KYLE WENT on the Arizona trip with the team. They didn’t even make it to the quarterfinals. Coop and Mateo were all depressed about it, but Kyle didn’t care. He was just glad that he was able to avoid his mom during the half day between when he got home from the farm and when he got on the team bus to head for the airport.
Now they were hanging out in their motel room with a couple of pizzas, waiting to find out if they were going back home or staying for the rest of the tournament. Coop was on one bed with a pizza box balanced on his stomach, Mateo on the other, and Kyle was on the floor next to the other pizza, because the rollaway was too uncomfortable to be on while awake.
“That one pitcher,” Coop said.
“I know,” Mateo said. “Dude was on a tear.”
Kyle looked at his phone. He and Nadia had hardly been texting, her in Chicago and him here, and the tension over Jack and everything else still stretched tight. “We’re not that good, though,” he said. “Even if the pitcher hadn’t been so hot.”
Mateo didn’t say anything, but Coop threw him a glare. “Your attitude sucks. No wonder we lost.”
Kyle found a gif from Damn Yankees and sent it to Emily.
Baseball and musicals collide. p.s. we lost.
She sent back there’s always next time plus a “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” clip from The Sound of Music.
“Is that Nadia?” Mateo asked.
“It’s my cousin.”
“The girl?” Coop asked. “The one who came to our game last year?”
“Yeah.”
It had been a home game toward the end of the season, and his grandma and grandpa and also Aunt Brenda and Uncle Dale and Emily and Alex all showed up, packed into a minivan. “They all came? Just for this?” Coop had asked, glancing up at the bleachers. “To see you play on our dumb team? I can barely get my own dad to take off work once in a season.” Later on, Coop had asked, “Did your cousin say anything about me?”
Kyle had laughed. “No, Coop, she didn’t.”
“So what’s up with you, Baker?” Mateo asked now. “No mojo out there. Not that we had a chance anyway, but you’re off.”
“Not my week, I guess.”
He imagined telling them. My mom is having an affair. Mateo he could sort of trust to keep it to himself, but there was no way Coop could keep his mouth shut about something like that. Plus, what if knowing that info made them picture his mom having sex? It definitely would. Kyle had a hard enough time keeping that shit out of his own mind, he didn’t need his friends thinking about it.
Coop shoved the pizza box to the side and rolled off the bed to use the bathroom. While he was in there, Mateo asked, “You and Nadia cool?”
“Yeah, man, we’re fine. She’s just in Chicago with her parents. The team is here. So, you know. We’re both busy and stuff right now.”
Mateo waited as if he expected Kyle to say more, to relent and be like, Well, okay, there’s more.
“That’s it,” Kyle said. “That’s all.”
Not hungry, he took the last piece of pizza to prove he was all good, that he came from a big, basically happy family and he had an awesome girlfriend and a healthy appetite. No weakness, no crack in the system. If he could play it like that, maybe it would be true. The “blip,” as his dad put it, would unblip, and life would go back to how it was.
And he tried.
One day at a time, he tried. Tried to wait it out. Tried to act normal around his mom, then couldn’t, so avoided her. Tried to act normal with Nadia and had the same problem with the same solution: avoidance. It became impossible for him to be around anyone for more than minimal chunks of time, because he was afraid of what would be asked or told once the small talk was over. He skated over just the very top layer of his life, knowing that if he stayed in one place too long, the whole thing would crack beneath him, pull him under.
The only person he could talk to without fear was Emily. She knew something was up, and that he couldn’t say what it was. That was enough for her and enough for him and it hadn’t changed anything between them. She didn’t expect anything from him like Nadia did, like the team did.
After Arizona, he started skipping practice. Missing games. Coach Ito put him on probation. Kyle told Nadia his shoulder was bothering him, even made up some crap about physical therapy, but kept it vague. In fact he mostly used baseball time to drive around.
Driving was his new pastime.
Driving did not require teamwork, talking, being talked to, enduring being cheered up, listening to more lies, pretending to be the same old dumb Kyle he was before. Driving only required gas.
