Shouts erupted from his team. “Way to go, O!” someone called. Then he was carrying the ball toward Ian who was nodding and people were shouting his name and in the distance the girls were cheering and for a brief moment O shed the hyperawareness of his black skin and was just another shiny new hero on the playground.
As he passed by to go out to pitch, Casper said, “Nice catch.” There was no layer of jealousy or sarcasm beneath his words; he meant what he said. His straightforwardness and natural self-confidence were appealing. They also made O want to trip him up.
Osei did not assume that one good catch would make him the star of the team, nor that Ian would put him in one of the best positions in the running order of kickers: fourth or fifth, when the bases might be loaded and one good kick would bring in several runs.
And he didn’t do that. “You can obviously throw and catch,” Ian said as the team gathered at home plate. “But can you kick?” He gave O a long look with his murky gray eyes that were set so close together you felt off-kilter looking into them. Then he gestured to the plate, and O realized he was expected to go first.
It was not a crazy tactic. If you didn’t know how well someone would perform, you could take a chance on them going first and getting out and the team would still have more opportunities to score. Of course, if the first boy went up and kicked the ball far, that was a great waste, as he wouldn’t bring in any runs other than his own.
And that was what Osei was going to do. What he had to do. He couldn’t show he could throw and catch well and then kick poorly. He couldn’t even kick medium-well—enough to get to first base. He had to kick a home run.
As he walked up to the plate he heard a murmur cross the playing field, and was gratified to see the fielders all take several steps back. They were expecting great things of him. Dee and Mimi were now standing on the ship, watching. In fact, it felt as if the whole playground had come to a halt.
At the school in Rome, Osei had often been the goalkeeper when they played soccer; the other boys didn’t like having physical contact with black skin, and for the most part that could be avoided if he was in goal. In that position he had at least learned how to kick high and far. Normally a goalkeeper kicks a ball from standstill, so when Casper rolled the ball toward O unexpectedly fast, he took a split second to gauge it, then ran to meet it, and felt his toe connect, true and hard. It should go far.
It did go far. The ball soared over the heads of all the fielders, flew over the chain-link fence that bounded the playground, and bounced off the roof of a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked across the street. A cheer rose from the field, from the girls, from the whole playground—except for Osei’s team members. They groaned.
He looked around, puzzled by their response. “Is that not a home run?”
“It doesn’t count if it goes out of the playground,” Ian explained.
“Yeah,” Duncan added, “and we can’t play anymore if it does. Teachers’ rule. They hate having to go after it. Look, it’s gone all the way to Maple.”
The ball had rolled down the street, knocking into the wheels of parked cars, and was heading into an intersection, where drivers swerved and honked.
“I am sorry. I did not know.”
“You know you bounced it off of Casper’s parents’ car,” Ian added. “He lives right across the street.”
“Oh! I will apologize.”
Ian shrugged. He seemed more amused at O’s humiliation than angry that the game was over.
Not for long. Dee came running over from the ship. When she reached Osei she threw her arms around him. “That was amazing!”
O froze, and the rest of the kids on the playground did too: the cheers died, the buzz was silenced. Ian stopped smiling.
“She touched him!” Patty whispered in a mixture of awe and horror. A chorus of voices joined her.
“Not just touched—she hugged him!”
“Damn!”
“I wouldn’t do that—would you?”
“Do you think they’re going together?”
“They must be.”
“She could have any boy she wants and she chooses him?”
“Is Dee crazy or something?”
“I don’t know—he is kind of cute.”
“Are you kidding? He’s—you know!”
“Not only that—he’s new. She doesn’t even know him.”
“Yeah, he could be an axe murderer, or like that guy dressed as Santa who strangles the girl in Tales from the Crypt.”
“You saw that? My parents wouldn’t let me.”
“I saw The Exorcist too. Snuck in with my older brother. Scared the hell out of me—especially that weird voice she talked in.”
Osei could not hear what they said, but it didn’t matter. They were all witnesses to a line he had never intended to cross.
Dee noticed when she was hugging him that Osei stiffened, and when she pulled away from his smooth arms she became aware of the rigid atmosphere around them. Mimi had her eyes fixed on the ground; the boys—Ian and Casper and Rod and the others—stood straight as soldiers, arms at their sides. Patty was shaking her head slightly. Dee had touched O, in front of everyone, and the disapproval of the entire playground and even, it seemed, of O himself, was so strong that she had to close her eyes to it. “Let’s go to the trees,” she said. Sanctuary.
The cypress trees were the most surprising feature of the playground. The designer must have had a soft spot for trees, and instead of tearing out the existing stand of cypress trees when the school was being built, they were left, the playground designed around them so that they towered over one corner. Perhaps to justify keeping them, a sandpit had been built there, which was never used for play—this was the older students’ playground, and digging in sand was something only younger kids did with any enthusiasm. Instead it became one of the few neutral places on the playground where boys and girls from all the grades went to hang out.
Dee led O to the trees and dropped to the sand. He hesitated, then joined her. As they sat side by side, the playground slowly began to revive. The boys got the kickball back and used it to play dodgeball—Ian and Rod throwing particularly hard and making red marks on the calves of the boys who wore shorts. Girls got on with hopscotch, and Mimi sat playing jacks with her classmate Jennifer not far from the sandpit. Blanca had begun jumping Double Dutch.
“That was such a great kick,” Dee remarked.
O shrugged. “But it hit Casper’s car. And it stopped the game.”
“Well, you didn’t know. Ian should have told you the rules at the start.” She scooped up a handful of sand, still slightly damp with dew, and began sifting through it with her fingers to pick out the cypress needles and cones. “Did you play kickball in New York?”
“I played a little bit.” O ran a hand over the sand, smoothing a patch.
“What was New York like? I always hear such scary things. People getting mugged all the time, or murdered. And it’s so dirty.”
“Oh, it was not so bad. We lived in a nice part of the city.” O paused, as if thinking of New York reminded him of something.