Skyler
I need this to be the last pitch I throw for the rest of the scrimmage. On a regular day, I’d strike Carter out no problem. She always swings a half second too late. But today, my fingers and wrists have turned against me. My best friend, Paige, our catcher, signals to throw a change-up—my least painful pitch. I cringe. She knows. But I’ll worry about that later.
I wind up, attempt to lock the pain away where I can’t feel it, and send the change-up flying.
Carter gets a piece of it, and it pops up up up. It’s gonna be a foul, I can tell, but she’s already tearing toward first, because you don’t wait around to see. And then the ball is coming down, and Paige is rushing to get underneath it. I close my eyes. If she catches it, the inning is over. I hear the thump of the ball in her glove. Thank. Goodness. I run over to her, screaming some unintelligible softball raving. Our first rec league scrimmage is finally over. She claps me on the back on the way to the dugout.
“You okay?” she asks as we slump onto the grass with our water bottles.
I nod. I’m always okay.
The doctor says it’s senseless to fight my pain. That I have to listen to it.
Which kind of goes against everything I know about softball. Daddy taught me and my sister, Scarlett, how to play when we were five. I remember Scarlett throwing the ball down after about two minutes and saying, “This is boring.” But I threw it back, hard as I could, and you should have seen the way my dad looked at me. He grinned and said, “You’ve got an arm, kiddo.”
I was used to my sister getting all the attention, usually by any means necessary. I threw the ball back to my dad even harder.
Today, my hands couldn’t hurt more if someone ran them over with a truck and lit them on fire. But none of the girls seem to notice (well, except Paige, who is totally looking at me with question-mark eyes). I want to keep it that way, so I paste on a grin and skip over to Emmeline.
“You killed it today, girl!” I bump my hip against hers.
“Thanks.” She blushes. The freshmen, they are big on blushing.
“Just, like, keep waiting for your pitches, and you’re going to crush it this summer.”
“Awesome. I will! Hey, you’re pitching next game, right?”
“Uh . . .” My smile falters. “Well, my hands have been bothering me a bit, so I don’t know . . .”
All the girls—all my favorite girls from years and years and years of playing rec softball together—start pressing in on me and talking all at once.
“Sky, you have to!”
“We can’t win without you!”
“You said that last practice too, but you always push through, don’t worry!”
“Yeah, and even if you have to sit out a few games, you can be like our mascot!”
Is that what I am now? I don’t want the girls to see how that makes me feel, so I plaster on an even bigger smile and say, “Totally. Her-ricanes for life.”
And then they’re cheering and dancing and yelling around me, and it feels wonderful. But also like it’s going to be the thing that breaks me.
I remember a game a couple months ago, midway through the varsity season. The pain was so bad I had been planning to ask Coach if he could sub me out and put in a closer. But then my dad came down to the dugout, and he was all, “How are your hands feeling? How’s the new medicine working?” He couldn’t keep the eagerness out of his voice. The thought of telling him the truth made me queasy.
So, I went back in and finished the game.
Because that’s what athletes do. Because you always give 110 percent and pain is weakness leaving the body and winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.
And we did win.
Three outs and sixteen broken-glass-in-my-knuckles pitches later.
I iced my hands and thought everything would be okay.
Until the pain knocked me out of bed in the middle of the night.
I remember my dad kneeling on the floor next to me, saying, “What’s the matter?”
And my mom standing over him. “What in the damn hell do you think is the matter? You pushed her too hard, and now she’s paying for it. She needs to quit the team.”
It turned into one of the worst fights they’d ever had. I remember being surprised that it was over me and not my sister. While they yelled at each other about what to do with me and everything else under the sun, Scarlett got me into a warm bath. She tried to distract me, but I couldn’t block it out. The pain or the fighting. Even when they went in their room and shut the door.
I was hopeful at the start of rec season. Dr. Levy said that since my rec softball team is less intense than varsity, it would give me a chance to see how my arthritis does in a lower stress environment. It felt like my last shot at making softball work.
But it’s too much, trying to play softball and sorting through this arthritis stuff at the same time. Too much for all of us.
I walk up to Coach after practice. I wait until no one is close enough to hear. And I open my mouth.
“See you tomorrow!” is what comes out.
“See you, Skyler,” he calls back.
I hesitate, shifting my weight from foot to foot, hoping for something—the truth? A miracle? But I can’t seem to make myself tell him.
I’ll do it tomorrow.
Paige drives me home, but since Emmeline and Carter are in the car, I still have to pretend like everything is OMGOMG-AMAZING. It’s really not that hard. Beyoncé comes on, and I turn it up, and we sing at the top of our lungs as we fly through downtown Winston-Salem in Paige’s convertible.
Mama’s car is at the house when we pull into the driveway, but not Daddy’s. He’ll be home from his work trip later tonight though.
“Hey, call me if you change your mind about the sleepover, okay?” says Paige. “I don’t mind driving back over here to get you.”
She’s making the Paige face—the one that means she can see right through me. “Thanks. You are such a sweetheart. My mom’s forcing us to do family time since my dad’s getting back, but next time?”
“Next time!” they yell.
Then Paige turns the car around in my driveway while they squeal/giggle/fight over music.
I smile and walk up the cobblestone path to the front porch. I smile and climb the steps. I smile so dang hard I think it might break my teeth, and I open the door and I close it.
It is such a relief to finally be able to stop smiling.
I sag against the front door. I have to come up with an alternate plan for this summer. Because going to practices is killing me by degrees, but quitting the team feels just as impossible as playing through the pain. Why does everything have to hurt so much?
I really don’t think the pills I’m on are working. I’ve been thinking it for a while, first a creeping suspicion and then a bell clanging over my head. I picked the pills over a biologic, because needles scare the bejesus out of me, and they expect you to do the injections yourself. But even needles would be better than this. I’ll tell my parents today. When Daddy gets home. I’ll ask them to take me back to the doctor. Maybe I’ll even talk to them about how I don’t think I can play softball anymore. If I’m calm, if I say it right, everything will be fine, and no one will get upset.
I’ll have to sew my smile back on. But first, a break. I imagine closing the door to my bedroom and sliding down to the floor, ready to let the sobs flow through me.