Dad’s face was positively glowing. He thanked Hank Aaron for taking the time out of his busy schedule to work with us.

Tenacity. It was a strange and awkward-sounding word, and I had no idea what it meant, though I could tell from the way Hank Aaron said it that it was a good thing.

He turned and waved to us one last time before he disappeared into the darkness of the stadium corridor.

“Goodbye, Hank Aaron,” I said under my breath. It seemed like he was gone right after he arrived.

CHAPTER TEN

It wasn’t even especially hot the day I fainted; in fact, it was a rather breezy June afternoon during the Regional Championship. I jogged out to center field, mitt tucked under my arm. Once I got there, I adjusted my hat and slipped on the mitt, and tried not to feel the tightness across my chest. I didn’t know if it was because I had recently started to grow breasts, and so also decided to cover up the strange blobs with the tightest sports bra I could find, or because of all the new tension between me, Dad, and Jason. Lying in bed at night, I could almost feel my hips starting to spread, and my sense of balance was off at the plate. Two weeks before nationals, I found myself in an extended batting slump, and Dad pulled me out of the lead-off position.

My arms and legs weren’t packing on bulky muscle like the guys’, either. Norm, Enrique, and even Jason were hitting for power, regularly slamming the ball into right and left field for doubles and triples, and even sometimes out of the park altogether. Overnight, my fail-safe strategy of lobbing one up the middle lost its magic. Strength had become more important than smarts, and playing was a daily reminder that my body was not strong enough. I was even having trouble keeping pace with the sprint work-outs – always being the third or second to last to finish. Just a few months before, I was consistently first.

Jason and Dad pretended not to notice what was going on. At dinner or on their way to a game, they made extra efforts to include me in discussion and strategizing. And they would both compliment me excessively when I got a hit or made a great play, whereas they would not have even mentioned it when I was playing well.

Maybe part of it was that Jason’s hands were growing, his knuckles bulbous and pink – like Dad’s. When he talked, he stretched out his fingers and moved them around in circles, which was something I had never seen him do before; that was how Dad talked. My hands were still small, my fingers stubby. They weren’t growing, and when I talked I moved them a little, but they mostly remained still, controlled, at my side.

But I wasn’t going to give up so easily. Early mornings after running, I spent hours in front of the mirror in my room. I knew a lot of girls at school who carefully monitored everything they ate, mortified that they might add an extra pound to their hips or ass. But that wasn’t my problem; if anything, I would have welcomed the extra weight on my frame. Next to the guys, I looked like I might blow away in the wind. I would turn my arms back and forth in front of the mirror, analyzing the flex of a bicep, wishing it thicker. The guys were all developing six packs on their stomachs, but a small mound of flesh remained stubbornly attached to my abdomen no matter how many sit-ups I did. My thighs were, perhaps, my biggest disappointment: they were as malleable as Play-Dough. On Jason and Enrique, they seemed to grow in size and sheer muscle mass every few months. Dad had always told us that strong legs were what really generated power in the game, so all of us were constantly striving to shape them. Jason and Enrique adopted a strict exercise, weight, and diet regimen, which was yielding incredible results.

This can’t be it. That was the thought that usually visited me those mornings in front of the mirror. There has to be something I can do. I vowed to improve somehow, improve to the point where Dad felt he had to put me back in lead-off position, that he was a fool to ever doubt my capabilities. There was no good reason why it couldn’t be done, I just had to focus. Focus. Focus. I began running twice as far as everyone else, and lifted less weight than the guys, but did more intervals. Whereas eating gratuitously had previously been one of my greatest joys, I now strictly monitored everything I consumed. Sweets and fried foods were the first things to go, followed by salty snacks with saturated fat and high carbohydrate content.

But a few days into the regimen, my body let me down again, and I had my fainting spell on the field. Dad hadn’t played me all game; we were up six to two in the eighth, and he told me to go in. I knew that this was my chance to show him and everybody that I was still the old Alex, Hank Aaron’s daughter, the best player on the field who wasn’t scared of anything and who was going to be the first girl to make it.

As he headed towards number 715, it became more and more difficult for Hank, I remembered (Dear Nigger, You black animal, I hope you never live long enough to hit more home runs than the great Babe Ruth). The hate mail increased exponentially as he approached that number, but he put it back somewhere outside of his sight. Somewhere where he couldn’t see it every time he came up to bat.

