High and Dry (11 page)

He went to the fridge, scooped out some leftovers onto a paper plate, and offered them to me. I shook my head.

“No thanks.”

Ryder shrugged and grabbed a warm beer from a case on the floor, tossed it to me, and cracked one for himself.

I opened my liquid lunch. “What's the deal with
West Side Story
Maria?” I asked.

“They should just call her Salvador.”

I laughed. “That's what I said. Any idea how she overdosed?”

“Yeah. Some people can't handle a party.” Ryder shook his head ruefully.

“Were a lot of people doing LSD, or just her?” Bridget's words
from Sunday night floated back to me, but not clearly; more like I remembered them from someone else's dream in which I was a bit player.
It's not that kind of party
, she'd said, lowering my flask out of sight.

“Some of the girls wanted to unwind after the stress of competition. But no one else overdosed, so it's tough to say.”

“I saw her in the kitchen before it happened,” I said.

“She was cute.
Is
cute. Posey would have my ass if she knew I said that. The Marias
hate
each other.”

“Why?”

“There can only be one soloist in choir, right? It's right there in the name. But anyway, the reason I wanted to talk …”

“Any idea who dropped her at the ER? 'Cause they really wanted it to look like me.”

“I heard about that. Yeah, I heard about that.” He glanced toward the other room, where Griffin was, and lowered his voice. “We can talk about that later, but lunch period's almost over, so—”

“You said you had a way for me to make some real cash?” I said, taking a swig of my beer. I wasn't sure it would help my headache, but it couldn't make it worse. Liquor was foul, but watered-down Miller Lite barely registered with me anymore. It practically tasted like water, just enough to remind me it wasn't; I'd spend the next hour sideways, wishing I were on the other side.

Ryder knocked his can into mine and got down to business. “Yeah. So. The soccer game on Friday.” He glanced toward the other room again. “Are you going to foul Agua Dulce?”

“That's the question of the day.”

“Who else asked you that?” he said sharply.

“No one,” I said, taken aback. “Just two clogged pores at the bus stop.”

“And what'd you tell them?”

“That I have to see how it goes. Contrary to popular opinion, I don't actually plan when and how I'm going to foul someone. I still
play the game
. Fouling might be part of a strategy, but if there's a better way for me to get the ball, I do that instead.”

“There's five hundred bucks with your name on it if you do what you normally do.”

“And what do I normally do, exactly?” I said, teeth gritted.

“Foul the crap out of Steve as quickly as possible. Preferably when he's about to score.”

“When he's about to score,” I repeated.

“Yeah, just foul him like you normally do.”

“But it won't be normal if I'm doing it because you told me to.” I was reminded of Ellie's words to me on the phone last night.
“But you can't change those things,”
she'd said
. “You didn't think they were a problem. So if you change them, you'd only be doing it because I asked you to, not because you agree with me.”

“Pretend we never had this conversation, but know that if you do what you normally do, you'll be five hundred bucks richer,” Ryder said simply.

I really wished I were still center forward instead of fullback. Then maybe Ryder would pay me to hit the back of the net,
something I'd
want
to do. Winning should be what I normally do, not maiming.

“You want me to throw the game,” I said slowly.

He made a motion like “lower your voice.”

“Don't you?” I said, quieter.

“No, no, I just—”

“Foul him
when he's about to score?
After he's had a first touch, gearing up to strike, so he'll get a penalty kick.”

He snorted. “You're overthinking things, man.”

I folded my arms, certain I had his scheme pegged. “Steve's got the best PK conversion stats in LA County. If I give him a penalty kick, I'm
giving him
a score.”

Ryder didn't say anything.

“Can't do it,” I said. “If I'd decided to foul him on my own, in the heat of the game, that would be one thing, but asking me to deliberately lose a match? I have my faults, but that's not me.”

Ryder finished his beer and crushed the can in his fist. “Okay, okay! Sorry I asked. I thought you'd be cool with it.”

“That's what you think of me? That I don't care about the team, I don't care about our record? That I'd sell the guys out?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You didn't care about the lottery for junior parking spaces.”

