Mom and Dad don’t say anything about what happened on the field at the Bandits game. Not one word. Dad turns on the radio to the Cubs game, and the whole drive home, over the swish-swish-swish of the windshield wipers, we listen to the play-by-play.

When we get home, I go right up to my room and close the door. I pull out my calendar. I count five games to figure out when Hector is pitching next. With my fattest black marker, I cross out that game. That whole day. I’m not going.

One, two, three, four, five. I scribble out that day, too, so hard it bleeds onto the next month. I flip the calendar over to August. One, two, three, four, five. And then I’m on August 8th.

I can’t scribble out that day. I can’t even touch it.

I’m still looking at August 8th when Dad knocks on my door.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Can I come in?”

“Okay.” I flip the calendar back to July and turn around. It’s not just Dad, though. It’s Mom, too. They come in and sit down on my bed.

“Honey,” Mom says. “I think we need to have a talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

Dad puts his hands on his knees and leans toward me. “Can we try?”

I nod.

He looks at Mom like they’re trying to decide what to say next. The teams are all messed up now. When it was Team Mom and Dad versus Team Haley and Quinnen, at least I had a shot.

“Have you talked to Zack? Since the funeral?” I ask. Zack had come with his grandmother. There were about a million people dressed in black and navy blue telling me how sorry they were and hugging me. But real me had floated away like a little balloon. Real me was far away, watching robot me say “Thank you” over and over and over again.

Mom nods. “I’ve run into him around town here and there. And of course we said hi to him when we saw him at the pizza stand.”

“You knew he was working at the stadium?”

“Not before today,” Dad says. “Actually, we were pretty surprised to see him there. You must have seen him there before, huh?”

“How does he get to— Why did he get a job there?”

“I don’t know, Quinnbear,” Dad says.

I rub my sneaker against the edge of my desk. “Did you know he’s friends with Hector, too?”

“No, sweetie,” Mom says.

“It’s like he’s trying to take everything that’s mine,” I say, staring at the Bandits sticker on my headboard.

“I doubt that’s his goal, Quinnen,” Dad says.

“Well, it sure feels like it!” I don’t intend to shout it, but that’s how it comes out.

Mom looks startled. “Quinnen,” she says softly.

“First he takes Haley away from me, and then he starts working at the pizza stand so I can’t even get my snacks and Casey has to do it for me, and then he’s friends with Hector, my only real friend since Haley died. All I have left is Casey! And now he’s on vacation, so really I have nobody. Don’t you get it? I. Have. Nobody.”

“You don’t have nobody,” Dad says. “You know you have us.”

“Your dad’s right,” Mom says. “You always have us.”

“No, I don’t. It’s not the same.”

“What do you mean?” Mom asks.

“I don’t want to play tennis or be in a book club or whatever thing you wished you could do with Haley. I’m not Haley. I can’t be Haley.”

Mom cringes. “Nobody’s expecting that, honey.”

Dad takes a deep breath. “This past year has been hard for all of us. We all miss her. We’re all fumbling. And we’re trying—we really are trying to help you, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.” He looks up at my Bandits poster for a second. “That’s why we got…Anyway, Quinnbear, what can we do? How can we help you?”

“I don’t know!” I close my eyes when I say it. When I open them up again, the tears are there. It’s still me and my parents. Just the three of us. It’ll never be four again.

“I want to take it back. All of it. All of last summer. I want a do-over.” I think about Zack’s face, when I finally saw it behind the pizza costume, and how he was crying. And the nail polish, Haley’s favorite color. “It wasn’t Zack’s fault. It was me. My fault. I’m the one who ruined everything.”

“Quinnen,” Dad says.

“No!” I shout again. “All last summer, I never told Haley what was really bothering me. I never told her how I missed her, or that it hurt my feelings when she ditched me and how she always wanted to hang out with her friends and Zack instead of me. And then it was too late. It was too late, and I messed it all up.”

I stare down at my lap, at my stupid hands that are way too big for my glove. I don’t deserve to play baseball, to be good at it again.

“I never got to tell her I was sorry.”

“Quinnen, honey,” Mom says. There are tears pooling in her eyes.

I don’t think she’s ever going to stop crying, and that’s my fault, too. I made my mom cry. I can’t do anything right.

Mom reaches out her hand and takes hold of mine. “Haley knew—she always knew that you loved her.”

“I miss her,” I say. “I miss her so much I can’t even believe it.”

“I know,” Mom says. “I miss her, too. Every day.”

“Then why can’t we talk about her more? I don’t like pretending she was never here. I can’t keep doing it.”

“You know, you’re right, Quinnen,” Dad says.

The chair makes a creak when I stand up and squish myself onto the bed between the two of them.

It’s three now. Just three. But three’s a lot better than one.

I’m hugging them, and they’re both hugging me, and then Mom is rubbing my back. She keeps saying the thing I’ve wanted to hear for so long, the thing nobody told me after Haley died. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay.”

Even though it’s not, I still need to hear it.