Stepping Up to the Plate

Stepping Up to the Plate By J.M. Snyder Every strike brings me closer to the next home run. —Babe Ruth Chapter 1 From third grade on, Stacy Evans spent more time in the principal’s office than most other students—for fighting in the halls and talking back to teachers, forgetting his homework, cheating once on a test. Only once, because most of the time he didn’t care much if he passed or failed. School bored him. Early on in high school there was the jv baseball team to keep him busy—he made the cut his freshman year, he had a damn good pitching arm and wasn’t too bad with the bat, either—but too many detentions after school kept him away from practice and he wasn’t picked for varsity. He told himself he didn’t care. He never considered himself a jock. He spent too much time in trouble to be the school’s all-star player. His sophomore year at Petersburg High that title belonged to Rick Major, a preppy kid with skin the color of polished ebony. Stacy hated him. In the eyes of the teachers, Rick could do no wrong, but when the coach was out of earshot, he and his buddies used to corner Stacy in the locker room after a game. “Yo Stay-see,” Rick would say, his deep voice creeping up an octave or two. With his back to the guys, Stacy would hunch his shoulders and duck his head so they couldn’t see the color rising in his cheeks or his lower lip, bloodless, caught between his teeth. He yanked up his pants so hard, the seam cut into his crotch. His hands shook as he buttoned the fly. Behind him the other guys laughed, following Rick’s lead. It was after the last jv game of the season when Rick stepped over the bench to lean against the locker beside Stacy’s. His wide eyes looked shocked, so white against his dark skin. “Stace,” he purred, in that ‘listen to me’ voice teenaged boys seem to have perfected. Stacy ignored him, concentrating instead on getting his uniform into his bag and himself away from the guys who circled him. Rick tried again. “Stacy. I know you hear me. I’m standing right up on you.” On cue, the guys laughed. Stacy felt his face burn, his eyes sting. Reaching into his locker, he snagged his baseball cap and tugged it over his sandy hair, damp with sweat. Two weeks’ prior at an away game Rick pulled something similar, egging him on, in the team bus that time, and Stacy’s temper landed him in-school suspension for three days after the fight. He wasn’t falling for that s**t, not again. He started to shut his locker but Rick stopped it with one foot. Closing his eyes, Stacy took a deep breath. Oh no you didn’t—“Leave me alone.” The laughter was gone. Stacy felt a dozen hot stares on his back, heard the first whisper from somewhere on the other side of the lockers, “Fight.” The whole team was waiting for his reaction, watching him…all except the coach, who had an uncanny knack for looking the other way on these locker room scuffles whenever his boy-star was involved. “Or what?” Rick wanted to know. A giggle punctuated his words, someone thought this was too damn funny to hold back. Gang up on Stacy, he had piss-poor grades and his momma couldn’t be bothered to rag on the coach about the way her son was treated by his teammates. One of the few kids at Petersburg who wasn’t black or Latino or in some way mixed but straight up Caucasian, tanned from the sun but still white. One of the shop boys who tended to kick it up, even dared to call Principal Harold Dugan ‘Dirty Harry’ to his face. Who would care if they picked on him? Rick leaned closer and Stacy could smell chewing gum on his breath. “Hey Stacy.” His low voice carried surprisingly well in the quiet locker room. Somewhere far away Stacy could hear the drip of water in the showers. Someone slammed a locker, someone else hissed, “Shh.” Rick had them enthralled, every one. Stacy wished he could disappear. With the quick reflexes that made him such a valuable player, Rick snatched the cap from Stacy’s head. Before Stacy could react, Rick jammed it onto his own head, hiding his tight curls. Taking a step back, his wide lips spread into a dazzling grin. “Funny how your momma gave you a girl’s name,” Rick said as he straightened Stacy’s cap, “when you don’t even like chicks. Was it just a lucky guess? Or did she know you’d be a fag?” Their laughter smothered Stacy. A familiar anger surged through his veins, sizzling his blood, short-circuiting his brain. Without thinking, he threw himself at Rick and barreled into the other boy. Stacy’s shoulder caught him low in the chest, knocking out Rick’s breath in a great whoosh, and