He’d been burning through a tank of it every week, while he drove around during the time he was supposed to be at practice or games. Getting on the 101—south to Ventura one day, north toward Lompoc another. Or inland, AC blasting until he shivered. The best was how when he was driving, it felt like he wasn’t in a real place. It wasn’t home and wasn’t school or Nadia or baseball. It was nowhere.
A couple of weeks after Arizona, Kyle sat in his car in the student lot, in his favorite parking space: under a tree, in the farthest corner. He used to avoid parking near trees, let alone under them, because he didn’t want his car covered in bird crap and pollen. Now all he cared about was being hard to find, keeping to the perimeter of the lot, of the halls, of his house—the perimeter of his life where he wouldn’t see or be seen head-on. Anyway, if bird crap and pollen and dust got on the car, that meant he could go through the car wash—easing onto the track and shifting into neutral, hands off the wheel as he let the belt chug him forward one inch at a time under the tentacles of the scrubber. He liked the way it made his car a dim cave, a cave inside a cave. And it came out clean. No evidence that anything messy had ever touched it.
He sat there, thinking about going to practice. If he didn’t go today, it basically meant he’d be quitting. He could play baseball; sure, he could go to practice. It wasn’t the game itself he didn’t like anymore. It was everything else: having to see the team, listen to their stupid talk in the dugout, rib or be ribbed for missed easy catches and awkward strikeouts, hear Coach Ito yell or joke or deploy one of his meaningless phrases about hustle or teamwork—
A knock on his car window made him jump. It was Coop. Kyle turned the key so he could lower his window halfway. “Dude, don’t scare me like that.”
Coop’s face loomed close. Too close. Kyle could see the scraggly blond hairs of the beard that Coop had been trying to make happen for a month.
“Are you coming or not?” Coop asked. “This is it. Shit or get off the pot.”
“I don’t know,” he told Coop.
“What don’t you know, Baker? Whether or not you give a crap about literally anything?”
“Ellison is good at second. You don’t need me.”
“Not the point, dude.”
“I’m not feeling too . . .” He couldn’t finish.
Coop stared at Kyle, then tried the handle of the locked car door, rattled it a couple times. Like if he tried hard enough, he could reach in and physically drag Kyle out from under this cloud of garbage that had been following him everywhere since the trip up to the farm for Martie’s birthday.
Kyle closed his window, and Coop slapped the glass.
“Just get your ass out of the car and show up!” Coop’s voice was muffled, but not muffled enough. “You don’t have to pretend to like it. Just show up! Drag your ass two hundred yards so Ito doesn’t cut you! Think about next year.”
Kyle ran his hands around the steering wheel. Pictured himself gliding in slow motion through the car wash.
“You’re shit. You know that?” Coop shouted through the window.
Kyle nodded. “Yeah, I know.” Absolute shit. The way he’d been ghosting Nadia, ghosting his whole life.
“What did you say?”
He lowered the window half an inch. “I said I know.”
Coop put the fingers of both hands through the half inch of open window. Kyle pressed the button to raise it; Coop pulled his fingers out as quickly as he could. Two fingers on one hand got stuck. “Dude!”
Kyle lowered the window enough to release him, started the engine, and backed out carefully while Coop watched, stunned and holding his fingers to his chest. Kyle stayed in reverse, backing all the way across the lot. Coop recovered enough to flip him off.
He meandered from neighborhood to neighborhood in his car. His phone buzzed with texts and calls, all from Nadia, he knew. The situation with her was pretty much like it was with the team: time was up. He’d been given a kind of relationship probation for his avoidance, which Nadia at first thought had to do with Jack being at that party and Kyle being possessive and punishing her somehow. No matter how many times he told her it wasn’t that, she didn’t believe him.
Why are you breaking up with me? she’d texted a couple of nights ago.
I’m not.
Sure feels like it, Kyle.
It was more like a long, slow process of trying to get her to break up with him because he couldn’t do it himself. Because he couldn’t bring himself to say what it really was. What if she told someone else at school and word got around? What if his mom’s boyfriend was someone connected to school? Or to his parents’ company?
Kyle saw every male teacher and wondered, Is it him? Every random dad doing after-school pickups or drop-offs at the traffic circle. Every Baker & Najarian subcontractor or delivery guy. Him? Him? Him?
Not only that.
