This Close to Home, page 1
For my parents
CHAPTER ONE THINGS SEEN BY THE FERNS
I have a job to do, and the sky helps me find my way. I rip off my catcher’s mask and search the clouds for an electric-green foul ball. If it’s anywhere behind home plate, my space to protect, then I’ll drop to my knees in the dirt before I let it get away.
I lift my arm against the honeycomb-patterned fence, my glove finding the ball just in time. That leathery slap is my favorite sound in the world.
“That’s three outs,” the umpire announces.
My teammates give me high fives and pound on my chest protector when we swarm the dugout.
“Good one, Brooke.”
“Nice out, Brooke.”
I half smile at them and head to my corner, a place between the dugout and the fence where I store my equipment between innings. I sit on an upside-down orange bucket and sweep away the dark hair matted to my temples. Coach Tanaka calls this spot my Disaster Corner, but I know where everything is. Mostly. My bat is on the ground, and a torn bag of sunflower seeds spills out at my feet. My batting glove rests in the dirt like a seashell washed up on the beach.
I turn toward the fence and see my sister, Calla, cross-armed in front of a wall of ferns with her boyfriend, Robby. He stares at his red cleats while her mouth moves; I can’t hear what she’s saying, but it looks like I’m sorry. She leans her head toward the sky, and sunlight catches the wet spots on her cheeks. I look away, nerves racing around in my stomach like they do during championship games.
Mom used to say my focus made me a great softball player; nothing could get to me in the middle of the game. If she were here now, she wouldn’t say that. Whatever I just saw between Calla and Robby burns itself into my brain. It’s like I’m looking at the field through a filter of Calla’s tears and green ferns.
“Helloooo.” Lily Graham, our star pitcher, waves her hand in front of my face. She’s the kind of pretty that everyone notices: gold hair, smooth skin. It’s just a fact. She’s Lily and she’s the Pretty One.
“What’s up?” I answer.
“You’re up,” she says in the not-exactly-nice way she says everything.
“Thanks.” I grab a helmet and my sky-blue bat. I’m at the plate before I realize I forgot my batting glove. It’s Mom’s from when she played in college. There’s a hole in the thumb and the Velcro is frayed, but I wear it anyway. I get into position at home plate, trying to push away the feeling that something is missing.
The pitcher on the other team, a girl from my homeroom with curly red hair, does her windup and sends the ball toward the plate. I swing so hard, I stumble forward. But the ball flies past me.
“Strike!” the umpire calls, as if I need the reminder.
I bounce the bat against my cleats while the catcher throws the ball back. Coach Tanaka motions to me from the third-base line. I look to him for a signal: maybe he wants me to bunt; maybe he wants me to swing no matter what. He doesn’t give me the sign for either. Instead, he waves his hands and imitates a big breath. The sign for calm down. It’s not a sign he’s ever had to use for me. It only makes me more nervous.
The pitcher windmills her arm back again, and the ball comes at me. It’s a little high, but I swing anyway. My bat slices through the air at nothing again, a bright blue blur.
“Strike two!”
I step back from the batter’s box, hit my cleats with the bat a few more times. My heartbeat travels from my chest to my throat. It makes breathing hard.
“You got this, Brookie.” Calla’s voice comes from behind me. I turn my head. She’s still by the ferns, but without Robby, smiling at me. It’s not her real smile. It’s the one she wore at Mom’s funeral, when people came up to us one by one and said how sorry they were. A smile that looks glued on.
I get back into position. The pitcher wastes no time with her throw. It’s a slower pitch, a changeup right down the middle, and I swing hard. My bat connects and the ball shoots into the outfield, over the center fielder’s glove.
I run without thinking, head down, until I see the base under my feet. My hand throbs from batting without my glove. I look up from the dusty base and see Coach Tanaka, which doesn’t make sense, because he was giving signals at third base, not first. Behind him, my teammates gawk through the fence that blocks the dugout.
I’m at third base.
I ran to third base instead of first.
