She pats the pages resting in front of me.

“Let’s start off small, okay? Turn this four-page beginning into a true short story. I can yank you out of every weight training, or you can promise me that you’ll write it in your free time at home. The choice is yours.”

And it’s a no-brainer. “I’ll do it in my free time.”

“Good.” Her eyes light up. “But I’m still keeping you for the next hour. I want you to get started now.”

Beth

ALLISON OWNS A MERCEDES. Leather interior.

Jet-black on the outside. Isaiah would get all hot and bothered about the junk under the hood. She drives fast on the backcountry roads and a couple of times my stomach drops like we’re on a roller coaster.

“You smell like smoke.” Allison wears a red business suit and black stilettos. She’s slicked her blond hair into a painfully tight bun.

Maybe that’s why she’s uptight.

While waiting for Allison to drag herself away from the Ladies’ Planning Committee, I smoked one of the cigarettes I bummed from a stoner boy before the incident in Calculus. I hoped it would help me get over the fight I had with Ryan. I don’t know why, but yelling at him made me feel like crap. Kind of like I do after I fight with Isaiah. “Must be in your head.”

“You smell like smoke when you come home from school. Scott may choose to ignore it, but he’s not ignoring your little stunt in class.” Allison pulls into the massive driveway surrounded by woods and notices when I glance at her. “That’s right. Your teacher called.”

Crap. I don’t have any idea how to get myself out of this.

Scott and Allison live in a two-story white house with a wraparound porch. It resembles something you’d see in a Civil War movie full of rich plantation owners. Part of the house is surrounded by woods. The other part faces an open pasture with a barn.

Allison parks the car outside the four-car garage and grabs my wrist before I have a chance to bolt. “Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was to leave the meeting because you called? This is a small town. Your teachers belong to our church. How long do you think it will be before everyone knows what a menace you are? I won’t permit you to ruin our life.”

“Get your hands off of me.” My eyes flicker from her fingers on my wrist to her eyes.

No one touches me.

She drops my wrist like she was handling fire. “Why don’t you leave? Even Scott knows you’re miserable.”

I bet Scott knows she’s miserable too. I’d never have imagined him with someone like her. Manicured. Polished. Heartless. “Were you surprised he wasn’t hard to trap?”

“What?”

“When you—” I do the mock quotation marks in the air “—‘told’ him you were pregnant, were you surprised how quickly he proposed? Scott always had a soft spot for babies. Why else would he marry you?”

Blood flushes her collarbone and her hands flutter up to her neck. “I don’t know what you’re even asking me.” She clears her throat, obviously flustered. “Scott doesn’t have a soft spot for babies.”

Has she had a conversation with the man she married? “If it weren’t for my mom, he would have married half of the girls knocked up in our trailer park.” And he wasn’t even the daddy.

Her hands slowly lower to her lap and I swear she quits breathing. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

Her lips twist into a snarl. “Get out.”

“Gladly.” I open the door to her car, slam it shut, and repeat the process with the front door of Scott’s house. Before I can even reach the guest bedroom Scott declared as mine, Allison stalks in behind me, slamming the front door with as much, if not more, force than I did.

Scott opens the door to his office—the room across the foyer from my bedroom. He wears his crisp button-down shirt. Shit. He came home early from his “sales job” at the bat factory in Louisville. His eyebrows scrunch together. “What the hell is going on?”

Allison points at me. “Get rid of her.”

Scott places his hands on his hips.

“Allison…”

“You knocked up girls in trailer parks?”

In my defense, that isn’t what I said, but even I know when to keep my mouth shut.

Scott’s face turns red, then purple. “No.”

Allison clutches the hair on her head and the perfect bun loosens. “Forget the trailer parks. I can’t believe you told her. You promised you would never tell anyone.” One hand descends to her abdomen.

Damn. I was right—sort of. She did tell him she was pregnant, except she wasn’t lying like I’d assumed. She was pregnant, and then she lost it. If I’d known, I never would have said those things. Guilt makes me nauseous.

“Wait. I didn’t tell her.” Scott reaches out to Allison and his hand freezes in the air when she steps back. He extends his hand again and when she remains still he wraps his arms around her, pulling her close to him. Scott lowers his head to her ear and I can tell he’s whispering to her. Allison’s shoulders shake and I feel like a Peeping Tom intruding on this intimate moment.

I slip inside the bedroom and try to close the door without making a sound. Sun shines from the two walls of windows. Crawling onto the middle of the bed, I draw my knees up and curl into myself. I hate this house. There are too many windows. All floor-to-ceiling. All open.

All of them make me feel…exposed.

