Fanfare (Country Roads #2) - Chapter 15

The rest of the day I thought about Rowan’s suggestions, but between training with Chef, practicing with Willie, homework, and working with Hanna to come up with some kind of plan to help Kat.

On the Kat front, we were having no luck. We went through women's support groups, forums, and chat boards for victims and survivors of abuse and help columns, but all of their advice boiled down to ‘tell someone if you’re in trouble.’ Someone had to have faced a similar situation, where their abuser was well connected enough in the community to make it difficult to report, or at least find anyone that would believe the report, but we couldn’t find anyone talking about it. Maybe people who were that trapped and managed to get out just didn’t want to talk about it.

Kat, for her part, had settled back in denial, mostly just banking on her father’s next trip, which was coming up soon. I guess if he was gone she could just pretend it wasn’t happening, and we didn’t dare bring it up with her and break that illusion and damage her mental health any more than it already was.

We agreed to keep looking, but I felt a little hopeless. At this point, it seemed more likely she’d hit her eighteenth birthday before we stumbled on a viable way to get the abuse to stop.

Besides, even with the worries about Kat’s safety, our worlds kept spinning. Hanna was waiting for responses to college and trying to get through the last semester of school and while I wasn’t struggling in my classes anymore, they were still a lot of work, aside from all of my other commitments.

One more curveball got added to the pile when I sat down at lunch the next day, just as Jordan leapt into a tirade.

“I can’t fucking believe her. You’d think after that dumb shit she pulled before Christmas, she would have learned her lesson. I swear to God I’m ready to write her off.”

“I’m guessing you’re talking about Rhonda?” I asked.

“Yes. Can you fucking believe it?”

“I’d say no, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“She started dating Harry Torres this weekend at a party celebrating their win,” Megan said. “I heard they got together at Karen Brooks’ house, upstairs in her parents’ room.”

“A rumor probably started by Harry himself,” I said. “Have you talked to her about it?”

“I tried, but she told me to mind my own business. Like I said, I’m washing my fucking hands.”

“It might be different this time. I mean, it’s still insane that she’s with Harry, but she’s different than she was a few months ago. I think she did learn a lesson from how easily she got ostracized by her friends, although not the one we’d have hoped she’d learned. The last time I talked to her, she seemed determined to set herself up to be queen bee her senior year, and even next year if she could manage it. She was a lot more calculating.”

“I know, it’s like she’s a completely different person. I mean, she’s always been shallow, although I thought she might break out of it while she was dating you. Now, though, she’s become the classic mean girl. Spreading rumors about her enemies, playing little mind games with everyone around her.”

“It’s working for her. She got her friend group, minus Camille whose set herself up as Rhonda’s rival and she managed to squash all of the rumors about her.”

“Maybe, but once she’s out of high school she’s going to find it doesn’t mean shit. My mom is ready to ship her off to whatever the girl version of military school is. She came home hammered on Saturday night. Harry basically dropped her off on our doorstep and took off before anyone could talk to him. I’ve been trying to convince Mom she’s in trouble, but Mom hasn’t believed me until now. I’m ready to give up on her.”

“Like you said, she’ll realize all this stuff doesn’t last once she’s out of high school. You’ll be gone next year anyway. By the time you’re done with college, she’ll either have crashed and burned or turned things around. Instead of giving up on her, maybe just wait it out. Ignore her and live your life in college and see what happens when she’s out of school.”

“Don’t they always become sorority girls with their weird culty chants?” Fatima said.

I’d never figured out why, but Fatima hated sororities while being simultaneously obsessed with them. I think she’d watched too much TV, since her parents would have never let her within a mile of one. They’d determined from birth she’d be a doctor, and would probably rather see her in the ground than drunk at frat parties. Or at least that’s the impression I got.

“If it happens, it happens. Your sister is going to be whoever she wants to be. Hopefully, she’ll figure out she’s going the wrong way before things go bad again, but maybe she needs to hit bottom before she realizes she’s making a mistake.”

“I will never understand why you keep defending her no matter what she’s done,” Jordan said. “She screwed you over so hard.”

“Because inside she’s a good person. I know you’ve seen it, you’re just angry at her. Figuring out who you are sucks, and some people make the wrong decisions. Yeah, she may be a pain right now, but she hasn’t done anything worth burning bridges over.”