“Me having a damn parking space junior year is not the same thing as screwing up people's
scholarships
,” I said, mostly because he had a point. Hadn't I used the exact same argument on Ellie?

All right, so I hadn't been a model student before, and maybe
he was right in thinking my ethics were flexible. But it bothered me nonetheless. “College recruiters are going to be there. Maybe they're not looking at me, but they might pick Patrick or Delinksy. But not if Steve's scoring left and right! I can't do that to those guys.”

Ryder's eyes were cold black pools. “Then don't show up, if you're such a team player all of a sudden,” he said. “Just take the game off.”

I wiped a tense hand down my face. “Oh, God. You bet against us, didn't you?”

“A thousand,” said Ryder quietly. “It could pay off triple.” He glanced around the trailer, at the filth coating every surface, the empty beer cans on the floor, and the stained mugs filled with cigarette butts and moldy coffee. “Thought I could skip town.”

We stared at each other.
Shit
.

The sounds of gunfire and chaos in the other room abruptly stopped. “Yo, baby b,” Griffin's hoarse voice called from behind the door. “We need your expertise.”

“Where's he been all day?” another voice wanted to know.

“He went to school this morning,” Griffin responded. Both voices erupted into high-pitched, hysterical laughter.

“Duty calls,” Ryder said, a bitter edge to his voice. He stood up and offered me his hand. “Are we on the same page for all this, or what?”

I ignored his hand. Did “same page” mean forgetting about the flash drive, or did “same page” mean fouling Steve for cash? Did “same page” mean leaving the history window unlocked again on Wednesday? Had we agreed to something, and I'd been too buzzed to realize it?

“Aren't you coming?” I said, heading to the door.

“No, Charlie,” he said in a tired voice, as though I were kind of slow, “I'm not going back to school today.” He tapped his nose. “The nose knows.”

There was a vibe in the air I didn't like. I just wanted to be back on the sidewalk, away from the trailer homes and out in the fresh air, away from my friend and all the ways our paths had separated since Little League.

Griffin appeared in the doorway. His hair was greasy, his face pockmarked, and he'd developed a bit of a sag around his belly since I'd seen him last. He'd scared the hell out of me when we were kids. He once pinned me down and made me drink an entire bottle of Seagram's Jamaican Me Happy.

Maybe I was never meant to like alcohol but always meant to drink it anyway. Maybe I wasn't into the high, I was into the familiarity.

Griffin clamped a hand on Ryder's shoulder and tucked a container of orange Tic Tacs into Ryder's shirt pocket, patting it protectively. He looked straight at me and chuckled, showing off a rotten tooth.

“Go get 'em, killer,” Griffin said. I didn't know what he meant, but something about the words bothered me. It was just a feeling I had, that something was horribly wrong. And on the walk back to school I realized what it was.

He'd been wearing a Flynn Scientific baseball cap, exactly like the one worn by the driver of my car on the hospital security tape.

WHEN RYDER THREW THE BAT

SIXTH GRADE. SUMMERTIME IN A NEW TOWN. NO SCHOOL
, no homework, no responsibilities. It should have been a carefree couple of months, a chance for me to meet my classmates outside of school and show up at homeroom on the first day with an entire team of built-in friends. Mom signed me up for baseball the moment we moved to Palm Valley; we just made the cutoff date.

It was a good plan in theory, except for my all-encompassing fear of the Little League coach, Coach Tierson (a.k.a. Tears You One). He wasn't just a big guy; he was a red-faced spittle shooter, who, as far as I could tell, hated children. He was like a snapping bulldog on a leash, so close to throttling you that if it weren't for the choke chain of potential lawsuits, you'd be in pieces scattered all over the field.

My first mistake was showing up in a clean uniform the first day of practice. Everybody else on the team had broken theirs in; their pants and jerseys were smudged with dirt, grass stains, even dots of blood. Their gloves were dark with sweat marks. Their cleats
were clogged with mud. I was sparkling. I looked like I'd stepped out of a commercial for Tide laundry detergent, and this immediately earned me Coach's ire. He thought I was soft. My shoes were new, from the Sports Chalet in town, and my glove still had the tag attached. Coach took one look at me and introduced me as the new kid all the way from New Mexico who was afraid to get down in the muck.
I guess you think we look dirty. Not used to the dirt, kid? Fifty push-ups, let me hear you count 'em, kiss the dirt, kiss the dirt.

