“I’m fucking with them,” said Klemp. Laverna decided not to give her any more money. This continued for the next ten minutes. Klemp gave Bucky the evil eye until he arranged the ball, and Klemp bashed it into the outfield, and the Flood Girls proved to be useless. Rachel especially. Once she saw an easy target, Klemp hit it to Rachel again and again, until Rachel just held the mitt up to her face permanently.
Laverna was disgusted. She forced Jake to fetch her an antianxiety pill, and he held up the can of beer to her mouth. She could no longer watch the carnage, and she sighed. She studied Klemp, her grimly determined face and firmly planted stance. Laverna had no doubt that Klemp would grow up to be a silver miner.
“You’re not even trying!” Laverna shouted to the outfield, her casts slammed against the chain link, and pain shot up her arms. The dog reached the ball before any of the outfielders, and pushed it with his nose, deeper into the grass. Ronda threw her mitt at the dog, missed by a good three feet. Finally, the taller Sinclair scooped up a ball and threw it to Diane, who had hustled out into the grass of the outfield. At least the Sinclair had hit the cutoff, thought Laverna. Of course, Diane had been wildly gesticulating with her hands, so she wasn’t hard to miss.
The Flood Girls did not need uniforms. Laverna would rather spend the money on something useful. She wondered how much it would cost to import a ringer from Cuba, a woman who could actually play ball. She didn’t give a shit about the language barrier, or the paperwork. Laverna calculated the cost of housing a foreigner, and the expense of finding plantains, or whatever Cubans ate. The hell with it, decided Laverna. She would figure out a way to draft Klemp, even though she was too young for the league.
Concealer
Jake found himself awake at three in the morning. This had been happening for a week. He would lie there, still as a corpse, for two hours, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the alarm clock until 5:00 a.m., when he would just give up and put on his headphones.
Jake didn’t dare turn on a lamp. When Krystal worked the night shift, he made himself as unobtrusive as possible. He didn’t want a lecture about Jesus, so he stayed in his room, in the dark. When he could see the glow of the kitchen light under the door, Jake knew that Bert was distracted with eating breakfast, part of the new righteous routine.
Yesterday, his English teacher had made a remark about the circles under his eyes, said that Jake looked like the mother of a newborn.
While he applied his hair wax, he studied his reflection in the mirror. This morning, he resembled someone who had barely survived being lost in the woods.
He stared in the mirror, and his teacher’s remarks made him determined. He opened the cupboard below the sink and fished around for his mother’s concealer.
He opened the tiny jar, and ever so carefully, began to dab a bit under his eyes. He made sure to rub it in as much as possible—he knew that he had to make it look natural.
Jake believed that he looked well rested, but just as he was applying a tiny bit more, Bert burst into the bathroom in his typically cloddish way.
Bert made a strange sound, almost a growl. He yanked Jake out of the bathroom and carried him to his bedroom.
Jake lay across his bedspread and listened as Bert yanked the drawer in the kitchen completely free. Jake could hear the clatter of cooking utensils as they spilled out on the linoleum, hear Bert cursing until he found the wooden spoon.
* * *
The sting of the spank had dissipated by the time he arrived at school, but his face was splotchy from scrubbing it with a washcloth. He didn’t care. His homeroom was taught by a woman who despised him and rarely looked at his face.
Ms. Bray was ostensibly a science teacher, but he had decided she was a complete idiot the first month of school and had stopped paying attention when he realized she lectured directly from the textbook. In October, she had declared war on Jake when she had caught him reading a paperback behind his science book. She couldn’t believe that he dared find a paperback more interesting than her lecture. She had ordered Jake to the front of the class to tell his classmates what his book was about, and why it was more important than cellular division.
Jake was flame-faced as he stood there, holding up his copy of Lady Boss. He showed the book to the class, careful to cover Jackie Collins’s name with one hand.
“I’m currently reading a book entitled Lady Boss, and it is about how hard it is for women in the workplace. I think it might also be about capitalism, but I’m not sure.”
He returned to his seat, and she had hated him ever since. He’d had teachers in the past who found his advanced reading skills precocious and worthy of praise. She was not one of them.
* * *