“I guess,” Jordan said, grumpily.

I was pretty sure it was an act. She loved her sister, despite Rhonda’s bad decisions. She just needed someone to validate her feelings.

That night we had another game, which thankfully went much better than our first game. The team we played was better than our last opponent so while we still won, the margins were still pretty close, ending with a four-five. I felt pretty good about my performance, which was solid although a little overshadowed by Percy Barker who batted right before me and hit a home run with one on base in the fourth inning.

I got one RBI on a stand-up triple late in the sixth when I hit a rope, down the right-field foul line that their fielder, who probably thought it was going to bounce out, got a late start on. I also made a good catch in the third that I was really proud of. They had runners on second and third and when the batter looked to have found the gap between our center and left fielder. Even though it looked like it was going to be out of reach, I leapt for it and managed to get the very tip of my glove on it and pulled it down, closing out the side and leaving their runners stranded.

My hitting was coming along well. I wasn’t knocking every pitch out of the park, but I managed a .667 batting average in the game, getting on base two out of the three times I went up. In practice over the last few weeks, Coach Cooper had decided that I needed to focus on putting the ball where I wanted it to go, since I was hitting most of the stuff they threw at me pretty regularly in practice.

He’d walked me through the basic idea of how and why a baseball reacted after a hit. There were a lot of variables that decided where a ball went, some of them outside of the hitters’ control like the amount and type of rotation a pitcher put on the ball, but it was possible for a hitter to have some ability to direct their ball if they accounted for the things that were in their control. He pointed out that even if I did everything right, sometimes the ball just wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do but that I also needed to remember that baseball was a game of averages. What mattered was how many times I was able to put the ball where I wanted, not individual moments when I accidentally hit a fly ball right to the outfielder.

The two biggest things I could adjust for when hitting are where in relation to my hitting stance the ball was coming to me and where I hit it. In general, balls hit dead on with the center of the barrel, which is the fattest part of the bat, at the apex of the swing will go straight away from you towards the pitcher. If the ball is hit with the upper part of the barrel, it will tend towards popping up and with the lower part of the barrel towards the tapper, which is the thin middle part of the bat, it will tend towards a grounder.

As a right-hander, if I hit a ball early in my swing, when it’s closer to me, it would go towards right field, and late it would pull off towards left field, because of the angle the bat is at when I make contact. Some pitches also made it more or less likely that a ball will be a fly ball or not, with balls that break downwards tending towards grounders more than balls that didn’t break downwards.

When he first started explaining it, I thought there was no way I could work out all of the variables and be able to adjust for them in time to actually make any difference, but he said it was all about practicing. If I took enough swings, I’d eventually get a sense for where to hit the ball, so I spent a good amount of time in the batting cages every day, making small corrections as I shanked balls in the wrong direction.

I still wasn’t good at it, and the ball that went down the right-field line I’d been trying to put between the right and center fielders, but I had managed to make a couple go where I wanted them to go. The hardest thing was to just stop thinking about it and react. I knew it was possible, since it’s what I did when I played guitar. After I learned a song and had the muscle memory down, I didn’t really think about notes anymore. My fingers just did what they needed to do. I was pretty sure the same was true of hitting a baseball. I just needed to build the muscle memory.

David hadn’t played this game, but he’d hung out with me on the bench when I wasn’t up. All week he’d been asking me if I’d talked to Kat, and I’d been mostly dodging the question, partly because I was a coward and didn’t want to tell him she said no, but also because she had enough going on and I didn’t want him deciding to make a play for her after all.

“Seriously dude, why haven’t you talked to her yet?” he asked when we sat down in the sixth inning. I was almost certainly not going to need to bat this inning, since it was starting with the seventh player in our lineup.

He sounded annoyed, which probably meant I’d used up all of my options for delaying him without him just going to ask her out himself. Given Kat’s reaction when I’d brought it up, I was just as worried about how he’d feel if she said no the same way as she’d said it when I’d asked for him.

“Sorry, Man. She said she wasn’t interested.”

“Really? Maybe it was because I had you ask? Maybe she thought it was too high school.”