“Go to first, there’s time, back to first!” Coach Tanaka shouts, pointing across the diamond to the base where I should be standing. The center fielder has the ball now, and sprints across the outfield to make the throw to first. I run as fast as I can back down the baseline, touching home plate. Lily is slack-jawed in the on-deck circle. Calla has a hand over her mouth.
My feet pound the dirt and leave brown clouds behind. I’m almost to first when the center fielder’s throw arcs across the infield all the way to first base.
“Out!” the umpire announces.
I jog back to the dugout, because it’s important to hustle even if your heart is sinking. Lily continues to stare. I sit on my orange bucket and grab my shin guards from the ground where I tossed them. My teammates don’t say it’s okay, because it’s really not. We are the Poppyseed Garden Center Lions, defending champions of the junior softball league. Errors like mine can cost us our first-place finish.
It’s the second major error of my softball career. I may have a hard time keeping track of things, but I never forget my mistakes.
Luckily, we were already beating the J&B Funeral Home Bashers by three runs before my wrong-base debacle, so it doesn’t ruin the game. Mom used to tell me that there is only one direction in softball—forward. You have to move on to the next play, the next game, no matter what. It’s hard advice to follow. The thing about an error is it reminds me of all the other ones I’ve made, the ones off the field. And then I get stuck in the tornado of things I’ve done wrong.
For the first time in a long time, I’m glad the game is over.
CHAPTER TWO EMERGENCY SLUSHIES
I gather all my stuff from the Disaster Corner and start shoving it into my bag. Coach Tanaka whistles through his fingers. The sound is like a wheezy bird.
“Listen up, Lions. Good work today.” He pulls a stack of paper from behind his notebook, where he keeps track of the team’s stats for every game. “I have permission slips for you. It’s basically a release so we can help you in case of an emergency. You all turned this in at the beginning of the season, but we changed the template, blah, blah, boring junk. You won’t be able to play until you get this filled out, so bring it back to me, signed, at Wednesday’s practice.”
Coach Tanaka hands out the forms. He pauses for an extra second when he gets to me.
“Don’t think about what happened, Brooke.” He gives me my form. I wonder what he wrote about my error in his notebook. When he walks away, I shove the paper into the corner of my bat bag where dirty socks hide.
My sandals clip-clop on the path when I walk away from the junior softball field. To my right are some bleachers and the junior boys’ baseball field. The senior fields are farther ahead, by the concession stand, and the football field is all the way up on the hill, goalposts standing like towers. I think I could walk through the fields blindfolded and not get lost. It’s all as familiar as my own house. The Lincoln Youth Athletic Complex feels like home.
“Hey, B!”
I snap my head to the side. Derek jogs away from the junior boys’ field with a bat bag bouncing against his leg. His red Papa Margherita’s Pizza jersey is streaked with dirt. He takes his hat off, revealing black hair pressed down flat.
“Hey, hat head,” I say.
Derek smirks.
“This is the hat head of a guy who hit three RBI doubles today. And look who’s talking, sideburns.”
I laugh and stuff the sweaty hair behind my ears. Derek catches up to me on the path. He rubs a palm hard against his head, and his curls pop up. It makes my heart pop too, but I try to ignore that. It’s Derek Perez. Derek from the sandbox and front lawn sprinkler on extra-hot days. Derek whose abuela watched Calla and me when Mom went back to work. Permanent buddy-system Derek.
But lately he’s been Derek who gives me heart pops.
“I ran to third instead of first, D,” I tell him.
Derek gasps, then clears his throat like he’s embarrassed. He puts his hat on backward. My neck gets hot but I try to ignore it.
“Emergency slushies?” he asks.
I nod and we keep walking. The hot dog smell hits me before we turn the corner to the concession stand, a white cement building with broken shingles on the roof. Smoke pours out of the little tin chimney. I spot Calla at a big wooden planter behind the stand. It’s full of marigolds, though when we get closer, I can see they’re mostly brown. The soil looks crumbly and cracked. Calla has the tip of her finger dipped in.
“What are they saying, Plant Whisperer?” I ask.
