Coming up short, p.1
Coming Up Short, page 1
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morrison, Laurie, author.
Title: Coming up short / Laurie Morrison.
Description: New York : Amulet Books, 2022. | Audience: Ages 10 to 14. | Summary: Seventh-grader Bea is the star short stop on her softball team, which is going to the league championship, but her world has just been turned upside down by the news that her father has been suspended from his law practice because he used some of his clients’ money to pay bills; worse the news has been spread by another lawyer online, and that lawyer happens to be the father of Bea’s almost boyfriend, Xander; now her fielding skills are slipping, and Bea does not know which is more difficult—dealing with either pity or snickering from her schoolmates, learning to throw again, or forgiving her father.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021037663 | ISBN 9781419755583 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781647003678 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Softball—Juvenile fiction. | Embezzlement—Juvenile fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Juvenile fiction. | Families—Juvenile fiction. | Friendship—Juvenile fiction. | Forgiveness—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Softball—Fiction. | Stealing—Fiction. | Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Parents | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Themes / Emotions & Feelings
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M673 Co 2022 | DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037663
Text © 2022 Laurie Morrison
Baseball image courtesy Antonov Maxim/Shutterstock.com
This page–this page and back jacket flap: image courtesy NTL studio/Shutterstock.com
This page: image courtesy natsa/Shutterstock.com
Book design by Deena Fleming and Chelsea Hunter
Published in 2022 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Amulet Books® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
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For my team: Mike, Cora, and Sam.
And for Myles and Clint, my first (and forever) teammates.
I pound my fist into the worn pocket of my glove and crouch into fielding position.
This—right now—is what I live for. It’s the softball league semifinals, and we’re up 5–4 with one out in the last inning. The other team’s center fielder just slapped a perfect bunt down the third base line, so she’s the tying run, standing on first base and ready to take off. But there’s no way she’s crossing home plate. There’s no way we’re giving up this lead.
“One down, Falcons!” I shout. “Play’s to first or second!”
The cack-cack cheer starts up on our bench and spreads through the bleachers. Cack! Cack! Cack! Faster and faster, louder and louder, with more and more people joining in.
That’s the sound actual falcons make when they’re protecting their nests, so it’s a Butler Middle School thing, to yell Cack! Cack! when our teams are protecting a lead. I’ve never heard the chant get anywhere near this loud at a softball game, though, and I freaking love it.
Adrenaline courses through my body. All these people are watching us. Parents. Teachers. The whole baseball team. Even Tyson Carter, who hates me because I got him in trouble for not doing any work on our science project, and his friends who groan when I talk too much in class. They’re all here, cheering for my teammates and me.
I glance at Emilia, who’s playing second base, and wiggle two fingers in the air. She nods and flashes two fingers back.
A double play ends the game right here. If there’s any way Emilia and I can turn two, we will.
“Let’s go, Falcons!” Coach Yang yells. “Stay focused now. Play smart!”
The other team’s batter gets into her stance, bending her knees and wiggling the bat over her back shoulder.
Right here, I will her. Hit the ball to me.
There are two kinds of fielders—that’s what Dad says. The ones who want to make the play with the game on the line, and the ones who hope the ball goes somewhere else because they’re scared of messing up.
I never play scared. I always want to make the play.
Our pitcher, Monique, whips the ball over the inside corner of the plate, jamming the batter. The ball pops off the skinny part of the bat and bounces past Monique’s outstretched glove, toward me.
Yes.
I charge.
“First! First!” Coach yells.
That’s the safe play: tossing the ball to first base to get one out. But the other team’s best hitter is in the on-deck circle, up next, and Emilia’s ready at second base. I pull my arm back and throw as hard as I can.
Smack.
The ball hits the webbing of Emilia’s glove and beats the lead runner by a full step. Emilia pivots and launches the ball to first base, just in time.
“Out! Out!” the umpire shouts, pointing to second base and then to first, and I leap into the air and scream my lungs out.
“Yes!”
Emilia runs over to do our double play handshake, bumping shoulders and then hips and slapping our gloves together.
“You’ve got guts, Bea,” she yells over all the noise. “I can’t believe you threw to second on a dribbler!” “It wasn’t a dribbler,” I protest, even though it kind of was.
Emilia whacks my arm with the outside of her glove. “It was definitely a dribbler. Not that I’m complaining!”
Behind home plate, Coach Yang is talking to the umpire.
Try to turn two if the ball is hit hard, go straight to first if it’s not. That’s her rule, and I broke it.
But Dad’s the one whose voice I hear in my head when I play softball. And Dad’s rule is to trust your gut and never second-guess yourself. That’s when errors happen, when you let doubt in. I believed I could make that throw, and I did.
My best friend, Jessi, sprints in from center field. “That was clutch, Beasy!” she yells. “We’re going to the finals!”
On the sideline, everyone is chanting, “Falcons! Falcons!”
