Playing the Field (17 page)

He sat up straighter. “You want to share our
room again?”

“Well, not exactly. I just thought I’d let
you keep the old room, and I’ll move into the office. Then every
once in a while I’ll come back and visit you.”

He still smiled over this bit of news. “Can I
have the baseball posters too?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I can get some new
ones for my room.”

He jumped up and gave me a hug. He landed a
little on my leg, which I’m sure did nothing to help my recovery,
but I didn’t complain. Then he got down and headed toward the
kitchen. “I’m going to tell Mom I get my room back.” I guess he
figured he’d better go make the decision official before I changed
my mind.

A few minutes later the doorbell rang, but I
didn’t pay any attention to it. I was busy wiggling my toes to see
if they hurt less now than right after the accident. I was hoping
for an improvement. Any improvement.

Mom came into the family room with Serena
behind her.

“You have a visitor,” Mom said.

I stopped wiggling my toes. “Uh, hi.”

Serena looked at my leg propped up on the
pillows and the ice pack on my ankle. “How bad is it?”

“It’s only a sprain,” I said, and then added
for Mom’s sake, “And it’s feeling a lot better already.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Serena said. “I was
worried about you.”

I shrugged in what I hoped was a macho
cavalier manner. “It was just a little crash. I’ve been in worse.”
Right after I said it, I realized this sounded more stupid than
macho. Mom was pursing her lips together, probably in an attempt
not to laugh. I guess this was for the best though, otherwise she
might enforce her threat to make me pay for my medical insurance. I
tried to think of something better to say, but didn’t come up with
anything.

“Well, I’m glad you’re all right,” Serena
said. She’d been hiding one hand behind her back, and now she
brought out a bouquet of yellow lantana and held it out to me.
“These are for you. I picked them myself.”

I took them from her, and a few of the
blossoms fell onto my lap.

“Gee. Thanks. No card?”

“I couldn’t get past ‘Dear McKay’.”

Mom looked back and forth between Serena and
me like she couldn’t quite decide what to make of us or the
bouquet.

I held the flowers out to her. “Can you put
these in water for me?”

“Sure.” Mom took the bouquet but held it a
little ways away from her. She walked out of the family room,
leaving a trail of little yellow blossoms as she went.

Serena sat down on our old gray recliner by
the couch, and we stared at each other for a moment.

“I’m sorry about that note to Tony,” I told
her. “It really didn’t mean anything. It was just stupid guy
talk.”

“I’m not mad about it anymore. It’s hard to
be angry at you when you’re hurt. And I know the only reason you
even did that jump was because you wanted to talk to me.” She
shrugged, and a section of her hair slid from her shoulders. “I’m
sorry Brian was such a jerk to you. I talked to him about it after
we took you home.” She tilted her head at me. “It’s funny, but I
started off the day angry at you, and now I’m angry at him.”

“You’re angry at Brian now?”

Her voice grew soft. “Yeah.” It wasn’t really
an answer. It was a question—she wanted some indication of how I
felt about her. Only now that she was going out with Brian, it
didn’t seem right that I say anything about her and me. In fact the
whole thing suddenly seemed liked a soap opera. It seemed like the
stuff Tony had been doing the last couple of weeks. I didn’t want
to act like he had.

In that instant I began to understand what
Mom had told me about relationships. Everything got more
complicated when you started dating. I didn’t want to fight over
who I did or didn’t slow dance with or whether it was okay to talk
to one girl when you were going out with another. I didn’t want to
get stuck in some note-passing, hallway-glaring, second-guessing,
junior high melodrama triangle. I wanted things to be the way they
were when Serena and I were just goofing around, doing our algebra.
I tried to tell Serena this.

“I think we should just be friends,” I
said.

She blinked at me. “What?”

“I want to just be friends,” I said again,
this time feeling more confident about it.

Her eyes narrowed at me. “McKay, you are the
most aggravating boy I know. We never even went out together and
now you’re breaking up with me?”

“Well, no. I didn’t mean it in the
breaking-up sort of way.”

Until that moment I’d forgotten that’s what
people say to each other when they break up. I want to just be
friends. It seemed like a really absurd thing to say when usually a
person means exactly the opposite. What a person means to say is,
“I don’t like you, and I never want to see you again. I realize any
time we run into each other, you will glare at me, and every time
you are forced to say my name, you will do it as though a lemon
just bit your tongue.” People don’t want to say the truth because
they want to pretend to be all nice about it, but everyone knows
what that, “Let’s just be friends” phrase really means. Everyone,
that is, except for me thirty seconds ago when I said it.

I quickly added, “What I mean is, I really
like you, and I want to be your friend. I’m afraid if we try to be
anything more than that right now, we’ll mess it up. If you’re
friends, you can be friends forever. If you’re dating, you can only
be friends until you like somebody else better. I mean, look at
Tony and Rachel.”

Serena’s eyes were no longer narrow. I think
she was beginning to understand.

I shifted on the couch so I could face her
better. “I’d like to be able to talk to you without worrying about
what I’m saying. You can’t do that with a girlfriend.”

Now Serena smiled. “McKay, did you ever worry
about what you were saying?”

“Yes. That’s why it always came out sounding
so stupid.”

“It didn’t always sound stupid.”

“I still want to teach you how to hit a
ball,” I said.

“I guess I’d like that.” She smiled over at
me. “And I’ll still help you with your math. Although now that
we’re just friends, I can tell you that I don’t care about your
baseball card collection. It’s just a bunch of guys in uniforms to
me.”

