Heft by Liz Moore Page B

the way out I convinced my mother to stop at J.Crew and I walked to the back, to the sale rack, and spotted two oxfords: one white and one blue. I wanted them very badly but they were so expensive, even on sale, that I almost wouldn’t let her buy them, but she insisted. She loved them. She said they made me look grown-up. The white one was missing a button at the bottom and the blue one had a tiny tear at the back. I didn’t care.
    The next day was better. I was not sure if anyone would recognize me from the day before. I had slouched through every class my first day but walking in I stood up straighter. I had grown a lot over the summer and a girl smiled at me on my way in. I was wearing the blue shirt.
    In my first-period class, Señorita Klein went around the room asking, Juegas al deportes?
    Sí , I said. Yo juego al béisbol, al basquetbol, y al fútbol americano.
    The last wasn’t true. I hadn’t played football since I was a little kid doing Pop Warner because my friends did. But the kid next to me looked at me and later in the class, when Señorita Klein was writing on the board, he leaned over to me and said Yo. You play football.
    Yeah, I said.
    How come you didn’t try out, he said.
    I didn’t know when they were, I said, but my heart was sinking. This was something my mother should have told me. I felt like a dud.
    Captains’ started middle of August, said the kid.
    Chiquitos , said Señorita Klein. Por favor .
    This kid was Trevor Cohen who is now my best friend, along with Kurt Aspenwall. Trevor got me on the football team. In the winter I played basketball. In the spring I tried out for baseball and made varsity and I was the first freshman to do this in five years. That spring we won state, which we also did last year. Baseball is the best and most important thing to me. Sports in general are the one thing I have ever been very good at, excellent at, even, which I don’t feel shy about saying because I am good at nothing else. But I can boast about this without much fear of comeuppance. I can throw and catch balls. I can run faster than most people. I can swing bats and launch my body like a missile toward the bodies of other players and I can knock them down. I can jump. I can tense my muscles and swallow the blows that come in my direction from elbows and shoulders and hips. I can puke and keep going. This is my talent. It glows inside me like a secret jewel.
    My mother began going downhill when I was a sophomore which was also around the time that I started to really love school.
    She had had her ups and downs. Always. It was what we called them, together. Outside the house she was normal. She cared what people thought of her and she saved all her madness for me. I would come home and find her flat on her back with sadness, or up and acting like a maniac. Happier than happy. She would have cleaned the house and she would have baked. She would say Have some! Or she would clutch me in her arms—this was when I was very little, too little to know that nobody else’s mother was doing this—and hold me so long that my joints got stiff. She would rest her chin on my head and sometimes she would cry. I was afraid to move or breathe.
    When I was little she would date sometimes. Never anything that lasted. Always boys she grew up with in Yonkers who turned into men that had never left. I tried to imagine what they were like when they were my age and I came up with the worst boys I knew. The boys I hated when I was younger, the boys I brawled with. When her dates came by the house I would never even look at them.
    Besides these men and her work she had few connections to the outside world. She had few friends and now she has none. She liked some of the checkout clerks at the grocery store and would make conversation with them when she saw them, asking after their families. She liked Frank at the corner store. And for years, for as long as I can remember, she has had a pen pal named Arthur Opp, which was a