See No Color by Shannon Gibney

Author:Shannon Gibney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

CHAPTER TWENTY

No one talked about my fainting spell, but I saw them watching me more carefully now than ever before. If I tripped, there was always an arm to catch me. If I wiped the sweat off my brow, at least two people handed me water bottles. I tried to smile about it all, but what I really felt like doing was smacking all the hands, all the help, away.

After practice two days after I fainted, I came out of the locker room wearing my warm-up gear, my sports bag slung over one shoulder, to find Dad huddled with Kyle, who played some right field and backed up Jason at first. Dad was waving his hands around, pointing alternately to Kyle and then to right, left, and center fields. Kyle kept on glancing at the field, looking back at Dad attentively, and then nodding. I couldn’t hear anything, but I knew exactly what he was telling him—your job as center fielder is to read the whole field, not just field the center. He had told me so many times. I turned around and walked around the corner, out of sight. Dad was doing the smart thing, I knew, by getting Kyle ready. There are teams that win and then there are individuals. But in my game, you have to be both.

My disappearance from the starting nine was about to be permanent.

• • •

At least there was one thing that I was still good at—running distance; my hips hadn’t thrown that off. After I got through the pain of the first five or ten minutes and acclimated my body to what it felt like to work that hard, it was almost like I was in another world. Time slowed down, and everything around me blurred into one big backdrop. Even my thoughts slowed down. Breathe. Turn right. Breathe. Just a little further. My stomach tightened. Breathe. You can do this. I was strong while I was running because there was never anything else to conquer but the next step.

Which was why I wasn’t so surprised to find myself in front of Reggie’s house one evening a couple of days after I’d seen Dad with Kyle. All I was doing was running; not thinking, just moving, but somehow I ended up at 5498 Juniper Lane. His house wasn’t close to mine—a little over six miles away, so in some part of my brain I must have been thinking about going there all along.

I paced in front of the house for a good three minutes, breathing heavily, trying to decide what to do. I was drenched in sweat, and my hair was frizzing like it always did when I pulled it back into a tight ponytail for a workout. It wasn’t exactly the look I wanted to present to Reggie. I bit off a hangnail. Still, I wanted to see him. He’d been busy with his job stocking products at Home Depot, and I’d been all baseball, so our relationship, whatever it was, had dwindled to texts in the last week.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.