Amy had given up just two hits, one to Cassie and one to Sarah, in the first inning, but none since. The score was still 0–0. The only base runners after the first had come on walks, one by Cassie, one by Amy Lewis.
After Cassie had struck out the side in the top of the fifth, Lizzie walked off the field with her.
“This is the best I’ve ever seen you pitch in your life,” Lizzie said. “And I’ve watched you do a lot of pitching. Even Kathleen and Greta said so.”
“But they wouldn’t say it to me.”
“That would be against the code,” Lizzie said. “They still all agree your stuff is stupid today.”
“As stupid as they’ve been acting?” Cassie said.
Amy blew through the bottom of the Red Sox order in the bottom of the inning. The game stayed scoreless. Cassie managed to get three outs on just five pitches in the top of the sixth, keeping her pitch count down. Then, with two outs in the bottom of the inning, she doubled to left-center, the hardest hit ball of the game by far.
Sarah was up now.
Cassie watched from second as Sarah went through her routine, all her various tugs and taps, always in the exact same order. One time Cassie had walked into the living room as her dad, who loved tennis, was watching Rafael Nadal. He’d made her watch as Nadal seemed to go through his own checklist of tics before every single point.
“Obsessive-compulsive,” Cassie’s dad had explained. By now Cassie knew that a lot of people with Asperger’s were the same way.
When Sarah was ready to hit, she took ball one. Then ball two. From second base Cassie was trying to think along with Amy. Having played against her since they were both nine, Cassie knew how confident Amy was in her own ability, almost to the point of cockiness.
Was she pitching around Sarah, even though Sarah had had just the one base hit back in the first inning? No, Cassie thought. Amy had just missed with the first two pitches, and not by very much.
Cassie didn’t want Sarah to take a walk. Greta was coming up next. She was a decent hitter. But she wasn’t Sarah.
Cassie thought: If you’re gonna be a hitter, be one now.
Sarah hit the next pitch over the second baseman’s head and into right field. Cassie was already at full speed by the time she was halfway to third, and the right fielder knew there was no point in throwing home. Sarah would take second, and the Sox would have another runner in scoring position.
Red Sox 1, Astros 0.
Greta was next. Maybe Amy was still thinking about Sarah’s hit, and how it had broken the tie. But the first pitch she threw to Greta was right down the middle, and Greta lined the ball over the shortstop’s head and into left-center.
This time, Cassie could see, there was going to be a play at the plate, even with the jump Sarah had gotten.
Cassie had a perfect angle on the play from where she was kneeling in front of the Sox bench. Saw the left fielder reach down, in stride, and cleanly field the ball. Saw the clean transfer of the ball from glove to throwing hand. And saw the ball practically explode out of her hand, on its way toward home plate.
Allie, who’d been in the on-deck circle, was telling Sarah to slide. Sarah did.
But Cassie could see that the throw had her.
She didn’t come in with cleats high, the way Sam Anthony had come into Teddy that day at practice. She hit the ground exactly where she should have, and went into a neat hook slide, angling her body into the right-handed batter’s box, her left leg going for home plate.
But the Astros catcher had set up perfectly to take the throw on one hop, and put a shin guard down between Sarah’s front foot and the plate, and reached down to put the tag on her.
All good, at least from the catcher’s point of view.
No, the problem was that as Sarah went sliding through the tag, the catcher’s mitt caught her right in the face.
Cassie was already up, off her knees, and running for the plate herself, because she knew that as much as Sarah Milligan hated loud noises, she hated being touched even more.
Before Cassie could get to her, Sarah was already on her feet, coming for the Astros catcher, who was just getting up herself. But Cassie wasn’t focused on the catcher. She was focused on Sarah, who had her fists clenched and was in the process of raising her right hand.
“You hit me!” she shouted. “You hit me in the head!”
Cassie didn’t know if Sarah was going to take a swing at the girl. But she wasn’t taking any chances, so at the last second, Cassie launched herself through the air like a football player trying to make a diving tackle on a ballcarrier.
Right play, she thought later, just the wrong sport.
Sarah was so startled that somehow she’d ended up underneath Cassie that she just lay there for a second, before she was shouting at Cassie to get off her.
The umpire totally got what had just happened. She came over, after Cassie and Sarah were untangled, and the umpire was the one helping Sarah up.
“It was an accident, is all,” the umpire said.
Sarah’s face was red, and her chest was heaving. But she stayed where she was, the umpire’s arm around her shoulders as the umpire walked her back toward the Red Sox bench. When she got there, head down, Cassie’s dad told her that he was moving Kathleen to center and putting Hallie Sands in left for the bottom of the seventh. Neither one of them had to worry about making any plays out there, because Cassie struck out the side. Red Sox 1, Astros 0. Final.
They’d made it
