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1.
give her the slip at the airport on the way back home from the quarterfinals. take her ticket out of that plastic purse she’s always carrying, and substitute your name for hers and sit in seat M8 on the window side.
she’ll whirl around and feel the panic rise in her throat and you will already be miles away, and you won’t have to deal with that problem. the team will have her locker cleared out by early sunday morning.
tell her to her face. push away her hand gripping that cracked wooden bat with the wire you watched her tie around the end, then replace after every eighth game. dunlap is bleeding on the ground and the mask feels cold on your cheeks and you can’t think of anything but the number 110 and how loud she screamed all those years back in new york.
she didn’t even blink now. the gravity is heavy. go, you’re not welcome here.
count down as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. hold your breath and check the roster. roll your eyes when you find she’s still there. you should’ve known by now not to hold some stubborn hope that time will work the way it should, ‘cause by this point she’s breezed by all the notches on your stopwatch like it doesn’t mean a thing.
you mark the numbers in your head till gods’ day and hope the wind blows.
do not give away your game. the last time someone did that, they heard glass shattering and found her in the dressing room bathroom with half the mirror all over the floor and her eyeshadow and mascara smudged. unharmed and uninjured but sniffly-teary and mad, mad, mad.
“they hate me!” she says. “they really do hate me! isn’t it grand?”
she makes eye contact—you don’t have the heart or strength to look away. her makeup kit scattered across the counter.
bring the house down on her, tie her to a signal pole and hope that lightning strikes twice, three times. but the lightning won’t speak to her and the thunder thinks she’s a coward and a sellout for not breaking when shadow covers the sun and for not holding her own out there like everyone else. check the forecast and hope for eclipse. check the forecast and hope for eclipse and pray that the umps here know how to aim.
let the reverberations tear down the old shed outside the field outside of town and listen to the crunch of metal and steel crashed together as the building falls apart. the switchboard console is halfway clipped into the dirt now like some rusted Titanic and there’s a cup of old, disgusting coffee, dripping, hanging from a stadium light.
people cried when they demolished Pudge’s house. nobody has been in the shed for at least three years. nobody will miss it.
send her off into the brink in a boat you hit with a bottle. say, aren’t you so happy? you’re going to see your brother again, the real one, aren’t you overjoyed? ignore her scratching at the sides of the deckboards with perfect red nails and ignore the burning fire (not real fire, sure of that) in her eyes that says you don’t get to end this story.
throw a party. pop champagne. turn your back on the setting sun.
if you can bear patience, wait a few years and let time and love eternal finish their craftsmanship. when they set her in gold, put the statue in a closet behind the lockers and bar the door. check it periodically at the usual intervals but keep your eyes on the ground. let the rust gather, keep it away from all power sources, and surely in a few more years she’ll wear out her charge and stop with all the ringing.