The umpire signaled the end of the time-out, and the batter stepped up to the plate. I licked my lips; they were as dry and cracked as my throat. I looked over at the guys on the bench, who were trading sips from a bright green water bottle. A streak of silver on the water bottle threw the bright sunlight back in my eyes and I winced. It suddenly felt like I hadn’t had a drink in a very, very long time. The batter took his stance, and I crouched down. Focus. Focus. I wanted him to lob it straight into center field, maybe a bit to my right so that I would have to run and then make a sliding catch. Something dramatic. Liam, our pitcher, delivered the ball. My eyes became transfixed on the ball as it sped out of his glove. It was like it was carving a tunnel with the air, turning it violet, yellow, and light blue as it shattered into pieces. I was conscious that I was waiting for the pieces to come back together, and then I was conscious that my eyes were actually shut, not open. What I was watching was occurring in a different world, on a different plane. I was here, but I wasn’ here. I was lying in the grass, my feet buckled beneath me, arms splayed out at my sides.

“Alex! Alex!” a voice said anxiously in my ear. It was Hank, my father. It was my birth father, Keith.

“Is she all right?” said another voice.

A hand on my face. Someone pouring water on my forehead.

“Oh, God. Oh, God.” That was Jason. That was my brother. I opened my eyes.

“What happened?” I asked.

His eyes were deep with worry, his skin almost ghostly. He took my hand.

“Are you all right?” said Dad. He was crouched down beside me. “Can you see okay?”

I concentrated on the endless blades of grass that surrounded us. “I can see fine.” I sat up slowly, and rubbed my head. “What happened?”

“It looked like you fainted,” said Jason. “You just fell.”

I frowned. I didn’t believe him. I pushed my palms into the grass and shoved myself up to my feet.

“Whoa!” said Dad. “Why did you do that? Jason and I would’ve carried you back. They’re bringing a stretcher.” Over by second base, I could see two umpires carrying a taut white stretcher up field.

I laughed, already starting towards my glove, about a foot away in the grass. “I’m fine, Dad.”

Dad and Jason exchanged glances.

“Alex,” Dad said. “I hope you know you’re done for the day.” There was no mistaking the regret in his voice. It made me angry.

“I’m fine,” I said.

He sighed. He looked at the ground, then back up at me. “Alex, you fainted. You’re going to go drink some water, and then you’re done for the day.”

I winced at the finality of his tone. There would be no amazing plays made today; I would end the game having barely played two minutes of it. I picked up my mitt and began to walk silently back to the dugout. All the guys on the field clapped as I passed them. I wanted to flip them off.

Walking beside me, Dad said, “You definitely need to rethink that whole diet you’re on. I think it’s doing you more harm than good.”

I lay in bed that night, dressed in my Umbros and State Champs T-shirt. Dad and I hadn’t spoken during the whole drive home, and we hadn’t spoken after that either.        “It’s going to be okay, honey,” Mom had told me, rubbing my back like she always did when I was younger, to calm me. “I’m sure your dad has a plan.”

I wanted to ask her if this new plan she was sure he had would work as well as all the previous ones, but I decided that I didn’t really want to talk about it anyway.

Mom patted me on the forehead, and then left me there in the darkness of my room, shadows looming large in corners, lights from the neighborhood bouncing off the walls. The scratch of the sheets underneath my feet was reassuring to me, let me know that I was still alive, that I was still here.

And then there were voices, faint, down below in the living room. “You knew that this day would come,” Mom was saying in the kitchen below, her voice barely above a whisper.

My breathing was deepening now, their voices anchoring me to the earth. I stepped out of bed, tiptoeing toward the doorway. Are they discussing Keith, or my adoption?

“We just… We need to wait and see. She might still pull out of it,” Dad said.

I crept towards the railing so I could hear better.

Mom sighed. “Terry… We just all need to be prepared. Because she might not.” I heard her walk across the room.

My stomach sank. Suddenly, I knew they were not talking about those adoption papers.

Dad’s voice rose. “I’ve always been prepared. Girls softball is always an option.”

I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp. Girls softball? The idea was about as palatable to me as playing golf.

“You just have to keep your ace in the hole as long as you can possibly play it,” he said.

“You turned your ace in a long time ago, and you’ve made other things work,” said Mom.  “You thought you could play forever, too.” She sighed again. “She’s going through so much right now, I guess we really shouldn’t be surprised.”

Dad told her that that was not the same thing at all. “You hold out as long as you can and then you have no choice. But Alex is different. She never gives in.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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 straighten me before I fell. If I wiped the sweat off my brow, at least two people handed me their 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 one afternoon, 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, our B team center fielder. Dad was waving his hands around, blocking out parcels of the field in front of him, 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.

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 10 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 farther. My stomach tightened, and I felt whatever food it carried coalesce and push downwards. Often, I spit out mucus on the sidewalk, clearing out my lungs. 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 was so surprised to find myself in front of Reggie’s house one evening. 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. The unconscious was a strange beast.