“I think horses are all right,” I said, “but
I’ve only ridden a couple of times and both of those were the kind
of things where someone leads you around with a rope.”

“I’ll teach you how to really ride. You’ll
love it.”

“And I’m sure Coach Manetti will love it too.
That’s just what my leg needs: horseback riding lessons.”

And then both of us laughed. I’m not sure at
what. I guess at ourselves. She said, “Maybe being friends will be
okay.”

“Better than okay,” I said, I could already
see how it would be in the future. I saw us sitting in class and
doing homework together. I saw us talking in the school hallways,
and I saw her cheering for me at school baseball games. And maybe
someday, down the road, we would become boyfriend and girlfriend,
and that would be okay too because we’d been friends first.

Serena and I talked for another half an hour,
and then she said she had to go because it was about dinnertime.
She smiled when she got up. “I’ll bring you your algebra homework
if you want.”

“Thanks. Are you still going to watch me play
baseball?”

“Sure. I’ll be there for every quarter.”

“Inning,” I told her. “Football has quarters.
Baseball has innings.”

“Whatever.” She grinned. “I’ll be there for
all of them.”

She said good-bye, and I watched her leave.
You know, it’s strange how your mood can change so easily. I never
would have thought that a peanut butter and mustard sandwich and
bouquet of lantana would have made me so happy, but they did. Even
though my ankle was still swollen, hurting, and purple and green, I
felt better. So I guess, in a way, my miracle happened after
all.

* * *

I sat out for game five, but I could hobble
around well enough when it was time for game six that Coach Manetti
said I could bat. Serena was there watching. In fact, she’d dragged
Brian along with her. As I recall, he never cheered very loudly. He
also wished me good luck with a stiff and pained smile on his face.
I would have liked to think this was because he was tormented with
guilt for his part in my injury, but he was probably just mad
Serena had made him come to watch me.

Anna also came to the game, although she
didn’t sit anywhere near Serena. She brought another one of her
friends, Krissy, and they sat up front and completely ignored the
game except for when Tony went to bat. Then they clapped and
hollered. Krissy clapped especially loud, and I wondered if she was
a fan of the game, or just a fan of Tony’s. Then I wondered why in
the world Anna would bring Krissy with her to watch the game, given
Tony’s track record with his girlfriend’s friends.

I could only bat once, late in the inning,
because after the pinch runner replaced me, I wasn't allowed back
in the game. But I hit the tying run in, and my replacement ended
up scoring to put us ahead. It felt odd to see someone else running
over home plate in my place, and even odder to sit out during my
team’s turn in the outfield, but it was better than sitting in the
bleachers with my parents, so I didn’t complain. I was still part
of the team. That was enough.

We won that game, and the last tournament
game too. We were undefeated. When the final inning was up, and we
were officially the district winners, everyone on my team rushed
onto the field screaming and jumping around. I ran onto the field
much slower, and I jumped a lot less, but I still screamed just as
loud. We’d done it. We’d all done it.

Tony and I gave each other our high fives and
yelled, “Who the champion? You the champion! No, you the champion!”
until we were almost hoarse.

After a while my parents made it through the
throng to congratulate me. “You did wonderfully,” Mom said, and
gave me a hug. “How’s your ankle feeling?”

“It’s fine.”

“Do you think you’re up to attending the
victory party?” Every season, whether we had a winning record or
not, Coach Manetti held a victory party for the team at his
house.

“Sure.” I wasn’t about to turn down an
afternoon of junk food and bragging with the rest of the team just
because my ankle hurt a little. I only worried about one thing.
Family and friends of the team members were also invited, and I
knew I ought to ask Serena if she wanted to come. I wanted her to
come, but I wasn’t so thrilled about having Brian hanging around
scowling somewhere while I was trying to celebrate.

My parents congratulated me again, then told
me they’d be ready to leave in just a minute, because they had to
go and talk to some of the other kids’ parents. My parents like to
talk, so I knew it would be a little while until they were ready to
go. Tony went off to talk to Anna and Krissy. I didn’t want to have
to stand there and be a spectator in their flirt-fest, so I headed
back to where most of the team was still gathered. Serena
intercepted me along the way.

“Hey, you’re the winner!” she said.

“You never doubted that, did you?” I looked
around her and noticed she was alone. “Where’s Brian?”

“He didn’t come today.”

It’s true, I hadn’t seen him in the crowd,
but I assumed he was just lurking somewhere unseen. Sort of like
bacteria. “He missed a good game,” I said.

“I’ll tell him about it.”

“Don’t leave out the part where I lead the
team to victory with my fabulously amazing hits.”

She laughed and shook her head.

“You want to come to the team’s victory
party?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

We walked together over to where the team
was. I took a deep breath of the cool afternoon air and smiled just
because life was so great. All in all, it was a pretty good ending
to the game.

The End

###

Janette Rallison (who is also sometimes CJ
Hill when the mood strikes her) writes books because writing is
much more fun than cleaning bathrooms. Her avoidance of housework
has led her to writing 12 young adult novels, which have sold over
1,000,000 copies and have been on the IRA Young Adults’ Choices
lists, Popular Picks, and many state reading lists. She would name
them all but knows your eyes would gloss over if she did, so you
will just have to trust her that she has lots of books and they are
all awesome! Most of her books are romantic comedies because hey,
there is enough angst in real life, but there’s a drastic shortage
on both humor and romance. She lives in Arizona with her husband,
five kids, and enough cats to classify her as eccentric.

Contact me on-line at my website,

JanetteRallison.com (email:
[email protected])

Or CJHillbooks.com