She looks up at me, smiles.
“Nothing that I can repeat.” She takes her finger out of the planter and wipes it on her jeans. “No one is watering these. I told Mr. Spitz I wouldn’t be able to help with the flowers as much, but now they’re being forgotten,” she says.
“Maybe you should’ve planted forget-me-nots,” I say, and slap my thigh, pretending to crack up at my own joke. Calla humors me and half laughs.
“Maybe it’ll rain,” Derek says.
“That seems to be the only hope for these babies.” Calla pats the dry soil over the hole
“Or you could start coming to the fields like you used to. Bring them back to life,” I suggest.
Calla squints at me. I know it’s not an option. Her days are stuffed with student council, cooking club, Spanish club, anything to fill her time. She pulls car keys out of her back pocket. They’re attached to a royal-blue lanyard dotted with daisies. Robby gave it to her for her sixteenth birthday. I think she stares at the keys for an extra second, but maybe I imagine it.
“I’m heading home. Do you want to come with me or wait for Dad?”
The mascara smudge under her eye reminds me of what I saw at the ferns. I want to ask about Robby, but maybe Calla won’t want to discuss it by the wilting flowers. And I don’t want to ask in front of Derek. He’s kind of obsessed with Robby. I’ve caught Derek staring at him when we all watch movies together, copying his couch slouch and laughing whenever Robby does. I get it. Robby is a star outfielder and radiates with cool rays, like the sun. People with cool rays are usually meaner, like they’re better than everyone else and they know it. But not Robby. Robby’s energy is contagious. It feels special to be around him.
“We’ll go with Dad. We require slushies,” I answer.
Calla curls the lanyard in one hand and puts the other on my shoulder.
“You had a good game, Brookie,” she says, her leafy-green eyes acknowledging that slushies are for tough times. “See you at home. Bye, Der Bear.”
Derek rolls his eyes like he hates Calla’s nickname for him, but I know he doesn’t. For a second, Error #2 is out in the distance, so far away that I’d need a telescope to see it. I watch Calla’s bronze-brown braid until she disappears into her little blue sedan, and Derek and I walk to the ordering window on the other side of the concession stand.
Dad is there, filling a white bucket with Dubble Bubble. His glasses are fogged up from the grill. Every parent in the junior softball and baseball leagues has to take turns working the stand. Tonight is Dad’s shift.
“We need Cherry Explosions right away,” I say.
“Uh-oh,” Dad replies. “Haven’t needed one of those since Derek ripped his pants sliding into home.”
“Thanks for bringing that up, Mr. Dell,” Derek says.
“Anytime. So what happened?”
I glance around the snack bar. Some of my teammates sit on the bleachers nearby, licking vanilla cones. Lily is with them. She’s taken her tight French braids out, and her hair is all blond ocean waves that no curling iron could replicate.
“You don’t already know?” I ask.
Dad’s mouth straightens into a line before he turns toward the slushie machines. Sloshy liquid whirls around inside, red in one and blue in the other. He fills two plastic cups with Cherry Explosion.
“Calla may have mentioned something,” he answers when he turns back around. My teammates burst into laughter over some joke I can’t hear. Heat rushes to my cheeks, probably turning my face the color of my slushie. What if they’re talking about me?
“I was distracted, I guess.”
Dad snaps lids onto the cups and gives us each a paper straw (the stand made the switch to paper straws last season to be more environmentally friendly—it was Mom’s idea). I take a careful sip of my drink. It tastes like a cherry wrapped in sugar and plastic, in a good way. Derek slurps away at his while Dad wipes slushie juice off the counter. Some parents barely fill your slushie cup when it’s their turn in the snack bar, or they don’t restock the Gatorade cooler when only the bad flavors are left (cough, purple, cough). Dad does it all. Sporting his cheesy grin and his favorite Baltimore Orioles cap.
Mom was like that too, but on a whole other level. No one ran the concession stand like she did. There was always plenty of blue Gatorade when she worked.
