“No.”
“You should try out.”
I’m still shaking his hand. Longest Handshake of All Time. Maybe we can shake hands until practice is over and then I’ll ask if he wants to hang out.
Wait. This guy’s a coach. How old is he? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?
I release his hand and wipe my tingling palm on my jeans. Corndog’s shaking his head at me. Coach Hoffman beckons for us to follow him onto the field. My pulse races as I cross the fresh chalk of the first base line. This is the first time I’ve stepped foot on a diamond in a year.
We meet the team at home plate, where Coach Hoffman tells them I’m the new manager. The guys crowd around me, saying stupid things like “Parker Shelton, woooo!” and “I love you, Parker!” and “Parker Shelton, I want to have all your babies!” and I shove my hands in the pockets of my fleece, glancing between the guys and the ground. Normally I’d be grinning, but I don’t want Bri—I mean, Coach Hoffman seeing me act desperate.
Coach Burns takes this moment to tell the guys to keep their hands off me or risk getting suspended for two games. Then he leads the pitchers to the outfield for long toss.
“Coach Burns must really be pissed about last year,” Paul Briggs says under his breath to Sam, but loud enough for me to hear. Paul plays catcher, and his weight rivals that of an orca whale. He gestures at me. “Sucks we won’t be getting hot managerial play. Everyone knows she puts out.”
“Shut up, man,” Sam says, slapping Paul with a glove.
Corndog glares at Paul. “Apologize now.”
Paul shrugs. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Coach Hoffman tells Paul, grabbing him by a sleeve. “Five laps.”
Paul throws him a look of hatred but takes off ambling around the field. Paul’s not even capable of jogging.
I toe the ground, wishing someone would squash me into the red clay.
Coach Hoffman steps closer, his face turning rosy. Freckles dot his nose. His lips are chapped. Does he bite them?
He whispers, “I’m sorry about that.”
“No big deal,” I say, folding my arms across my chest. I want to tell him that I don’t technically put out. I’m still a virgin. Honestly, I still have problems using tampons. They just don’t work for me. I even studied this diagram in Seventeen that gave tips on how to get them in, but I can’t figure out the logistics. And sometimes trying to figure it out makes blood rush to my head and I feel like I might pass out and I can only imagine Dad finding me in the bathroom, unconscious next to the toilet, pants-less with a tampon in my hand.
As if I’d ever ask my mother for tampon tips.
Coach Hoffman directs the JV guys to the batting cages and sends the varsity onto the field, to scrimmage. He adjusts his beige cap, looking at me. “Let’s go over how to take stats, okay?”
“Okay, sounds great.” Not that I need help with stats. I’m so good, I bet the Braves would hire me. But he doesn’t have to know that.
Coach Hoffman goes on, “I’ll need you to take stats at practices too. I’m in charge of the lineup, so accurate stats are crucial to my decision-making process.”
His decision-making process? Crazy mature.
“Okay, Coach.”
“Coach?” He lets out a ripple of laughter. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to kids calling me coach or mister.”
He thinks of us as kids? “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?” My voice shakes.
He pauses. “I’m twenty-three. Just finished up my master’s in phys ed at Georgia Tech.”
He’s a complete adult. He’s six—one, two, three, four, five, six—years older than me. “What class are you teaching?”
“Gym, but I’m not sure what my schedule is yet.” He pulls his cap off and puts it back on. He chomps on his gum. “They hired me to take over the baseball team for Coach Burns when he retires next year.”
“So it’s true?”
Coach Hoffman nods. “I’m in training this season.”
As far as coaching goes, working at Hundred Oaks in Franklin is an impressive job to have. Our Raiders usually make it to the district tournament, if not further.
“You must know your baseball,” I say.
He gives me a long serious look. I see his Adam’s apple shift as he swallows. “Something like that.”
“Did you play?” I ask.
“Something like that.” His face goes hard.
“They must call you Cryptic Coach Hoffman.” We haven’t taken one step away from home plate.
“I’m never gonna get used to being called coach. Seriously.”
I laugh lightly. “How about a nickname?”
“Such as?” He raises his eyebrows.
I stuff my frozen hands in my armpits. “The Hoff?”
“Isn’t that David Hasselhoff’s nickname?”
“Perhaps.”
“So you’re equating me with that movie star guy who gets trashed and videotapes himself drunk and eating cheeseburgers?”
“Exactly.”
“Back in high school they called me Shooter.”
“Why? Are you a deer hunter or something?”
“Uhhh, you don’t want to know what it means.” The side of his mouth quirks up.
I rock back and forth on my heels. “I like the Hoff way better.”
He smiles at me. “If you’re gonna call me the Hoff, I’m gonna give you a nickname too.”
