“Okay,” Cassie said. “Even though I don’t think it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in the world, I believe you messed up on that play and felt so badly afterward that you blamed it on Sarah.”
Kathleen sprang to her feet. “So you’re saying I’m the liar? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I just don’t think you told the truth,” Cassie said.
“It’s the same thing!” Kathleen said.
“Kathleen,” Cassie’s dad said, “what happened on that play happens all the time in baseball. The real truth is that sometimes it’s just miscommunication. The only two people who really know what happened out there are you and Sarah. But what I know is that it’s my job as the coach of this team to not let one blown play blow up our season after just one game. Over a ball that maybe neither one of you could have caught anyway.”
Kathleen turned now to look at Greta, and Allie, and all the girls who were sitting closest to her. “Do you guys believe them too?” she said.
Greta and Allie gave quick shakes of their heads.
Kathleen turned back to Cassie’s dad and said, “Since I’m such a horrible person, do you even want me on this team?”
“I never said you were a horrible person, Kath,” Cassie’s dad said. “Come on.”
“Well, do you?”
“You’re a very good player, and I’ve always enjoyed coaching you. And you know what everybody out here knows, that we’ve got a chance to be great this season, and one loss doesn’t change that. I very much want you to be a part of all that. And I can’t force you to apologize. But I still think it would be better for everybody if you did.”
Kathleen was talking again to Greta and Allie and the girls next to them. “Do you believe this?” she said.
When she turned back to the rest of the group, she pointed at Sarah again and said, “She’s the one who should be apologizing. To me.”
Sarah spoke for the first time, her voice barely more than a whisper. “No,” she said, almost as if talking to herself. “No, no, no.”
Kathleen said, “I’m not listening to this anymore.”
To Cassie’s dad she said, “Do I have to stay?”
“No,” he said, his voice sounding sad as he did. “No, you don’t.”
“Do any of us have to stay if we don’t want to?” Kathleen said.
“You don’t,” Chris Bennett said. “And it looks as if we’re done here, anyway.”
“Then I’m leaving,” Kathleen said. She looked around and said, “Anybody else?”
Greta stood up. Allie did. So did most of the other players on the team, surprising Cassie. Lizzie stayed put. So did Brooke. Cassie and Sarah. That was it. The rest of the Red Sox players followed Kathleen back toward the infield.
Cassie’s dad had come here tonight hoping he could bring the team together. Now the opposite had happened. And now Cassie’s dad was the one who seemed to be talking to himself.
“Well,” he said, “that went well.”
“This is all my fault,” Sarah said. “Allmyfaultallmyfaultallmyfault.”
By now Cassie knew that Sarah often repeated herself when she was under pressure.
In almost the exact same moment, both Cassie and her dad said, “No, it’s not.”
But Cassie was starting to wonder if that one stupid ball between two of their outfielders was ever going to stop rolling.
FOURTEEN
All of the players who had walked off with Kathleen the night before showed up for the Red Sox game against the Moran Mariners, another home game for them before they’d play their next two games on the road.
Anybody watching Cassie and her teammates warm up on this night might not have noticed anything different about them, during batting practice, during infield practice, or when Allie’s dad was hitting fly balls to the outfielders.
But Cassie did.
The players who had followed Kathleen weren’t speaking to Cassie, and were doing everything possible to ignore her. They were even keeping eye contact to a minimum. The only time Kathleen and Greta and Allie and the rest of them did make eye contact, it was to see if Cassie was walking toward them, so that they could casually walk in a different direction.
Lizzie was still talking to her. She lived three doors down and had been Cassie’s friend since they were in preschool together. So was Brooke Connors, who had played softball and soccer and basketball with Cassie the longest, until Cassie had played on the boys’ team last winter. But Kathleen and Greta and Allie had also played on Cassie’s teams for a long time. They had all done a lot of winning together. Now, at least in Cassie’s view, they were acting like losers.
“What’s up with this?” Cassie said to Lizzie. “They’re acting like I’m going to play for Moran tonight.”
They were standing behind the Red Sox bench. Kathleen and Greta and Allie, and a new girl on the team this year, Maria Castellanos, had gone down the right-field line to play catch. But Cassie could see them occasionally staring in at her.
Lizzie said, “There was a group chat last night.”
“Were you on it?” Cassie said.
“Everybody on our team was on it,” Lizzie said.
“Except me.”
“You and Sarah.”
“She’s never been on our group chats,” Cassie said. She actually felt a smile coming up out of her. “And you know that I do everything possible to stay off them.”
“This wasn’t our old group chat,” Lizzie said. “This was a new one they started last night.”
“And the point of it was giving me the silent treatment?”
Lizzie said, “Pretty much.”
“Anything else?” Cassie said.
“Yeah,” Lizzie said. “They said that players on our team had to decide whether they were with them, or with you.”
FIFTEEN
What was happening went against everything that Cassie thought about teams and what they were supposed to be about.
Because there were two teams today:
Hers and Kathleen’s.
Like they’d chosen sides for a pickup game.
Except that Cassie had Sarah and Lizzie and
