A Stitch in Time Pt. 06

"I'll call you tomorrow," she said, giving me a quick nod as if I was already a part of whatever conspiracy she was planning. I nodded back, and hustled Tanya out to the car.

It turned out to be the worst sex of my life. Ever. Excluding, of course, all the times I didn't remember in tenth and eleventh grades. For one thing, we probably shouldn't have eaten at Carter's. Their hamburgers and fries are absolutely wonderful, but probably about as greasy as the chicken that Tiffany was wolfing down when I left the house. It left us both feeling a little bloated, a feeling that hadn't really left when we climbed into the back seat of my Civic at Chapman's Point.

Second, it actually wasn't that warm. Which probably explained why we were the only car parked at Chapman's Point. We threw our coats in the front seat, but we both kept our shirts on. And we both only pulled our pants as far down as we had to.

And finally, there was no way with my frame to get Tanya warmed up with my tongue. I couldn't manage to do that without opening a door, which would have made it even colder, and Tanya graciously told me, after we thought about it for a while, that it wasn't necessary. She did her best to blow me, but I found that I didn't like it as much from the side as I did from straight in front. I have no idea why. Maybe it was something to do with where the tongue and the teeth end up. She gave it a good try, certainly a better try than I gave her, but in the end it really wasn't that satisfying to either one of us.

So without really saying anything, we both sort of worked ourselves up, each with his or her own hand, until I sort of grunted that I was ready. She swung herself over me, but we found that there simply wasn't enough room for her thighs unless I slumped down like a couch potato cradling a bowl of Fritos. So instead, she swung around, this time facing away from me. That worked well, and I tried to reach around to finger her as she carefully bounced up and down on my lap. She only hit her head on the ceiling six or seven times before I came, probably the result of getting myself a little too ready. It didn't do anything for her, and she pulled herself off of me as soon as she felt me go soft.

"Well, that really sucked, didn't it?" she asked. Her voice caught a little as she said it, but I wasn't in a sympathetic mood.

"Yeah, I guess it did," I agreed.

"Trick, I'm sorry," she sobbed, burying her face in my shirt.

"It's fine," I said, uncomfortably throwing an arm over her shoulder and hugging her to me.

"It's not fine," she bawled more. "You just said it sucked."

"I was just agreeing with you," I pointed out.

That wasn't the right thing to say, either. It just made her cry even harder. Fifteen minutes later, when we had exhausted all of the 7-Eleven napkins that I hadn't managed to find when I was cleaning the car this afternoon, we decided that we would consider this to have been simply a bad experiment. One of the benefits of being friends with benefits was that we could be honest about the things we did and didn't like, and we agreed that car sex wasn't something that we had really enjoyed. Certainly, it wasn't something that we had any intention of repeating.

I dropped Tanya off around ten o'clock and headed home. I should have known that Friday wouldn't be any better than the rest of the week. The only way it could have been worse, in fact, was for it to have been Saturday.

Jeanne and Jill both had play practice that morning, so I spent the first couple of hours running errands for Dad and Tiffany. It wasn't until around eleven that I learned that Mrs. Szerchenko had called for me, several times in fact. I went upstairs to use my cell phone, and found that she had tried there several times as well.

"Mrs. Szerchenko, this is Patrick."

"Patrick, thank goodness you called. It's about tonight."

"Yes, ma'am?"

"I don't want to ruin any of your plans, of course, but I was thinking how nice it is that Tanya finally has some friends and I was wondering if they would like to come over tonight for some cake."

"Cake, ma'am?"

"I couldn't help myself. She always says, 'Mom, I don't need a cake.' But you only have birthdays once a year, right?"

Birthdays? Fuck, what was today?

"Patrick, are you still there?"

"Sorry, ma'am, must be a bad signal here. I tell you what, let me make some phone calls and get back to you, okay?"

"Certainly. I apologize for waiting until the last minute like this, but I just thought it would be nice..."

"I think so, too, ma'am. I'll be in touch."

"Shit!"

I managed to wait until after I had pressed the disconnect button to voice the thought that had been running through my head for the last twenty seconds. The party was actually the easy part. Jeanne would be home from play practice in an hour or so, and she could call Cammie. If the gang could come, fine. If not, well, Mrs. S was the one who waited until the day itself.

