Class A by Lucas Mann Page B

about Betty, about Tammy, and all the lost or not-so-lost people whose lives revolve around each new season? They are the ones who look at somebody hard enough until a player becomes what they need him to be. They make the fantasy.
    For nearly a month, I vacated the batting cage during Nick’s personal practice time, adhering to an unspoken rule. There’s something about his eyes when he doesn’t want you there. Nothing cruel or aggressive, but worse, disinterested. Bored by you. You are slowing him down, standing there being boring.
    When I finally joined him, he didn’t look at me. He took a swing at the tee he’d set up, watched the ball push through the mesh at the back of the cage, watched it hit the cinder-block wall, watched the red laces fray and spin off it like a blood spurt. He leaned his weight on his bat, glanced finally in my direction but over me. He smiled.
    “So,” he said. “You came for a look.”
    It wasn’t a question. And he was right.
    He kept on hitting until his bucket was empty. He spoke to himself in whispers after each swing, a common habit of his, reanimating the words that his father had spoken to him throughout Nick’s whole, short lifetime. A staccato code.
    When he finished, he was happy with the day’s output. He felt like talking, and I was there. He told me that this place—the field and the town, too—was like high school, which was a good thing. High school was fun. And here it was like being in the hallways, leaning against a locker with your girlfriend, not really knowing the people around you, but knowing who was who, kind of, recognizing faces as they recognized you. It has always been this way. Nick Franklin has never not had something to do. If people wanted to look in at him, they could. But how could he be expected to look back?
    He went silent for a moment, and it was my cue to do the same. I wanted to ask him how somebody who made himself so sought aftercould want so much to be alone. But that would remind him that there was company, and he would turn off, giving one-word answers behind plastic smiles until I left and no longer felt special through proximity. I have, after all, watched his face during team batting practice, with his coaches in his ear, doing the jobs for which they have nearly a century of combined experience, pretending that they don’t notice how little this kid listens and how little that lack of listening affects his performance. He nods just to mark the beginning and the end of their voices, the point at which he can return to himself. Then they stand and watch him swing, listen to the sound of the ball on his bat. They make eyes at each other, each planning the story he will be telling soon, that of a skinny kid whom they helped make, just as I will tell people that we became fast friends, that sometimes I put my hand on his shoulder and sometimes he put his on mine. Nick is right. This is high school. And he is that girl that you love forever because she won’t remember your name.
    I was numb-assed and daydreaming about high-school embarrassments on my overturned bucket when Nick attacked. He left the cage, tossed his bat aside, saw me open and vulnerable. He sprang. He snaked his right arm around my shoulder blades and pushed into my chest with his left. He tipped me back, as if we were dancing and I were the woman. I felt the coarse lines of muscle that ran across his arms, so much of it in such a wiry frame, but probably not as much as I let myself feel. I looked up at him, saw no strain in his face, just a slight smile as he looked past me at the floor.
    He held me there.
    I heard my breathing, loud and labored compared with his.
    “What would you do,” he said, “if I felt like dropping you?”
    It wasn’t a taunting tone of voice, or angry in any way, just flat.
    “For real,” he said. “What would you do?”
    I would do nothing to him. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
    And I said it. “Nothing,” I said, and I heard my voice