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 at the top like it always did when I pulled it back into a tight ponytail for a workout. The steam from the top of my head pulled my thick and plentiful curls apart, and the result was neither stylish nor attractive. It wasn’t exactly the look I wanted to present to Reggie. I bit off a hangnail. Still, I wanted to see him.

I stomped up the stairs to the door and willed myself to knock. I didn’t even have time to resent my decision to do so when the door flew open, and an elderly black woman half my size, dressed in a bright pink dress, was asking, “Can I help you?” There was my stomach again, rumbling and crying out for some food, and then also the feeling of air beginning to stick in my windpipe, the telltale signs of the hiccups that would follow. I blinked. The woman smiled. “You okay?” she asked. I tried to smile and nodded, but still no sound came out.

“Grandmom, who’s that?” I heard from behind her. Then footsteps, then Reggie’s face, long, girl-like eyelashes and baby cheeks. “Alex,” he said.

“Yeah,” I coughed out. The last time we had spoken was on the telephone a few days before. I had to get off the phone for dinner and told him I would call him back but never did.

“How’d…” He looked behind me, scanning for a car, I guess. “You bike?”

I shook my head. “Ran.”

“Right,” said Reggie, taking in my slightly matted hair, and glistening arms and legs.

Across the street, the kids were barking out orders to each other about some kind of tag game they were playing. A TV screen blared in the room to the right of where Reggie and his grandma stood. It sounded like American Idol.

“I’m Rebecca,” the woman said suddenly, extending her hand. “Reggie’s grandmom. You must be his girl.”

He mentioned me to his grandma, even? I felt my face grow hot.

“Momma, who’s at the door?” Reggie’s mom called from the kitchen.

“It’s just Alex, Ma,” Reggie called back.

“Oh, Alex! Haven’t seen that girl in a minute. Tell her to come in and have some dinner with us.”

I stepped backwards, almost tipping on the edge of the step. “Oh no,” I said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just was over here and I thought…”

“Girl, come on in and eat some food with us already. Everything’s getting cold,” said Reggie’s grandma. Then she leaned into me, screwing her face into a tight little ball.

I tried to smile, but could feel it wasn’t coming. “Oh no, I couldn’t…” I stammered. They’ll see it, and know it. The whiteness.

The woman frowned then, sensing my discomfort I think, and crossed her arms across her chest. “If you ain’t hungry, you should know better than to disturb folks at this hour. Plain as day that it’s dinnertime and folks is eating.” She turned around and started shuffling back to the kitchen, mumbling the whole time.

I hiccupped, and before I knew it, tears came to my eyes. Back home, Dad, Mom, Jason, and Kit were sitting down to dinner themselves. They would be wondering why my run was taking so long and they would save me a plate. Even though they knew less about me every day, what they knew was still enough most of the time. And no one, none of them would ever try to make me cry. So what was I doing here?

“Sorry,” I said. Then I turned and ran down the stairs before Reggie or anyone else could see any of the tears fall. There was nothing I hated more than crying in public.

But he ran after me. I heard him shout to his mom that he would be right back, and then the door slam behind him. “Alex!” he yelled, but my legs were moving again and I didn’t want them to stop. I brought my arms up and started pumping, and I felt like I was flying, like no one and nothing could stop me from just moving. And then he got a hold of my arm.

“Alex, wait!” he said again, and I snapped back into him. “What…” he said, calmer now. “What’s going on?”

I didn’t want to look up. I didn’t want him to see. I hiccupped. The kids across the street were finally beginning their tag game, screaming and laughing at each other.

Reggie leaned down and tried to see my face, but I turned away.

He sighed. “You’re not mad at my grandmom, are you? She’s just…on a different level than the rest of us. She’s too old to put up with social conventions now. But she didn’t mean anything by what she said to you, I hope you know. She really just wanted you to come in and break bread with us, you know?”

There was a fly buzzing around my head and I wanted to smack it, but it was moving too fast.

“Alex?” he asked, and I looked up finally. His eyelashes were even longer up close. And there was this one line across his forehead that was getting deeper with each moment I didn’t respond. So I decided to say something – anything.

“There is no way I can keep on playing ball. And I don’t know what else to do.” The tears were blinding my vision, they were coming so fast. The sky didn’t fall after I uttered the words, but I still knew they would jinx me.

Reggie put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulders. I just wanted to leave, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop talking. “You’re the only person I even talk to who’s black, and I’m black. Don’t you think that’s a little fucked up?” I said, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand.

His brow furrowed.