He didn’t have the family he’d thought he had at Thanksgiving, the one he’d brought Nadia into, showed her off for. Pictured her being a part of.
It was like he’d already lost her, along with his whole concept of what it meant to be him.
He turned off his phone, drove around a little more, hit the car wash. When he got home, he went in the side door and slipped through the quiet kitchen and straight to his room. Later, he was in there trying to do homework with a movie on when there was a gentle knock on the door. His mom’s knock.
This was exactly the situation he didn’t want to be in—trapped in a room alone with her. The fact that he’d managed to avoid it for so long kind of made him think she’d been avoiding him too. She hadn’t asked about his games or school or Nadia or anything else since he got back from Arizona, and he’d only given her the two-minute summary of the trip before making some excuse to get out of the conversation.
Now, she had on jeans and a light blue tank top that showed off arms she’d obviously been working on in the gym. Normal So-Cal mom clothes, but now Kyle thought about guys . . . men . . . maybe seeing her as attractive. When she sat on the foot of the bed, he scrunched against the wall on the other end with his laptop.
“West Side Story again?” she asked. “I thought I heard it through the door.”
He should have put on his headphones. Rookie mistake.
She gave him an uneasy smile. “Nadia looks a little like young Natalie Wood. Don’t you think?”
Natalie Wood aka Maria was on his screen now, frozen, smiling, feeling pretty. Nadia did have dark hair like that, and expressive eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, and closed the screen.
“Kyle, so . . .” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, and Kyle could see her hand was shaking. “Dad and I were talking last night. And he mentioned that he told you.” Her eyes met his for half a second. “About me. Weeks ago.”
He pressed his back to the wall, wishing it would absorb him as if he were a ghost in a movie. The Sharks and Jets sang in his head. Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it.
“I can’t believe you’ve been carrying this around for weeks,” she continued. “And neither of you said a word.”
He couldn’t look at her. “He told me not to,” he muttered. “He said it’s in the vault.”
“It is. You weren’t supposed to know.”
“But I do.”
“I’m sorry. He promised he wouldn’t tell you.”
A flare went off in his chest, and he tried giving her a hard stare. “People break promises, I guess, so.”
She gave him a hard stare back. Outstaring his mom had never worked, not once in his entire existence. He flinched first, looked away. Just play it cool, boy.
“I’m allowed to have a life, Kyle.”
What was that supposed to mean? “You had one already.”
The pause got long, flat. And, in his mind, hissing like a ballgame crowd waiting for something to happen. She lowered her eyes, smoothed out the blanket. Her hands, no longer shaking, looked strong.
“I came in here planning to be in mom mode. I wanted to say something to make it better and reassure you that Dad and I have this under control. That we have a plan, you don’t have to worry.”
“But?”
“But . . .” She laughed through her nose and looked straight at him. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Being forty-eight doesn’t mean you have it figured out and don’t make mistakes. All it does is show you how little you know.”
“That’s flimsy, Mom.” “Flimsy” was one of Coach Ito’s favorite words. Your fielding is flimsy. Your attitude is flimsy. Your excuses are flimsy.
“I didn’t want to be a cliché and a liar or to hurt anyone.”
“But you are.” All of it.
“I know.” She sighed. “I know, Kyle. Right now we’re trying to minimize the damage while I figure it out. That’s all. I’m trying to not make it worse, and maybe I don’t have to lose everything.”
Nothing in her voice wavered. She wasn’t going to cry like his dad did.
“That’s why I’m upset Dad told you, and that’s why I’m still hoping to keep your sisters out of it or anyone who might know anyone involved. We really want to contain this. If something gets out and causes trouble for innocent people—”
“Like me?”
She didn’t answer.
“Maybe you should contain it by stopping,” he said.
“Maybe I should.” And the way she said it was like . . . But I’m not going to.
Kyle didn’t want to look at her face anymore, hear her voice. “Can you, like, get out?”
She met his eyes with the most loving mom face he’d seen in a long time. He couldn’t understand it. How she could love him and be doing what she was doing.
“Okay, Kyle.”
