The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (12 page)

“Do we all have to be best friends?” Morales stopped and looked around. Giving them a chance, maybe, to consider how unlikely, how impossible, it was for the motley members of this particular crew ever to be best friends. “No,” he said. “Of course not. But we all have to pull together. We need each other. We're all in this together. We're a family.”

This practice session seemed to be conducted at some new level of intensity. It was hard to explain, but it just felt different. More serious. It was as if they'd moved on to the next grade. This was Baseball, the advanced course.

Molly spent most of the practice with the other pitchers—Desmond Davis, Lloyd Coleman, and Ian Meriwether—learning how to cover first base. When a ground ball was hit to the first baseman, and he was too far from the bag to get the runner himself, it was the pitcher's job to cover the base and take the throw.

It sounded simple enough. Molly must have seen it hap-pen in big league games on television a couple of hundred times. It seemed like a routine play. A ho-hum, garden-variety out. But watching it and doing it yourself were two different things entirely. Molly discovered there was more to it than she had imagined. It was not a maneuver Molly had practiced in the backyard with her father. It was all new to her. First, you had to get off the mound in a hurry. If you dawdled, if you even thought about it, it was already too late.

Next, Morales explained, a pitcher shouldn't run directly to the base—because you could collide with the runner. Instead, you had to aim for a spot several yards in front of the bag, then run up the line, parallel with the batter, and take the toss from the first baseman on the run. You had to touch the base and keep moving—it was easy to trip or get stepped on by the runner. The timing had to be perfect. If it worked, if the pitcher was quick, if the throw was where it should be, it was pretty. And if something went wrong, it was a train wreck.

Morales set up a drill so they could practice. The pitchers took turns. Each would throw a pitch home to one of the catchers, Ben or Lonnie, watch Morales hit a grounder to Everett Sheets, who played first, then dash down the line toward first and try to beat one of the boys Morales drafted to serve as the runner.

The first few times, Molly was slow, late getting to the base. “Again,” Morales said, not angry, just relentless. It had to be automatic. Your legs needed to react before your brain.

After each of the pitchers had taken a few turns, Lloyd Coleman, standing behind Molly in line, started talking. “A guy who plays sports you call a jock,” he said. “Because, you know. The equipment.” Lloyd was standing near Desmond and Ian, but they didn't respond.

It was Molly's turn next. She took her position on the rubber and started her windup. Lloyd kept talking. “But what about a girl who wants to be a jock?”

Just as Molly threw home, Lloyd said something else, answered his own question presumably. Molly couldn't make out the words, but his tone was nasty.

Morales rapped a hard grounder to Everett at first. Molly bolted off the mound and saw Everett fumble the ball briefly, then recover. She slowed down as she approached the base.

Somehow they all arrived at the same time: the ball, Molly, and Eli Krause, the runner. As Molly stretched for the high throw, Eli must have hunkered down to protect himself and came in low. He took out her legs, and Molly cartwheeled over the top of him. For that instant, cut loose from the ground, time seemed to slow and she could feel herself flying, she could see the landscape tilt. For that split second, she was Evel Knievel, defying gravity. It was thrilling. Then she came down.

She saw, not stars exactly, but a bright light, and may have even blacked out for a second. She opened her eyes and found herself surrounded. There were faces looking down at her. Her left shoulder and back ached. But most of
all she felt embarrassed. She'd managed to make herself a spectacle.

Morales shooed everyone away and attended to Molly. She was breathing in shaky gulps but was able to assure him again and again that she was okay, really okay, really, really okay. But he made her stay on the ground anyway and made small talk with her in a quiet voice. He asked her some simple questions. Her name and the day of the week. Maybe he thought she was concussed, brain damaged.

He let her sit up. “How's Eli?” Molly asked, and Morales told her he was fine, unscathed—she'd gotten the worst of it. She stood slowly with Morales's hand on her elbow, and he led her over to the bench. He got her some water and an ice pack. “I'm okay!” Molly said so emphatically that Morales smiled. He told her to relax, take it easy, and left her to watch the last few minutes of practice.

Molly put the pack to her head. Maybe she was brain damaged. Or maybe she'd been brain damaged when she'd decided to play baseball. What had she been thinking?

On the field Lloyd Coleman seemed to be sneaking glances her way—it looked to Molly as if he was smirking. She remembered his little monologue. What joy he must have felt watching her be upended. She could just imagine his rude commentary.

Molly watched Lonnie, who was catching a pitch from Desmond Davis. Lonnie waited while Morales hit a ground ball, then tossed another ball to him. Lonnie looked at ease and unconcerned, casual even. She felt angry at him—unfairly, probably, but since when is anger fair? How could he resume baseball business as usual while she was sitting
there, hurt and humiliated? She wanted something from him. She didn't know what exactly, but something. What good was a personal catcher if he couldn't take care of you when you were bruised?

Morales called an end to practice a few minutes later. The players gathered around him, as always, for a few parting words. Molly stood slowly and walked over and joined the team. Already, after just a few minutes on the sidelines, she felt like an outsider. Everyone else was dusty and sweaty, breathing hard, and she had an ice pack in her hand.

“Okay,” Morales said. “Listen up.” Ordinarily, Morales made only very brief remarks, telling them what they had done well, what they needed to work on. Today, though, he gave them a little talk, preached a little sermon—about failure.

Morales told them that baseball, more than any other sport, is all about failure. “Nobody goes undefeated in base-ball,” he said. “It's not like college football.” Morales explained that if a batter fails seven times out of ten, then he's among the very best. An all-star. How many times did Babe Ruth strike out? More than a thousand times. Think about that: striking out a thousand times. The greatest pitchers ever have won three hundred games in their careers, but how many did they lose along the way? Hundreds.

