the powder-blue shorts clung to his body with the wetness of the water. If I’d thought his dimples had made me blush….

Easton jumped in, and I decided it was time to show off. “Zach,” I said, “give me a throw.”

Zach counted down again. I jumped, caught the ball left-handed, passed it behind my back, and twisted in midair to fire it into the hoop on the far side of the pool right before I plummeted into the water.

I surfaced to cheers that let me know I had sunk the shot.

“That’s how you do it!” I shouted, tackling Gavin again. He could handle it.

We spent the next couple hours in the water goofing off; the pool doubled as the perfect post-workout shower for a bunch of teenaged boys, simultaneously cooling us and making us even more tired. Yeah, we were gross, but whatever.

Eventually, Ricky got out and started reading his current book of choice—something to do with baseball analytics—on the deck. I never grasped how he could read for pleasure, especially on the first day of summer vacation. But I guessed that was why he was smart enough to be looking at Ivy League schools, and I wasn’t.

The rest of us gradually joined him on the deck, collapsing onto the plastic chairs. The next thing I knew, Gavin was nudging my shoulder.

“Tanner, can we do catching drills? I have practice in an hour.”

I blinked the sleep out of my eyes. “Sure,” I said.

Grass pricked my bare feet as I followed him to the batting cage. Gavin geared up as I grabbed the bucket of tennis balls from our shed.

“Can we just do blocking?” he asked. “I let too many get past me last game.”

I smiled. Most players just wanted to show off what they were already good at.

“Sure,” I said again. I dumped the balls and sat on the empty bucket, lobbing one after another into the dirt. Gavin twisted and dropped, trying to keep each one in front of him. “Head down,” I reminded him. “Dig your mask into your chest.”

A few more pitches, and he was getting it. Then I faked him out—a clean pitch across the plate. Gavin dropped anyway, and it smacked his arm before bouncing into the net.

“You’re cheating,” I laughed. “Lucky that wasn’t a real ball, or you’d have a bruise the size of the Arch. Read it. Don’t guess.”

Footsteps sounded behind me. Easton walked past me and knelt by the plate; I kept tossing, but now I was watching him, too.