Authors: Barry Lyga
She's right. She's a thousand times right. I make my way up onto wobbly feet, swaying for a moment before I gain my balance. Without saying a word, I go to the door and pick up the bat propped against the wall.
I look back at her. Kneeling on the floor in front of the chair, her back to me. Shaking. She doesn't look over at me. I look at her and I feel...
I don't know.
I go outside. I force myself to close the door behind me. Oh my God. Oh. My. God.
I was molested. When I was twelve. And everyone in the world knew it except for me.
I sit in the car for a while. I don't know how long. Seconds, years, centuries—they all whirl by and spin off like new galaxies uncoiling in the sudden heat/cool of the big bang.
I drive home.
It's not even noon, but I'm exhausted. I feel like I've been running laps all day, and all last night and all last week, for that matter. My brain won't work right.
I sleep.
I dream that I'm in a movie: Mom and Eve turn out to be twin sisters, the revelation made to a devastating drum sting and a blitzkrieg of strings and brass.
I wake up in a panic, wanting to scream, wanting to cry out for my mommy, aware as I think it that it's a grotesque sort of irony, but wanting to do it nonetheless.
I keep my mouth shut instead. I lie on my bed like a corpse in a casket.
Five years. Five years. What
were
these past five years? Who was I?
What
was I? Nothing as I thought it was. Nothing as it seemed.
Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look to the future...
Is that even possible? Do people really do that?
The acceptance letters and packets are on my desk. I look through them. A multitude of options. I used to think it was a curse, having so many options, so many possible end-games for each decision. But the truth is, it's a
blessing.
I
have
these options.
It's not an easy choice, but that's OK. Easy doesn't equal good. Difficult doesn't equal bad.
It's just life, is all.
So Dad's in his study and Mom's eating by herself in the kitchen and I'm in my bedroom, and in a house of three people no one's talking, no one's saying anything, because no one has decided anything.
Except for me. I've decided.
I call Rachel on her cell phone and get her voice mail. I leave her a message and then I ask my parents to join me in the family room. They sit on opposite ends of the couch, as far from each other as possible.
"I've been thinking about college," I tell them.
Midnight comes and I'm wide awake, sitting on the hood of my car and looking up at the stars from the parking lot at SAMMPark when Rachel pulls up and parks beside me. I watch her get out of the car, dressed in just a plain green'T-shirt and gray shorts. Her hair's a mess and she doesn't have any makeup on at all.
God, she's beautiful.
"Got your message," she says, walking over to me. "Tried to call you a couple of times when I was on break, but your parents said you were out, and then it got too late to call."
"Sorry."
"You've
got
to get a cell phone."
That's not going to happen anytime soon, but I nod to her anyway. "Look, I'm sorry. About yesterday."
The ever-popular "pregnant pause" rears its ugly head between us.
"I'm
really
sorry," I tell her. "I said some shit that was uncalled for. I shouldn't have. You've been nothing but cool with me and I don't even deserve it. So I'm sorry. And if you want to walk away, that's fine, but I wanted to bring you here because I have a surprise for you."
She arches her eyebrow. "How can I turn that down?"
I bow and gesture into SAMMPark. "After you, madam."
She fakes a curtsy and we're off. "This isn't the part where you kill me with a hatchet, is it?"
"No."
She stops near the statue. "Hey, Josh, I'm enjoying breaking your balls, but about what
I
said yesterday—"
I hold up a hand to stop her. "You don't need to apologize, Rache. Everything you said was dead on."
"I'm not so sure about that."
"I am." I look over at the statue. "I never even looked at it twice until you pointed it out to me. Did you ever notice the dates?"
She squints at them. "Yeah. She was young."
"She was only nineteen."
"Not much older than us."
"'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may...'"
"Keats? Yeats?" Rachel frowns. She doesn't have my weirdly eidetic memory.
"Herrick."
"Oh."
We walk to the baseball diamond. Halfway there, she takes my hand.
Once there, I make her stand on the mound with her back to the plate. "This is when the hatchet comes out, right?"
"Stop it!" I yell back to her as I race over to the bushes behind the backstop. It's only been half an hour—at this time of night, the odds of anyone being here, much less stumbling upon my hidden stash, are pretty remote.
I drag the big cooler and the bundle of blankets and pillows stuffed into a trash bag from out of the bushes. I position everything in front of home plate and go to get Rachel. "Keep your eyes closed."
I hold one of her hands and use my other around her waist to guide her. She keeps her free hand over her eyes and giggles.
I stop near the plate and tell her to open her eyes.
"Welcome to a picnic lunch at..." I check my watch. "Half past midnight."
She claps her hands. "Oh, how sweet, you cooked."
I laugh a bit self-consciously. "Well, I spread hot mustard and put meat on bread, at least. Sorry—I had to buy this stuff at Sup-r-Shop because I didn't want you to see."
"That's OK. I won't dock you
too
many boyfriend points for that."
"Boyfriend, huh? Still?"
"You don't break up with someone just because of an argument, Josh. At least,
I
don't."
I spread out one of the blankets and we sit and eat. "My parents are getting divorced."
She puts down her bottle of soda. "I'm sorry."
"Well, you know. I don't know what to say. My mom was screwing around on my dad. It all started a while back."
She leans toward me and kisses me on the cheek.
"You're having a bad few days, aren't you?"
I chuckle at that because it's an understatement and an overstatement all at once. "I thought so. But, you know, I've made some decisions and that's made all of this other stuff a lot easier to deal with."