Ryan

IN THE GARAGE, I stand outside Dad’s office and prepare myself for the impending conversation. The enrollment papers for the writing competition are rolled tightly in my left hand. I rap twice on the door and Dad tells me to come in.

Except for the chair he sits in, Dad made everything in this room: the chrome desk and matching cabinet, the printer stand, the large art table that displays the stack of blueprints for his current clients. He shot the two deer mounted on the wall. The central air kicks on and a couple of papers near the vent on the floor crinkle against each other.

Dad keeps the office neat, tidy, and controlled. His eyes flick to me then back to the bound manual on his desk. He’s disposed of his tie, but he still wears his white work shirt. “What can I do for you, Ryan?”

I sit in the chair across from him and search for words. Before Mark left, I never had a hard time talking to Dad. The words came easily.

Now words are hard. I stare at the papers bound together in my hand. That’s wrong.

Since Mark left, writing words has made life slightly tolerable. “Do you remember last year’s short-story assignment?”

He gives me a blank look and scratches the back of his head.

“You were upset because it was due during spring playoffs,” I remind him.

The lightbulb goes on as he nods and returns to the manual. “Didn’t you write about a pitcher that came back from the dead or something?”

Actually it was a pitcher that sold his soul to the devil in return for a perfect season, but I’m not here to argue.

“Did your English teacher give you a hard time? Too much gore?”

My mouth grows dry and I swallow. “No.

I…uh…finaled in a writing competition.”

That caught his attention. “You entered a writing competition?”

“No, Mrs. Rowe entered the entire class in the state writing competition. It was open to any high school student not graduating that spring. They read the entries this summer and I finaled.”

He blinks and the smile is slow to appear, but it finally manages to form.

“Congratulations. Have you told your mom? She loves it when you do well in school.”

“No, sir, not yet. I wanted to tell you first.” I would have told them together, but since Mark left, they can barely be in the same room.

“You should tell her.” The smile slips and he glances away. “It’ll make her happy.”

“I will.” I suck in air. I can do this. “There’s another round of the competition in a couple of weeks in Lexington. I have to be there to win.”

“Will Mrs. Rowe be providing transportation or will the school let you drive yourself?”

“It’s on a Saturday so I can drive myself.”

“A Saturday,” Dad repeats. “Was Mrs. Rowe upset when you told her you couldn’t make it? If so, I’ll talk to her. There’s no reason why she should hold this against you. Maybe one of her other students can take your place.”

He relaxes in his chair and folds his hands over his stomach. “I saw Scott Risk at your game yesterday. He didn’t stay long because of family obligations, but he saw you pitch and he was real impressed. He mentioned a camp the Yankees may be doing this fall. I know what you’re going to say—‘not the Yankees,’ but once you’ve proved yourself you can trade teams.”

My mind swirls. Scott Risk watched me play. Which is great and odd. Great because Scott knows people—specifically scouts. Odd because I’d have bet Beth would crucify me to her uncle.

Not important. Or it is, but not now. I came in here to discuss the writing competition. A competition Dad never considered. “I think I should compete. I can play the Thursday game and let one of the other two pitchers on the team play for me on Saturday.”

Dad’s forehead wrinkles. “Why would you want to do that? The teams worth playing are scheduled on Saturdays.”

I shrug. “Mrs. Rowe said that a lot of college recruiters will be at the competition and that a lot of the finalists win scholarships. I figure I can get some sort of an athletic scholarship and combine that with whatever scholarship I could win from this writing event, and that way you won’t have to pay much.”

Dad lifts his hand. “Wait. Hold on. College recruiters and scholarships? Since when do you care about that?”

Until my conversation with Mrs. Rowe, never. “You and Mark visited colleges. We haven’t discussed it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to…”

Dad’s face flushes red and he spits the next words. “He was different. You can’t go into the NFL straight out of high school. He had to go to college first. You can go straight to the minors out of school. Hell, Ryan. You can go straight to the majors.”

“But Mark said…”

“Do not say that name in my presence again.

You’re not doing the competition. End of story.”

No, it’s not the end of the story. “Dad…”

Dad picks up an envelope off his desk and tosses it at me. “A two-hundred-dollar-a-month car payment so you can make practices and games.”

The envelope lands on my lap and my throat tightens.

“Your insurance on the car, the booster fees, the uniforms, the travel costs, the league fees—”

“Dad—” I want him to stop, but he won’t.

“Gas for the Jeep, the private coaching lessons…I have supported you for seventeen years!”

The anger inside me snaps. “I told you I’d get a job!”

“This is your job!” Dad pounds his fist against the desk, exactly how a judge ends all discussion in court. A stack of papers resting on the edge falls to the floor.