THE park with intense caution. It took me more than half an hour to be reasonably sure that Buzz wasn’t there, somewhere, lurking with another .50-caliber salutation for me. Of course, he could have been watching from the window of one of the nearby buildings—but none of them were hotels or apartments, and none of the pictures taken in the park had been shot from elevation. Besides, if I avoided every place where a maniac with a high-powered rifle might possibly shoot me, I’d live the rest of my life hiding under my bed.
Still, there was no harm in exercising caution. Rather than walking across the open ground of the park to the softball field, I took the circuitous route around the outside of the park—and heard quiet little sobs coming from the shade beneath the bleachers opposite the ones where I’d sat with Michael.
Slowing my steps as I approached, I peered under the bleachers.
A girl in shorts, sneakers, and a powder blue team jersey was huddled up with her arms wrapped around her knees, crying quietly. She had stringy red hair and was skinny, even for someone her age. It took me a minute to recognize her as Alicia’s teammate, the second basem—person.
“Hey, there,” I said quietly, trying to keep my voice gentle. “You all right?”
The girl looked up, her eyes wide, and immediately began wiping at her eyes and nose. “Oh. Oh, yes. I’m fine. I’m just fine, sir.”
“Right, right. Next you’ll tell me you’ve got allergies,” I said.
She looked up at me with a shaky little smile, huffed out a breath in the ghost of a laugh—and it transformed into another sob on her. Her face twisted up into an agonized grimace. She shuddered and wept harder, bowing her head.
I can be such a sucker. I ducked down under the bleachers and sat down beside her, a couple of feet away. The girl cried for a couple more minutes, until she began quieting down.
“I know you,” she said a minute later, between sniffles. “You were talking to Coach Carpenter yesterday. A-Alicia said you were a friend of the family.”
“I’d like to think so,” I agreed. “I’m Harry.”
“Kelly,” she said.
I nodded. “Shouldn’t you be practicing with the team, Kelly?”
She shrugged her skinny shoulders. “It doesn’t help.”
“Help?”
“I’m hopeless,” she said. “Whatever it is I’m doing, I just screw it up.”
“Well, that’s not true,” I said with assurance. “Nobody can be bad at everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.”
“I am,” she said. “We’ve only lost two games all year, and both of them were because I screwed up. We go to the finals next week, and everyone’s counting on me, but I’m just going to let them down.”
Hell’s bells, what a ridiculously tiny problem. But it was obvious that it was real to Kelly, and that it meant the world to her. She was just a kid. It probably looked like a much larger issue from where she was standing.
“Pressure,” I said. “Yeah, I get that.”
She peered at me. “Do you?”
“Sure,” I said. “You feel like people’s lives depend on you, and that if you do the wrong thing, they’re going to be horribly hurt—and it will be your fault.”
“Yes,” she said, sniffling. “And I’ve been trying so hard, but I just can’t.”
“Be perfect?” I asked. “No, of course not. But what choice do you have?”
She looked at me uncertainly.
“Anything you do, you risk screwing up. You could do a bad job of crossing the street one day and get hit by a car.”
“I probably could,” she said darkly.
I held up my hand. “My point,” I told her, “is that if you want to play it safe, you can stay at home and wrap yourself up in Bubble Wrap and never do anything.”
“Maybe I should.”
I snorted. “They still make you read Dickens in school? Great Expectations ?”
“Yeah.”
“You can stay at home and hide if you want—and wind up like Miss Havisham,” I said. “Watching life through a window and obsessed with how things might have been.”
“Dear God,” she said. “You’ve just made Dickens relevant to my life.”
“Weird, right?” I asked her, nodding.
Kelly let out a choking little laugh.
I pushed myself up and nodded to her. “I never saw you hiding over here, okay? I’m just gonna go do what I gotta do, and leave you to make the choice.”
“Choice?”
“Sure. Do you want to put your cap back on and play? Or do you want to wind up an old maid wandering around your house in the rotting