She left, and Kyle slipped his headphones on and watched Maria dance through her song, a ribbon on top of her head, and it made him think too much about Nadia, so he stopped the movie and went over and over his mom’s words. “I’m hoping,” she’d said. “We really want,” she’d said. She didn’t tell him not to tell. Okay, his dad had said that, had invoked the vault, but that was weeks ago. Maybe if his mom had said she was going to stop and she was sorry and she was going to be better, or at least seemed like she felt slightly, like, guilty, he’d feel more like keeping her secret. But she didn’t, and he was sick of knowing this all by himself.
I want to talk about the thing, he wrote to Emily.
Her face materialized on his laptop screen after he told her it was too complicated for texting. That swimmer’s hair was in a bunch of clips all over her head, and she sported a septum ring. “Is that new?” he asked, touching his own nose.
“Yep. My dad is annoyed I didn’t tell him ahead of time. And double annoyed because now my mom wants one too.”
“It looks cool.”
“I agree,” she said with a laugh.
“So,” he said, trying to think how to ramp up to this. There wasn’t any good way. “The thing my dad told me is that my mom is having an affair.”
She scrunched her brows together. “What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . my mom is having an affair?”
“Your mom is having an affair. Is what you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Like an emotional affair? Or a sex affair?”
She was so matter-of-fact about it, about the word. Given that she was the one who didn’t date or hook up, was it ironic that it was easier for her to talk about? Maybe not, maybe it made perfect sense. She’d probably given all this stuff way more thought than he ever had while she was working out her own identity or whatever.
“My dad’s exact words were ‘Mom is seeing someone.’ And I’ve been dealing with that information for weeks. Not telling anyone. Not Nadia, not you, not my friends. Not Taylor or Megan. Nobody.”
“Oh, god, Kyle.”
“Just now she came in and talked to me about it, and she was all like . . . this is happening and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Wow.”
“I mean, those weren’t her exact words.”
Emily nodded.
“The point is, no remorse or anything. Why should I keep her dirty secret if she’s not even trying to, I don’t know, stop? But,” Kyle continued, “the affair guy is also married. With a kid. And they don’t know, and I have no idea who it is, so I’m like not going to go around telling people at school or whatever . . . or anyone. And why would I dump it on Taylor or Megan when they would end up being in the same situation as me? Knowing some garbage they never asked to know.” He watched her face. “And neither did you.”
She shrugged. “I told you that you could talk to me about it, whatever it was.”
“You didn’t imagine this, though, I bet.”
“Um, no. What is the matter with people? Is sex really worth it?”
He hated thinking about the sex part. Maybe before, when it was an abstract idea, he could have handled it. But now that he’d been with Nadia, he knew the great and weird moments, the embarrassing and amazing thing that it could be.
“Sorry,” Emily said. “You don’t want to talk about that.”
“Nope nope nope.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Maybe they’re in love.” Saying it aloud made him uneasy, like he’d jinxed something.
“Maybe love is worth it, then?” Emily asked.
“Maybe? But that’s not the point. She should love my dad.”
Emily ran her hand through her hair, scratched at her nose ring.
“What?” Kyle asked.
“I don’t know if ‘love’ and ‘should’ go together like that.”
“Okay, but . . . you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do,” she said. “I can imagine if it was my parents, and like what if I knew something like that and I was supposed to keep it from Alex and Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Mike and Aunt Jenny. I mean, I’d be pissed. Like aside from being sad? I’d be super, super angry.”
All Kyle could do was nod. Anger felt like something waiting for him on the sidelines, something he hadn’t totally looked at yet, was afraid to.
“So, what now?” Emily asked. “Have they said anything about divorce?”
He explained everything he knew about the money, the business, and not only that but how his parents weren’t even sure what they wanted. As if this affair thing was like a losing baseball season, would come to an end and be in the past and they’d rebuild and make a comeback. Only unlike in baseball, this comeback would depend on the whole shitty season being a secret.
And right before he had to go, he told her one more thing he’d hadn’t confessed to anyone, even himself, not totally.
“I think me and Nadia . . .” He rubbed his face. Pressed his fingers into his eyes like he could make them stay dry. Chewed on his knuckle. He didn’t even have to finish his sentence.
“Oh, no. Kyle.”
Emily put her hand up to the camera, and this small gesture let his heart finally crack.