We start out with the star drill. It’s the exact same drill we used to call hot potato a few years ago. It’s a little confusing. Like if someone misses practice and asks what we did, you might say, “We started off with the star drill,” and they’d say, “You mean hot potato?” and you’d say, “Yeah.” It’s just that we’re older now. You’ve got to have some self-respect.

Anyway, the drill is pretty simple. You break up into groups of five and get in a circle. Then you toss the ball to the person two to your left. They call it the star drill because the ball travels in a star shape by the time it gets back to the first guy.

The first thing is, you want five good guys. Andy and I are already standing next to each other, so there’s two. But it’s a scramble after that, because the good partners get snapped up. So it’s like: Here’s Chester again.

He latched on with Tim and Dustin, so that’s the three we need. I try to make eye contact with one of them, but there are already kids heading for them. Andy takes a few quick steps, but he’s not going to get there in time. If they add even one more kid, they’ll have four, and the two of us will have to keep fishing.

So I throw my glove. It hits Tim in the back of the legs.

“Hey!” he says, spinning around.

“Nice arm,” says Andy.

The first kid is talking to Dustin, but Tim turns to him and says, “Nah, we’re set.”

Dustin looks up, like: We are? And Tim just points his glove at Andy and me, hustling up. Chester smirks. “Oh, noooww you two want some of my sweet, sweet glovin’,” he says.

So we luck out and get a good group. We form a circle and start out pretty close in.

“Toss it!” yells Coach.

We flip the ball to each other fast, like we’re getting the ball out of our gloves to turn a double play. We’ve got Andy, Tim, and Chester: all top-of-the-line infielders. And Dustin and I have both spent time there, too, and we’ve been doing this drill since, you know, hot potato. So we’re flying.

Toss; catch, transfer, toss; catch, transfer, toss; catch, transfer, toss; catch, transfer, toss; and we’re done, and we start again, even faster.

Coach Liu wanders by. It looks like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t, probably because of Tim being here. He notices, though. You can see he’s impressed. When he walks away, we exchange smiles as we follow the ball around the circle.

“Back it up!” Coach yells out.

We make the last toss, back to the guy who made the first throw. Dustin holds the ball, and we make the circle wider.

“Grounders!” yells Coach.

I groan. Great: I’ve got three awesome infielders and the starting catcher. These guys eat bad hops for lunch. Me? I’m an outfielder, all right? Most balls come to me airmail, and the ones on the ground are usually all out of tricks by the time I can get a glove on them.

So you’d think I’d be concentrating, right? Well, I am — until I see Katie in the next group over. What? She’s a great infielder. Seriously. And OK, there’s something about how her ponytail flies around, and her —

“Heads up!”

But with grounders that really means heads down. My eyes go the wrong way, but my body has done this drill before. I fall down to my knees to smother the ball. It bounces up into my chest.

“Oooof!” I say as it rolls away. I scramble after it, and the other guys are laughing.

“Nice play,” says Tim. “Maybe you should just tape the glove to your chest.”

“They could call you Chester, too,” says Chester.

Yeah, ha-ha-ha. I drill the ball into the ground in front of Tim. I throw it extra hard, but he vacuums it up like it’s nothing.

I swivel my head in every direction: Did Coach see? Katie? When the next ball comes, I’m ready. It was another dumb mistake, though, like diving for that ball on Tuesday, like bailing out at the plate. My cold streak is becoming an ice age.

And I still have to bat.

I’m waiting for it all practice, but I’m thinking we’ll just do batting practice. Since Tuesday, I’ve been thinking what I could do differently, how I could get myself to stay in on those inside pitches. How I could convince myself or trick myself or just anything.

We motor right through the middle of practice, and long after the star drill ends, we’re still in the field. I know from the postmortem there were some errors against Haven, so Coach is making a point of “the fundamentals” today.

Still no BP, and I know what that means.

Katie, Tim, and Jackson turn a sweet double play. Coach finally seems satisfied.

“Live batting,” he calls. “Let’s get ready for those Rockies.”

Live batting … Not everyone will bat. Maybe I can slip by. Maybe I can even still start. It was really just one bad practice.

I can’t help myself. I look over at Coach. He gives me just the tiniest nod of his head, and my heart lands somewhere down by my cleats. I’ll be batting, all right. Coach has been doing this too long to miss something so obvious. He needs to know what I’ve got for Saturday. He needs to know if he needs a new left fielder.

“Meacham!” Coach shouts. “Take the mound.”

Malfoy sprints in from right, a wicked smile on his face and his glove up for the ball.