“Can I say something?” Gus said.
“You don’t have to ask permission,” she said.
He grinned. “Well, sometimes I do with you.”
“Guy makes a good point,” Teddy said.
Gus said, “You told us that Angela told you that maybe the best thing would be to let Sarah feel like she was the one in charge.”
“And I’ve been doing that!” Cassie said.
In a quiet voice Jack said, “Like when you tackled her?”
“She was about to hit that girl!”
His voice still quiet, Jack said, “Are you sure?”
Cassie took a long time before she answered, and then finally said, “No.”
She moved herself back, so that she could face all of them at once.
“You guys think she might have stopped herself?” she asked them.
“Would’ve been kind of a cool thing for her if she had, right?” Jack said. “Maybe then she would have been the one feeling as if she’d won something.”
Cassie hadn’t thought about it that way for one second. Hadn’t even considered it. In the moment, she’d just made up her mind about what she thought Sarah was going to do and then reacted.
When she had done that, she’d been doing exactly what Angela had accused her of doing:
Trying to be her hero.
“I didn’t think,” she said.
“Hey,” Teddy said. “Happens to the best of us.”
“So if you guys are so brilliant, what do I do now?”
“Now, you’re probably going to hate what I’m going to say next,” Jack said.
“Try me.”
“How about you apologize?” he said.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cassie rode her bike over to Sarah’s house later, timing it out so she could go from there to the Cubs’ game at Highland Park.
It’s funny, she thought on the way over. Even though she knew all the different ways to get to Sarah’s street, she ended up taking the exact route Sarah had described that day in Cassie’s room. She could almost hear Sarah reciting the streets like she was the voice of the GPS woman on a phone.
Cassie thought about calling first. But if she did that, she risked Sarah telling her not to come. And if there was no one home, Cassie had decided she’d ride into town, grab a slice of pizza at Fierro’s, and wait until it was time for the Cubs to play the Greenacres Giants.
But when she got to the house, there was the Milligans’ car parked in the driveway.
After Cassie rang the bell, Mrs. Milligan opened the front door.
“Hey, Mrs. Milligan,” Cassie said. “Sorry to just drop by this way. But I was wondering if Sarah’s home.”
Kari Milligan smiled. “Soon,” she said. “She and her dad are over at the park playing catch.”
“Didn’t even think to check there.”
“She hadn’t touched a ball or bat or her glove since the game ended the way it did. But about an hour ago she asked Jim—my husband—if he wanted to go over there. He’d taken the afternoon off from work.”
“Well, the way that game ended for Sarah is why I’m here,” Cassie said. “I wanted to apologize for what I did. I just assumed . . .”
Mrs. Milligan smiled again. “The worst,” she said.
“Kind of.”
“Would you like to come in and wait for her?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.”
Cassie didn’t want to put this off. The things she wanted to say to Sarah, she wanted to say today. She didn’t think they would keep. The way Cassie had worked it out, if she could get Sarah to change her mind before the Red Sox played another game, then her quitting the team really didn’t count.
And maybe the fact that she even wanted to have a game of catch with her dad today was a good sign.
They sat in the living room. Mrs. Milligan asked Cassie if she wanted something to drink. Cassie said she was fine.
“Is there any way I can help you?” Mrs. Milligan said.
“I just don’t feel as if I can do anything right with Sarah,” Cassie said. “And then even when I feel like I’m doing something right, it goes all stupidly wrong.”
“That can happen around here on a daily basis,” Mrs. Milligan said. “And I don’t just mean once a day.”
“Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m feeling,” Cassie said.
“My guess is sympathy, whether you look at it that way or not, Cassie. Only, that’s not what Sarah is looking for. If anything, she’s looking for empathy. Do you know the difference?”
“Not really.”
“Empathy is when you put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” Mrs. Milligan said, “particularly if that someone has Asperger’s, and you’re trying to get close to them.”
“Now I’m totally lost.”
“Sarah’s the one who gets lost sometimes, trying to identify her own feelings, whether they’re about you or softball or the team or something else.” Mrs. Milligan clasped her hands in her lap and leaned forward. “The frustration you’re feeling is something her dad and I feel all the time. As much as Sarah knows how much her dad and I love her, she still pulls back from us all the time. Often she does it by reflex without even understanding why she’s doing it.”
“She says she doesn’t trust me.”
“It’s because she doesn’t. You have no idea how challenging it was for my husband and me to not only gain her trust when she was a little girl, but keep it.”
Cassie said, “I’ve tried really hard.”
“And in her own way, Sarah’s tried too. I believe there’s a part of her, maybe even a big part, that wants to be your friend. She simply doesn’t know how to do it, because she keeps getting in her own way. That’s the thing about Sarah that you need to understand: it’s not you who can’t get through her defenses. It’s Sarah herself.”
“I’ve tried every way I can to tell her she doesn’t need to be suspicious of me.”
“And you could find a hundred more ways. She’s still going to be suspicious. Or maybe ‘wary’ is a better word. It’s like the old
