By the time the weekend came around, I had spoken to nearly half the parents on the team and gotten a definite feel that I wasn’t in any way, shape, or form the only one who wasn’t okay with the revised schedule from hell. We wanted it changed and no one in power was willing to do it. Governments had fallen thanks to pissed off citizens. Why couldn’t Tornado parents or guardians do the same thing on a smaller scale?
Over the course of those days, the parents I talked to reached out to others they knew and soon the entire team had been contacted. There was a handful that genuinely didn’t care about the schedule or understand why we were upset by it. Suck-ups.
But there was no way a big group of us could all be ignored. I figured, if nothing was done, those of us who disagreed could plan to not show up on the new date that had been added during the week. I wasn’t just doing this for me; I was doing it for Josh and Louie. When the hell would I manage to do things with Louie if we were always busy with Josh? He was at such a delicate age for memories and shaping the outcome of the kind of person he would become. I didn’t want him to ever feel like he was less important than his brother. I knew what that felt like, and I’d never want either of the boys to experience that.
Someone decided that at the end of practice, we were all going to talk to the coaching staff. And that was what happened. A swarm of parents descended on the head and assistant coaches of the Tornado. It looked like a mob with the three men and one woman in the middle. Some people were shouting to get heard; there was some finger pointing, but mostly there was a ton of “Yeah!” when someone overheard a good point another person made. Somehow I’d gotten wrangled into the middle of the circle, right at the center of the action. My head had started hurting earlier in the day, and the near shouting didn’t help it at all.
I was only partially surprised as Dallas, while in the middle of saying, “Stop yelling. I can’t think when you’re in my face,” looked right at me. He’d been glancing from face to face from the moment he’d been surrounded, but as soon as his gaze landed on me, it stayed there.
What the hell had I done now? He’d brought this on himself, hadn’t he?
“It was brought to our attention,” he said, staring right at me, “how unhappy you are with the schedule. I get it. I’ll get together with the rest of the staff and see what changes we can make.” He repeated the same words he’d told me days ago.
I looked from side to side as discreetly as possible, but when my eyes went forward again, Dallas still hadn’t looked away. Why? I hadn’t been the only one to complain.
“Some of us don’t mind the schedule the way it is,” one lone, ballsy parent piped in. It was the woman who had complained during the tryouts when the two women sitting in front of me had been talking about Dallas’s body.
“Some of us have a life, Christy,” one of the parents, whose name I couldn’t remember, shot back. “Our kids need lives too.”
“It isn’t that bad,” Christy kept arguing, her gaze landing on me and narrowing. What the hell was happening? Why were multiple people looking at me like I’d caused this? Hadn’t I tried to prevent it? “We never had problems like this before. Some people need to realize they aren’t always going to get their way.”
The fact that she was looking right at me didn’t help the situation at all. The schedule hadn’t been like that before. One of the parents I talked to told me that.
Plus, I wasn’t an idiot. Josh hadn’t left his old team on good terms. His coach had moved him to second base to give his own son the catcher position and we’d complained. Soon afterward, the team had picked up another player and Josh had gotten screwed over again. Coincidence? I think not. It had been his idea to leave, and I had supported him 100 percent… even though I’d called his ex-coach a prick when we finally walked out of there for the last time. Had rumors gotten around here already about that? I knew how tight this community was. There might be two degrees of separation between everyone.
Either way, I knew this parent was talking about me. Us. I’d have to be an idiot to not recognize that. And I didn’t like it.
From what I’d learned, only three new boys had joined the Tornado at the same time Josh had, and I didn’t know where the hell the parents of those kids were. If they were even here. Regardless, with parents of kids in competitive teams, you had to assert your dominance before your voice was lost forever. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to put Josh into that position of having the parent that was just okay with everything. If anyone ever picked on him, they were going to learn the hard way my family didn’t get messed with.
Those were the excuses I was going to go with to justify what happened next.
“Why are you looking right at me as you say that?” I asked the woman calmly. Was today “Pick on Diana Day” and I hadn’t gotten the memo?
The woman sneered, and I swore a couple of people standing right by her took a step away. “I didn’t say your name, did I?”
I didn’t have an anger problem. I never had because I didn’t bottle up my emotions, except for that one stupid period at the age of twenty-six when I wasted months of my life on the second worst thing that ever happened to me: my ex. If I had a problem with someone, I dealt with it, and if I happened to stay mad afterward, it was no one else’s fault but mine.
But I was going to beat the shit out of this woman the second there weren’t any witnesses around, I decided instantly. “You didn’t have to say my name. You were staring right at me. Am I the one having a hissy fit about wanting things to go ‘my way’?”
The woman had the urge to shrug.
I made sure not to break eye contact with her as I stayed pretty damn calm. “I’m not having a hissy fit. The schedule is ridiculous, and I’m not the only one who thinks so, so don’t put this on me, lady.” Looking back on it, maybe I shouldn’t have used the “L” word. Someone had called me that once and it had the same effect on me as the “B” word did.
“But you started it,” she argued.
“I didn’t start sh—anything. My kid needs a day off during the week. This has nothing to do with me. My kid is ten. He isn’t in the majors yet. You want him getting Little League elbow or stress fractures in a couple of years? I don’t want Josh to have to get surgery before he’s even out of high school because I wanted him to win a fu—damn tournament he isn’t going to remember when he’s sixteen,” I snapped at her, irritated.
“I do care about my son,” she tried to argue.
“I didn’t say you didn’t.”
It was shameful how much I enjoyed her cheeks going red. “But you implied it!”
I shrugged right back at her the same way she had at me, and it sent her into a rage. Bitch. “Well, you have an awesome way of showing it when I just told you about how he could injure himself by overdoing it, and you’re still arguing with me over something that’s had plenty of studies done on.”
“I do care about my son, Teen Mom—”
God help me. I took a step toward her. I didn’t know what the hell I was thinking about doing to her, but it was something, damn it.