“I mean, we are in high school, but no. I don’t think she’s interested, but I don’t think you remember how bad you barfed all over the field while she was watching. As first impressions go, that wasn’t great.”

“That wasn’t her first impression of me. We went to eat before the game, remember?”

“I do. You were shoveling food down your throat so fast I thought you might choke.”

“I was?”

“Yeah. I mean, some girls might find that a turn on, but I don’t think you did yourself any favors.”

“Really? That sucks. She’s cute.”

“She also has a bunch of stuff going on. Honestly, I don’t think it has anything to do with you personally. After dating Aaron, I think most girls would need a break, you know?”

“Yeah, he is kind of a tool. All right. Thanks for asking, though.”

“No problem.”

He paused a second and then asked, “Do you think a lot of people know about the barfing thing?”

“Someone from our school threw up on the field? Yeah, people know about it.”

He dropped his head, defeated. I don’t think he realized until that moment how bad a look that had been for him.

“Don’t worry,” I said, thumping him on the shoulder. “This is high school. The gossip’s already moved on to the next two poor souls. Give it another month and hardly anyone will remember that it happened.”

“You think?”

“Sure. Well, maybe not people who were there. It was really gross.”

“Screw you, Nelson,” he said, laughing.

I was in a good mood as we headed back to the locker room. Now that we weren’t screwing up so bad, it felt like I remembered a baseball game feeling, just with more people watching. With my track record, I should have expected something shitty to happen right about then, since the universe seemed determined to keep me from getting too comfortable.

Walking into the locker room, I found my lock missing along with most of the stuff I had in the locker. The stuff that wasn’t missing, mostly what had been in my backpack was strewn all over the ground in front of the locker. I stood there, fuming, while everyone tried to look away, not wanting to get involved with whatever had happened. To his credit, David got down on his knees and helped me scoop up all of my notes and homework, some of which I’d have to rewrite, since a bunch of the pages had muddy footprints on them.

“Down on your knees, just where you like it,” Harry’s voice came from behind me.

I shot to my feet and took two steps towards him when he held his hands up, “Hey, I didn’t have anything to do with it, just saying you looked pretty comfortable down there.”

“That’s some bullshit. Everyone knows this was you.”

“Are you sure? You’ve been acting all big around here this year, thinking you’re special because some broke down old chink let you play in his bar. Maybe someone decided you needed to find out how much of a nothing you really are.”

“Maybe I should decide to find out how you look when I beat the shit out of you.”

“Big man. You like to talk a lot, but I don’t see you taking any swings, but go ahead. After Aaron’s dad finished taking what little money your family has I can see if mine can take your car and trailer. It’ll be hard to become a big shot when you’re family’s living under a bridge.”

I knew I should back down. Chef would tell me I have a responsibility to use what I learned only for defense. After the thing with Aaron, he’d lectured me several times on responsibility being one of the tenets of Kung Fu and how one of the meanings was to be responsible using the things that those who came before me had passed down. While Harry had almost certainly stolen my clothes and emptied my backpack on the ground, he wasn’t a danger to me at the moment, so I didn’t have anything to defend myself from.

Mr. Eaves would tell me that one court case at a time was all I could handle, and this time I’d be the aggressor and he’d have plenty of witnesses to swear that I’d thrown the first punch. I doubted we’d get lucky enough to have someone defend me for free the next time.

Knowing all of that, I still took another step, ready to beat the shit out of him. It was only Coach Dean’s voice calling out from behind me that pulled me to a stop.

“Torrez! Nelson! What’s going on here?”

“Harry broke into my locker and stole my clothes. I was about to make him tell me what he did with them.”

“I didn’t touch his clothes,” Harry said.

Coach didn’t even bother asking anyone else. The locker room had started emptying the second he yelled our names and the players who were still here were working very hard to pretend they didn’t even see us.

“Torres, you’re not playing today, so you have no reason to be here. Go home or end up in detention. Nelson, come with me.”

I glared at Harry, but it wasn’t like there’d been anything I could have done about it. We would have been playing and he would have made sure there were no witnesses.

“Coach, I’m telling you Harry did it.”

“That may be, but there’s nothing I can do about it without a witness. Was there anything expensive in your locker?”

I didn’t own anything expensive except for my guitar, but I also didn’t own a lot of inexpensive stuff either. What I did own I didn’t need someone like Harry taking.