they both fell to the floor. Stacy’s fists pummeled Rick’s stomach with a fury of blows. Around them a chant started up, fight fight—Stacy timed his jabs to the rhythm of the crowd. Sweat as bright as blood stood out on Rick’s upper lip. His arms flailed around Stacy’s head, trying to knock him back, but Stacy was too close and digging in further with each hit. One fist struck Stacy in the neck, the next glanced off his cheek, then fingers plunged into his hair, tugging his head back. A low growl escaped him as he gnashed his teeth at Rick’s arm, trying to get free— Suddenly uncompromising hands hauled him up. He struggled against them, bucking as his arms were pinned behind his back. The coach had him, Stacy knew it because the old man was the only one who could hold him—anyone his own age he tore through easily enough. Still, he strained at the hands cuffing his, even when the coach yelled out, “Break it up, Evans.” “He started it—” Stacy began. The coach jerked his arms to silence him. “Major,” he hollered down at Rick, still lying on the floor, “get up, son. What the hell’s going on here?” Stacy glared at his cap still crammed down on Rick’s head as his teammate stood and ran a shaky hand across his mouth. He frowned at the sweat glistening in his palm, as if annoyed he wasn’t bleeding. “Major?” the coach asked, his voice impossibly loud in Stacy’s ear. When he moved towards Rick, he pulled Stacy’s arms a little bit further up his back, and pain shot through his elbows where they bent. “Someone tell me what this is all about.” Stacy tried again. “I said he started it—” The coach gave another hard tug on his arms. “Let me be the judge of that,” he muttered, which meant he’d believe any line Rick fed him and Stacy would get suspended. Again. * * * * A week that time, right at exams. He spent long days in the detention room, a tiny cell tucked away down a forgotten corridor off the auditorium. The only students who came down that far were either troublemakers like Stacy himself or members of the drama club. Through the sky blue walls Stacy could hear the annoying plink plink plunk of the piano on stage as the club rehearsed an upcoming show. He stared at the walls as he leaned back in his chair and tapped his pencil on the desk in front of him. His Scantron answer sheet was unused, his exam paper unopened, as he listened to the piano. Every so often it’d stop, the notes faltering, as whoever sang screwed up the scene, but then the music would start again, from the beginning, the same tune all over. This is what hell would be like, Stacy was quite sure—a nondescript room in the bowels of the earth surrounded by the mindless scritch of other students’ pencils, the faint turning of the teacher’s magazine page, and the eternal accompaniment of a distant song that never made it past the first verse. He wasn’t doing his exam, he decided. He was sick of playing this s**t, he wanted out. The Thursday coming up he turned sixteen, and for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine spending his birthday holed up in that hellish room. Before the final bell rang on Wednesday afternoon, he’d decided that he simply wouldn’t go to school the next day. Cal Jones, Stacy’s step-dad, left for work in the morning at 6:30, a whole half hour before Stacy had to be at the bus stop. Cal was an ass and if he even suspected that Stacy might want to play hooky, he’d hang around the house just to make sure the bus picked him up. So on his birthday he kept in his room, out of sight, and waited until he heard the front door slam shut. Outside the car started, the engine revved, oily backfire belching into the early morn. When the wheels spun over gravel, Stacy began to get dressed—by the time they squealed out of range, he was already creeping through the house, careful not to wake up his mom. She worked double shifts, retail all afternoon and waiting tables at night, and she was a light sleeper. Most days she heard him rummaging around in the kitchen for something to eat, no matter how quiet he tried to be, and she’d pad barefoot into the doorway, hair disheveled, eyes puffy with sleep. “Stace?” she’d murmur, rubbing at her face. “What time is it?” “Go back to sleep, Momma,” he would say. He didn’t look at her at these times, when she looked too much like the young girl she must have been before he came along and not his mother at all. Instead he’d concentrate on making his lunch—a sandwich, some chips, a soda if there were any in the fridge—and sooner or later she’d leave him to find her way back to her room.