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when you leave Kansas City the second time, you shut the shed door behind you. you left enough hours there in the dark, bitter as the wind on the prairie, and you’re tired of missed calls. the feeling of your face resting resignedly against the cold table, eyes closing for the night on whirring buttons, remains.
you figure leaving will mean people stop asking you who you were trying to call out there. you’ve gotten tired of avoiding the answer.
in all the press interviews, they mention him without mentioning him. “A history marred by tragedy,” “one out of two.” you give up at one point and snap my, it sure has been a long twenty years, even if you don’t exactly remember how long it’s been. nostalgia runs in twenty-year cycles, it’s good enough.
something the color of dawn in your head told you a few seasons ago that maybe now was a good time to finally stop pretending.
sweet things taste sour in your mouth these days, and you find yourself avoiding them. you lean against the wall, aloof, at the weekly competitive bake sales. offhandedly, you remember someone telling you about miracle fruits, and wonder how long the effect lasts.
you’ve long sworn off any pastries made by anyone other than yourself. the twisting, crackling fear in your gut isn’t worth the texture of fracturing meringue. you do your shopping alone, and check every label once, twice.
you bolt awake screaming at midnight and clutch for something that’s nowhere to be found. you lay there the rest of the night both too afraid and too angry to move. the feelings blurring into each other like a gradient from red to black.
in the morning, your limbs feel distant. the frizz separates from your curls in the mirror and you spend an hour painstakingly touching up your buttons with red shlarpie. they never used to chip like this.
she keeps her hair natural instead of braiding it now, and climbs up in the rafters of the stadium to practice the violin. you hear rumors from someone that she was dating this girl who used to play for the Garages, but nobody’s seen them together in a while.
“did you ever get that record player back?” she asks, out of nowhere. still next to you in the dugout, but reversed.
“what?” you have no idea what she’s talking about.
he leans on the rail, smug as ever. something about him in Tigers red makes a suspicious amount of sense.
“you’re flying too close to the sun again, aren’t you,” he says, in Latin.
you reply in the same manner and tell him to shove it.
you hear the thud behind you as he attempts to mimic the trick you pulled off with flawless accuracy. the humor’s enough to distract from the nagging fear that Mora’s warnings are always right.
you know where to find him, on the roof. all Tigers do.
“been a while, hasn’t it,” he says, crackling at the edges. so much less rage in his voice than the last time you heard him. so much less justice. so much less fun.
“they tamed you, did they?” you reply. you don’t look up.
his laugh is like thunder and it makes you want to start a fight. that’s more like it.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
they hand you a bat.
it’s nothing special.
something about it feels insulting, but you take it anyway.
you take a fancy knife you lifted from the Pies kitchen for your cooking kit, and scratch your initials into the pommel, J-P-T. you ask Zion for some wire and plastic insulation and a bit of welding material, and she doesn’t question why.
it wraps haphazardly around your wrist, and doesn’t stay at your hip when you drop it. but it’ll do.