The words were pouring out; I didn’t know where they were coming from. “My parents can’t even admit that I’m black anyway. My dad’s like, ‘Oh, she’s just half black.’ Such a crock of shit.” I was walking faster by the minute, the intensity of my steps scaring the kids and adults who passed us onto the street or yard. We were already almost to the end of his block.

“But aren’t you?” Reggie asked.

I peered at him. He was asking for real. “Aren’t I what?”

“Aren’t you half black?”

I laughed. “Yeah. So?”

He shrugged. “So, maybe it’s like he’s just stating it like it’s a fact or something. You know, because he doesn’t know what else to do.”

I suddenly found myself shouting at him. “He’s my fucking father and he doesn’t know what to do with me?”

Reggie held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa.”

A middle-aged woman walking her poodle across the street glared at me. I bet she had known Reggie since he was three or something.

Breathe in. Breathe out. I closed my eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like to wake up every morning and not know if your skin is really your skin. You don’t know how it feels to look like a whole group of people who you’ve never even fucking talked to, much less feel a part of. You don’t go to West High, you don’t even hear half the stuff…” I was walking away from him, slowly, and the tears were falling again, hot on my cheeks, hot in my throat and mouth. I didn’t even try to brush them away this time. “Yes, I’m a white black girl, okay? Are you happy?” I mashed my eyelids together, willing all of it, everything I had said and not said, everything that I wanted to be, to go away. This is all there is. I inhaled, slowly, and suddenly there were arms around me.

He didn’t say anything; he just held me while I cried. It seemed like all the water I had in my body was coming out my eyes – I cried for a good 15 minutes. When I felt completely dry and almost empty inside, I wiped my face clean. He took my hand and led me back to his house, around the front to the back door, which he opened slowly and carefully, gesturing for me to come inside.

I hesitated. What if I ran into his grandmother or his mom? What would they say? “They’re not here,” he said, flipping on a hall light. “They go out and play Spades every Thursday night.”

I followed him to his bedroom, where he sat me down on his bed, took off my shoes, and laid me down on top of the covers. Then he turned out the lights and stretched out beside me. I wanted to thank him because I felt my brain finally slowing down, but I was suddenly too tired to speak.

His hands rested on my side for an hour or two. The clock ticked on, and someone’s radio was playing “The Night Shift” out on the street. I exhaled deeply when he pushed his hand up under my shirt and onto the small of my back. I had been drifting in and out of sleep, surprised by how comfortable his body felt around me, how easy it was to be with him like this. It was cold in his house – his mother and grandmother liked to pump the air-conditioning in the summer, he said, especially since the heat was hard on his grandmother. So I needed his warmth to heat me.

But when he put his palm on my skin, and then slowly stretched out his fingers, I felt another kind of heat brewing in my stomach. He ran his fingers up and down my spine and I shivered.

“You okay?” he whispered in my ear, and I nodded, closing my eyes.

He kissed the nob on the back of my neck, which stuck out so far because I was so skinny. He kissed it so sweetly that I shivered again, and turned over to face him.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

He looked at me and laughed.

I studied his face to see if I noticed anything new there, anything I hadn’t seen before. The only thing I could find were the pores on his nose – I could see each one. I leaned over and kissed them.

I listened to the house. The air conditioner was laboring in the next room, and a branch tapped at the windowpane. Someone had finally turned the radio off outside. I couldn’t hear any other human sounds, except for us, which calmed me.

He kissed me. This time on the lips. They felt warmer than the rest of him, and I leaned into him. We opened our lips and he felt around my mouth with his tongue. The heat came again, but this time it had pushed itself down further.

He pressed his chest and mid-section against me, and I felt something stiff push into me. I knew it was his penis, and that made me want to laugh.

He pulled back. “What’s funny?”

I couldn’t tell him that I had seen Jason’s penis when we were little, and even now when we were big, when he had forgotten to shut the bathroom door all the way, and that it was somehow absurd that they both had the same equipment that did the same things for them, and that they struggled with in the same way.

“Nothing,” I said.

He looked at me incredulously.

“I’m just…” I struggled for the right word. “Nervous.” I stroked his arm, and he leaned back on it.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s cool.” He moved away from me a little, and I immediately felt cold all over again.

I burrowed my head into his chest. “No, that’s not what I mean.”

He stroked my head.

I stared at him. He just looked like he was enjoying touching me, being here, that whatever happened was enough. That made me want to do more with him.

“I want you to touch me,” I said.

He smiled, and leaned over to kiss the top of my head.