Molly knew all this. It was the conventional wisdom. It was the sort of thing announcers would discuss during a rain delay. It had been one of her dad's favorite set pieces.

It was not what Molly wanted to hear. She was in no mood to listen to a hymn to failure. Not while she was still
smarting from her fall. Not while she was annoyed with Lonnie. She remembered the human chain they'd formed less than two hours earlier. She remembered how solid she felt, how connected. It had not taken long for that feeling to evaporate, for the chain to fall apart.

olly's mother arrived home later than usual that night. Molly had set up at the kitchen table with her homework and a bag of baby carrots. She'd begun work on her social studies project, which was to invent and describe her own country. It had seemed like a stupid assignment at first, but now Molly was getting into it. She was crunching carrots and sketching a map of her country, and it was taking her mind off what she didn't want to think about.

Molly's country was going to be an island, she knew that much. Her country—the Kingdom of Molly, she was tempted to call it—would be in the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and New Zealand. It would be ruled by a girl queen. Sparkling bits of coral would be used as money.
There'd be no written language, no technology. Anything important—laws, history, whatever—would be sung. The national pastime would be a primitive form of baseball played with small coconuts.

Molly's mother came through the door, brisk and cheerful, suspiciously cheerful, a bag of groceries in her arm, a bunch of celery sticking out of the top. “Hi, honey,” she practically chirped. She could have been auditioning for some retro sitcom.

Molly looked up from her country. “Hi.” Her mother had been to the salon. She'd gotten some color and a new haircut. It was sort of sculpted, casually ragged—a Meg Ryan kind of look.

“How was your day?” her mother asked.

Molly could tell that her mother wanted her to say something about her hair. She had that vacant supermodel look. It was a self-absorbed, how-do-I-look? expression, like someone looking into a mirror. Someone using another per-son as a mirror. She wanted a compliment. She seemed pathetically eager for attention. But Molly wasn't willing to play that game.

“Would you like some carrots?” Molly said, and pushed them across the table. She didn't want to play girlfriend to her mother. Thanks, but no thanks. Maybe the fact that Molly was eating dinner out of a plastic bag would make her mother feel guilty.

Her mother opened the fridge and started loading it from the grocery bag. She gave her head a little shake. Her mother's birthday was just three days off, Molly remembered, on Saturday. Maybe they'd go out for dinner to celebrate.

No matter what, Molly had to think of a gift for her.
The need to shop for her mother made Molly feel a creeping kind of anxiety and even dread. It was an impossible task. If you asked what she wanted for her birthday—or for Christmas, or Mother's Day, for that matter—she'd smile and say, “Nothing.” (What was it that Celia had said?
It's okay to want something.)
Or she'd suggest some loving-mom version of nothing: something homemade, a hug. But it was a trap. When she'd open Molly's sincere offering—a hand-picked bouquet, a hand-lettered poem—her mother would smile and say all the right things, but it seemed like a hollow performance. Whatever she really wanted, this wasn't it. It made Molly feel stupid, like a failure. Once Molly presented her with a book of coupons, for things like breakfast in bed, but she never redeemed a single one of them.

A few days before her mother's birthday, Molly and her dad used to hit the mall together. He seemed as clueless as Molly about what might please her. And he seemed baffled, frightened even, by women's things—perfume, lingerie, jewelry. But somehow they always had fun on these doomed shopping missions. She'd tease her dad by dousing him with perfume or by suggesting that they surprise her mom with something hugely inappropriate. A moped. A set of wrenches. A few rap CDs. They'd eventually choose something innocuously beautiful—a silk scarf, say—and then, relieved, happily off the hook until Mother's Day at least, they'd eat Chinese in the food court. Molly realized that this would be another gloomy first without her dad. She'd have to go it alone this time.

“So, Molly,” her mother said. “Guess who I ran into? Lorna Schmidt.”

“That's nice,” Molly said. She was drawing a river and
didn't look up. The river would divide Upper Molly from Lower Molly and bring fresh water to all her subjects. Lorna Schmidt was the mother of Eva Schmidt, a girl in Molly's grade whom she'd been friends with briefly back in fourth grade. Molly's mother seemed to believe they were still close, and Molly never bothered to set her straight.

“You know what she says to me?”

“What?” Molly said. “What does Lorna Schmidt say to you?”

“She says, ‘I hear Molly is really stirring it up at school.’ ‘Oh,’ I say. Stirring it up. I don't know what she's talking about, but I play along. I pretend that I have a daughter who tells me things. A daughter who keeps me in the loop. I pre-tend that I have a daughter who talks to me while she's out there making waves and stirring it up.”

Molly put down her pencil. She could feel her face growing warm. “I have no idea what you're talking about,” Molly said, but of course she did. It had only been a matter of time, and now she was busted. Eva Schmidt was a gossip, a girl without a life of her own, who had nothing better to do than entertain her mother with stories of her former friend's goings-on at school.

“Oh really,” her mother said. Her mother told her the story she'd gotten from Lorna Schmidt. Call it “Molly Stirs It Up.” It was pretty funny, as ludicrous and distorted as what gets announced at the end of a game of telephone, after the long chain of whispers, just about everything lost in translation. Molly would have laughed, except that in this story, she was the main character.

The single accurate fact in the story was that Molly was on the baseball team, the only girl. The rest was embroidery,
speculation, buzz. In this version of the story, her playing baseball sounded like some wacky stunt. No mention that she had earned her spot on the team, nothing about striking Grady Johnston out, no suggestion that she might actually be a good ballplayer. There was something catty about it, as if playing baseball were a way to meet boys, as if she were some kind of boy-crazy hussy.

“Why wouldn't you tell me?” her mother asked. “Why don't you talk to me?”