The lady with the pink bow gave me a satisfied nod. “Good timing.”
“The best.” My smile practically touched my ears.
“Nice of you to be there with the assist,” she said to Eric.
He blushed, which was cute enough to make me forget my earlier annoyance with him. Besides, he had kept me from face-planting on the jumbotron. “She made a great catch.”
Mom passed the ball over to me so I could let Eric get a closer look. He took a selfie with it, the field behind him, and handed it back to me. Then I took a similar selfie and handed it back to Mom so I could get a shot of the two of us and the ball.
The lady with the pink bow raised her phone and sort of pointed it toward me, but when I caught her eye, she quickly lowered it and whispered to the man next to her. Weird. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up for a second, but she was probably just taking a picture of the players on the field, like everyone else. I dismissed that feeling as adrenaline, and I turned back to my mom.
This would definitely be a day we’d remember forever.
CHAPTER
TWO
THE NEXT DAY, AFTER I rolled out of bed and got ready for work, I curled up on the sagging recliner in the living room. We had a couch and a love seat in pristine condition, but because Gram refused to take the plastic off, I never wanted to sit on them. I unlocked my phone to check my YouTube channel. My latest upload had five thousand views. Not bad. I was already set to outpace my John Hughes/Molly Ringwald video, and if I could hit a hundred thousand, maybe I’d be able to buy more fabric instead of relying on leftovers from the Bees.
I counted my Goodbye Honeyfield stash this morning, the bills I kept carefully tucked in my underwear drawer next to the package of condoms I sadly hadn’t needed to open in months. I only had a few hundred dollars, and it had taken me nearly a year to save that. The Royals game bit into my savings, but if my viewership kept growing at this rate, I’d be able to put away a little more than fifty dollars a month.
At first, I’d wanted to go to LA, to get as close as I could to the movies, but that felt too far away. I still wanted to visit Mom and Gram whenever I had a full tank of gas, so my plans shifted to Chicago. Eventually I wanted to expand my YouTube channel into live coverage of independent film festivals along with reviews, and Chicago had dozens of festivals every year. Not to mention, thousands of jobs that paid more than minimum wage. Just looking through Indeed had my fingers itching to apply. Not yet though. I promised myself I’d stay in Honeyfield a full year after graduation to save money. I’d start my new life off right, which included being able to afford a roof over my head.
After we got home from the game, I spent some time in my room sketching baseball jerseys. No White Sox, definitely no Tigers, but I could do baseball movies as a theme. Maybe all the reasons why A League of Their Own was the superior movie, even if it went out of its way to hide the queer history behind the true story. Part of me wanted to rush it, just throw something together and put it up while the nineties rom-coms had so much traction, but that wouldn’t help my long game. Quality over quantity.
I had a magic number I wanted to hit. A million views. Then I’d feel legit, like I’d actually made it. When I hit a million, I’d do my Say Anything review. I was holding on to it because it meant the most. It had started everything.
A lot of people thought Say Anything was just a romance movie from the eighties, but it was so much more than that. It was about a girl named Diane Court who’d been sheltered by her father, had her life planned out for her, until she met a guy named Lloyd Dobler, who had nothing planned. He showed her what it felt like to be free, while she showed him what it meant to have a future. They worked because they gave each other something the other needed.
While most kids got the Talk in middle school, Gram and Mom sat me down to watch Say Anything, and when it was over, they talked to me not just about condoms and consent (though they’d covered those, too), but about female sexuality in general. How cis-men would try to control it or shame us for it or shove us into boxes where we couldn’t be smart and funny and sexual all at the same time. They made sure I knew that who I wanted to be was my choice, not the choice of a man who marked boxes for me. I grew up watching eighties and nineties movies because they were Mom and Gram’s common ground. They disagreed on nearly everything, except movies and the kinds of messages they sent to girls.
While I’d found the entire thing mortifying back then, it was also the first time I really understood that movies were magic. Not special effects and explosions, but they could speak to your soul, start conversations, reflect the things you needed to say. It was the whole reason why I’d started doing reviews. To dig into what others considered mindless entertainment, and pull out those nuggets of truth. To look at the way people connected to certain stories in a way that made us real and human. It was all I ever wanted to do for the rest of my life.
“Morning.” Mom drifted down the hall, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
“Someone call a reporter,” I said. “Gracie Evans, sleeping past nine. Which means pigs are taking flight and they’re building an ice rink in Hell as we speak.”
“Har.” She ran a hand over my hair, which had started to resemble an unruly dandelion once the summer humidity hit. “I like Charlie’s new look.”
Charlie, the ceramic parrot Gram had won on Wheel of Fortune in 1984, back when there was still a shopping round, sat directly in front of the window, his place of honor since Gram had brought him home before Mom was even born. I’d put the KC hat on him. Sometimes he wore Santa hats or Uncle Sam hats, and I figured catching a fly ball was as good as a holiday.
“We should make a Royals outfit for one of the Vannas,” I said.
Mom stuck out her tongue. “Now you’re going too far.”
The Vannas were Gram’s collection of Vanna White dolls. She displayed them above the fireplace, and other than the light layer of nicotine-stained dust, they remained in their boxes and in mint condition. They gave me nightmares as a child.
I followed Mom into the kitchen, where Gram and Peg had their quilting patterns spread out on the dining room table. It was that time of year again.
“You two got in late last night,” Gram said. “How was the game?”
“I’m still wondering how I got so lucky in the daughter department. Macy caught a fly ball.” Mom gave me a knowing look over her coffee mug. “And a boy.”
“What’s this about a boy?” Gram lit a cigarette and fixed her steely gaze on me. She barely cleared five feet but had a way of making everyone else around her feel smaller.
“It’s nothing.” I shot Mom the stink eye. “I didn’t even get his number.”
“For Heaven’s sake, why not?” Peg crossed her arms. She lived down the street, but ever since Gramps died, she spent all her time here. She’d probably move in if we had an extra room to spare. “This is what we old people mean when we say youth is wasted on the young.”
Desperate for a subject change, I picked up one of the quilting patterns. “What are the Bees thinking their theme will be this year?”
“We’re debating that now,” Gram said. “Peg doesn’t like First Love.”