I kissed him on the lips, and then slowly stuck my tongue in his mouth. Before I knew what I was doing, my hands were pushing up his shirt, fingering the muscles there. I heard myself moan, and blushed. “You are so beautiful,” I whispered, and I meant it. His skin was so soft, and the fingertips tripped on the muscles underneath it. I suddenly realized that I had wanted to be with him like this from the moment that we first sat down at the pizzeria and had that terrible conversation. This was supposed to be wrong though – for a girl, for a woman, whatever I was, to let a boy, a man touch you like this. Girls who did this were called sluts. Everybody knew who they were in school, everyone talked trash about them. It seemed so unfair to me.

Reggie’s hand was traveling back up my back, unhooking my bra.

My breath caught.

He brought it back down, further, into my pants, and squeezed my left buttocks. “Your ass is just tremendous,” he said.

I giggled.

“What?” he said. “I’m just being real with you. It’s amazing.”

I moved my hand down to his stomach and made circles there. I felt him shiver, and I felt powerful. “What makes an ass ‘tremendous?’” I asked.

He squeezed it again. “Its shape,” he said into my ear. “Its fullness. Trust me when I say that there are few asses in the world that are stacked like this one.” He moved his lips up and down my earlobe, nibbling and kissing, and I felt my pelvis grind into him. My body was mine and it was not mine, I realized. I didn’t know what it was doing, and yet it was me.

He wound his tongue around my ear, and I moaned and brought him closer to me. We began to grind our pelvises together and his penis was so hard and his hands were everywhere – I couldn’t keep track anymore. When he stuck his finger into me I just lost track of everything and held on tight. There was no baseball, there was no Dad, nobody was black and nobody was not black enough, there were just hands, fingers, tongues, backs, butts, ears, everything opening.

Dad and I stood in the backyard, dusk coming behind us, throwing the ball around.

“Houston got word that they might have to play us. They’re not pleased.” He grinned, catching the ball.

“Better us than Memphis,” I said. Memphis had won nationals three out of the last seven years, although they weren’t playing so well this year for some reason.

Dad frowned. “What do you mean? Memphis sucks.” He threw the ball back to me, and I watched it spin towards me.

“They don’t.” I reached out and grabbed the ball. “They suck right now, but they might not suck next month. There’s a difference.”

Dad snorted. I wondered if he knew that we weren’t really talking about Memphis, but about me. “Memphis sucks,” he repeated.

I shivered. It would soon be dark.

“They couldn’t find their asshole if it bit them in the face right now,” said Dad. “A winning team has to win games. Everything else is just nice stories for the history books. What have they done lately?”

I whipped the ball at him sideways, so that it curved around, headed for his head.  “Hey!” He dove for it, landing on his side in the grass. “What are you trying to do, kill me?” He stood up slowly, brushing himself off.

I wasn’t grinning. Not quite. “Sorry, Dad.”

He looked at me funny from across the yard. Even though he had thrown around with me in this very spot and at the same time of day thousands of times, I got the feeling that in that moment, he wasn’t sure he recognized me. And then it passed. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just be more careful next time.”

I punched my glove, nodding. “Sure,” I said. “Sorry.”

Thursday night, Reggie and I sat under the elm tree with branches that twisted and turned in the wind. His arms were around me, and I felt safe again, but also anxious.

“You okay?” he asked me, in my ear.

I nodded.

“You’re a little quiet.”

I didn’t say anything, just watched a squirrel dig up acorns in the dirt around us.

“Did you tell anybody? About what happened the other night?” he asked, his voice a little strained.

“No,” I said.

He kissed the top of my head. “Me neither.”

The wind was swirling in my ears.

He pulled at a strand of my hair so that the curl straightened, and then he let it go and it bounced back. Reggie laughed. “You got pretty curls, especially in the back.”

I picked up a stick and began digging in the dirt. “I don’t like it,” I said. “It’s too frizzy.”

“No one wants the hair they got, no matter what kind it is,” he said, and then pulled on another curl. “I bet your mom doesn’t know what to do with it neither.”

I laughed and dug deeper. The sky was turning from purple to deep blue.

“I don’t really get what ya’ll do with your hair, but I know my mom and my sisters get theirs straightened,” said Reggie. He shrugged. “They seem to like it well enough.” He snaked his face around so that he was looking at my profile. “You ever been to a black hairdresser?”

I shook my head, thinking that I just might dig all the way to China.

“Well, maybe you should go, see what you think.”

I paused in my digging. “Would you really walk in there with your white mother if you had one?” I asked

“If I needed to get my hair done I would,” he said. So many things were so simple for him.

My face colored. “You think I need to get my hair done?”

He snickered. “Now, don’t put that on me. You’re the one who said you wanted it less frizzy.”

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