A short story by Gwen E. Kirby ’07
The Mt. Adams varsity softball team warms up in right field, throwing yellow balls back and forth in sunny arcs. They try to be quiet, but they cannot stop their chatter as their shoulders loosen. The field is a good one. The grass is close cut, the bases bright, and the brick dugouts painted red and navy, the home team’s colors. It is nicer than the Mt. Adams ballpark, with its dugout full of weeds and half-eaten sunflower seeds. The girls like to see how far they can spit the uncracked shells, sucking off the salt first and then aiming them through the diamonds of the fence.
It is a perfect day for a game except that everything is wrong. All week, adults have plagued them. How do you feel about playing Mar Vista? Do you want to talk about it? It’s so soon — and in this pause fall all the words they don’t say. Shooting, death. Ms. Matheson, the Mt. Adams AP chemistry teacher, gets teary-eyed and looks at her students too hard, like she is trying to preserve them in amber with her stare. Mr. Grater, the eleventh-grade English teacher, tells them they will understand it more, and differently, when they are older, which they suppose must be true, but also must be true of everything. What they understand right now is that these conversations are warnings as much as anything else. How the girls should feel, the adults convey with every softened syllable, is sensitive to the tragedy. And they should be on their best behavior. They should feel respectful and aware and appreciative of the other team’s courage. The fact that those girls are even playing, it is made clear, is a victory for them. Everyone is a winner on this field today, said Coach Jeff as the girls unpacked their gear in the dugout, hanging bats and knocking dirt out of their helmets. And while this is true before the game starts, it cannot be true by the time the game ends.
The Mar Vista girls warm up in left field. How do the girls of Mt. Adams varsity softball actually feel? Molly feels sympathy but nothing stronger. This shooting was closer to her school than the one in Philadelphia or the one in Ohio, but in the end, it still wasn’t at her school. When she tries to make herself feel upset, nothing will really come until she thinks about her grandmother dying. That is as close as Molly has been to tragedy and she is embarrassed but grateful. Lisa worries that her parents are fighting a lot lately. Simone feels too much when she looks at the picture of the dead student, a freshman who looks like her own freshman brother. She looks at the picture often. She cries well and easily and this means that when she is not looking at the picture, she feels fine. Anna feels like she has been hitting badly and, though she knows it’s wrong, she is upset right now not because of the shooting but because she’s been moved in the line-up from second to sixth. If she keeps playing like this, Coach Jeff will start Becky at third base. Anna hates Becky because Becky has a long blond ponytail and wears mascara during practice. Worst of all, Anna is sure that Becky doesn’t like her.
And all the girls on the Mt. Adams team feel that they would like to win this softball game. It makes them uncomfortable, this desire that doesn’t go away. The three seniors who drive to Mar Vista together instead of riding the bus are frank about it when they are alone in the car. It isn’t our fault this happened.
If we’re going to play, they say, then we have to play. I don’t know what they want us to do about it.
Certainly not throw the game, which would be as disrespectful as winning. More disrespectful, say the seniors, because they suck at softball. They tell one another how they are sure the girls of Mar Vista varsity softball are wonderful people, even if they are bad at softball. Coach Jeff tosses whiffle balls to Lisa, whose swing is compact and powerful. She does not hold back just because it is practice. She cracks open one of the Whiffle balls and it falls to the ground, spread open like a bird. Another one, says Coach, and she feels proud. She wants to break every whiffle ball in the world. Lisa loves being up to bat, the center of the entire game, feeling all of her power gather in her back leg and her loose hands, the barrel of her bat heavy but quick. She wants to be the one to drive the final run in, to hit the ball into the gap when there is a runner on second. This is why Anna is a bad hitter. Anyone can see it, Lisa always can, how Anna walks up to the batter’s box like she’s asking permission, like swinging at a bad pitch will kill her. Wrong word. Lisa wants to think about the game and nothing more. She wants to swing her bat and see the ball go so far so fast that it looks lazy in the sky, effortless. She will run around the bases like she owns them.
Coach Jeff hits sharp grounders to Becky who is never afraid of the ball but today flinches just enough to pull her glove out of the dirt, to let the ball sneak under. Coach Jeff reminds himself that she may be upset, given the circumstances, but mostly he finds himself worried that they have a real weakness at third. Anna is getting worse and he’s seen players go that way, more timid the more they play, each mistake adding up until their play is driven by fear. But Becky is usually fearless. It’s a strange day, a sad day. He eases up a little on the grounders, lets them take a few hops before they reach her, and she brings them in cleanly, her face as it always is, inward and a little angry, the face of desire.
