Maybe Teddy wasn’t set-set.
“If you quit,” Jack said, keeping his voice even, eyes on Teddy, “then that guy wins.”
Before Teddy could respond, Jack added, “And what I’ve found out being your teammate is that you hate to lose as much as any of us.”
“I managed to survive losing the championship game in football,” Teddy said.
He had survived. It had been his first season of organized football, and once he’d made the team, he was supposed to be their tight end. But then Jack had gotten hurt, and it had turned out Teddy had the best arm of anybody else on the team, and he’d turned out to be a terrific quarterback, all the way to the championship game, when the other team just ended up with the ball last.
Cassie said, “That was different and you know it.”
“How was it different?”
“Because you didn’t quit that day.”
“You’re right about that,” Teddy said. “I didn’t quit. We just ran out of time.”
“It was like the other team got the last word,” Gus said.
Jack said to Teddy, “You can’t let Coach Anthony, or Sam, get the last word on you.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Yeah,” Cassie said, “it is. And it’s about you being better than them.”
Teddy took a long drink of iced tea, put his glass down, put his head back, closed his eyes, and shook his head. No jokes from him now. Cassie could just tell from his tone of voice. He was speaking from the heart.
“He makes me not want to go to practice,” he said. “It’s not just that he yells at me. He’s yelling all the time, like he’s always got the volume turned all the way up. Sometimes, swear, the last thing I hear when I close my eyes at night is the sound of his stupid voice.”
“Same,” Gus said.
“I think it might happen to me tonight too,” Cassie said. She tried to imitate Coach Anthony, making her voice deeper. And louder. “Game of inches!” Then she was back in her own voice, saying, “I almost laughed when he said that, but I was afraid if I did, he’d call me out of the bleachers and make me run some laps.”
“Maybe on his days off from us, he can come bark at your team,” Gus said.
“And you know what another crazy part of this is?” Cassie said. “His son’s not even that good!”
“Tell me about it,” Teddy said.
They sat in silence then. They could do that sometimes when they were together, even Teddy, who out of all of them was the one who liked to talk the most. Cassie didn’t want to push him right now, just because he’d calmed down so much in the past few minutes.
Finally Teddy said, “You know it’s not just baseball, right? You wait the whole school year, even when you’re having fun playing other sports, waiting for summer. And I don’t want this guy to ruin mine.”
Cassie turned to him, and started to speak, but Teddy put up a hand. “Let me finish,” he said. “I think a lot about stuff like that. I think about how good we have it, just having each other. But guess what? Before long we’re going to be in high school. I mean, what the heck? That means we’ve got five more summers, counting this one, before we’re in college. We’ve got to make all of them count, is all I’m saying.”
“Teddy’s right,” Gus said. “I think about stuff like that too. I just don’t talk about it as much.” He grinned. “But then, I don’t talk about anything as much as Teddy does.”
“Hey,” Teddy said. “You’re one of my wingmen, remember?”
“But I can’t lie, Cass,” Gus said. “I feel the same way about Coach as Teddy does.”
“Then we gotta find a way to power through,” Jack said. “We’ve all done that with teammates we didn’t like.”
“They were teammates,” Gus said, “not the boss of us.”
“You’re the boss of you when it comes to baseball,” Jack said. “Same with Teddy. Same with all of us. Nobody can make us not love baseball.”
“I’ve been trying to explain the same thing to Sarah,” Cassie said. “I can see how much she wants to be a good softball player, how much she wants to be a part of a team, and belong. I told her that she can’t let some of the girls on our team make her forget that.”
“You’re not playing for Coach,” Jack said to Teddy. “You’re playing for you, and for us. Not him.”
“But what about Sam?” Teddy said. “He’s no better than his father. And I’m supposed to catch him and act like I want him to do well?”
“Yup,” Cassie said. “Because it’s not about him, either. It’s about the team.”
Teddy pointed at her first, then Jack, then back at Cassie. “You two know how much you sound alike, right?”
Cassie smiled. “Yes,” she said. “And I just hope Jack appreciates how lucky he is to sound like me.”
“So, so much,” Jack said.
Jack looked at Teddy again. As always, when Jack had as much to say as he did today, it wasn’t just Teddy paying attention to him. They all did.
“You’ve come too far in sports to quit now,” Jack said to Teddy. “Baseball’s gotten too important to you, and you’re too important to our team to walk away.”
“Basically,” Cassie said, “it’s not about asking if you want to play for him. It’s asking yourself why you want to play in the first place.”
Teddy was quiet again. Cassie knew this look too. It was as if he were having a conversation with himself that only he could hear. Finally he nodded, got up, opened the sliding door to his kitchen. When he came back a couple of minutes later, he was holding a Wiffle ball and bat.
“I’m not making any promises about sticking it out with this meathead,” he said. “But I will for