"What kind of decisions?" And I can tell from the expression on her face that she's wondering. Wondering what I've decided about
us.
"I saw her today."
Her face goes blank. "Who? Your mother?"
I have to laugh again;
her
only means one thing in my mind, or at least it has for so many years. I just assumed..."No. Eve."
"Oh." She brushes some crumbs off her shirt. "I see." She starts to get up. She's upset, moving with those jerky, staccato motions that tell me she's too distracted to think straight. "Thanks for the picnic."
"Rache." I reach up and grab her hand, pulling her down to sit beside me. "Stay. Please. Listen to me."
She looks into my eyes with an anxiety I've never seen in her before. Not even when I was at my worst, refusing to look at her or speak to her. "You're old enough now. She's what you've wanted, Josh. She's what you've always wanted. It's so fucking
obvious—
"
"Look, Rache. You said yesterday that I couldn't touch you without hating you or hating myself. I'm touching you. I'm holding your hand."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know. Let me start slow, OK?"
And I tell her. About visiting Eve. About what I learned about myself that everyone else already knew.
She takes my face in her hands and kisses me hard on the lips.
"You've been telling me to get over the past five years, Rache. And it turns out that the past five years weren't even what I thought they were.
"So I'm throwing them out. That's what I've decided. To hell with it. Who needs it? I'm looking forward now, not back."
She kisses me again and something happens. Something I never expected to happen. I close my eyes and lean into the kiss and I slide my hands up her arms until I'm surrounding her, holding her, hugging her to me. Her arms slip around me and we're clenched tightly together, kissing. My hand goes up and skips past her bra strap, then runs through her hair. She digs into my back with her nails, worn short for softball. I hear myself moan into her.
And I think of nothing.
I think of nothing but Rachel.
What happens next is pure magic, and is for us and us alone.
Huddled together in the blankets, we look up at the stars together. I want to point out Mars, which you can see with the naked eye tonight if you look
just right,
but Rachel shifts against me, leans out of the blanket for a second, just long enough to tap home plate.
"Look at that. We hit a home run." She laughs, and I can't help it; I join in.
I didn't flicker once. I haven't flickered in hours. Maybe I'm done with them now. I used to think that the flickers were a consequence of losing my virginity. And maybe they were. Maybe they've gone away because this time I did it right.
"Hey, Rache?"
"Hmm?" She snuggles close to me. I'm a little worried about someone stumbling upon us here, but it's almost two in the morning now. No one's going to come out here to the ball field. And if they do ... well, we'll worry about it then.
"Rache, I have more stuff to tell you."
"Of course you do." She kisses her way up my chest to my throat, then my lips. "You
always
have stuff."
"I'm serious."
"You're also always serious." She's giddy.
"Do you think I was wrong to let that pitch go by?"
She sighs away her giddiness.
"Tell me, Rache."
"Yes. Absolutely."
"You're right."
She tilts her head at me, confused. "Then why did you—"
"Because I didn't know it was wrong until I did it. I had to
learn,
don't you see? I had to see what would happen when I let my hatred for coach go like that. I had to take control completely, just for once in my life, and see where it led me. And most important of all, I had to..." I'm getting lost in her eyes, the way I used to get lost in Eve's, but better.
"Rache, on prom night, you—"
"Don't." She puts a finger over my lips. "Don't ruin this. You don't have to. Can't you see how
happy
I am?"
I kiss her finger. "Let me talk.
"On prom night, you said you loved me. And before you stopped me, I was going to tell you that I didn't love you." Her eyes cloud over and she leans back, moving away from me. "Let me finish, Rache. Please, just let me finish."
She nods wordlessly and stares up at the sky.
"But something happened, Rache. See, I thought my mom loved my dad. I thought Eve and I loved each other. I was wrong.
"This feeling I have for you ... I've never had it before. And I've never had a name for it. Because the name was being used—
mis
used, misappropriated—by something else."
I grab her by the shoulders and turn her to face me. "I love you, Rachel. I really do. I have for a long time. I just didn't know it."
I've dreaded this moment all day, what comes next. But I have to do it. Because it's honest and true and real.
"Rache, I love you, but—"
"You're going to Stanford," she says very calmly, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.
And I guess it is. "Yeah. No matter what Coach does or doesn't do. Because ... I'm going on my terms. Even if by some miracle he recommends me for the scholarship, I'm not taking it."
That
surprises her. "I don't get it."
"
That's
why I had no choice but to let that pitch go by. I had to prove to myself that I could live without baseball. I can't go to college on
their
terms. I can't be the ballplayer first and the student second, and if they're giving me an athletic scholarship, believe me—that's what it would be. Athlete-scholar, not the other way around. No one can convince me otherwise.
"So, yeah. I'll have to take out student loans. I'll have to work my ass off. But that's OK. I've wanted to go to Stanford as long as I can remember. It's my dream and I want it to come true."
She shakes her head and looks up at the stars, a weird little smile on her face. "Wow. You. Not playing baseball anymore. I can't imagine it. It's strange."
"There's always intramurals. But I really want to ... I really
need
to focus on one thing. I can't do both and be my best. For me, baseball was always a means to an end. I'm not like Zik. The game itself was always enough for him. For me, it was about the statistics, the improvement. It was a way of seeing if I measured up. But I'm tired of measuring myself that way. No matter how well I play, I'll never have a thousand average. I'll never hit a home run every time. You can't be a perfect baseball player."