“I dare them to sue me. I’ll flash them my student loan debt and say good luck.”
Sighing, I reply, “Please take it easy on them. We need to instill confidence in these kids, not break them down into emotional messes.”
“Breaking them down is how you build them back up.” Jerry winks at me.
“I’m serious.”
He rolls his eyes. “I know. Don’t worry, I won’t mow them down with my pitches, but I’m also not going to lob them in. These kids need to learn how to hit.”
Shane pats Jerry on the back. “That’s why we recruited Milly. If she can’t get these kids to hit, no one can.”
We break into our different sections, and I wait over by the tee with a bucket of balls and my practice bat so I can demonstrate techniques while teaching the kids at the same time. Finishing up their laps, I take in the bright blue sky and the cool breeze that picks up the freshly cut grass scent around us. Baseball season, my favorite season of all.
Growing up with three older brothers and a dad obsessed with baseball, I had no choice in the matter of what sport I liked to watch. They started me at a young age, taking me to every Chicago Bobcat game my parents could afford, decking me out in Bobcat gear, and sticking me in front of the TV whenever the game was on, listening to them analyze every swing, every pitch, and every catch.
I became addicted.
I spent my weekends driving from ballpark to ballpark with my parents, watching my brothers play, offering them my advice and encouragement. I soon became my brothers’ good luck charm and they started to fight over whose game I attended during the season. My parents got so sick of the bickering they finally wrote out a schedule of what games I attended based on importance.
I have what seems like hundreds of scorebooks stacked in my parents’ attic from watching my brothers play. Scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings, of pictures of them on the field, of their stats that I would print out and share with them. I was their own personal historian and coach when it came to their baseball careers. They all went to college on full-ride scholarships for baseball, but only one attended Brentwood, my oldest brother, Cory. He plays for the Baltimore Storm now, six years deep in a contract, playing first base, and absolutely killing it this season so far.
Rian and Sean, my other brothers, own a Division One training facility outside Chicago where they train athletes looking to move on to Division One programs. They focus on agility and power, working in heavy weightlifting and quick cardiovascular spurts to drive up the heart rate. Last year, they were named the best gym in the area and are now expanding to a second location. I couldn’t be prouder, and I also like to think I had a little piece in their success. Being hardcore baseball fans has benefitted all of us in some way over the years.
“Coach Milly, do I have to wear my batting gloves?” Dennis, the runt of the team, asks as he stumbles over to me, pants too big, and helmet covering his eyes.
I catch him right before he faceplants into the grass and squat to his level so I can help him with his helmet and pants.
“You don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to, Dennis.”
He holds up a hand where one of the gloves is on backward. The fingers are barely filled by his small hands, and the fingertips of the glove look like deflated balloons.
Oh Dennis.
“Were these your brother’s gloves?” He nods. “Well, they seem a little big, and they might get in the way rather than help you.”
“I thought so.” He takes the glove off and then smiles a toothless grin at me. “I can put them in my back pocket like the big leaguers. Like an asessory.”
“Do you mean accessory?”
“Yeah, like my mom has necklaces. I have batting gloves.” He turns around in a short circle for a moment, trying to reach his back pocket and when he does, he shoves the gloves inside, making his little butt very large on one side. “There. How do I look, Coach?”
I smile kindly at him. “Like a ballplayer.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
CARSON
“Thank fuck,” I answer, placing my EarPods in my ears. “I need to hear your voice.”
“You make it sound like we’re dating,” Knox says, on the other end of the phone.
I huddle in the corner of the dining hall, waiting for my teammates to show up. Because of my show of unsportsmanlike conduct on the field yesterday, Coach Disik suspended me from practice today and is benching me for the next game as well. Just what I fucking need when I’m trying to enter into the draft at the end of the season.
I’m already behind thanks to my injury, add to it my shitty performance on the field, and now warming the wood in the dugout, I’m never going to make it to the big leagues.
“We are dating. We’ve been dating since freshman year,” I say.
“When you say shit like that, it makes our relationship seem weird.”
“Hey, I warned you I was clingy when we first met. It’s not my fault you let me into your world. How’s your mom by the way? I miss Mama G this season and watching her tits bounce up and down in the stands.”
“I will murder you.”
I laugh, feeling a small sense of relief talking to one of my best friends on the phone after the stress I’ve been carrying.
Not only did I miss out on being drafted last season, but because my two best friends, Holt and Knox, were drafted, they left me with all the underclassmen, making me the only fucking senior on the team.
If you’ve been counting, that’s number two hundred sixty-two when it comes to swift kicks to the crotch when it comes to my luck.
Luckily, there are a few guys I’ve been able to lean on this year, Jason Orson being a big one since we share a wall in the loft.
And for the record, he thinks Badcock’s story about tripping is a crock of shit. He was one of the guys in the dugout and saw the sheer force and speed he was running at. Badcock had one thing on his mind: destroy Carson Stone.
I begrudgingly allow him access to the baseball loft, as the weasel head has convinced some teammates what he did was accidental. But he’ll never make it past door duty while I’m here. Maybe he’ll consider his actions next time before he goes and snaps another man’s Achilles tendon.
Poking fun at my love for Knox’s mom is one of my favorite things to do so I say, “She sent me Oreo brownies a few weeks ago, and I pictured her while eating them.”
“I’m about to hang up.”
Laughing harder, I stop him before he hangs up—he’s done it before and refuses to answer the phone when I call him back . . . multiple times. “Coach benched me.”
Silence.
I check the screen to make sure he actually didn’t hang up on me. “What? Why?”
Slinking against the brick wall, I ask, “Do you want the real reason or the ‘for show’ reason.”
“Start with the ‘for show’ reason.”
“I struck out three times in one game yesterday, lost my cool, slammed my bat to the ground, tossed my helmet toward the dugout, and screamed ‘fuck’.”
Chuckling, Knox says, “Yeah, that will get you benched.”
“But he also benched me from practice and the next game.”