“Such as…?”
“Trouble. I’ll call you Trouble.”
“Cliché.”
“Touché.”
We start laughing.
“God, this is the silliest conversation I’ve had in ages,” he says with a smile.
Yeah, probably because you’re an adult and I’m a child, and how could an adult possibly have a normal mature conversation with a girl? I gaze down at the red clay beneath my boots, then look up into his brown eyes and sneak a glimpse at the loose curls peeking out from under his hat. Are they soft?
I say, “Fine, you can call me Trouble. And I’m still gonna call you the Hoff.”
His face contorts into this blend of pain and amusement. “Call me Brian,” he says quietly. “I’m not ready to be called coach or mister. I’m not ancient.”
“Brian.” I like the way it sounds coming off my tongue. Full and deep. His mouth slides into a smile, and I catch him quickly scanning my body.
He leads me over to the dugout, picking up a stick along the way. We sit down. He hands me a pencil and the stats book, which looks like a large, floppy sketchpad. Boxes of tiny field grids fill the inside pages. I bring the stats book to my nose and inhale the smoky gray paper.
Brian laughs softly and uses the stick to clean clay out of his cleats. “You must really like baseball. Smelling the stats book and all.”
“Smelling books is a habit Dad got me started on.”
“There are worse habits.” Brian shows me his fingernails. He’s bitten them down to the quick. How personal. It’s not like I openly show people my super-long second toes.
“You ever taken stats before?” he asks. I like his voice. Low, Southern, manly.
“Sort of,” I say, tracing my palm. “Dad is a big Braves fan.” Was a big Braves fan.
“Me too.” He goes back to picking wet clay and grass out of his cleat. “What’s your team?”
“Braves, I guess.” I want to keep talking to him. I can do this. I can talk about baseball again. When my family was still together, we loved heading down to Atlanta on weekends to catch games, especially when they played the Phillies and the Mets.
Mom played softball in high school, and then went on to play shortstop for the University of Tennessee. Before she ditched us, I played softball too. I loved it. But last January, when she left and moved to Knoxville with Theresa, our family was embarrassed to the nth degree. Everyone at church gave us funny looks on Sundays during Coffee Time in the Fellowship Hall, which is a fancy way of saying we eat stale donuts in the church basement. I don’t even know why we kept going to church.
“But why would we want to hang out with those jerks who judge us because of something Mom did?” I had cried to Dad.
“It’s just a phase. They’ll forget about it.”
“But—”
“We are not negotiating this,” he replied, studying the newspaper.
“Are we going to atone for Mom’s sins?” my older brother asked.
“Becoming a lesbian is a sin?” I replied.
“I’m not sure. People at church think so.” Ryan sucked on his bottom lip.
“Does it actually say that in the Bible? Thou shalt not become a lesbian?”
“No,” Dad said with a sigh, his eyes closed.
“Then why are we going to church?” I blurted. Phase or not, how the congregation turned on us didn’t seem forgivable.
“We trust in prayer,” Dad replied. His father believes in prayer. So did his grandfather.
Church means dressing up on Sunday mornings and forgoing French toast at the kitchen table for stale powdered donuts. It means listening to Brother John saying “Your body is a temple” and “True love waits,” and then we all would say we’ll wait until we get married to have sex. Or at least until college.
Some people at church thought I might turn out like my mom. A lesbian. A sinner. I overheard the youth pastor whispering that to the choir director. Brother John told Mrs. James that they would always love me, but he and his wife had to protect their daughter, Laura (my former best friend), from making similarly bad choices. I went home and hid all my pictures of Mom and cried and cried.
But that made me feel worse, because I knew Mom adored me, and no matter how hard she had tried to hide it, we could tell she was depressed. Before she left Dad, sometimes I came home from school and found she’d been crying.
I used to love church, but I turned away from it like they turned on me. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After Tate Gillam’s dad got caught doing his secretary, my own dad told me not to hang around Tate and his sister Rachel anymore.
When I confronted Laura about what her dad had said, that I might turn out like my mom—a lesbian, a sinner—we got into a huge fight because I said her father wasn’t being a good Christian toward me. Laura asked, “What do you know about being a Christian? You knew I liked Jack Hulsey. When you turned him down to the Winter Wonderland formal, you could’ve put in a good word for me. But you only care about yourself and proving you’re better than me.”
So untrue.
Our frustrations had been building up for a long time anyhow, so she didn’t take it well when I called her a jealous bitch. The words popped out and I wanted to take them back, but I couldn’t.
Then Laura spread a rumor around school, saying I’m just like my mom. A butch softball player who probably likes girls.
Apparently “love thy neighbor” changes to “judge thy neighbor” if your family doesn’t follow the church playbook.