I can’t see.” And then all at once, Walsh collapsed in the grass by the dugout, falling easily, landing hard. I almost called out to him before he began to laugh. Laugh and laugh, the sound plastered with happiness. “The sky is so pretty, Sophie. Come look.”
“You’re quitting? Walsh Hunter is a quitter?” I got closer, hovering over his lying form, hands on my hips. “Man, Scott’s going to steal that captain spot from you if you don’t put in enough effort.”
Walsh’s eyes shifted from the endless sky to me, but his gaze didn’t change. He still looked at me like I held all the stars in my arms, brilliant and aglow.
Gosh, he shouldn’t look at me like that, I found myself thinking, my lungs taking a shaking breath. It’s not fair.
In the blink of an eye, Walsh reached upward and grasped my wrist, pulling me down to the grass beside him.
The ground was firm when I landed, but the laugh pulled from me was loud. We were close enough that I could feel Walsh’s shoulder brushing mine, hear his breath pull in and push out. I didn’t know why watching him breathe was so mesmerizing in that moment, but I became distracted.
For a long, silent moment, I stared at him and he stared at the sky, both of us mesmerized, both of us lost in thought. I wished I could be like him, caught up in the beauty of the night. His eyes, which had been glazed over with an excited sort of humor, bled into a more haunted look the longer we held onto our words. And the longer we were quiet, the harder the idea of talking became.
I tugged off the baseball helmet so I could see him better. “Are you going to play baseball after high school?” I asked, trying to fill the silence, wanting to hear his voice again.
“Don’t know yet,” he responded, not looking at me. His fingers were splayed at his side. “There’s a county league for Fenton—you’ve heard of it?”
I hadn’t.
“It’s kind of like your newspaper internship, just for baseball. They pick a few seniors from each school in the county to play for their league, especially if they want to go on to play for college.” Walsh raised a shoulder. “They take their picks in the fall and it’s hard to get into. That’s why Coach drills us so hard about winning, why our team is so competitive. Last year, they only took one senior from Bayview.”
“So that’s what you want to do?” I asked, anxiety curling in my chest. “Play for that team next summer?”
“The county league has a leg-up for players to get on college teams. I have a better shot at it if we win the last game—it’s the championship game in the entire county. It’s us against Greenville.”
I swallowed hard. Guilt, my brain whispered. What you’re feeling is guilt. “But do you want to do that?”
“I love baseball,” Walsh told me, voice almost sounding mechanical. I couldn’t figure out why. “It would be a great opportunity.”
I stared up at the stars as his words sunk in. Playing for the county league—that would be a great opportunity for him. He said that it’d be a good step if he wanted to play on a college team. But if I published my article and word got back to the county team about Bayview’s cheating habits, they wouldn’t want a player from a corrupt team. They wouldn’t want Walsh, captain of that team, no matter how great his batting average was.
I blinked fast, feeling like I was fighting back tears, but my eyes were dry. My brain was right—this was guilt, and it ate my insides, weighed down my body, turned my spine into lead.
Walsh turned his head to look at me, his hair rucking up against the grass, his bright blue-green eyes cutting into mine. “Are you cold, Sophie?”
Goosebumps dotted my skin, but I wasn’t cold. The night stole my voice when I spoke, words coming in a whisper, “Why do you call me that?”
“It’s your name.”
“My name is Sophia. An a, not an e. I’ve corrected you how many times? And yet you didn’t want your mom calling me that.”
Walsh fell quiet for a moment, but I couldn’t look at him. I was too afraid he’d see how desperately I wanted to know his answer or be able to sense how quickly my heart was beating. Rapid succession, boom, boom, boom, like stars falling from the sky and