In the meantime, though, there was the whole thing about a present. Tanya had gotten me a very nice sweater for my birthday. I opened the window, and yelled out to Tiffany, who was supervising Dad pruning the rose bushes, that I needed to borrow her car. She waved back. I ran downstairs to rummage through Tiffany's purse for her keys.

Once I got to the mall, I was completely stumped. There was always the Victoria's Secret gift certificate. But the chances of Mrs. S being there when Tanya opened the presents were pretty good. And the chances of her liking that particular present were probably pretty small. In the end, I got one of the perfume spritzer girls in Hecht's to recommend a nice perfume, and I was on my way out of the store with that when I nearly mowed down Cammie and her mother.

"Patrick," Mrs. Rowe said effusively. "How nice to see you."

"You, too, Mrs. Rowe. Cammie. Oh, jeez, Cammie. Tanya's mom called me this morning and wants to invite some people over for birthday cake tonight. Can you come?"

"Sure," Cammie said. "I suppose you want me to call up the guys, huh?"

"Yeah. I was going to leave a note for Jeanne before I came here but I kind of forgot. So, uh..."

"Jerk. What is it with you two and birthdays? I suppose you waited until today to get her present, too."

"Well, um, yeah."

"Mr. Thoughtful," Cammie smirked.

"I remember for Cammie's sixteenth," Mrs. Rowe interrupted, "you got her a very lovely pair of —"

"Mother," Cammie said in a voice fraught with warning.

"Well, I'm just saying it was a very thoughtful gift," Mrs. Rowe concluded.

"Yeah. Well, let's see," Cammie snatched the bag from my hand. "Perfume?"

"Well, maybe his girlfriend likes perfume," Mrs. Rowe smiled at me.

"She's not really my girlfriend," I told her.

"She's not?" Mrs. Rowe asked.

"Does she?" Cammie interrupted. "Does she like perfume?"

I was stumped. The Hecht's girl had assured me that all women liked perfume.

"What kind does she wear?" Cammie pressed on. "Floral? Spicy? Sweet?"

"Cammie," Mrs. Rowe said. "You're embarrassing him."

"Mother, Trick Sterling doesn't need any help from me for that. Come on."

"Me?" I asked.

"Of course you," Cammie said with disgust. "Tanya's never worn perfume in her life. Mom, I'll meet you at the fountain in half an hour."

Mrs. Rowe waved goodbye as I hurried to catch up with Cammie. Our first stop was Hecht's, where she basically read the perfume girl the Riot Act and made her refund my money.

"You are such an asshole," Cammie said as we left the store. "What is she wearing to the Formal?"

"The what?"

"The Senior Formal. May nineteenth. Oh God, you haven't even asked her, have you? Of course not, you're Trick Sterling. Girls all over school are probably waiting by the phone for you to call. Come on."

She dragged me into a very small jewelry store, where she finally found a very elegant gold necklace. She assured me that it would go with anything Tanya wore, whether she went with me or wised up and went with someone else.

"Um, thanks, Cammie," I stammered as she started to head off to the fountain to meet her mother.

She turned around quickly.

"You know, I'm glad Tanya's not your girlfriend," she said, pausing slightly before she went on. "She deserves better."

Yeah, and fuck you, too, Cammie Rowe.

She wheeled again and stalked off.

The party turned out to be very nice. I impressed Tanya and her parents by showing up at five o'clock — while the Yankees and the Red Sox were playing — with all the fixings for a steak dinner, the only kind of dinner I knew how to cook. At seven-thirty, Tanya answered the doorbell to find not only our gang, but also Tanya's yearbook buddies. All of them, I learned, had received a phone call from Cammie. I mouthed a "thank you" to her. She mouthed an "asshole" to me.

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of banging on my door.

"What?" I said sleepily to Jeanne when I pulled it open.

"Church?" she asked. "You have ten minutes."

"Is Jill going?" I asked.

"No," Jeanne looked down the hall, her lip curling into a sneer. "She says she didn't sin this weekend."

"Me neither," I nodded slowly. "Tell Cammie thanks again."

"Tell her yourself, Trick," Jeanne said, pulling the door shut.

Chapter 22

Monday's baseball game was against our arch-rival, McKay Academy, at their lush, nicely appointed home field. Coach Torianni reminded us that our league playoff game with them last year had been a nail-biter. Mo Perra's two-run homer in the eighth had been the only scoring in the game. This year, they were supposed to be even better, and their record going into the game was a league-leading 8-3. With Marshall standing in seventh, with a league record of 4-5, it was unlikely that McKay was thinking of us as their arch-rival. We were more likely just a slow possum on their road to a league title and the state playoffs beyond that.

