Teddy asked Cassie then what her dad had said after Sarah and her parents were gone. Cassie told them what her dad had told her: that what had happened tonight would happen from time to time, unexpectedly. When Sarah was younger, she’d experienced some bullying in school, and it had made her more sensitive and sometimes defensive than she already was, even though there hadn’t been any bullying for a long time in Sarah’s life, at least that they knew about. But she still had her guard up, constantly, for aggressive behavior of any kind. And Mr. and Mrs. Milligan had told Cassie’s dad that the other kids on the Red Sox were going to have to understand that what they considered normal communication might not be normal for a child with Asperger’s.
“Dad said that we need to have our guard up, especially when it comes to our body language and facial expressions,” she said.
She pushed her plate to the middle of the table, having only eaten a couple of bites, and lowered her voice.
“Don’t any of you repeat this,” Cassie said. “But maybe it is too much, having her on the team.”
“Won’t repeat it,” Teddy said, “because we all know you don’t mean it.”
“But Greta’s right about something, as much as I hate admitting that,” she said. “We don’t need her to be great.”
“But won’t it be greater if you’re great with her?” Gus said. Then he grinned and nodded at her plate and said, “Don’t mean to change the subject, but do you mind if I finish that?”
Cassie couldn’t help it. She smiled. “Good that all this stress hasn’t made you lose your appetite.”
“I need to keep my strength up to be a good wingman,” he said.
Cassie nodded her head toward Greta and Kathleen and Nell.
“Isn’t that supposed to be their job too?” she said.
“None of this is supposed to feel like a job,” Jack said.
“Then how come it’s starting to feel like that already?” she said.
They decided not to walk up the street and get ice cream. Teddy texted his mom, who was picking them up, and told her they’d finished eating. On her way out Cassie stopped at her teammates’ table, smiling a smile she really didn’t feel, and said, “C’mon, you guys. There must have been times when one of you wanted to give me a good shove.”
Kathleen smiled up at her. “You mean like now?” she said.
Cassie forced a laugh out of herself, thinking, Yeah, big joke. But she was the only one who laughed. Only when she was in the front room at Fierro’s did she hear a big shout of laughter from them.
She didn’t turn around. It had been a long enough night already. She hoped it wasn’t the beginning of a long season.
All of a sudden Sarah wasn’t the only one on the team who seemed alone.
SEVEN
Sarah and her parents were coming over to Cassie’s house the next night after dinner.
It gave Cassie some time to think about everything that had happened to the team so far, and also to ask herself why it was so important to her to have things work out with Sarah.
She kept coming back to the autistic boy in fifth grade, Peter Rizzo.
She had never been one of the kids, boys or girls, who had made fun of him behind his back. It had only been a handful of them, and they never did it to the boy’s face. Looking back on it now, Cassie didn’t even think they were being malicious. They were ten-year-olds, and were acting like ten-year olds.
None of Cassie’s friends, at least none that she knew about, had an autistic brother or sister. For most of the kids in the fifth grade, it was likely that this was the first time they’d ever been around an autistic boy or girl. So no one was sure how to act. Maybe some of them were just acting the way they usually did, about almost everything, thinking they were being funny when they weren’t.
But what Cassie did know is that she had never told anybody to stop when they were making fun of Peter Rizzo. She definitely knew that. And she definitely knew, in her heart, the one her dad said he knew so well, that she hadn’t made enough of an effort to make things easier on Peter, whether she could have done that or not. Oh, she told herself she wanted to fix things. To her that meant making Peter feel more welcome in the classes they shared, and in their grade. But when he left after the school year ended, she was honest enough with herself to know that she hadn’t done enough. It had bothered her ever since. It wasn’t just that she’d let this boy down. She felt as if she’d let herself down.
She hated letting herself down.
In anything.
Maybe, she thought, lying on her bed after dinner and waiting for the Milligans to show up, it went back to something her grandmother—her dad’s mom—had told her not long before she’d died. The beautiful old woman whose name was Connie but whom Cassie had always called “Nonnie” from the time she’d mispronounced it as a little girl spent most of the last few months of her life in her bed, suffering from emphysema. But Cassie would sit there with her for hours and just talk to her. Mostly Cassie just listened. Until the end her grandmother, who’d read as much as anyone else Cassie had ever known, had a stack of books on the dresser next to her bed. One day one of them was The Great Gatsby, which Nonnie said she’d first read more than sixty years before.
“I’m going to give you a piece of advice that Nick Carraway’s father gave him in this book,” Nonnie said to Cassie. “Not everybody in this life
