Stealing Home

The baseball sat heavy in my hand, cracked leather rubbing against my palm. Seventh inning. Two outs. Bases loaded. Everyone watching.

"You got this, Marco!" someone yelled from the dugout.

I didn't got this. What I got was a secret I'd been carrying since freshman year: I hated baseball. I hated everything about it — the dirt, the pressure, the way Coach Richardson's face turned the color of a rotten tomato when we messed up.

But my dad lived for this stuff. Last season's trophy still sat on the mantel like a shrine.

I wound up and threw. The batter connected. CRACK. The ball soared toward left field.

My legs moved before my brain did. I sprinted, lungs burning, cleats tearing up the infield. The ball arced down. I leaped, glove extended.

And watched it drop three feet away.

"You suck, Torres!" someone yelled. Probably Jason, whose vocabulary was mostly grunts and insults.

Later, I sat behind the abandoned water tower, skipping stones into the creek. That's when I saw them — a red fox and this beat-up orange cat, just chilling together like it was the most normal thing in the world. The fox nudged the cat with its snout. The cat headbutted back.

Weird, right? Predators and prey becoming homies.

"What are you looking at?"

I jumped. Maya stood there, holding a sketchbook. THE Maya. Junior class artist, weirdly cool, currently dyeing her hair a new color every week. Today: electric blue.

"Nothing," I said. "Just...thinking."

She sat beside me. "About how you struck out?"

"Thanks for the replay."

"My brother's on the team," she said, opening her sketchbook. "He says you've got an arm but your head's somewhere else."

I laughed. "He's not wrong."

She showed me her drawing — a bull, but not like any bull I'd seen. It had butterfly wings. Massive, detailed, unreal.

"Why wings?" I asked.

"Because sometimes the things that seem scary are just trying to fly," she said, like that made perfect sense.

We talked for an hour. About art, about how much high school sucked, about how she wanted to go to RISD and I wanted to...honestly, I didn't know.

"You ever gonna tell your dad?" she asked.

"Tell him what?"

"That you'd rather be anywhere but that field."

The fox and cat were gone when I looked back. Just us and the water trickling over rocks and the weight of everything I hadn't said.

"Yeah," I said. "Someday."

"Sometime's not today, Marco."

She stood up and handed me a smaller sketch — a baseball with wings.

"Food for thought."

I walked home with that drawing in my pocket. Tomorrow I'd tell them. Probably. Okay, maybe not probably. But for the first time, someday felt like it might actually come.