“Remember, it’s just a game,” Dad says to me now.
I grip the cold cup a little harder. Mom had a lot of softball advice, but that was the biggest. Whether I won or lost, hit a home run or struck out, every time, she would remind me that it was just a game.
“Thanks, Dad.”
Derek and I walk over to the bleachers, on the other side from Lily, and sit down. A senior baseball game changes innings on the field in front of us. The sky is all kinds of pink, like swirls in the concession stand’s rainbow sundae. Derek follows my gaze.
“It’s cool that they did that,” he says.
“Did what?” I take another sugary sip.
“I thought you were looking at the sign.” He sucks up the last drops of his slushie. The straw wheezes.
The bronze sign is posted next to the ordering window, where Dad hands a senior player a hot dog. My head squeezes from brain freeze and something else. Something bittersweet.
“It is cool.”
MADELINE DELL MEMORIAL CONCESSION STAND. Named for Mom. It’s the first softball season without her. Last October, two months after Mom’s funeral, the director of the complex called Dad and asked us to meet him at the stand. There was a purple suede cloth over the sign, and Mr. Spitz pulled it off like a big reveal.
“Wow, Phil. I don’t know what to say,” Dad said. He cleared his throat and adjusted his Orioles hat. “Maddie would love it.”
“She was a staple here, Jonas. All you Dells are. With you helping out, Brooke playing, Calla watering our plants. We want to show our appreciation.”
Calla hadn’t looked away from the sign since Mr. Spitz had taken the cloth off.
“You named the hot dog shack after our mom?”
“Calla.” Dad shook his head.
“They serve more than hot dogs,” I added, because I didn’t know what else to say. There was a softball-sized lump in my throat. It was wrong to be at the fields in the fall, when everything was brown instead of green. It was even worse to be looking at something named in Mom’s memory. She wasn’t supposed to be a memory. She was supposed to be here.
Calla’s mouth dropped open, like she was horrified by what she’d said. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Spitz. It’s nice.”
It was just like Calla to apologize for having feelings. In that moment, looking at the silver sign with Mr. Spitz’s fingerprint smudged in the corner, I tried not to have feelings at all.
The fluorescent lights above us turn on, pouring a white glow over everything, over Robby out in left field. Short black braids pop out from under his cap. I watch him punch the inside of his glove a few times.
“Why didn’t Calla stay for Robby’s game?” Derek asks.
“Not sure.” I shrug. Derek studies my face.
“Want to tell me what was distracting you when you ran to third?”
“Not right now.” I take a breath. Something is going on with Calla, and I ran to the wrong base, and Mom’s concession stand sign makes my heart ache. But it’s hard to feel too bad while watching a baseball game under the swirly sundae sky. “We got to play our favorite game today, D.”
Derek smiles. He taps his empty slushie cup against my half-full one.
“That makes it a pretty good day, B.”
CHAPTER THREE GROUP PROJECTS
We’re learning about bugs in science class. Or insects, rather. I sit in the back corner of the classroom on Monday, staring at the huge praying mantis image projected onto the whiteboard. Its twiggy green body stretches across the whole thing. I scribble notes on the page in front of me. The paper looks like my Disaster Corner in the dugout, or my side of the bedroom that I share with Calla—an explosion. I wish my binder could always look like it does on the first day of school, all empty folders and blank notebook pages. But now, in April, it’s like a graveyard for old assignments and smudged doodles.
“These creatures are small, but don’t let that fool you,” Mrs. Valencia says. “Though they be but little, they be fierce.”
Mrs. Valencia likes red lipstick and quoting things. She presses a button on her remote, and the screen switches to a list of facts about the praying mantis. I copy the slide word for word in the last bit of space on the page. Mrs. Valencia’s tests are always pulled straight from her slides.
Kasey Maleski, the left fielder on the J&B Funeral Home Bashers, turns toward my desk.
“There’s a fact missing,” she whispers.
Aimi Tanaka, Coach’s daughter and the second-base player on the Lions, scoots closer. The legs of her desk scratch the carpet.
