The Riddle at Home Plate

The baseball sat heavy in my glove like a secret I was keeping from myself. Dad wanted me at tryouts Friday—legacy of the golden age when my older brother Jake dominated the pitcher's mound. Jake, who was now too cool for anything involving actual effort.

I walked past the mini-golf course on my way home, past that fiberglass sphinx with the chipped nose and the mysterious smile. Some riddle, all right. The real question was how to tell my dad I'd rather rot than spend another summer getting shelled by kids who hit puberty three years ago.

"Hey, baseball boy!"

I turned to see Maya and her friends by the fence. They'd just come from the arcade where the mechanical bull had been taunting me since sixth grade. The one where Chase "The Bull" Martinez had held on for a record three minutes last summer before bailing in front of everyone.

"Tryouts Friday, right?" Maya called. "Or are you gonna chicken out?"

"Baseball," I said, like it was a sentence and not a noun. Heat crawled up my neck. The cable from the utility pole above us swayed in the wind like a metronome counting down my humiliation.

"Your brother was pretty good," she added, which somehow made it worse. Jake's shadow stretched longer every year.

That night I found Dad in the garage, winding baseballs into a bucket like he was preparing for war. "You nervous?" he asked, not looking up.

"No," I lied.

He nodded at the TV where SportsCenter flickered. "The cable's out again. But I've got tapes of Jake's no-hitter."

The bull in the room wasn't mechanical. It was the weight of being a Martinez boy in a town where the name meant something. I looked at the sphinx smile on my worn-out batting tee, suddenly seeing the riddle clearly: How do you become yourself when everyone expects you to become someone else?

"Dad," I said, my voice cracking. "I don't want to play."

The silence stretched between us like a bad inning. Then he set down the baseball. "Okay," he said simply. "So what DO you want?"

The sphinx had spoken, but for once, I had the answer.