Nick was not looking forward to his brother’s baseball game after school.

This should have been a sign that something was off—not only because he loved baseball, but also because he prided himself on being a good big brother, and these days Danny really needed him. The house fire back in Florida may not have been as momentous as an asteroid strike, but it had been just as devastating to Nick and Danny and their father. Four months was not enough time to heal from something like that. Nick’s family had changed forever, and it could be years before they truly came to terms with it.

Perspective. It was a luxury Nick, his brother, and his father simply didn’t have right now.

Danny’s previous game had ended abruptly when a meteorite the size of a grapefruit was pulled from the sky and into his mitt. He took to the field alone a few nights after that, pulling dozens more from the sky with the Tesla-modified glove, hoping beyond hope that wishing on the falling stars would bring his mother back. The last space rock he had turned in Earth’s direction was the heavy hitter.

Now Danny would be in the field again. A different field, to be sure, since the Sports McComplex they had played in was now cratered from meteor strikes. Instead they would be playing in Memorial Park on Wednesday afternoons, when the diamond was available.

The park was in an older part of town, fairly close to where Tesla’s laboratory had once stood. With mixed feelings, Nick rode his bike through the neighborhood of old homes and came to a stop across the street from the site. The lab was long gone, of course; the ordinary tract house occupying the space had an iron fence and two guard dogs to keep away the lunatics who saw it as hallowed ground.

That was the problem—it was mostly lunatics. The greatest inventor of all time deserved more than the babbling fringe.

Such was the brine of Nick’s thoughts as he joined his father in the bleachers while Danny took to the field.

“He’ll do fine,” Mr. Slate said, clearly trying to convince himself. “Baseball is in his blood. He’ll do fine.”

Watching Danny play baseball was a rare moment of escape for Nick’s dad. Wayne Slate worked as a copy-machine repairman at NORAD—which would have been fine, if it weren’t for the fact that Jorgenson, the veritable eye of the Accelerati, had gotten him the job. It was his way of keeping their whole family under his thumb.

Nick’s dad didn’t know about the Accelerati, of course, or about Tesla’s inventions. Nick wondered, though, if his father knew that it was his very own swing of the bat—even though it missed the ball that Nick had pitched to him—that had saved the world. Surely he must have suspected, but they had never spoken of it, and Nick doubted they ever would.

After that day, Wayne Slate had slipped into a bizarre form of post-traumatic stress. He became busy. Busier than ever before. It was as if keeping the blood flowing to other parts of his body prevented it from reaching his brain, where he would have to process everything that had happened. And whenever he slowed down, he began to sink like a stone into himself.

“I’m fine,” he had told Nick and Danny. “Better than fine. The world is saved—we all have a new lease on life, right? I intend to make the very best of it.”

They all rose for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed by a paunchy middle-aged guy who had once been in a boy band, and then Danny’s team took the field. The woman sitting next to them on the bleacher kept looking at Nick’s dad out of the corner of her eye. Finally she turned to him and said, “Your son’s the one who caught that meteorite, isn’t he?”

Nick could hear the discomfort in his father’s voice as he deftly changed the subject. “Say, didn’t I spill popcorn on you during that game? I hope the butter didn’t leave any stains.”

“No, not at all. Thanks for asking.”

Stains. Nick suddenly remembered the last game. This woman said her son—one of Danny’s teammates—had bought her a miraculous stain remover at a garage sale. Nick’s interest in the woman was piqued. She probably didn’t even know how unique the object was. Perhaps, thought Nick, that’ll make it easier to get it back.

The popcorn woman slid a little closer to Nick’s father on the bench. “The way you raced out there when the meteorite dragged him through the field…it was very moving. I’m glad to see he’s okay.”

“Thanks,” his father said.

The woman smiled and held out her hand. “Hi, I’m Beverly—Seth Hills’s mom.” She pointed to the ten-year-old at third base.

Nick’s father grinned. “So I suppose that makes you Beverly Hills.”

She sighed. “Luckily, no. I mean, that was my married name, but when that ended, I went back to Webb, my maiden name.”

Nick watched this little parental drama with a feeling resembling nausea. In just a few brief moments she had sidled up to his father and smoothly let him know that she was available. Well, his dad most certainly was not.

