The Girl Who Threw Butterflies (15 page)

She looked out the window and saw the flickering glow of a television next door in the Rybaks’ house. It was one A.M. Face it: Nobody watched television at this hour because of the high-quality programming. Did Mr. Rybak have insomnia? Mrs. Rybak? They didn't seem like the sleepless types. What could possibly be keeping them awake at this hour? Molly had assumed that their happy, wholesome, well-regulated lives excluded all confusion, doubt, middle-of-the-night dread. So maybe not. Maybe the walls of even the nicest, most carefully constructed homes were semipermeable
membranes. Siding, double-pane windows, caulk—it didn't matter; sorrow and confusion were going to leak through from time to time.

There was a phrase Molly had heard her dad use more than once: Dark night of the soul. She hadn't understood it at the time, but the words stuck with her. They must have scared her a little. So this was probably it. Her dark night. It sounded worse than it was. It wasn't so bad.

Molly stepped away from the window and toed an imaginary rubber. She knew she looked ridiculous, standing in her bedroom wearing plaid flannel pajama pants and a Bills T-shirt, in the middle of the night, getting ready to pitch. But no one was watching. It was her bedroom, her dark night of the soul; she could do whatever she pleased. She gripped the ball for a knuckler, rocked into her windup, and coming over the top the way Morales had coached her, went through the motion of delivering a pitch home.

Her arm felt good.

hen she took her seat next to Lonnie in English class the next morning, Molly noticed that his hand had been injured. His thumb was swollen, purplish, painful-looking.

“Hey,” she said, and pointed.

“What happened?” “Dunno,” Lonnie said. He shrugged. Put a look on his face that was supposed to express bewilderment. He was a terrible liar, which was something Molly liked about him. She knew exactly how he must have hurt himself. One of her wild pitches must have ricocheted off his mitt and caught his bare hand. It happened a lot.

She'd done it to him. Being her personal catcher was no treat. There was a good reason why even big league catchers hated catching knuckleballers. Nobody wanted to go
through that misery, endure all the sprains and bruises. Who wanted to get beat up?

Molly didn't like to think she was capable of injuring someone else. Her mother, her father, the jerkhead boys on the team—they'd injured
her,
she'd been the victim. That was how she thought of herself, as innocent. But clearly, she could dish out some hurt, too. The evidence was right in front of her. Lonnie's knuckles looked scraped and raw, too, and there were some yellowish bruises on his forearm. She was going to have to readjust her thinking about herself.

“Does it hurt?” Molly asked.

“Not a bit,” Lonnie said. Which had to be another lie. It hurt just to look at his hand.

Molly felt terrible that she'd done it to him. On the other hand, she couldn't help but think that bruising Lonnie made for a weird kind of intimacy between them. You could kiss someone hard enough to put a bruise on them. It was a physical connection. She'd left her mark on him.

During homeroom, as part of the morning announcements, the details of the game that afternoon were broadcast by Vice Principal Niedermeyer. Normally, announcements were made by two students, but this week's pair apparently had been fired the day before for reading the announcements in crazy accents. Something like that was too funny to be tolerated. In the vice principal's voice, even a baseball game—four o'clock start, home field, first game of the year, come and support the team—sounded ominous somehow. When he spoke, everything sounded ominous. He had a voice that made you want to duck and cover.

The vice principal referred to the team as “the boys’
baseball team.” Molly wouldn't have thought about it one way or another, but that phrase, presumably, and Molly's presence in the room, seemed to evoke a reaction from some girls in the back. There was some laughter, some tittering and pointed looks. Molly wasn't paranoid, but she knew when she was being talked about.

The girls were an A-list clique. Celia called them The Mindys, though only one of them was actually named Mindy, Mindy Banks. There was also a Jodi, a Lindsay, a Hailey, and an April. When Celia called them that, The Mindys, it always sounded to Molly like the name of a band. They didn't actually play anything, but here, in this little world, they were stars, minor celebrities. Skinny and glamorous. Lots of eye makeup. Kids gossiped about them, noticed what they wore. Boys whose names they probably didn't even know had crushes on them. They were always well turned out, always on. In their own way they were performance artists.

“When I said I was going out for baseball,” Molly said, “you told me that I was Amelia Earhart. I was a pioneer, you said. You remember that?”

Celia nodded. “Sure,” she said. “I remember that.”

“So how come they don't seem to think so?”

“Just wait,” Celia said. “It takes time. At first the other girls didn't know Amelia Earhart was Amelia Earhart. Know what I mean?”

Molly didn't, in fact, know what she meant, but she said she did, which was what she often did when faced with this sort of Celia-ism. It was just easier. “Of course,” Molly said. “It takes time.”

On her way to fifth period Molly passed Morales in the hall. He was dressed as a mild-mannered social studies teacher, pushing an overhead projector on a rolling cart, but he was apparently thinking about the game.

“How's the arm?” he asked.

