Page 6 of The Way We Swing Back

“I don’t need you to walk me home. I’m fourteen, not like a toddler who eats dirt when nobody’s watching.”

“Mrs. Quinn asked me to,” I said. “I do what she tells me to and fear her wrath if I don’t.”

“Whatever,” he said, bouncing down the steps to me.

“Are your parents home?” I asked.

“It’s only me and Mom. Dad ran out on us a long time ago,” he said, as if he was giving a weather report.

“That sucks.”

“She’s awesome, so it makes up for it. I didn’t like him, anyway. He’s like that teacher who gives three hours of homework. Or the umpire that has a strike zone in the other batter’s box. Or the coach that thinks baseball is a sport where you need to run all the time. Or—”

I stopped him, unable to keep up with the analogies. “I get it; my dad was a dick, too.”

“You said ‘was.’ Is he dead? That sucks, man,” Jake said.

I clenched my hands, debating whether I could trust him. I guessed if Gavin did, so could I. “He’s in jail. But no one but the Quinns know, so don’t run your mouth, or I’ll know it was you.”

“I wish my dad had ended up in jail. Dude was a total clown. Thought he was a poker player, but he lost money faster than Gavin loses pencils in school. He’d brag about a ‘super system’ and then couldn’t even buy Taco Bell. How about your mom? You live with just her, too?”

I winced, finding my line of what I was willing to tell this kid. I didn’t want to talk about what my dad had driven my mom to do, and he certainly didn’t need to deal with that kind of info.

“I live with my grandparents, actually,” I said. “They’re old.”

“Most grandparents are older than the Arch,” Jake said, before changing the subject to cars as we got to the trailer park where he lived.

I dropped him off, craving alcohol after that conversation. Any time Mom came up, my mind needed a refresher; sometimes that was a talk with Tanner, but he was no longer an option.

So, instead, a drink.

Chapter 3

Idug the toe of my cleat into the dirt on the mound, my shoulder throbbing even though I’d only thrown forty-five pitches. I rotated my shoulder once, hoping to loosen it enough to throw a pitch that didn’t sail fat and straight. There was no chirping on the infield, probably because we were already down seven.

Gavin threw down one finger, calling for a fastball. The pitch had been getting crushed all day, but so had every other offering. I wound up and fired the ball as hard as I could muster, only to watch it get plastered to the gap for a double.

As the ball got tossed back to me, I looked around the field for help that wasn’t there. No Tanner, the heart of the team and leader of the infield. No Maddux or Silas, the only real arms we had, both graduated and gone. No Ricky, either, who chirped with the best of them.

Sure, Gavin was on the team now. And he was trying to make up for the silence around him, yelling out between every pitch in that voice of his that hadn’t dropped yet, like nobody had told him the score. Even in his catcher’s gear, he couldn’t have been a buck twenty, and he looked exactly like what he was—someone’s younger brother who was tagging along with the bigger kids. Not that it was his fault we didn’t have an older catcher.

Our defense still fielded everything hit at them, and my shoulder wasn’t hurting my batting any, but we had no pitching. That was why I was still on the mound, struggling through this god-awful outing with a shoulder ready to explode at any moment. The team needed me to figure it out, maybe not today, but definitely before the high school season, when games mattered more.

The rest of the day didn’t get any better; we ended up losing 12-1 and 9-2, with Zach and me scoring the only three runs.

“That was awful,” Zach said when we got back to the Quinns’ house, uniforms and eye black still on. He sat on his favorite loveseat in the basement; I took the couch with Gavin, who’d been unusually quiet since the games had ended.

“I hate pitching,” I said. “There’s nothing fun about it.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t have anyone else since Maddux and Silas graduated. It’s you and Joe and a pile of trash.”

“I pitched like a pile of trash today, too,” I said. Eight runs in three innings. The worst I’d pitched in my life. My shoulder ached just thinking about it. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to fix my performance.

Chip Caray’s voice rang through the basement from the game on TV. We all knew we were awful right now, and wallowing in our self-pity wasn’t the best way to spend a Saturday in the middle of summer.

I nudged Gavin’s rib with my right foot. He swatted away my toes without looking at me, his head turned to the inside of the couch.

“Gavin.”