Becky is not afraid of the ball. Every girl on the team knows what a bruise from a ball looks like, a raised purple welt in the shape of an inner tube. When Becky was eight, her older brother died in a car accident. It’s not a thing she tells people because it’s a thing people never forget. She is surprised to find herself so distracted by the Mar Vista girls. She keeps looking over to them to see if they understand, as she does, that life is unfair. How could they not? And not even that, because unfair suggests a standard of fairness, something to hope for. Life is unrelated to such standards. Life is a physical activity achieved by the body — until it isn’t anymore. Her body achieves a throw from third to first. She’s got a big arm, Coach says. Big is, of course, the same as strong. Anna is right: Becky doesn’t like her. Becky thinks that Anna feels she deserves to start because she has started in the past. But every game is a new game. One of these days, it’ll be Becky, and when it is, she’ll hold onto that spot for dear life. When she steps up to the plate, she will attack before she can be attacked.
The girls circle up. Coach Jeff says again that everyone on the field is a winner already. And then he says, Molly, cheat left when number eight comes up. She’s their best hitter. She pulls to center right. When Coach Jeff leaves the huddle, the girls lock arms and realize they don’t know what to do next. Usually they would scream and stomp, do the cheer they learned from the girls who went before them. We’re two games out of first, the captain says. And then she doesn’t say anything else. They kick at the dirt with cleats, they throw balls into the pockets of mitts. They are happy to have the captain’s permission to do what they were going to do anyway.
Before the game begins, the teams line up on the baselines and take off their caps. It is a moment of silence. Lisa thinks about getting a hit and begins to pray for that but, abashed, instead thinks, I’m sorry. I hope it’s all okay. I know it isn’t okay. I’m sorry. Simone feels like she could cry but does not because that would be horrifying, attention seeking. Anna and Becky stand next to each other and feel at odds with each other and with themselves. Molly is dry-eyed and watching. She will grow up to be good in a moment of crisis but always a little distant, a little withheld, especially when she does not want to be. Molly is the first person to notice when a girl on the other team begins to cry. Not sloppily, but a few tears and then more, until the other girls on that team circle round her and hide her from view. The girls of Mt. Adams know, at this moment, that something real and horrible and true has happened, something that cannot be changed or even understood, and the right fielder and left fielder grasp hands, and the left fielder holds hands with Simone who holds hands with Lisa, and on down the line, in a gesture that relieves the adults, so respectful and thoughtful, but the girls are doing it for themselves, to feel a part of something, not a part of this tragedy, which is not theirs to own, but a part of their team on this particular day, a piece of something larger than themselves. They look across the dirt to the girl who has seen what they are afraid they will someday have to see, and in the face of this crying girl, winning seems wrong, and losing seems wrong, and playing seems wrong when the world around the game is so real.
And then the game begins. Up to bat first, the girls of Mt. Adams are clumsy. With none of the usual chatter and cheering from the dugout, they feel alone at the plate. The crack of the bat on the ball is loud as it ricochets foul. The girl with the tear-stained face crouches at second and Anna swings at bad pitches. She has never been so eager to be invisible. When the third out is called — Anna hits a weak grounder to the shortstop — they all feel relief, and shame. Coach Jeff says nothing. Mitts on, they jog onto the field like they’ve been taught, you don’t walk, you run, crossing the sharp chalk lines, spreading out across the smooth dirt and the grass that is so even and green. Taking their positions as the pitcher takes the mound, they adjust their hats. They wait, crouched, bouncing lightly on the balls of their feet.
When the pitcher releases the ball, they follow it from the hand to the bat, and then the ball is in play and they are in motion. They stay low though the ball comes in fast, wait until they feel the ball in their mitts before they rise, and even as they rise, they are pulling the ball from the glove. Anna and Lisa and Molly and Becky don’t know how to grip a ball without rotating it in their palms, without picking out a seam for the thumb, a seam for the middle three fingers. A whip of the arm sends the ball flying. Simone reaches out, stretches her body, back foot firm on first base, ready to feel the ball meet her mitt with a sharp pop. The first out is called. Then, as they always do, they throw the ball around the horn, everyone getting their chance, staying warm, holding hands across an empty space.
Simone gets the ball back, circle complete. She feels the pleasant sting in her hand, the sting that means she’s alive. She slaps her closed mitt against her leg, calls one down, two to go, and flicks the ball back to the pitcher.
This story first appeared in One Story, #240, April 19, 2018.