Xander Berg-Thomas is there in the front. I spotted him during warm-ups because I basically have Xander Radar, so I always spot him. I didn’t let myself look back at him the whole game so I wouldn’t lose my focus, but I look now, and my already-full heart swells.
The rest of our teammates pile on top of Emilia, Jessi, and me. I end up at the bottom of a mass of sweaty softball players and somebody spikes my toes, but I don’t even care. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
“Great game, Falcons!” Coach Yang calls. “Let’s line up and show our opponents some respect.”
The other team’s waiting, tears streaming down their faces because their season is over. We head over to tell them all good game, and then I scan the crowd for my parents, but I don’t see them.
They were here in the bottom of the fifth inning. I saw them cheering after I scored a run. But now, I see everybody else’s families except mine, which makes zero sense. My parents wouldn’t miss this for the world. Literally.
There’s a hand on my shoulder—Coach Yang, leading me away from the rest of my team. “That was a risky play, Bea.”
And, okay. There. I see Mom’s reddish-brown hair and big sunglasses and Dad’s red Falcons hat, white shirt, and softball tie. They’re standing way far away, closer to the other team’s fans than ours. They’ve folded up their chairs and packed up all their stuff as if they’re in a hurry to take off, which is bizarre, but they’re here, waving at me. Dad pulls on his earlobe three times.
One. Two. Three.
I. Love. You.
I do it back fast and then focus on Coach.
“I need you to play smart,” she’s telling me.
I nod, but I’m not going to say sorry. That’s a Mom thing: not saying you’re sorry when you haven’t done anything wrong. Mom says apologies should be reserved for “expressing remorse when you’ve done something you regret,” but girls are conditioned to apologize whenever anyone else is the tiniest bit unhappy and it strips away our power, apologizing so much.
“I know the safe play was throwing to first,” I say. “But I didn’t want to give their best hitter a chance to beat us.”
Coach Yang shakes her head. “If one thing had gone wrong, though. If your throw had been a few inches off, or if Emilia hadn’t been ready for the ball, we would have given away an out. That could have cost us the game.”
I take a breath before I speak so I won’t sound like I’m talking back. “I did check that Emilia was ready. I wouldn’t have thrown to second if she wasn’t.”
Coach sighs and finally cracks a smile. “It was an impressive play, Bea. Most high school varsity shortstops can’t make a throw like that, and you’re in seventh grade.”
I grin back. “Thanks, Coach.” I’m practically bursting with pride as I follow her back to the bench, where she congratulates the whole team.
“We’ve got a championship game in two short days,” she tells us. “But we’ll talk more abou
We all erupt in cheers, because Luigi’s is where we go to celebrate our biggest wins. We sit together at the long tables in front and recap the best moments of the game while we stuff our faces with extra-cheese pizza. And Coach names a player of the day, who gets the game ball as a souvenir and a Nutella-filled dessert calzone.
Everybody heads off to find their families, and Jessi adjusts the clips that hold back the front pieces of her long black hair. “You think I can get a ride with you? My parents are probably going to want to take the goofballs home.”
She points to the sideline, where her five-year-old brothers, Jack and Justin, are picking dandelions and shrieking as they rub the yellow part on each other’s cheeks.
“Of course. Meet you in the parking lot?”
“Yep!” She bounds over to her parents, and I swap my spikes for sandals, sling my softball bag over my shoulder, and start walking over to the spot where I last saw Mom and Dad.
But when I pass the bleachers, Xander jogs over to me. My skin heats up, my pulse skyrockets, and my stomach goes wobbly—because that’s what happens whenever Xander Berg-Thomas is nearby.
It’s been like this since March. One day after spring break, he was wearing a new yellow shirt, and Tyson kept calling him “Sunshine” and singing that “You are my sunshine” song. When I looked over, Xander made his eyes wide and shrugged at me, like, “Tyson’s the worst, but what can you do?” and bam. Wobbly stomach. Too-fast heart. Giant crush on Xander. Maybe it had always been there under the surface, waiting to activate. I have no clue. Jessi’s had a bunch of crushes already, but this is new for me and it’s weird.
Xander’s a little out of breath when he catches up to me. “Bea! Hey, great game! You made some sick plays. You’ve got a cannon for an arm.” He reaches out as if he’s going to touch my right bicep, but his fingers freeze before they make contact and he blinks at his hand, as if it moved without his permission. His freckly white cheeks turn so pink they clash with his red Falcons T-shirt, and he stuffs his fists into his shorts pockets.
He’s nervous. I make Xander nervous.
Jessi keeps saying he’s into me, and I think she might be right.
“Thanks for coming,” I say.
He shrugs. “I wanted to. I wanted to see you play.”
You.
He could mean “all of you.” As in, the whole softball team. But now his cheeks are even pinker, so I don’t think he does. He’s standing so close that I can hear his breath go in and out, in and out. I can see the gold glints in his brown eyes and the one tiny tuft of dark brown hair at the back that always stands straight up instead of cooperating with his part.
