Cassie, waiting to hit after Lizzie, watched Sarah take off to her right, covering an amazing amount of ground on her long legs even though she didn’t seem to be running her hardest, her eyes tracking the ball, focused only on that. But even with the great jump she’d gotten, Cassie thought there was no way she could outrun Lizzie’s ball.
But she did.
She didn’t put up her glove hand, reaching across her body, until the last possible second, maybe ten feet away from the Dunkin’ Donuts sign on the wall in left-center. She stretched across her body, and reached for the sky with her glove, made the backhand catch, stopped herself a few feet short of the wall, pivoted, and made a perfect throw to Allie Gordon at second base.
As soon as Sarah had made the throw, she ran back to the exact same spot in right-center, head back down.
Cassie felt her dad looking at her from the pitcher’s mound. He was smiling as he mouthed the words, Told you.
Cassie smiled back at him, and nodded.
They’d talk later, at home, about autism and about Asperger’s syndrome, the developmental disorder on the autism spectrum—the disorder with which Sarah Milligan had been born.
For now, though, on the field at Highland Park, Cassie understood what her father had meant when he’d called Sarah special.
• • •
She could hit, too.
And she could pitch.
She couldn’t pitch as fast, or as well, as Cassie Bennett could. But when Cassie’s dad went behind the plate and got into a catcher’s crouch and told Sarah to cut loose, Cassie saw the way the ball exploded out of her right hand, and how natural her windmill motion looked. Cassie heard the sound the softball made in her dad’s old catcher’s mitt.
“She’s weird, but she’s really good,” Kathleen Timmins, their left fielder last season, said to Cassie.
Cassie grinned. “Wait,” she said, “that sounds exactly like you.”
“Funny.”
“I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I can’t help myself.”
“Is she really going to play on our team?” Nell Green said.
“You’ve been watching tryouts,” Cassie said to her. “What do you think?”
Kathleen said, “She doesn’t talk.”
Cassie said, “With the way our team talked last year, that’s probably a good thing. A blessing, even.”
They were halfway through tryouts. Everybody had batted by now and gone through some basic baserunning drills. Cassie’s dad and Allie’s dad were about to separate the outfielders from the infielders and have them all take the field. Cassie was a shortstop when she wasn’t pitching, but before the fielding drills began, she ran out to where Sarah was standing in right-center, alone. Cassie’s dad hadn’t told the other girls what he’d told Cassie, about giving Sarah room.
But the other outfielders were doing just that, almost as if they were afraid to approach her, like there was some sort of force field around her, less than an hour into the new season.
Cassie ran straight to where Sarah was standing, the exact same spot to which she returned every time after she had caught a fly ball during batting practice.
“I’m Cassie,” she said, and put out her hand.
Cassie couldn’t tell whether Sarah looked startled or just plain frightened at first. But she finally put out her own right hand, just the way you would if you were afraid you might be touching a hot plate.
She didn’t look at Cassie as she did, staring past her, like she was fixed on some spot in the infield.
“Sarah,” she said.
“That was some catch you made at the start of tryouts,” Cassie said.
She was looking right at Sarah. Sarah was still looking in the direction of home plate, or maybe downtown Walton.
Sarah didn’t respond, just kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
Cassie wasn’t giving up.
“How long have you been playing?” she said.
“I never played,” she said.
Then she was running again, not after a ball in the air this time, just running toward first base, then past first base. Cassie was afraid she might be running right off the field, like she might be thinking about running all the way home. But when she got to the bench, she suddenly sat at the end of it, head still down, alone.
Cassie wasn’t sure if she understood. No, she was sure she didn’t understand Sarah, at least not yet, and maybe not ever. But it wasn’t as if Sarah didn’t want to be around other people. It just seemed that she didn’t know how to act when she was.
She didn’t want to be alone. But didn’t know how not to be.
FOUR
When they got home, Cassie’s dad told her as much as he said he knew about Asperger’s, at least for now.
“You remember back in fifth grade,” Chris Bennett said to his daughter, “that boy Peter Rizzo, who had autism?”
“Peter didn’t speak at all,” Cassie said. “But the thing I remember best is how smart he was, especially in math. I used to wish I was nearly as good at math as he was.”
They were in the living room. Cassie’s mom was out to dinner with Jack’s mom, and Teddy’s.
“I was trying to explain to you before,” her dad said, “about the autism spectrum. The higher you are on it, the better able you are to function in school, or really in the world.”
Cassie had only had a couple of classes with Peter Rizzo that year, before he and his family had moved to Texas. Something else she remembered about him—when he’d get frustrated with something in class, even in math, he would just suddenly get up and leave the classroom. And she remembered how frustrated that had made her feel. She’d felt as if there ought to be something she could do to help him, or reach him, make him feel more accepted. Or safe, even. She would try to sit with him sometimes at lunch, because she
