Page 5 of Breakout Year
Because he was supposed to be drafted high in the first round—and he had been. He was supposed to play pro ball—and he did. He was supposed to spend his career in Cleveland with the kind of contract extension that meant his parents could enjoy some well-earned rest—and…he wasn’t, apparently.
No response came from his parents. Which could mean anything. It was midday, a weekday. They both worked.
Messages kept rolling in. Interview requests, demands for exclusive statements, ask after ask after ask.
Don’t respond.
His fingers itched to, the same impulse he’d had when he was four and his parents were trying out their first real American barbecue. When he’d pressed his palms to the red-hot grating of the grill and had to have mittens taped on for a week.
Well, his phone was already out.
There was something almost charmingly old-timey about the headlines—or would be, if every discussion wasn’t ragging on him. He checked the comments—a mistake—then Instagram—a bigger mistake—then Reddit—a true error in judgment.
Wow, who knew Rivkin was so ungrateful to the organization that drafted him?
He must hate the team.
Sounded like he hates the whole city.
Are we just ignoring the part where he said he was gay???
Okay, enough. Eitan muted his texts from unknown contacts, then booked a courier service to bring Isabel a fruit-as-flowers arrangement. Breathed, focusing on the traffic around them. Outside, a line of cars passed by, all full of people going about their lives, most of whom probably hadn’t embarrassed themselves in front of the media today. He’d live.
After a minute, a text appeared, a mom-sized string of hearts that strained the character limit on the message. What his mom sent when she didn’t have the English to say what she was feeling or he lacked the Russian to understand it. For a second, he held his phone, clenched his eyes shut. A scratch developed in his throat. He wanted to call her, but he didn’t want to have the conversation out loud. Joe seemed trustworthy, but right now, Eitan had no idea who he should trust. What might Joe say about what Eitan Rivkin, Cosmos third baseman, had said while in the backseat of his car?
Eitan: I screwed up pretty bad
Mom: it is what it is
An expression she’d learned from a wall hanging she’d gotten at Target and hung in her kitchen alongside the one that read, G-d bless and keep the tsar…far away from us.
Eitan: it felt like the right thing to do
Mom: I like that my son isn’t afraid to speak his mind
What she’d said as she handed him a bag of frozen peas after he’d gotten his eye blackened in a schoolyard fight, when some bully or another had said something out of hearing range of a teacher.
Eitan: People are asking me all kinds of questions
Including one that Eitan couldn’t answer. Am I…? He didn’t know what he’d say if she asked him the same thing. He didn’t want to lie, but he also wasn’t entirely clear on the truth.
Mom: The beautiful thing about this country is that people can be who they are
Can they? he didn’t write back, so he added another few hearts to the thread, then put his phone back in airplane mode.
It took another half an hour to get to Manhattan, another thirty minutes of listening to his audiobook, which was good enough he was slightly sad when they arrived at his hotel. He tipped Joe generously—for Cleveland—then added another twenty at Joe’s questioning glance and got out.
Outside the car, the city was still the city: fucking loud. Eitan didn’t know how he’d be able to think in all of this. Cleveland was a city, but the kind that most definitely slept.
He had on the ballplayer-standard invisibility outfit: sunglasses, a minor-league ballcap that’d gone pale with sun and sweat. A few pedestrians cast looks his way. Odd, how the faces of people passing started to look familiar, like long-ago acquaintances. A girl with the same nose as someone he’d gone to high school with; a couple, walking arm in arm, like his distant cousins. A man, tall, lean, with sandy brown hair who looked like… But no, that wasn’t him.
So Eitan went into his hotel to spend his first night being truly famous alone.
That night, he fell asleep to the blare of city car horns; the next morning, he woke to the alarm of jackhammers. No matter how much water he downed in the cab to the stadium, he couldn’t shake the feeling of his skin being too small for his body. More like the mess he’d made was too big for him to contain it.
Sometime in the night, the haze of adrenaline had faded, and reality had taken its place: he’d committed the cardinal baseball sin of having an opinion in public, even if he knew his was the right one. His phone was full of reporters’ questions; his social media mentions breathless with an entire city’s speculation. Noise even his book couldn’t block out.
Only the Cleveland group chat was…quiet. Eitan had sent a hello from the big apple where apple was an emoji. No response had come.