“So,” Nick found himself blurting out, “did your husband die, like my mom did, three and a half months ago?”

“Nick!” his father said sharply. It was the first time Nick had used his mom’s death as a weapon. Under the circumstances, he thought she’d be okay with that. In a way, he felt she was an ally in saving his father from Beverly, the Popcorn Lady.

“How awful,” she said, backing off a bit. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“It was a fire,” Nick said. “Did I mention it happened only three and a half months ago?”

They were all rescued by a line drive to her son, the third baseman, who fielded it, getting the first out of the game.

Now that Beverly Webb had become quiet and had moved out of Nick’s father’s airspace, Nick realized that he had just missed a golden opportunity. If she and his father got friendly, Nick would be that much closer to retrieving the stain remover.

A storm raged in Nick now. A single word from him could ease the tension he had created. He could bring this woman into his family circle, or he could keep her out of it forever. But could he betray the memory of his mother just to get a stupid stain remover? Although, it was more than a stain remover, wasn’t it? Would he hate himself if he did it? Would he kick himself if he didn’t? And which was worse, hating himself or kicking himself?

Nick looked up when he heard the crack of a bat. The batter had popped a fly ball into right field—where Danny was waiting.

The ball reached its apex as the batter rounded first, and it came down toward Danny. The entire crowd fell silent with anticipation that bordered on dread, and the other fielders actually began to back away.

Everyone remembered what had happened the last time a ball was hit in Danny’s direction. The sky had opened up and hurled a flaming piece of heaven at him.

This time Danny reached out his arm, held his mitt high…

…and the ball hit the ground about five feet to his left.

The fans rose to their feet in thunderous cheers—even his own teammates were cheering. The batter continued to round the bases, but no one much cared—no one even went after the ball. It was as if, by failing to catch it, Danny had just won the World Series. Danny, not knowing what to make of it, just watched the cheering crowd, and then took an exaggerated bow that brought on even more cheers.

“Go, Danny!” yelled Nick’s dad, ever the proud father.

Nick also cheered his brother’s magnificent error. And in that moment he got an idea.

Swinging his arm wide, he brushed his elbow against Beverly Webb’s purse, knocking it off their bench and sending it down into the dim framework of the bleachers. As it tumbled, it spilled keys and loose change that clanged and tinkled on dusty struts all the way down.

“Oops,” said Nick.

Beverly Webb gave Nick a gaze that was not so much cold as piercingly honest.

“We both know you did that on purpose,” she said without any of the anger Nick wanted her to have.

Nick’s father opened his mouth, fully prepared to defend him, but Nick didn’t let him.

“Yeah, maybe I did,” said Nick.

“And maybe you’ll go get it,” said Beverly Webb.

“No maybe about it,” said his father. “Nick, apologize and get her purse.”

Nick stood up. “It was a dumb thing to do. I’m sorry.”

As he left the bleachers, he heard his dad say, “He’s really not that kind of kid,” and that bothered Nick, because it made him wonder what kind of kid he was…or was becoming.

The crawl space beneath the bleachers was darker than Nick thought it would be, with only a few slender beams of light piercing the gloom. The ground was littered with soda cans, gum wrappers, and popcorn. Right now the darkness was his friend, because it meant that no one peering through the slats up above could see what he was doing. He found the purse and began gathering the various things that had fallen out. Including the woman’s wallet, which he now opened.

Beverly Webb thought he had knocked the purse over because he didn’t like her. It was true he didn’t like her—but that wasn’t the reason for what he did. As long as she believed it was, though, she’d never suspect the whole truth.

Nick pulled out her driver’s license and held it in a shaft of light just long enough to memorize the address. Then he slid it back into the wallet, slipped the wallet into the purse, and returned to the bench above, where he presented the purse to its owner.

“Thank you,” she said. His father chose not to look at him.

“Like I said, I’m sorry.”

She offered him a forgiving grin. “Apology accepted. And I get it, okay?”

Nick shrugged. “There’s nothing to get,” he said. Well, there was one thing. And now that he knew where she lived, he’d be coming for the stain remover.