“She wanted to know how come I wanted to be her friend when nobody else on the team did.”
“And you just have to accept that she’s probably never going to be your friend, at least not the kind of friend you’re used to. It has nothing to do with her intelligence. Sarah is a highly intelligent person. It’s why it frustrates her when she realizes that she’s not fitting in. Frustrates her and makes her angry, and even makes her lash out occasionally.”
Mrs. Milligan was smiling again, but it didn’t seem to be a happy smile. “And then she has no idea how to fix things.”
“I thought I could help her fit in, but I was wrong.”
“You can’t look at it that way, in terms of right and wrong. Black and white. That’s the way Sarah looks at things. In her world there is no gray.”
“One thing is black and white for me,” Cassie said. “She shouldn’t quit the team. She’s too good to quit.”
“She’s great, actually,” Mrs. Milligan said, looking almost sad as she did.
“Do you think it will help if I apologize?”
“It can’t hurt.”
They heard Sarah’s voice in the front hall then. Her dad was laughing about something, and Sarah was telling him he was crazy. He said he wished he had a dollar for every time somebody had told him that in his life.
Then Sarah laughed.
Cassie wasn’t sure she’d ever heard Sarah laugh like that. Or at all.
And in that moment Cassie knew exactly what she wanted to say to her. Maybe what she needed to say.
When Sarah came around the corner and saw Cassie sitting there, she stopped. And stopped laughing. “What are you doing here?” she said.
Cassie didn’t know why, but she stood up.
“I figured out something,” she said to Sarah.
“What?”
“I figured out that it’s not you who needs a friend,” she said. “It’s me.”
TWENTY-FIVE
So now you know how I feel,” Sarah said.
“Little bit.”
“What took you so long?” Sarah said.
She was still standing in the doorway to the living room, arms crossed in front of her.
“Sarah, please be nice,” her mom said.
“ ‘Sarah be nice,’ ” Sarah said. “Sarah be this. Sarah be that.” It was like she was reciting. “If I won’t be nice, is she going to tackle me again?”
Cassie just watched. If anybody else, boy or girl, acted the way Sarah was acting right now, even after what Cassie had said about needing a friend, Cassie would have thought she were getting blown off. If Jack or Teddy or Gus tried it, she would have gone right at them and accused them of being rude.
Bottom line?
She wouldn’t have let anybody else she knew get away with it. But Sarah wasn’t somebody else. She was Sarah. All Cassie could think of in the moment was something she told other people all the time: deal. Meaning deal with it, whatever “it” happened to be. Now Cassie was the one who had to deal.
Mrs. Milligan stood up. Mr. Milligan was behind Sarah. Mrs. Milligan reminded Sarah that Cassie had made the effort to come over to talk and said that now she and Sarah’s dad were going to leave them alone to do that.
When they were gone, Sarah said to Cassie, “That’s my chair.”
“Okay,” Cassie said, and moved over to where Mrs. Milligan had been sitting on the couch. They stared at each other for a minute. Sarah still had her arms crossed.
Finally Sarah said, “You shouldn’t have tackled me that way. My mom just said for me to be nice. That wasn’t nice what you did. That was bad. You made me look bad in front of all the other players. That was bad and wrong.”
“I realize that now,” Cassie said. “It’s why I came over to apologize.”
“You keep asking me why I don’t trust you? That’s why. You don’t trust me. Why should I trust you?”
“You’re right,” Cassie said. “It’s why what happened is on me.”
“You thought I was going to do something stupid,” Sarah said. “People always think I’m going to do something stupid. Don’t try to deny it. They do, they do, they do.”
“No,” Cassie said.
“Yes,” Sarah said. She started nodding her head. “Yes, they do. People always say they want me to fit in. But then they don’t let me.”
It was one of those times when it was almost as if Cassie weren’t here and Sarah was talking to herself.
“I did want to do something to that girl. She hit me in the face with her glove. She was the one who did the stupid thing. But I knew better than to hit her. I was just going to tell her she shouldn’t have hit me in the face. But that’s all. You have to be careful how you touch people, even when you’re tagging them out.”
Now she looked up at Cassie, as if remembering she was still there. “I don’t like being touched.”
“I get that.”
“Why couldn’t you trust me just one time?”
“I should have.”
“Now you come here to my house and tell me you want to be my friend,” Sarah said. “But how does that work if you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you?” She gave a quick shake of her head and said, “Who’s friends like that?”
Cassie took a deep breath, let it out. “I never thought you were stupid,” she said. “But I didn’t give you credit for being as smart as you are. Which makes me a little bit stupid.”
“You think I didn’t know you were pitying me?”
And there it was. All Cassie could think of was what Mrs. Milligan had said about sympathy and empathy. Not only was Sarah smart, but she was smart enough to know pity when she saw it.
“Another thing I was stupid about.”
And then Sarah was shouting at her.
“Just let me play my game!”
“Okay,” Cassie said, trying to make her voice as quiet as possible, as a way of bringing Sarah’s down.
“Let me play my game and you play your game
