Page 83 of Breakout Year
Now they were standing around. He could just wave as he passed them by. No, that was cowardly. If they wanted to ignore him, they could do it to his face. He slowed his steps, giving the group time to register him his approach. If they wanted to turn tail and flee to their clubhouse, they could cede the field to him.
He jogged up. Wiped his face on the stretched-out collar of his T-shirt.
For a moment, no one said anything.
“Rivkin, hey,” Connor said. When Eitan had been on the team, Connor had mostly called him E. Guess they were on last names now.
“Reynolds.” Eitan didn’t know if there was a touch so brief baseball players didn’t think you could get gay cooties from it, but he extended his knuckles anyway.
A moment later, Connor tapped them, then glanced over his shoulder as if he was already plotting his escape.
Ice semi-broken—or just very slightly thawed—Eitan repeated the same gesture with Hairston, an infielder he didn’t know too well who’d taken over at third base, then considered possible topics of conversation. Normally they’d just stand around and talk about whatever bullshit. Baseball was a lot of standing around and talking about whatever bullshit.
“Nice day out,” Eitan said. The weather. He was talking about the fucking weather. He was half tempted to say something like, Hey, do you think it’s going to rain? Also I’m really, really gay, as it turns out.
Connor did that backward glance again. “Yeah.”
Eitan ground his molars together. He wasn’t really someone who believed in clubhouse hierarchies: if you were in the big leagues, it didn’t matter if you went first overall or were an undrafted walk-on. But he had gone first overall and had been an everyday player since he’d been promoted to the majors, and an All-Star, twice, a Gold Glove winner, once, and one of the only reasons people bothered to buy tickets to see Cleveland play for the past few years. He deserved to be on this fucking field as much as anybody. “How have things been here?”
Connor heaved a shrug. “You know.”
Eitan did know: the team was bad, the kind of bad that went from being a fluke to a habit. The kind of bad it felt rude to comment on now that he wasn’t experiencing it along with them. He didn’t want to say something hollow, that things would surely get better, when there was little guarantee that they would.
Mostly he wanted to know how they’d rode together on team planes and lost money to each other at poker with the kind of friendly debt neither of them kept track of—and now Connor had only a handful of words to say to Eitan, none of them friendly at all. “Glad to see you’re doing well at least,” Eitan said, before Connor cut him off.
“I gotta go.” No excuse offered. Just a simple statement: given the choice between Eitan’s company and not, he’d rather be elsewhere.
In the intervening months, Eitan had invented any number of reasons for Connor’s silence, beginning with a rigorous adherence to the old anti-fraternization rules that discouraged friendships between guys on different teams and ending with grand conspiracy that the Crooks told players to stop talking to Eitan.
Not this simple, obvious loathing.
Something surged in Eitan’s belly: Anger, sure. Disappointment, yes. The reminder that he couldn’t force anyone to like him, of course. Followed by a familiar wash of determination that maybe he could. If he could just get Connor to see that Eitan was happy—happier than he’d been in Cleveland, when he’d been universally adored and, he was just now realizing it, incredibly lonely—he might soften.
Connor didn’t deserve any of that. He certainly didn’t deserve Eitan’s words. Eitan’s hands, however, were suddenly curling into fists. One good punch might be all he got before his inevitable suspension. It’d feel good. Fuck, given the way Connor was looking at him, it’d feel great right until it didn’t. Eitan pushed his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Yeah, man, see you around.” And he glared at Connor until he walked away.
Which only left Eitan and Hairston standing there, looking at one another. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way—” Hairston began, and Eitan readied himself for any number of things that could be contained under a ballplayer’s conversational warning. “How do you get so quick off the jump fielding?”
Eitan laughed. “Wouldn’t want you to use my secrets against me. But ask me again in the offseason, and we can go through some things.”
Hairston’s eyebrows rose up the dark brown skin of his forehead. “You sure?”
“Hit me up when you get to spring training.” Then Eitan realized they might be at different locations—that he might end up in Florida, not Arizona. That he didn’t really have any kind of certainty for the next season. No wonder Akiva had turned down coming to see him play. “Or whenever.”
“Thanks, man, I appreciate it.” Hairston glanced around, and there was something different in that glance from Connor’s. “Maybe I’ll get traded next season.” Said hopefully, as if he’d already packed his bags.
“Can’t recommend that enough,” Eitan said.
Hairston’s eyebrows rose again, this time more knowingly. “New York’s good?”
An innocuous question, at least on its surface. The weather was good, Eitan’s move had treated him okay. Innocuous, unless Hairston had seen anything Eitan had done since he’d gone to New York—including who’d been spending his time with outside the ballpark. Eitan couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “Yeah, New York’s been really good.”
The game that night started at 7:10 PM. By 7:09, Eitan’s heart was hammering against his ribs. The stadium was moderately full—bad for a Cosmos game, extraordinary for a Crooks one. Which meant either people started caring about relatively meaningless late September baseball or some of them were here to see him. Returning players were often treated as heroes: scoreboard tributes, a pause before their at-bat so the crowd could toss adulation like roses.
The most Eitan had done was check into buying the Crooks breakfast as a thank you, only to be told in no uncertain terms that the team wasn’t interested. He’d brought gifts, though the best gift one could get most stadium workers was cash. So he’d spent a while that afternoon distributing envelopes and greeting ushers and clubhouse attendants. At least they seemed happy to see him.
It was unclear whether the crowd felt the same way. He’d stood in the dugout for the anthem, hat over his heart, and thought of all the times he’d stood and listened to some local talent navigate the anthem’s verses. His parents were here. They’d texted him a picture from their usual row, the two of them together next to an empty seat Eitan had also paid for.
Akiva still hadn’t texted him back. Maybe that was his way of beginning their inevitable goodbye to one another.
