This book is for Teri Thompson
BEFORE THE SEASON . . .
ONE
It wasn’t as if Cassie Bennett were looking to make any new friends that summer.
She definitely wasn’t looking to lose any.
She ended up doing both.
DURING THE SEASON . . .
TWO
As weird as it sounded, sometimes Cassie felt as if managing the friends she had, in school and in sports, were like having a full-time job.
Cassie had her classmates at Walton Middle, where the school year had ended the previous Friday. She was about to have her softball teammates, as the All-Star League in their part of the state was about to begin.
Some of her classmates were teammates, but not all.
On top of all that, she had her best friends in the world, Jack Callahan and Teddy Madden, Gus Morales, and his twin sister, Angela. Though, Angela wasn’t around right now. She’d signed up for Walton’s Teen Abroad program, and was spending most of the next two months staying with a family in Barcelona to study art.
For now her friendship with Angela involved Skype and FaceTiming. Cassie spent a lot of their conversations offering to pay Angela to stop speaking Spanish as often as she did.
“I get it,” Cassie had said to her last night on Skype. “You’re not just having an adventure without me. You’re having it in your second language.”
“Technically,” Angela said, “and as much as I know you hate being corrected, Spanish is my first language.”
Her parents had been born in the Dominican Republic, and both Gus and Angela had spoken Spanish before they’d spoken English.
“All I know,” Cassie said, “is that now you’re annoying me in both languages.”
“De nada,” Angela said, smiling at Cassie through cyberspace, and from across the world, telling Cassie, “You’re welcome.”
“Cállate,” Cassie said.
Shut up.
She’d been saving that one.
Angela laughed, said they’d talk in a couple of days, and cut the connection.
Cassie knew she was lucky to have the friends she did. She was even smart enough to know by eighth grade that there was nothing more important—at least outside family—than being a good friend and being able to count on your friends, no matter what. She knew more about that than ever before because of the way her friendship had been tested during the previous basketball season, after Cassie had tried out for, and made, the boys’ town team, the Warriors. Gus hadn’t wanted her on the team at first, and for most of the season. He’d gotten mad at her, she’d gotten mad at him, and they’d both dug in. It had sometimes seemed as if they weren’t going to be able to work through all that, and that the friendship might really be gone. There were times when Cassie was sure she’d lost Gus for good. But they had made it through. They had worked it out, both on and off the court, as stubborn as she was and as stubborn as he was.
In the end, it was what friends did. They were able to figure things out even when one of them thought the other was being as dumb as a sock drawer.
But it seriously did feel like too much of a full-time job sometimes, having a lot of friends. Or just too much responsibility. If somebody texted you and you didn’t text them back right away, it could quickly turn into a thing. If one of her girlfriends posted a picture on Instagram and Cassie didn’t immediately slap a like on it, pretty soon that was a thing. Or if she wasn’t involved enough when there was a group chat.
All sorts of things could be things.
It made Cassie giggle sometimes when she thought of it that way, as if she were starring in a Dr. Seuss story.
But Cassie was smart enough to know that a lot of the pressure she was feeling was because of who she was. She was the best girl athlete her age in Walton, maybe any age, and because she’d just shown everybody in town that she could hold her own with the boys, it was as if people were watching her more closely than ever. It put even more pressure on her not to act as if she were big-timing her friends, almost as if there were one set of rules for her and another for everybody else.
She was trying to explain that to Jack and Teddy and Gus at lunch on Monday, at their favorite pizza place in Walton, Fierro’s.
“No question,” Teddy said. “It’s hard being you.”
“Cállate,” she said.
When you get a good thing, stay with it.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“It means ‘shut it’ in Spanish.”
Teddy grinned across the table at Jack and Gus. “Help me out here,” he said. “Don’t we talk about how hard it is being her?”
“I think she just manages by being so cool,” Gus said.
He was grinning too, but at Cassie.
She leaned forward across the table and gave him what they all called the Look. “Your sister isn’t around to protect you,” she said. “Keep that in mind.”
“You know,” Gus said, “that is an excellent point right there. Why don’t I cállate and finish my delicious slice.”
“I’m actually trying to make a serious point here,” Teddy said. “People wanted to hang with you before the basketball season. But now that you became the Mo’ne Davis of the boys’ team, you’re like a rock star.”
Mo’ne Davis, they all knew, was the girl from Philadelphia who’d been the star pitcher on a boys’ baseball team that had made it all the way to the Little League World Series a few years ago.
“Wait,” Jack Callahan said. “You mean Cass wasn’t a rock star already?”
“I wasn’t trying to prove a point in basketball,” she said. “I just wanted to play point guard.”
“Yeah,” Teddy said, “go with that.” Then Jack and Gus were trying to make laughs sound like coughs, and Teddy was doing the same thing, and somehow Cassie, being Cassie,