My wallet was still in the front pocket of my backpack and the couple of bucks that had been in it was still there. Harry had been trying to embarrass me, not actually steal anything.

“No, Sir.”

“Okay. You have your uniform, so you can at least make it home. I’ll make sure someone’s keeping an eye on the locker room for future games, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks, Coach.”

I knew he had a job to do and he was being as fair as he could, but that didn’t make me any less pissed. David was still standing by my open locker holding my backpack when I got back. Most of the team had cleared out as quickly as they could. I didn’t really blame them. There was no reason to open themselves up to Harry’s hazing if they didn’t need to.

“Thanks, Man.”

“Do you want to look around for your clothes? He didn’t have them on him and he didn’t leave so they’re around here somewhere.”

“They could be anywhere. What’s the fucking point?”

“Sure, but what would it hurt to look for them?”

“You’re right. Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.”

“Hey, no problem. You’re keeping your shit together better than I could. I would have laid Harry out and gotten kicked off the team if he’d pulled this kind of thing on me.”

I hadn’t even considered that Coach Dean would have been forced to take me off the team if I attacked another member, even if provoked. The code of conduct we’d all signed when we’d joined had been pretty clear on that.

We looked around the locker room for a while, checking in team equipment bags, hamper for dirty towels and trash cans, and found nothing. For a second I considered asking Coach Dean to let us in Harry’s locker, since he could have hidden them there, but it was unlikely that Coach would consent to us cutting off his lock. Besides, Harry was an idiot, but even he wasn’t dumb enough to leave incriminating evidence in his own locker.

Finally, we gave up on the locker room and decided to head outside, since there were a lot more options of places to throw it out there.

“Where have you been?” Hanna, who was my ride home, asked when I left the locker room. “Why are you still in your uniform?”

I kicked myself for forgetting to come out and tell her what was happening or asking David to go do it. If I’d been in her place, I would have been pissed too. It had been almost thirty minutes since we left the field, most of which she would have spent waiting out here for me.

“Harry broke into my locker, trashed my school bag, and stole my clothes. Sorry, I was so pissed I didn’t even think to come out and tell you. We were looking through the locker room trying to find where he hid it. I’m really sorry.”

To her credit, her attitude switched instantly. It really spoke volumes about how good of a friend she was.

“Really? Ohh, man, that sucks. Do you want help looking for them?”

“Yeah. We think he ditched them somewhere nearby, cause he didn’t have them on him when I got in there.”

“Did he at least get busted?”

“There weren’t any witnesses, so there wasn’t much Coach could do.”

“Damn. Where do you want to look?”

“How about I check around the side of the building by the loading docks,” David said. “Hanna, you check the parking lot. Maybe he ditched them under a car. Charlie, you check along the building. All those bushes and stuff would make a good place to hide them.”

“Okay,” I said.

I spent another ten minutes trying to step through the bushes to look behind them, since I couldn’t see anything when I got on my hands and knees. The branches were hard and sharp and baseball pants didn’t offer nearly the same protection as jeans, so it took a lot longer than it should have. I wasn’t so much worried about getting scratched up, but we had to buy our uniforms and they were pretty expensive, at least to me. I didn’t’ want to explain to Mom I had to get a new pair because I’d ripped up the pair I had.

I was about halfway down the building when I heard David yelling my name. I pulled myself out of the bush I’d half climbed over when he came jogging up, holding my clothes.

“You found them, gre… holy shit. What’s that smell?”

My clothes were covered in bits of stuff, some of which looked gelatinous and slimy, and smelled almost like vomit.

“They were in the dumpster by the loading dock, right where the gym meets the cafeteria. I think it’s where they throw out old food and grease and stuff. You can probably wash it out.”

“I hope so,” I said, taking my pants, shoes, and shirt as gingerly as possible, trying to touch them as little as I could.

The clothes shouldn’t be a problem, but this was my only pair of shoes, and they were funky. I’d have to hose them down outside and hope they air-dried enough before I had to go to school the next day.

We found Hanna, who made me put my clothes in an empty plastic bag she had in her car, to keep them from touching anything. I’d gotten my clothes back, so I guess it could be worse, but it wasn’t a great way to end my second game.