I would have loved to have pitched, but it was Cary's turn in the rotation. He pitched very well through the first three innings, mixing just enough fastballs in with his wicked curveball to keep the McKay batters off balance. Jesse was home with a cold, so this was the first time Tommy had called one of Cary's games. I remember thinking that Jesse would be lucky to have a starting position when he got back if Cary kept pitching this well. Meanwhile, Matt hit a two-run homer in the second, and Cary bunted home another run in the third.

The pivotal moment in the game came in the bottom of the fourth, when their number three hitter sent a grounder screaming toward Matt at third. Everyone on the team held their breath. And we kept on holding it as the ball ricocheted off his glove, then off his knee, and straight up into the air. He managed to grab the ball with his bare hand on its way back down and looked immediately to first. He was just as surprised as the rest of us to find that he still had a play there. Tommy, who had hustled down the first base line to back up Mo and was probably the only guy on our team who wasn't watching Matt, told us that the batter had taken two steps out of the batter's box, dropped the bat, and then tripped over it. It didn't matter. It was still an out, and when we got back to the dugout, Cary made a point of high-fiving Matt.

After that, McKay seemed to lose a little of its focus. We ended up scoring three more runs to only two for them, and went home with a well-earned, if somewhat surprising, 6-2 league win. I had done my part, singling in a run in the fifth and scoring another run in the seventh after a two-out triple.

The day's real good news, though, came that evening, when I got a call from Uncle Ted, the UVA history professor. He said that Coach Rogers had told him about my interest, and that they were very interested in me. Uncle Ted had a friend with a small plane, and he was willing to fly up and fly me back down to UVA on Friday evening. I would spend the night at Uncle Ted and Aunt Helen's, watch a game and take a tour of the campus on Saturday, and maybe hang out with some of the guys on the team on Saturday night. Then the guy would fly me back on Sunday. It sounded great to me.

Jeanne and Jill were still feuding, of course. At least Jeanne was still feuding. Around nine o'clock she barged into my room to complain that Jill wasn't taking any of her rehearsals seriously.

"She shows up, sings her song, and then skips off to flirt with the guys in the stage crew."

"And she should...?" I asked.

"She should pay attention to everything else that's going on in the play, so she knows what everyone else is doing."

"So it is sort of like baseball," I smiled.

"Yeah," she said savagely, "and you know who she reminds me of?"

I shrugged.

"You," she stormed off again.

That threw me for a loop. Coach hadn't complained about my practice routine. It was true I probably didn't take as much outfield as the other outfielders did, but I had to get in my throws, too. So I wondered what she meant. I shrugged again. Maybe I would get a chance to ask her the following night.

On Tuesday afternoon, though, I suddenly remembered that I had a history paper due on Friday, something about the first two decades of the twentieth century. I spent the afternoon in the school library, and the evening at the public library. By the end I had done a little research and had, at least, decided upon a topic: Theodore Roosevelt's 1906 trip to Panama, the first time a sitting American president had traveled abroad. It was a nice, compact little topic, but it offered plenty of other stuff about the Panama Canal that I could throw in if it proved too compact.

Wednesday was another baseball game, a non-league match-up at home against Thorn River High. The game started off horribly and never got much better. After I struck the first batter out, the second guy hit a sharp line drive to Matt that skimmed his outstretched glove and deflected down the left field line. By the time Bobby could get to it, the batter was already on third base. I told myself that it was a tough chance, and I couldn't blame Matt for it. Rabbit would have had it easily, of course. The next batter grounded out to second, easily scoring the guy from third. We put two runs across in the bottom of the inning, but they had figured us out. One batter after another started to try to hit the ball to Matt. He actually handled most of them. But the ones he didn't cost us big. And I made it worse by trying to throw all my pitches to the first base side of the plate, hoping that the left-handed hitters would try to pull the ball into right field and that the righties wouldn't be able to get around on the ball fast enough to pull it toward Matt.

But that got me away from my kind of pitching, which involved mixing up my locations to confuse the hitters, and mixing my fastball with the occasional change to keep them honest. Once I got away from that, I was a fairly ordinary pitcher. By the end of the third inning, I had been charged with my second earned run of the game, only my third of the year. Matt had been charged with three errors that lead to four unearned runs, and we were in a five-run hole.