I love that uncooperative tuft of hair. I want to reach up and touch it.
Somebody calls Xander’s name, and when I look over to see who it is, I notice: Dad’s car is gone. It was right there in the front of the parking lot, and now it’s not.
Dad would never leave a softball game without me, especially not a game as big as this, but the car is definitely gone. He’s been super stressed about work, but he always, always says I’m more important than any client. I can’t think of any reason why he’d just go.
“One minute!” Xander calls to his friends, and then he turns back to me. “I saw you at the batting cages last weekend, with your dad. I don’t think you saw me. You were in the zone. But I think you love softball as much as I love baseball. I like that.” He winces. “That came out so dorky. I don’t even know why I said that.”
Past Xander’s left shoulder, Mom’s pacing. Two steps one way, turn, two steps the other.
I split into two Beas. One Bea is thinking Xander is really, really cute when he’s nervous, and I did see him at the batting cages last weekend, because hello: Xander Radar. And I like that he loves baseball so much, too, and I like him. A lot.
But the other Bea needs to know where Dad is and why Mom is pacing and what the heck is going on.
Worried Bea wins.
“It didn’t sound dorky. I actually . . . I wish I could keep talking to you. Seriously. But I have to go.”
“Oh!” he says. “Um, okay?”
I take off toward Mom, who stops pacing when I get close.
“Bea! What a game, honey!”
Her smile spreads wide. Anybody who doesn’t know her would think she’s fine, but this isn’t her real smile. It’s the fake one she glues on when somebody says something rude about an article she’s written or when people comment about how different she is from Dad’s first wife, who grew up here in Butler and died a long time ago. Mom’s fake smile stretches wider than the actual one, but it doesn’t crinkle the corners of her eyes.
She pulls me in for a hug, and I can feel her heartbeat, hard and fast.
“Dad had to head home, and we need to go, too. I’ll get us a ride, okay?” She punches at the car share app on her phone. “A car should be here in a few minutes.”
A car?
She says this as if it’s a normal thing, but we’ve only ever used that app to get a ride to the airport or to go from a museum to a restaurant or something when we take a day trip into Manhattan. There is nothing normal about somebody else’s car taking us to our own house.
“What about Luigi’s?” I ask. “Everybody’s going. I told Jessi we’d give her a ride.”
Mom sighs and smooths the top of my hair. “I wish we could go to Luigi’s. You deserve to celebrate with your team, but . . . something’s come up. We need to get home now. Somebody else will give Jessi a ride.”
She loops her arm through my elbow, and we take off toward the parking lot. I don’t have my softball bag positioned right, so the knob of my bat smacks my tailbone with every step, but Mom is walking so fast I don’t have time to adjust it.
“Bye, Bea! See you at Luigi’s!” somebody calls.
I pretend I don’t hear because what am I going to say? I can’t come because my dad left for some mysterious and urgent reason, and now Mom and I have to go, too, but I have no clue why?
Maybe Gran needed Dad for something. That’s all I can think of. Except why wouldn’t Mom tell me that?
“Here we go.” Mom points at a gray sedan that’s pulling into the lot.
She greets the driver and opens the back door, motioning for me to climb in. We end up all jammed together with my softball bag on my lap and my school bag between us. As the car pulls away from the field, Mom pushes her sunglasses up on her head to look me straight in the eye.
“Dad will explain what’s going on as soon as we get home. Everything will be okay. I promise.” She reaches over my stuff to squeeze my hand. “We’re the better-than-a-dream team. Right?”
That’s what Mom and Dad call us: the better-than-a-dream team. They say the three of us are the family they didn’t even dare to dream of, back when their worlds fell apart.
“Right,” I echo.
The driver wants to know whether he should take this turn or the next one, and Mom pushes her sunglasses back down and tells him this one’s fine. I stare out the window as we go through the center of town, past Dad’s law office, past Gramps’s old dental office, and past the tiny park in the middle of the town square with four benches facing each other. “The Bartlett Benches,” they’re called, in honor of Dad’s grandpa—my great-grandfather, Benjamin Bartlett, who served nine terms in Congress and always had time to sit down on a bench for a coffee and a chat with any of his constituents whenever he was in town. If we turned right and crossed under the train tracks, we’d get to Luigi’s, but we keep going straight instead.
I take my phone out to text Jessi and see her message from eight minutes ago. Beasy! I can’t find the car. Where are you?
A new text comes in now, from Xander. Are u OK?
And then a new text from Jessi pops up, too.
OMG Bea. I’m so sorry. Emilia’s mom is taking me to Luigi’s so don’t worry about that. We’ll miss you and we love you no matter what!!
Then there’s a whole line of hearts. I read the words a second time and blink at the screen. No matter what.
What?
“Bea.” Mom’s voice is urgent. “Put your phone away, please.”
“I . . . why? What’s going on?”
She squeezes my hand again. “Dad and I will explain as soon as we get inside.”
