Thrown a Curve
Authors: Sara Griffiths
HROWN
A
C
URVE
a novel
ARA
G
RIFFITHS
Copyright 2007 by Sara Griffiths
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Published by Bancroft Press (“Books that enlighten”)
P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209
800-637-7377
410-764-1967 (fax)
Cover illustration, design, and interior design:
Tammy Sneath Grimes, Crescent Communications
www.tsgcrescent.com
• 814.941.7447
ISBN: (ePub)978-1-61088-035-0
ISBN: 1890862487 (cloth)
EAN: 978-1-890862-48-0 (cloth)
LCCN: 2006938837
ISBN: 1890862-49-5 (paperback)
EAN: 978-1-890862-49-7 (paperback)
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
1 3 5 9 10 8 6 4 2
T
O
J
AMIE AND
B
EN
C
HAPTER
1
I
sat alone in the high school principal’s small office, waiting for my punishment. I leaned my elbows on the desk and covered my face with my hands. Why had I done it? What had I been thinking? How had I gotten to this low point in my life? I was a juvenile delinquent at age fourteen.
I’d never done anything wrong before. This was the first time I’d ever been inside a school principal’s office. It was all my dad’s fault. If he didn’t hate me, if he hadn’t said what he’d said, I wouldn’t be here. I sighed and tried to remember better days, when my life was just about playing games, like baseball . . .
When I was seven years old, my father bought season tickets to the Yankees’ home baseball games. Having lived in New York his whole life, he was a loyal fan. He purchased two seats for each game. One ticket was always for himself, and the other ticket rotated between my two brothers. Brian was four years older than me, and Danny two years younger. Dad never put me in the rotation, and I never asked him to. I thought it was just a father-son thing.
When my brother Brian tried out for Little League that year, I sat in the bleachers, eating handfuls of Swedish fish, stretching their little bodies as far as I could before gulping them down. I watched the other fathers, looking thrilled and hopeful, cheering on their sons. My dad encouraged Brian, but he looked even more intense than the other fathers.
After several hours of watching Brian try out, I wandered onto the playground, took a few rides down the slide, and considered joining some of my classmates in a round of Double Dutch. But then one of the Little Leaguers hit a ball out of the park. It flew toward the playground, hit the ground, and rolled to a stop in front of me. I stared at the baseball’s stitches. Its strange pattern put me in a trance that seemed to last for days. I’d never really thrown a baseball.
“Throw it back!” a coach yelled to me.
I picked up the ball and hurled it with all my might. It sailed over the fence, over the coach, over second base, and hit the pitcher in the head.
Oops.
I ran back to the playground, hoping no one had seen me.
On the ride home, I sat on the hump in the car’s backseat, squished between Brian and Danny. I kept thinking about throwing that baseball. I wondered if I could be as good as my brothers.
“Brian, you did a good job out there today,” my dad said. “Let’s go out for ice cream.”
As we were downing our sundaes at the ice cream parlor, my younger brother Danny said, “You can throw real good, Taylor. Daddy said so.”
Back then, I thought my father knew everything. If he’d seen me throw that ball and thought it was good, then he was right. He was always right. But if I was good, why hadn’t he told me so himself?
Later that night, I sat by my dad’s feet as he napped on the couch and watched Tom Brokaw talk about the news in the Middle East.
“Hey, Dad?” I said.
“What?”
“I think I’ll play baseball this summer, too.”
Looking confused, he said nothing. He hadn’t said much since my mother left us. And that had been two years ago.
Only one local baseball team had been willing to take a seven-year-old girl—the Hawks. Their assistant coach was the nurse at my elementary school, and I only made the team because she’d gone on and on with the head coach about women’s rights and other stuff I really hadn’t understood. She promised to look out for me. Back then, I wasn’t aware anyone needed to “look out for me.”
I wanted to be a pitcher because Dad said I had a good arm. But the coaches put me in center field.
“You can make that long throw from center to home,” Ms. Miller said, “and you’re too wild on the mound.”
I had a good summer playing with the Hawks. I loved playing
baseball. When I was out there on the field, I was so happy. It was weird how something so simple could make me feel so good.
The boys on the team hadn’t cared I was a girl, but the parents had. They made comments to my father when he picked me up after games. He just waved, nodded, and blew smoke rings from his cigar.
Dad never saw any of my games because Brian’s games were always at the same time on Field Seven. My brother Brian was an excellent baseball player—his batting average was .297.
I thought I could’ve played better baseball if my dad had come to watch me. I wished he would sit in
my
stands, even once. I always looked for him, and when he wasn’t there, it was hard not to cry. I kept thinking, maybe if I became a really good pitcher, never let any batters on base, and won the championship for my team, he’d come one day.
With this in mind, I practiced every chance I got. Once, I pitched to Brian in the empty lot behind our house. He whiffed at three of my pitches in a row.
“You throw too high, Taylor!” Brian screamed.
He swung at them,
I thought to myself. But he was eleven, and I was only seven, so I guessed he was right. Dad watched from the back porch, not saying anything. He just looked down, turned, and walked back into the house.
The next three summers, my dad sent me to my Aunt Maria’s house in Cape May, New Jersey to help out with her bed and breakfast. Aunt Maria, my dad’s sister, was widowed, and the only thing she knew about baseball was that the kids’ baseball field in town was too far away, and she didn’t have time to drive me there. She wanted me to take dance lessons at the nearby studio, but I hung around the beach instead.