The Spy in Right Field

Leo's palms were sweating, and not just because he was up to bat with bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh. The varsity baseball team was watching. Coach Miller was watching. But mostly, **Taylor** was watching from the bleachers, and that was infinitely worse.

"You gonna swing or just admire the pitcher's form, Newman?" someone yelled from the dugout. The **bull** pen, more like. Cole and his crew had been making Leo's life miserable since he'd made varsity as a sophomore. "Public school embarrassment," they'd whispered in the hallway Monday. "Daddy probably donated the baseball field." Never mind that Leo's dad drove a cable repair truck and Leo had spent every summer since age twelve batting cages until his hands bled.

The pitch came — high and outside. Ball four. Walk.

As he trotted to first, Leo caught Taylor's eye. She was half-smiling, that infuriatingly perfect smile that made him forget his own name. But she was also holding her phone weirdly, angled toward Cole's position in center field. Something about the way her thumb hovered over the screen pinged his gut.

Later, behind the portable classrooms where the stoners hung out, Leo found it: a loose cable box, exposed wires, a tiny lens reflecting the late afternoon sun. A spy cam. Someone had bugged the school.

His hands shook as he traced the **cable** back toward the main building. This wasn't just some prank. This was sophisticated, expensive, and definitely illegal. And the footage — if someone had been recording Cole and his crew all season, the stuff they said about girls, the way they hazed freshmen, the way they'd made that new kid cry in the locker room last week —

"You found it."

Leo jumped. Taylor stepped out from behind the dumpster, holding a laptop. "I mean, obviously you found it. You're literally standing there staring at it like it's gonna bite you."

"You — you put it there?"

"Duh." She sat on a concrete block and flipped the computer open. "Cole's dad owns like half the construction contracts in this district. Him and his friends have been stealing from the school for years. Embezzlement, fraud, super boring white-collar stuff except my mom's the auditor who caught it and nobody believed her because Cole's dad is, you know, rich and powerful."

She pulled up a spreadsheet. "But then I started recording and — anyway. Want to help take down a corrupt businessman using only illegally obtained footage and my mom's old forensic accounting skills?"

Leo stared at her, then at the camera, then at the baseball field beyond where Cole was probably still talking about how Leo didn't deserve his jersey number.

"Yeah," Leo said. "Yeah, I really do."

Taylor grinned and extended a hand. His palm was still sweating from the game, but she didn't seem to care. "Welcome to the resistance, Newman. First mission tomorrow night. Bring gloves. This might get messy."