“Dandy,” Molly said. Dandy? What a weird thing to have come out of her mouth! She had never used the word in her life. Who said that? What did it even mean?

But Morales seemed unfazed. “Good,” he said. “We may need you.”

“Sure,” Molly said. Though at first it didn't register—what he meant, who the “we” was who might need her.

Alone, in a far corner of the girls’ locker room, Molly changed into her uniform. She could hear, not see, the track team getting ready for practice, the happy hum of their talk, the squeak of their sneakers.

Always self-conscious about dressing and undressing, Molly in a way was a little glad to be an exile in the locker room, grateful for the privacy. Sometimes, entering and exiting the practice field alone through the girls’ door while the boys crowded through theirs in a pack, she felt a little special. But this afternoon she just felt lonely. She missed Tess and Ruth. Who was playing third base these days? She even missed Lu Baxter. Was she still dancing in the outfield? Working on any new routines? If Molly weren't alone, if she had someone to joke with, maybe she wouldn't feel so nervous now.

Molly smoothed the front of her jersey, made sure that her socks were straight. Her black uniform pants were
neither baggy nor tight—they were comfortable, just right. She thought of her mother giving her uniform a thumbs-up. Molly knew that from her mother's perspective, she'd always been insufficiently interested in style. They hadn't shared too many chummy shopping sprees—when they bought Molly's clothes, it was often testy, a battle of wills. For her mother not to offer some kind of full-blown fashion critique, that was something. At breakfast that morning Molly had mentioned the game to her, very low-key, just sort of FYI, and her mother didn't freak—she just kept blowing on her coffee and said good luck, which seemed to Molly just right.

Molly checked the wall clock—in three minutes she was supposed to be on the field for warm-ups. There was a full-length mirror near the door leading to the field, and Molly stopped to take one last look at herself. She didn't want to look fashionable, just professional, and Molly, giving herself as objective a once-over as she could, figured she passed—she looked like a ballplayer.

She was about to take the field for her first game, uniformed, wearing her cap the way she always did in the backyard, brim slightly curved, pulled low over her eyes to make herself look fierce. At that moment, naturally, she thought of her dad.

You look good, Molly. It's a dandy uniform.

That was your word! I should have known.

How you feeling? You look a little pale.

I'm nervous, Dad. I don't want to be Amelia Earhart. Look what happened to her!

You don't have to be anyone but you. Just be Molly Williams.

Molly Williams is scared.

Scared of what?

I don't know. What if I make a horrible error? What if I make a royal fool of myself?

What if?

What if I let the team down? I let you down?

You've got nothing to prove, Molly. You don't have to cheer me up. I'm proud of you. Do your best. Have some fun.

Fun? Fun?

Molly looked at the clock—she was a minute late. She grabbed her glove and, cleats clicking across the locker-room floor, headed out toward the field.

olly jogged out and joined her teammates, who were just lining up in right field to start stretching. The varsity field had been fenced off all spring, KEEP OUT signs posted every ten feet or so. Now, in May, it was in terrific shape. The infield dirt was smooth, the mound raked, the foul lines and batter's box neatly chalked. The grass was thick and green. After so many practices on their bumpy, dandelion-filled practice field, this was something else. Molly almost felt guilty for being on the field at all, half expecting some-one to holler at her to get off.

Dressed in their brand-new unis and let loose on the well-manicured field, everyone seemed a little formal, self-conscious
and cautious, like kids dressed up in their Sunday best. Coach V must have sensed how they felt. “It's okay to get dirty,” he said, walking among them while they got down to stretch. “You won't get in trouble. Grass stains are good. You want your parents to know you played.”

They went through the familiar routine, second nature now after performing it practice after practice, week after week. Molly stretched and tried, unsuccessfully, to empty her mind. She focused on her breathing. But despite her best effort to embrace the stillness of her inner depths and all that, her mind was full. It was overflowing.

She would never be a Zen master. She didn't have a single inner voice, she had a chorus of voices, all of them shouting questions, like reporters at a news conference. She wondered if the other team was going to harass her about being a girl. She worried that she wasn't going to get into the game; she worried that she
was
going to get into the game. There was a breeze blowing in from center field—would it help or hurt her knuckleball?

While they were running, a bus pulled into the parking lot. The doors opened and a line of boys in red jerseys filed off. Several men came last, a whole committee of coaches in matching shirts, carrying big canvas bags of gear, buckets full of baseballs, first-aid tackle boxes. Molly kept running, but of course, just like the rest of her teammates, she was checking them out.

The team came from Sheridan, a more distant, wealthier suburb, which called itself a village. The streets there all had names like Fawn Trail and Deer Run. Judging from a street map, you might think it was a wildlife preserve. The
players had their names sewn across the backs of the jerseys, just like the pros. To Molly some of the Sheridan boys looked physically intimidating—taller, more muscled up. One kid had a mustache. A big batter has a big strike zone, Molly's dad liked to point out, which was easy to say when you were sitting on the couch.