Page 8 of The Way We Swing Back

I thought I’d have seen you here by now. It’s been a year. I expected at least a letter.

My lawyer says I’ll be out before you graduate. Then you can come home and live with me again. Right where you belong. We’ll get back to how things used to be.

Please write back, as it’s very lonely in here.

Dad

The page shook as I read the letter a second time before jamming it into my bat bag, unable to look at it anymore.

There was a part of me that missed him, that wanted to see him and tell him how I’d failed in the state title game. There was a part of me that wanted him, not Mr. Quinn, to be the one who found me in those woods. There was a part of me that wanted to act like things were normal.

But things weren’t normal. Mom was dead. He hadn’t even mentioned her or apologized for all the years of damage he’d done. He probably didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.

I pulled out my phone to text Tanner. He’d want to know Dad had written to me, even if he was swamped with class.

But what could I say? My dad sent me a letter, and I’m sad he didn’t mention Mom and didn’t ask how I was doing? We both already knew Dad was an asshole.

Gavin and Zach didn’t need to know, either. Zach would want to act all tough, and Gavin would try to give me a hug when we got out of the car. Not exactly helpful. I could tell them after the game, so they wouldn’t get distracted.

The doubleheader went by in a whirlwind, Gavin beaming after his second infield hit of the day. We won both games, more so because our hitting was on point than because we’d figured out anything in the pitching department.

But two wins worked, and I decided the mood was too good to kill by bringing up the letter. I didn’t want to make anyone feel like I did, which meant completely avoiding the Quinns’ house after the game and instead spending the night trying to help Grandpa with his crossword puzzle as Grandma knitted a scarf for her daughter who had died a year ago.

I escaped them as the sun started to set. Even though I’d read the letter at least a dozen times, I yanked it out of my bag and read it again.

This time, I ripped the letter when I got to the end—once, twice, then, somehow, a seventh time. I let the pieces stay scattered where they fell.

Chapter 4

The ice on my arm was melting fast, water sliding over my elbow and onto the carpet. It numbed the pain but not the panic. Coach Berrios would be picking me up any minute now, and if he caught even a whiff of an injury, he’d shut me down.

A quick beep from his car reached me before I got too deep into my head; I tossed the ice bag in the garbage can and rubbed my bicep as I walked downstairs, stopping before I got within Coach’s vision outside. He didn’t understand what baseball meant to me, not only how little in my life I had outside the game but also what it meant to my future. Without baseball, I didn’t have one.

Coach drove a Toyota Corolla; the sun reflected off the gray paint job as I opened the passenger-side door, climbed in, and slipped my bat bag between my feet.

Coach Berrios’s dark skin contrasted with his white shirt. Tanner had told me once never to ask him his ethnicity, that it was Puerto Rican or Mexican. Apparently, whenever somebody asked him, Coach Berrios called them an idiot and said the opposite of what they’d guessed. Nobody had ever gotten a direct answer out of him in his twenty-plus years of coaching.

“Thanks for driving, Coach,” I said, the smell of dirt from my bag filling the car.

“Not a problem. Zach and Joe shocked me not wanting to go,” he said, his head turned behind him as he reversed out of the driveway, ignoring the rearview camera.

“Joe had to work, and Zach... I’m not sure,” I lied, knowing fully well Zach had been less and less into baseball recently, meaning I’d been spending most of my time this summer with Gavin and Jake.

“We may have to have a talk with them,” Coach said. His voice sounded pleasant enough but still had a hint of annoyance because he’d put in the effort to get the three of us invited to this showcase just for me to be the only one to attend. “This is the year colleges start to look at baseball players, and this showcase is important. Blows my mind you guys can’t realize that.”

“I do,” I said, fidgeting with the zipper of my bag. I knew it better than he did. My gut settled like wet cement with how much I knew it. At least fifty college coaches were attending the showcase today, watching us run, throw, and hit, and wondering if we’d fit into their program.

If I wanted to go to college, I had to impress a coach. I didn’t have parents who would not only help pay for school but also pay for an apartment like the Quinns did for Tanner. If baseball didn’t work out, my options were limited: army or factory work.

I looked over at Coach, remembering the first time I’d met him. He’d burned for the game the way only one other adult had—my dad. At first that scared me. Over the last year I figured out it wasn’t really about baseball; he just couldn’t stand losing at anything. That was why we gelled.

A part of me wanted to apologize to him like I had to Tanner about losing the state finals; he’d been to two now as a coach, having lost the first one by the ten-run rule. But that seemed like a child apologizing to their dad for not having dinner ready when he got home; sure, maybe, but also weird? Plus, he and Tanner were too similar and would never admit how much it’d pained them to lose that game, correctly blaming me.

Instead, I asked him for more details on the showcase, and the conversation centered on baseball for the next hour as we drove to a small Division II college I’d barely heard of before today.

The first hour of the event I worked as an infielder; I got ten swings at the plate (knocking one out of the park and seven to the gaps) and five ground balls, and I ran the sixty-yard dash. I put up a good showing. But so did everyone else—that was the problem.

Plus, when I’d made my throws across the diamond from short, my arm had throbbed, and I’d barely stopped it from shaking. I’d dug my toe in the dirt, trying to induce pain somewhere else in my body so I could focus on anything other than my shoulder. Every movement we made was watched by someone at all times—how we jogged between stations, whether we paid attention to the people in front of us, and whether we hit the ball a mile. Showing off arm pain was an instant deal-breaker.