My mom drives an old Corolla. For Christmas a couple of years back she bought Antonio and me pay-as-you-go flip phones. They’re burners—throwaway phones—only we don’t throw them away. We get our clothes at Value Village.
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t like new clothes and a better phone and a fast car, but it’s not like I’m wearing clothes that don’t fit, and it’s not like I don’t have a phone, so I’m okay with it. Not Antonio, though. Somewhere in there it started eating at him that he couldn’t have new Nikes or expensive jeans or an iPhone.
I remember the day Garrett sucked Antonio into his circle. It was last January, the middle of my junior year, Antonio’s sophomore. We were walking back from school on a cold, windy Tuesday when we saw what looked like a fire burning by the fence.
Mobile homes can go up in flames fast, so we hustled down the path, rounded the corner, and then slowed. No emergency, just Garrett burning old pieces of wood in one of the empty barrels back there. With him were a couple of guys and a girl with long black hair who was wearing tight jeans and a jean jacket. She was new at North Central; I’d noticed her, but I didn’t know her name.
“Hey,” Garrett called when he saw us. “Come back here, both of you. Tell me about the old school.”
He sounded high.
I struggled to answer. “I have stuff t-to d-d-do,” I finally managed.
Garrett grinned. I don’t know if he was laughing at my stutter or at me for being a wuss. Probably both.
“How about you, Antonio? You afraid to hang out with the bad kids?”
“I’m not afraid of nothing,” Antonio said.
Garrett motioned with his head. “Come on, then. You can give Jasmine a heads-up about North Central.”
Antonio glanced at me. Our eyes caught, and then he headed toward Garrett. The girl smiled at him, and the guys stood up a little taller.
As I watched him go, my pulse quickened. This wasn’t a good place. I wanted to say something that would pull him back, but the right words never come easily for me, and none at all came that day.
Four
The week before baseball season started, I was working on a writing assignment with Suja, a girl I’ve known since fourth grade. She was supposed to edit my essay and I was supposed to edit hers, as if I could possibly help her. “Your brother is headed for trouble,” she whispered as she marked up my paper.
My back stiffened. “What do you m-mean?”
She moved closer. “You know Selena, Garrett’s sister?”
Selena was a couple of years older and a lot friendlier than Garrett. We had a joke together: Whenever our paths crossed, she’d asked me how math was going. “Not so good,” I’d say. She’d smile. “I never could find X, either.”
“She got a job with Seattle Helpers, working for old people, doing their laundry, heating up soup, and keeping them company.”
“So?”
“So old people take lots of pills. Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin—the drugs you hear about all the time. If Selena thinks the old people won’t notice, or if they die, she takes their pills and gives them to Garrett. He puts out the word and then stands at the back fence waiting for the druggies to come to him. Our trailer is close to the fence. At least ten guys buy from him every day. And when he sells, your brother is standing right by him.”
That afternoon, as Antonio and I walked home, I sucked up my courage and confronted him. “Don’t g-go to the back fence,” I said when we reached the spot where we split up.
“What’s wrong with the back fence?”
I took a deep breath; I needed my words to be clear. “The stuff G-Garrett has. He buys it with d-drug money.”
Antonio looked up at the sky. “Who told you that?”
“It’s t-true, isn’t it?”
Antonio opened his hands. “Yeah, I guess. But it’s no big deal. Sometimes he gets a few pills from his sister. When he does, he sells them to old Jet City guys who can’t get them from their doctors anymore. That’s it. He’s not El Chaco, or whatever that guy’s name is.”
“It’s still a crime. He c-could g-get arrested. You c-could g-get arrested.”
Antonio tilted his head. “This is coming from Suja, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer.
He smiled. “You know what a drama queen she is. Remember the day she started bawling because she was sure the North Koreans were going to drop an atom bomb on Jet City? The girl is not happy unless she’s unhappy.” He paused. “I hang out there, tell stories and listen to stories. That’s all.”
I was silent for a moment. “If I told Mom, she wouldn’t think it was n-nothing,” I finally said.
His smile disappeared. “Seriously, Laz? You’re going to tattle on me? I’m sixteen, not six.” He paused. “How about you take care of you and I’ll take care of me. Deal?”
I didn’t answer.
“Deal?” he repeated, his smile back.
“I guess,” I mumbled.
He waited a beat. then he grabbed me around the neck and we wrestled a little. When he let go, he headed to the back fence as I walked to our trailer.
Five
Antonio was right—I did need to take care of me, especially on the baseball diamond. I’d grown, and I’d gotten stronger, making my fastball faster. And for the first time, North Central had the makings of a decent team. My junior season had a chance to be my breakout season.
We started with a run of five straight wins. The defense was strong, especially up the middle. Dawit Senai, our center fielder, ran down every fly ball anywhere near him; catcher Tory Nelson was solid behind the plate. Antonio was a vacuum cleaner at shortstop, and he sparked the offense, rocketing a slew of doubles into the gaps and driving in runs by the handful.
On the mound, I wasn’t in the zone all the time, but I was there most of the time. And even when I was off, I was never way off like I had been other years. “This is going to be a special year for us,” Mr. Kellogg said after win number six. “A really special year.”
Then the North Central curse hit. Our right fielder, Trey Lister, flunked two midterms and was ineligible. James Xiong landed an afterschool job working at Century Link and quit the team. Cam Hinton moved to Renton without telling anyone, not even his girlfriend. By May, we were down to eleven players, and we’d lost six of seven games.
Even though the season had fallen apart, I still had one game circled on my schedule: Laurelhurst High, the defending city champions. They’d lost in the state playoffs to Tacoma’s Jesuit High, but only because Jesuit had a pitcher named Fergus Hart that the Seattle Times said might be the next Clayton Kershaw.
Laurelhurst had a future major-leaguer of its own, a center fielder named Ian Thurman. Thurman had been all-league as a freshman and all-state as a sophomore, and he had a good chance to be Washington State Player of the Year as a junior if Laurelhurst could beat Fergus Hart and take the state title.
Websites that covered high school sports posted articles and stats on Thurman. After lunch, I went to the computer lab and pored over them. I knew his height, his weight, how many pounds he could bench-press, how fast he ran the fifty-yard dash. His coach, an old guy named Pop Vereen who’d been at Laurelhurst for a million years, said that Thurman was the best high school player he’d ever coached. Top baseball colleges were recruiting him, and a major-league team was sure to draft him, probably in the first round.