Page 80 of Clichés & Curses

‘You really like it here, don’t you? This spot I mean.’

‘I guess you could say that,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know what it is, but I just feel a lot calmer whenever I’m here.’

‘Do you ever come here before games?’ I remembered Colton telling me he would occasionally come by, but he never really specified when.

‘Sometimes, mostly when we’re up against another competitive college team.’

‘Like the team you’re competing against next week?’ I asked. Their last off-season game was happening next Saturday, right there on campus. The team might have won the last Men’s College World Series, but they hadn’t gotten that far without a few near misses, winning by only a point against the other team. The team they were battling against next week was one of those others.

He gave me a nod. ‘I know it’s only an exhibition game, but I want to do well.’

‘You will,’ I said, giving him a genuine smile.

‘Thanks,’ his voice was a little shaky from his honest admission. ‘Are you coming to the game?’

I thought of teasing him about my potential absence, but the vulnerability in his voice quickly dissolved that idea. Instead, I thought about something else to liven up the mood. ‘Yes, I am. I heard part of being a good partner is attending the other partner’s home games.’

‘Really? How come I never heard of that before?’

‘It’s an exclusive rule. It only applies when your partner is a star athlete.’

Colton’s laugh burst out of him, and it was so contagious that I started joining along.

‘Okay, enough chit-chat. Time to get to work,’ I said.

We were in the questions phase of our ASL class, meaning it was starting to get a little difficult. The things about asking questions in ASL are the movements of your eyebrows, and how different the structure of the sentence is, compared to the English language.

For example, for wh- questions, instead of signing them as the first word of the sentence, they are signed at the end, and you have to make sure your eyebrows are down when you ask the question. As a beginner, it takes some time to understand how to sign correctly as you rearrange the words from English to ASL.

We started with simple questions, such as ‘what is your name?’, ‘where are you from?’, and ‘where do you live?’, before moving on to yes or no questions.

When it comes to yes or no questions in ASL, you don’t have to sign the first part of the question, such as ‘are you’ or ‘do you’. Instead, you just have to make sure your eyebrows are up in order to signify that you’re asking a question, then continue signing exactly as you would, when making the usual sentence structure in ASL.

We slowly worked our way down the list from ‘do you like ice cream?’, ‘are you a student?’, and ‘is it cold here?’. We each tookturns signing the questions, while the other tried to guess what was being signed.

It was Colton’s turn to sign, and it seemed my brain was starting to get overloaded.

‘Wait, can you do that again?’ I requested.

He signed it once more, but I couldn’t seem to remember one of the words from the question he was asking.

‘What’s this?’ I asked him, repeating the hand motion of the word that I couldn’t quite recall.

‘It’s ASL for date,’ he said, signing it again. ‘Date as in a romantic date.’

‘Oh,’ I nodded. ‘Can you sign the question again?’

He signed the question one more time, and after his third attempt, I finally understood the question.

‘Do you want to go on a date with me?’ I guessed.

‘You got it,’ he said with a fond smile on his face.

I quickly flipped through my notes to see if I had written it down somewhere, when Colton asked me another question.

‘So do you?’

‘Do I what?’ I asked distractedly.

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