Lucia, a year ago
Like everywhere else, there was a hierarchy to baseball games, where the crowd sat. Parents and teachers perched in the bleachers, backs pressed against cool metal, lined up, expectant along the bottom few rows. Coaches’ wives sat higher up, showing up all at once, coordinated through text messages. As if there was an unsaid requirement to attend a certain number of games to be supportive, and they’d fill it by God, but they’d do it together, and are those new shoes? Most of the kids sat along the fence: they wanted to yell, hoot, and catcall. Whistle and insult. Andrew’s crew sat up on the grass hill, behind the dugout, but high enough to watch him, face pinked and shining, his arm like a rocket.
Mt. Oanoke had baseball. The football team limped along in last place, fraught with ligament sprains and concussions, the consequence of too much weight, too little speed, and half-assed training. Basketball did okay, but they hadn’t made postseason in as long as Lucia could remember. Most of the kids felt like Taylor did about track: it was something to do.
No one felt passionate about anything. Except baseball.
Lucia watched Coach Winters, his face scrunched and red, as he bounced on the balls of his feet, watching Andrew. Pick his hat up, run his hand through his hair, put it down, resting back on the tuft of his blond-brown curls, the sweat down the back of his neck, and Lucia wanted to dip her finger in it.
She watched the boys in the dugout vie for him, just for a second to feel the heat of his eyes, so intense, cut you right to the center like you weren’t fooling anyone, to feel the thrill of being called out on your own bullshit.
Some days she’d trade anything for that, even in a class as boring as statistics. She’d started to hang around after, seeking it, that look in his face, the way he’d say Lucia! What sort of interesting discussion do you have on probability today? His eyes twinkling, like something out of the paperback romance novels she saw at the library, where every man’s eyes sparkled and twinkled like they were all made of glittery icing or pure goodness, and that’s what she started to think about Mr. Winters. That he was made of goodness.
Her eyes darted to Andrew, his arms and legs tangled up, so fast and long, that ball coming like buckshot across the dusty white plate. Batters up, then down. So fast you could hardly count them.
She sat behind them, Porter and Riana whispering. Taylor twining her gum around her finger, her phone in her hand, thumbs flying over the keys, glossy lips laughing. At what?
Lucia had no idea. Taylor had asked her in the hall, an offhand comment, you coming? So quiet she almost didn’t hear it. Andrew’s mouth had smirked at that, Porter elbowing him in the ribs. This is how she got invited to things now: last minute, a guilty sigh, a laugh she didn’t understand. Ever since last year.
That fucking bird. She fucked a good thing up with them. Even Taylor had been different, shifting hot and cold with the wind since that bird. Lucia held fast to the denial, but Taylor knew, her eyes flicking around Lucia’s face looking for the lie.
Lucia had a temper, Jimmy used to tell her that. She knew they called her a witch. Fuck them, she’d be a witch then. You become what people expect. Who said that? Lucia pulled her journal out of her bag, scribbled it on a page, and shoved it back into the front pocket. She’d look it up later.
She glanced up to see Taylor, as if seeing her for the first time. She smirked, leaned over to Josh, a light tickling of his arm, and whispered in his ear.
Lucia didn’t know why she kept coming to these things. So desperate to be invited that she’d put up with this kind of shit? Not knowing what to do with her hands and her eyes or even the muscles around her mouth; they felt stiff and like they weren’t really hers.
The back of her head tingled and itched and she wound a tendril of hair around her index finger, pulling just to the point of pain, just enough to stop the urge. Taylor watched her and shook her head, a short burst, with a roll of her eyes. Don’t you goddamn dare.
She stood, too quickly, the pricks of stars dancing in her eyes, her legs swaying, and for a moment she thought she might pass out. Jesus God do not pass out.
“Where you going?” Taylor kept her eyes to her phone, her fingers dancing, those French-manicured tips white and bright over the glow of the screen as a smile played at her lips, the kind of smile she used to give Lucia but was now giving the nameless phone person, and Lucia almost, almost slapped that new iPhone right out of her hand. She was this close to it.
“Home.”
Her head snapped up and she snorted, a quick burst of air through her nose. “For what?”
The bitch of it was, she didn’t have an answer. Lucia looked out onto the field. Mr. Winters was pressing his palms against the ceiling of the dugout now, the hem of his shirt inching up, a soft stripe of skin there. Andrew’s face was a sheen, glowing, on fire. The whole crowd was quiet.
“You know he’s working on a no-hitter, right?” Porter pointed into the stands, his voice a whisper, the recruits with their radar guns clicking. “They’re watching him. He’s a sophomore. And they’re watching him. Fucking amazing.”
Lucia didn’t know. She thought of Andrew, that mouth against hers, those big-knuckled hands against her back, in her hair, her scalp tingling. That openness in his face that she never saw again, his eyes closed up tight now, those lids like curtains. It could just make a person so goddamn tired all the time, all this effort.
She looked back at Taylor. Her fingers waggled in her direction, bye, see ya, go now, but she didn’t look up, and then suddenly she laughed and leaned over, showed Riana her phone and Riana laughed.
Later she’d learn that Andrew finished that no-hitter, the second in Mt. Oanoke history. That later, because of that game, UT Austin would come, watch him try to repeat it and fail, but they’d offer him a full ride anyway. Because he was Andrew, no one expected any less.
But all she’d remember is their laughter at some inside joke. A big fucking mystery. Some inner circle she couldn’t understand and she’d never be part of again. She was so sick of wondering what they were talking about, laughing about, and how to figure it out, if she was doing the right thing or the wrong thing, and whether she was everything that was wrong or nothing that mattered at all.
That was the worst part: trying to figure out if she mattered at all.