It turned out to be too much to overcome. I doubled and Mo drove me in, but our clutch hitting was still largely absent. It went in the books as my first loss of the spring. Afterward, I stopped by Coach's office to let him know about my upcoming trip to Charlottesville.

"You realize we have a league game on Saturday," he said.

"Yeah, I know. But Tommy's hitting pretty good, so he can catch and Jesse can take my place."

"In the outfield," he said. "Not as captain."

"Captain," I scoffed. "Those guys don't listen to me any more than they listen..."

"To me?" Coach smiled. "Trick, they listen to me. If I tell them to change their stance, they change it. If I tell them to run more laps, they run laps. But it's true, they're not gonna listen to me tell them they need to become a better team. That kind of stuff has to grow from the inside out."

"Yeah," I nodded. "I'll do what I can. But this UVA thing really means a lot to me, Coach."

"So I gather," he smiled. "I don't think I've ever seen you run as fast as you did that day when their coach was in the stands. He's got a pretty good team this year. Top ten. You'd be a good addition."

"Thanks, Coach."

Damn right, I would be. Plus they'd have a real goddamn third baseman playing behind me. I could play the rah-rah cheerleader from now until the end of the season, and it wouldn't change how many errors we made in the field. Or how poorly we hit when we were up at the plate.

Tanya and Jeanne had both been at the game, but they were gone by the time I got out of the locker room. That was probably a good thing. Between the game and the A-minus I had received on the astronomy quiz that Carruthers had handed back today, I wasn't in a very good mood. I spent most of the first part of the evening sitting on my bed, stewing about the lack of defense and run support. It wasn't until around ten o'clock that I remembered that I had only one more day to finish my history paper.

I stayed up until one, finishing the research on all the books I'd checked out of the public library. I started writing the next afternoon in my study halls and was most of the way done by the end of the day. Even so, finishing the last page, giving it a final polish, and typing it took me up until eleven o'clock.

I turned it in on Friday morning, put in my two cents in Mrs. Palmer's ongoing discussion of Captain Ahab, listened to Mr. Carruthers blather on about redshifts, and partook in a spirited debate in Religion on the book of Daniel.

Jeanne grabbed me on my way to lunch with Tanya and hauled me into an empty classroom.

"Do you know what that bitch is doing now?"

"Jill?"

"Of course, Jill."

"Well, I'm sorry, I just never heard you call your sister a bitch before."

That didn't faze her at all.

"Fine. I'm sorry," she said with a total lack of sincerity. "My lovely sister Jill has decided that she's such a little prima donna that she doesn't even have to come to today's rehearsal. And Collins, the stupid ass, says that's fine, I can just practice my part of the duet. Like Jill doesn't need to practice her part."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"What?"

"What did you mean the other day when you said she reminded you of me?"

"I meant that you did exactly the same thing in tenth grade. You thought you were God's gift to Marshall High School."

"You mean I didn't go to practice?"

"Trick, I don't have idea whether you went to practice. What I do know is that you walked around just like Jill, looking down on everybody who didn't kiss your ass. Or suck your dick."

"But I don't do that now!" I protested.

"No, maybe Jill remembers you from tenth grade. Or maybe she's just making this up on her own. Maybe she doesn't even try to imitate her big brother any more. God, she makes me so mad. She's going to ruin the play for everyone."

"Because she can't sing?" I ventured tentatively.

"She can sing fine," Jeanne suddenly deflated. "I can sing better, but she can sing fine. She's just not part of the cast, you know? Maybe you could, like, talk to her?"

"I can talk about baseball," I said defensively. "I don't know anything about plays. Plus I'm going to Uncle Ted's this weekend."

Jeanne was staring at me blankly.

"He invited me down to tour UVA," I explained. "They're flying a plane up tonight. I'm gonna need the car to go to the airport.

She took a deep breath and sighed.

"Well, thanks anyway," she said. She pivoted and stomped off.

Well, fuck you, too, Jeanne Sterling. Who died and appointed me captain of the Sterling family?

As I followed her to the cafeteria, I remembered that Jeanne wasn't the only person that didn't know I was going to be away for the weekend. I had told Dad, and I had told Coach. I had completely forgotten to tell Tanya. Shit. And as I was turning over in my mind the best way of doing that, I nearly ran her over. Apparently, she had been waiting for me to finish with Jeanne.