My second mistake was being my mother's son. Coach Tierson used to teach social studies at Palm Valley High. Well, now he had to reapply for the position against cheaper, nonunion hires, and it wasn't looking good for the ol' man. It was the only time I remembered being happy about a stranger's misfortune. The schadenfreude went down like a cherry Slurpee: it wired me up and left my brain tingly. Another drink that does nothing but make you thirsty. What is sugar, after all, but kids' booze?

My third mistake was telling everyone my granddad worked at Lockheed Martin, and how Lockheed was the name of Shadowcat's dragon in
X-Men
, and wasn't that swell? (To soothe the pain of moving, my father had bequeathed to me his entire comic book collection from the 1970s and 1980s.) This was a piece of trivia I thought the other boys might appreciate. Wasn't I clever, integrating a fun fact of Palm Valley with a fun fact about superheroes? What it got me was blank looks and a “nerd” brand.

I decided I'd better shut that part of myself down, quick. All of it. Everything I liked, everything that made me
me
was to be
suppressed, ignored, and denied, until I could no longer remember what it was I'd been hiding. I'd be a jock. I'd be the quiet but effective type who said all he needed to say on the field via his baseball prowess.

In short, I'd be like Ryder.

Ryder was our star, the best hitter, runner, fielder, and thrower. His eyes were quick and bright, he was always accurately predicting where the ball would land, and he could catch anything: grounders, pop-ups, line drives, fly balls.

I was a good hitter, but I always threw my bat. I couldn't help it; it was like this trajectory my arms were on, and there was no way off the track once I started on it.

It was inevitable.

I could tell myself all morning, “Don't throw the bat”—I could be thinking it even as I stood at the plate—but it made no difference. I'd swing wide and connect with the ball, feel the tremors up and down my arms, the bat vibrating so hard it stung my palms, and I'd let go, the bat flying away and smashing into the chain-link fence. I'd be off and running toward first before any of it registered, until I could hear a faint din growing louder and louder like a train coming out of a tunnel, and then I'd realize it was a full-on meltdown from Coach Tierson. “Dixon! What have I told you about throwing your bat? Get back here and pick it up!”

Confused, I'd halt three-quarters of the way to first base, turn around, and look at Coach. He'd throw his glove onto the grass, scattering dust and grit, and start toward me. The urge to flee
would nearly overwhelm me;
It's not worth it, Charlie
, I'd think,
just get out of here
… I didn't even know how to find my new house from the field, though. If I'd taken off running, I'd be lost. I was stranded out there, helpless, until Mom came to pick me up. Besides, it was too late to run; I was frozen in place, dumbfounded and perplexed about what I'd done wrong, and he was a red-faced blubbery flubber storming toward me.

Day after day, the same words flung like shit against a wall, and I was the wall. I was worthless, a pussy, a fucking pussy, was I going to cry like a pussy? Did I need to practice with a NERF? Did he have to duct tape my hands to the bat so I wouldn't throw it?

When I told Ellie a shortened version of the story, the put-downs were the part she found most infuriating. “Why does every man think the absolute worst insult he can sling is to call someone a girl? And now all those boys think so, too. Asshole.”

I just knew I was terrified of him.

We always had to hustle, too.
Don't lose that hustle; let me see you hustle; who's got the best hustle; hustle, infield; hustle, outfield; move it, move it! Ryder's got the right idea, if only I had a team full of Ryders maybe we woulda won last night against Pacoima.

I thought about telling Dad. Every night at dinner, when he'd ask how practice was going and if I'd made any friends, I'd feel a lump form in my throat, poured there like concrete and hardened into a ball so I couldn't talk. I was afraid what Coach Tierson said about me was true, and that my dad would immediately see it. I was soft. Useless. A loser who couldn't hustle.