At least, Cassie thought, Sam saw that when he wasn’t checking his phone. Maybe it was just another form of his aggressiveness—aggressively checking the phone for messages.
They’d have to wait a few more days to see what it would be like when Sam was the one with the ball in his hand and Teddy was the one catching him. For now, though, the rest of the players on the Cubs had to feel the way Cassie did the other day:
A win was a win.
The way things were going these days, you took what you could get.
EIGHTEEN
As soon as Cassie showed up for her own practice the next day, it was totally obvious that the shunning from Kathleen and the rest of the girls was continuing, in full force. There were times during practice, in fact, when the only noise was the sound of the bat on the ball.
Kathleen and Greta and Allie didn’t even talk to one another very much when they were out in the field, as if they were afraid to drop their guards and actually act normal for a change.
When Cassie and Sarah were standing in the on-deck circle together, the way they sometimes did during BP, Cassie quietly said, “You just keep doing your job. I can handle the rest of it.”
Sarah turned and looked at her. Her voice wasn’t loud, but louder than Cassie’s.
“I didn’t ask you to handle things for me,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Cassie’s dad had stopped pitching now and walked to the plate to show Lizzie something with her stance, or with her hands. She heard him say, “We need to get you driving the ball again.”
“Definitely,” Sarah said. “Definitely what you meant. What you meant was that you’d handle things for you and for me both. But I never asked you to do that. Maybe you should just worry about your job.”
Cassie wanted to ask her where this was coming from, but she didn’t. There was enough trouble on their team right now. She didn’t need to get into a debate with Sarah Milligan.
Cassie just said, “Trust me. I’m sorry you took it the wrong way.”
“I don’t trust people,” Sarah said.
“I just thought because you wanted me to believe you on that play with you and Kathleen, that you did trust me.”
“I don’t,” Sarah said.
She was staring at the ground.
“I want to stop talking now,” Sarah said. “There’s always so much talking. Like talking can fix everything. Talking never fixes anything.”
Cassie said, “But—”
Far as she got.
“Please stop talking,” Sarah said. “Just go hit.”
Cassie did. She didn’t say another word to Sarah for the rest of practice. She didn’t say much to Lizzie and Brooke, or even her dad, for that matter. Nobody else said anything else to her.
When she got home, and even though she knew it was late in Barcelona, she Skyped Angela Morales.
• • •
It wasn’t that Cassie wasn’t getting good support and good advice from the guys. She almost always did. Nobody had better wingmen than she did. But they really were going through their own stuff right now. They were trying to figure things out on their own team. It didn’t mean they cared any less for her, or didn’t have her back, or wouldn’t have been there for her if she’d wanted to talk to any of them or all of them tonight. Jack, in particular, knew her as well as anybody could.
He was still a boy. Cassie grinned as she thought, Not his fault. She knew enough about boys to know that they didn’t know girls as well as they thought they did. Even though she wasn’t exactly an expert on them herself these days.
She needed to talk to Gus Morales’s twin sister on this night, because sometimes—no, a lot of times—it felt to Cassie as if Angela were her twin too. Angela cared about sports. She was a terrific softball player, which was something that made Cassie miss her even more right now, because there was a part of her that thought that if Angela were around, she would be the one to talk some sense into Kathleen and Greta and Allie and the rest of the ones doing the shunning.
Maybe she would even be helping out with Sarah.
“Buenas tardes!” Angela said when her face appeared on Cassie’s laptop screen.
“Oh, great,” Cassie said, “here we go from Spanish to English and back.”
“It’s my heritage,” Angela said, grinning, making Cassie feel better already. “Would you deny me my heritage?”
“Yes!”
“Would you be more comfortable with ‘Buenos noches’?” Angela said. “Except that it’s after midnight here, which means morning, which means technically I probably should have said, ‘Buenos dias.’ ”
Cassie didn’t say anything.
“What do you think?” Angela said.
“I think,” Cassie said, “that if I don’t engage, you’ll stop eventually.”
“Okay, I will, at least for now,” Angela said. “So what’s up?”
Cassie told her everything that had happened since the last time they’d Skyped. She told her about the way the Red Sox had lost their first game, about the ball in the outfield, which Angela said Gus had already told her about. Cassie told her about Kathleen and the other girls and the team meeting and winning the next game and, finally, about Sarah blowing her off the way she had at practice tonight.
“So she didn’t act like a friend.”
“Hardly,” Cassie said.
“But wait a second,” Angela said. “Aren’t you the one who’s always complaining about having too many friends? And now you’re complaining because Sarah won’t act like one more? Make up your mind, Bennett.”
“I’m not
