Page 7 of Breakout Year
“I grew up here.” A surprise, given her lack of apparent accent, but maybe she’d filed that off the way Eitan had blazed the tea off his teeth. Something deliberate. Still, she rolled her shoulders back with a defiance Eitan knew. The say something about it look he got when someone was going to insult his hometown. Except he’d insulted his hometown, and Isabel was here to, perhaps, fix that.
“What neighborhood are you from?” he asked. The longer he stalled, the less he’d have to actually deal with anything. Probably not healthy, but really, what in baseball was?
“Corona. You could walk to it from here if the city bothered to put in any sidewalk.” Which sounded like the kind of criticism that you could lob at the place you were from but would have an issue with if someone else pointed it out. “Here,” she said, obviously wanting to change the subject, “I made you a list.”
She handed him a printout. It had bullet points, plenty of white space around the accompanying text. Still, he read through it slowly. Was she looking at him? No, her attention was aimed at her notebook. After what she possibly deemed an appropriate amount of time, she looked up. “Finished?”
“Sure.” Eitan had read half the document. He put on his best aw shucks grin. “Maybe talk me through it.”
“We need to assume that every person in the city has your phone number and possibly your logins.” She held out her palm. “Let me see your phone.”
Eitan blanched.
Isabel lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t worry, I’m not checking for those kinds of photos,” she said, sparing Eitan from having to say he didn’t have a lot of those kinds of photos.
She spent the next few minutes scrolling through his various accounts. His phone buzzed each time she enabled two-factor authentication. “How’re your passwords?” she asked.
“Uh, password-y.”
“I hope they don’t involve your last name or jersey number.”
Whoops. “They won’t once we change them.” Which they did.
“Have you posted a thank-you message to Cleveland yet?” she said when they were done.
He hadn’t. Mostly because every time he’d tried to, he’d been hit with a wave of but then I’ll really be gone. Still, he knew he needed to, so he did, using a picture that the team photographer had taken a few years ago: Eitan at third base, slightly out of focus, people in the stands behind him like a pointillist’s set of dots. Cleveland, you always had my back. Which was true of the city, if not the team. There’s nowhere I’d rather call home. Once he’d posted on his Instagram account, he scrolled through the other photos he’d been tagged in. Connor’s farewell post was gone. Huh. Weird. Well, maybe he hadn’t wanted to deal with a flood of negative comments.
Eitan probably shouldn’t be getting the ghost of a sensation in his throat—homesickness for a place he’d only just left, for how simple his life had been before—especially not in front of someone he’d just met. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. “What’s next?” he asked.
“Next is damage control from yesterday’s press conference.”
Eitan winced at the word. Damage. What he’d undoubtedly caused. Now, in the eyes of organized baseball, he was tainted goods.
“I brainstormed a few possible statements.” Isabel handed him another piece of paper, this one with denser text.
“How long did it take you to do this?” Eitan asked, though the circles under her eyes answered for her.
“A while.” Though a while sounded a lot like all night. Eitan wasn’t the only person who’d gotten chewed out yesterday. She tapped her desk for emphasis. “Option one, which is, I think, the best option: we put out a statement reiterating your commitment to various social causes and clarifying that you were just discussing your advocacy work.”
Eitan considered. He could just let this go. Put out a statement. Control the amount of damage he was associated with. Having a full day to think about it hadn’t changed his decision. If you can’t be who you are in New York… What hope was there for anywhere else? The only issue—the issue that felt bigger than Isabel’s suddenly claustrophobic office—was that he wasn’t entirely sure who that was. “I meant what I said, even if I didn’t mean to say it that way. It probably makes your life more difficult, doesn’t it, if I’m not straight?”
“If?” Isabel’s face went through another set of contortions—surprise, potentially exasperation. “Sorry, that wasn’t…” For a moment, it seemed like she was gathering her words. “I have no issue with that. Obviously.”
Though from where Eitan was sitting, nothing about that was obvious.
“It’s just—” She glanced around as if pointing out they were very much in the executive area of a baseball stadium. “I want what’s best for you and what’s best for the team.”
Those probably aren’t the same thing. Eitan mentally calculated how many days he had left in New York. If the team didn’t make the postseason, he just needed to survive until the end of September. If they did, then maybe a couple weeks after that. A few years ago, he’d made it a point to start all one hundred and sixty-two games of the season, even if it meant he’d played on a sore hamstring for weeks. His parents sometimes described what life was like for them before they emigrated. This was nothing, and even if it wasn’t, he could survive it. “Sure, fine, I’m convinced.”
For that, he got another eyebrow lift, but Isabel leaned forward and tapped the first bullet point on the paper. “Saying nothing is always an option. Not for you but for other people.”
“Hey!” he said in faux outrage.
She shot him a smile. For the first time since he’d come to New York, his heart rate settled fractionally. “Or,” she continued, “we say nothing, but we do a photo op at a charity. There’s a community center near here we work with a lot. It’s LGBTQ-friendly but not for LGBTQ youth specifically.” She drummed her fingers against the surface of her desk. One of her nails was chipped, as if she’d been biting it. “Or we could get you a girlfriend.”
At first, he thought he’d misheard her. “A girlfriend—just like that?”
“You are aware as of twenty-four hours ago that you are the starting third baseman for the New York Cosmopolitans baseball team. So, yeah, just like that.” She dug around in her desk and came up with a card that she handed to him. On it was the logo of a modeling agency, though Eitan wondered if modeling was being used euphemistically for something else.
