One day she’d come home from school, nearly in tears, and said to her mom, “Why can’t I fix this?”
And her mom had said, “Because this isn’t something you or anybody else can fix. It’s who Peter is. And he doesn’t think he needs fixing. His normal just happens to be different from yours.”
Cassie’s dad told her now that Sarah had only played basketball before this, starting with a Special Olympics Unified Sports team, on which some of the players were mentally challenged and some weren’t. According to Cassie’s dad, it was Sarah’s being on that team originally, back in the sixth grade, and turning out to be as gifted an athlete as she was, that had helped her coaches realize that she had far more social skills than they’d originally thought.
“By last year,” Chris Bennett said, “she was the star of a team that went all the way to the Special Olympics World Games. And she’d gotten so good at basketball, she was the one partnering with more challenged kids, the way she’d been partnered herself when she’d started playing ball.”
“But that means she had to talk to them,” Cassie said. “You saw what happened tonight when I tried to talk to her. It was like I’d chased her away.”
“Her parents say it takes time for her to feel safe when she gets thrown into a new situation,” her dad said. “Now she’s living in a new town, meeting new people, playing a new sport. It’s going to take time, and a lot of effort, mostly on our part.”
It turned out that there were no softball teams in Special Olympics for girls her age. But her dad, just from playing in the yard with her, and then taking her to a local field, had come to see how much she loved softball, and how good she might be at it.
“Really good,” Cassie said. “Mad good.”
Their seventh-grade team, the Orioles, also coached by Cassie’s dad, had gone undefeated and had won every tournament in the state that a girls’ softball team could win. And they all knew that this summer the stakes were even higher for them. If they could win their All-Star League, they qualified for a New England tournament that would be shown on NESN, the Red Sox television network, with the championship game at Fenway Park on a weekend in August when the Red Sox were on the road. It wasn’t the Little League World Series. But it would do.
The teams that were good enough would get their chance to play at Fenway, and get their chance to play on television. Yeah, that kind of spotlight would do, all of them getting their chance to shine. It was the biggest reason why Walton Baseball had asked Cassie’s dad to come back and coach one more season, even though he’d sworn he was retiring last year.
Cassie’s dad told her he’d been reading up on Asperger’s since Sarah’s mom and dad had called and asked to meet with him. Not only did her parents want Sarah to play softball, but they planned on enrolling her at Walton Middle in the fall.
“I’m not trying to give you the same crash course on Asperger’s I’m giving myself,” Cassie’s dad said. “But the thing that can be most difficult for these kids is what we think of as normal social interaction.”
“Like just complimenting her on a good play in the outfield,” she said.
“Like that.”
He said it wasn’t going to be the last time that Sarah might panic and run away, and she might not even stop at the bench next time. Or she might lose her temper, because her parents said she could fly off the handle, sometimes for reasons that only she understood. Or she could get fixed on routines, like standing in the same spot in the outfield.
“She didn’t make much eye contact tonight, Dad.”
“And she might not. And there might be things that make no sense to you. Her parents said that even though loud noises bother her, she can get loud sometimes.”
“Sounds like a process,” Cassie said.
“And a challenge for you,” her dad said. “But who’s more up for challenges than you are?”
“You got me there,” she said, and bumped him some fist.
“Listen,” he said, “this whole thing is gonna be a work in progress, for me included. For all of us. But I’m gonna need your help to make it work.”
“Just tell me how.”
“With some of the other girls,” he said. “The ones who, let’s face it, aren’t always as aware about stuff as you are. I mean, I know a lot of people think you’re stuck on yourself—”
“Hey,” Cassie said. “I thought we were bonding here.”
He laughed. “But I know better, because I know my daughter. And her heart. It’s why I know you can take the lead on this.”
“Sounds like you’re setting the bar kind of high for me, Dad.”
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that had always felt to Cassie like his arms around her. “Almost as high as you set it for yourself.”
They sat in silence for a moment, the only sound in the room the ticking of their antique grandfather clock, actually given to them by Cassie’s grandfather.
“I promise this will be worth it,” her dad said.
Then he added, “Win or lose.”
Cassie felt herself smiling. “I know,” she said. “So she’s going to make the team, then?”
Chris Bennett laughed again, even louder than before.
“She made it when she caught that ball,” he said.
• • •
When they were finished, Cassie went upstairs and got out her laptop and read up on Asperger’s syndrome herself, starting with the Autism Speaks website. She was trying to understand about the autism spectrum, telling herself to think of it as a scale and not a spectrum. But what was pretty clear to her was some of the behavior you could expect from somebody with Asperger’s,
