I ran down the block, and she tore after me.
On Saturday, my mom picked Amanda up after her morning softball game. I had baseball that afternoon, but she got my friend Tristan’s mom to drive me. She’d found out that the party Amanda was missing was a Disney Princess theme, so she went to the store and bought a crown with a picture of Ariel on it.
“Amanda doesn’t like stuff like that,” I told Mom.
“Every girl wants to be pretty. When you see her, tell her she looks nice.”
“She’ll punch me.”
“Say it anyway.”
When Amanda and my mom came back from the salon, hours later, Mom looked the same as she always did. Amanda was unrecognizable. Gone were the bouncy red curls that clustered around her face and made me want to touch them to see if they’d spring back. Instead, her hair looked straight and poofed up like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, emphasized by the dopey green crown. I knew Amanda thought Disney princesses were stupid. She’d said so. The only Disney movies we liked were Aladdin and Ice Age. She held her hands in front of her, staring at her shiny pink nails. She had on sandals, and all her toes were a matching color. But the middle was still Amanda in her dirty baseball jersey.
“You look . . . pretty.” I followed Mom’s instructions and tried to smile.
She didn’t look pretty. She looked like all the other girls in school.
“Thanks.” She stared at me, staring at her. “Are we going to play something now?”
“Yeah. Tag! You’re it!” I ran to the door, relieved.
Mom said, “Maybe you should play something in—”
But we were already out.
Our yard had a hammock section with three black olive trees and lots of bromeliads that filled with water when it rained. We used the part where the trees hung low as a sort of clubhouse, spending days there, playing that it was a cave or a pirate ship or, today, the tree where the Lost Boys lived. Except in our version, Amanda was Wendy, a much cooler Wendy who ran with the boys instead of just sewing and telling stories like my mother.
When it started to rain, I said, “Should we go inside?”
“Nah,” Amanda said. “We’re not getting that wet.”
So we kept playing.
By the end of the day, Amanda’s curls were back. The pink nail polish was chipped, and her feet were dirty. “Where’d your crown go?” I asked her when we finally went inside.
“Oh, shoot. It must be in the bushes. Should we go get it?”
My mother walked in and sighed. “Oh, Amanda. I wanted your father to see. Well, at least we took a picture.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wasn’t.
Over dinner that night, Mom said, “I guess that girl was right. Amanda wouldn’t appreciate a party like that.”
Dad sort of smiled. “Maybe next time take her to an MMA match.”
“I wanted to take her for a girls’ day, since she doesn’t have a mother to do it with her.”
“How was your game today?” Dad asked.
“Good. I got on base twice and threw two men out.”
I’d actually gotten a triple and was given the game ball, but for some reason, I didn’t want to mention that. Other dads would know about that because they’d have been there. “Can you come next week?”
“Maybe when this trial’s over I’ll have more time. When does the season end?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They play until May,” Mom said, “so there are plenty of games after your trial. He might play summer ball too.”
I bet Dad wouldn’t come. I tried not to care too much. I didn’t really want one of those dads who coached, or a dad who had fits when his kid didn’t get played enough or got mad if they screwed up. Nolan’s dad had started yelling and kicking dirt like a baby the week before. He screamed at Nolan for dropping a pop fly. I didn’t want a dad like that. I was sort of glad Dad didn’t understand baseball. But it would have been nice if he’d shown up.
4
The next few years kind of blend together in my mind. T-ball melted into Khoury League football into coach-pitched baseball, then football, then baseball again.
I was sort of small for football. Okay, I was really small. But everyone played. People liked me when I was seven and the oldest on the Tiny Mites team, but I knew I’d be the smallest on the Mighty Mites the next year and drag everyone down. Coach Lou suggested I try to “bulk up,” so I got Mom to drive through McDonald’s after every practice and buy me a milkshake.
It was on one of those days, at one of those drive-throughs, that the song “Mandy” came on the radio. Mom started singing along, “Oh, Mandy, you came and you gave without tak-i-i-ing.”
The next day at school, when I saw Amanda, I started singing it.
“If you don’t stop, I’m going to karate kick you in the head,” she said.
I knew she would, so I stopped.
It was in the beginning of second grade that Amanda showed up at school and ran to my desk.
“My mom’s back,” she said.