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When I was on the mound, the cheers, boos, and heckling blended into white noise most of the time. But the jog from the mound to the dugout made that white noise sharper. Clearer.

“He had it comin’, Fulton!” one kid yelled.

Damn right, he did.

“Why don’t you go back to the farm you came from?” another cackled.

Screw you.

“Another summer, another year of Fultons losing to Crowleys!” a third one spat.

We’re winning, you moron.

I threw my glove against the wall behind the bench and sat next to it, fumbling with Dad’s tags under my jersey. Several minutes later, Tom finished the inning. We’d probably pull out a win today, but it still felt like I lost.

Ben took off his hat as he joined me in the dugout. “Did you mean to hit him?”

“What do you think?” I said.

But even as I sat next to him on the bench, I wasn’t so sure.

Yes, I wanted to hurt and humiliate him for all the times he had done so to me, but that wasn’t the way I’d wanted it to happen. I was better than that. I had to be—especially this summer.

Ben dumped some sunflower seeds into his hand. “You were on point all game, dude. You could’ve taken him.”

I know. I took a long drink of Gatorade.

“You can’t afford to have a repeat of last summer.” He put a hand on my arm. “You gotta keep your shit together—”

“I know!” Who the hell was he? My warden? I shook him off and walked to the other end of the dugout.

I had played the game for over ten years, worked my ass off to become as close to the ace pitcher my father was—did his workouts, learned his tricks, his pitches, all of it.

This summer was supposed to be all baseball. But playing against that family, with a bet that could save or sink my granddad’s farm, gave this season a hell of a lot more complications than I expected.

Granddad had a lot of sayings when it came to the Crowleys and this town. I usually rolled my eyes and chuckled at most of them, but one always struck true:

Nothing was fair in Fairfield.

Chapter Nine

Eliza

“Theater is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society.”

—Yasmina Reza

After a normal game, Dad-the-Coach-Crowley was completely unbearable when the team lost.

But losing to the Fulton Hawks in our first home game brought out a whole new kind of fury. On the surface, Dad looked like the eye of a storm—eerily calm, quiet, calculating. But behind closed doors—or in our case, concessions—the verbal wrath surfaced. Our own personal hurricane.

A slew of creative curse words swirled around the sinks, and the ice machine received another dent on its face. When I was eight, I named it Miss Hannigan after one of the most horrible humans created for the stage. Not a good start of the season for her.

Dad kept muttering under his breath as he counted the money at the register. “I’m callin’ Ed in the morning about those umps. Lousy, no good, biased…”

“Save it for home, Will,” Mom warned, her gaze down as she mopped. “Too many people will hear—”

“I don’t give a damn about the people.”