despite what people say
previously on
Zito fucks up and passes out in the middle of his Greek Mythology class. He’d still been drunk when he came to school, hadn’t slept the night before, and Munson triple-dog-dared him to finish what was left in the thermos, out in the hallway before they split up.
Last straw, and something about feet with wings, sprung fully grown from his forehead, and he collapses in the slender aisle between the desks, taking a hurricane of white paper down with him. He wakes up in the nurse’s office, reeking of whiskey.
There’s a cold compress wrapped in a washcloth on his forehead and the brightly colored posters showing the food pyramid make his head hurt. The nurse is silver-haired and tells him tiredly, you’re in some serious trouble, son.
They’d carried him all the way across campus, three guys from his Greek Mythology class who spread the story relentlessly at the break, and Zito keeps almost falling asleep. His eyes feel like stones, his arms dense and a hundred miles long. The principal appears, frothing and satyr-like, so disappointed in you, you’ve got so much going for you, wasting your life, who bought you the liquor?
Zito keeps his eyes closed and mumbles something about a Latino guy behind the Safeway. Same alibi for weed, same for anything else they aren’t supposed to have, and as always, it immediately stems the questions.
Munson shows up, panicked, and Zito can hear him shouting in the outer office, “He’s sick! He’s got the flu!” but Munson sounds drunk as fuck himself, and it’s almost funny.
Chavez is close behind, hauling Munson out of there before they all have to take Breathalyzers. They appear in the window next to Zito’s bed, Chavez’s dark fearsome eyes and Munson’s confusion, the green behind them. Munson puts his fist up on the glass and Zito flattens his hand on the same spot. Munson mouths, i’m sorry, barry, sorry, and Zito waves it away grandly, attempting to smile.
He takes a handful of condoms from the plastic fishbowl, and some of the chewy orange vitamin C candies that taste too good to be genuinely healthy. He’s still drunk and not really processing anything. The school is unable to locate his parents, and they’re talking about whether to bring the police into it.
Then Beane’s voice, cut like a knife, like a moment of lucidity in the middle of an acid trip:
“You will not call the cops.”
Zito blinks up at the ceiling, fingering the condoms in his pocket.
“I don’t care. The season starts on Friday and he’s gonna be pitching. And he’s not gonna be doing it with a fucking juvenile record.” A pause, a rumble of the principal’s voice, and then Beane again. “No, I don’t talk like that in front of the kids.” Beane coughs.
Zito scrubs at his face with the washcloth. He discovers a sore spot on the edge of his forehead, must have hit his head on the way down. There are cartoon vegetables on the food pyramid poster with big happy smiles and white-gloved hands.
Beane says, “I don’t think I need to tell you how much the team means to this school. That boy in there is kinda crucial to what we’re trying to do this year.”
Biting his lip, Zito looks down at his hands, the washcloth wrung between them. He feels sick, like maybe Munson was right about the flu, maybe he can see the future.
“I’ll take care of him,” Beane tells the principal. “Give me five minutes with him and I’ll straighten him out. Nobody’s more pissed off about this than me, and trust me, I can make the lesson fuh-I can make it stick.”
Zito glares at the food pyramid poster. He doesn’t want to get straightened out. He doesn’t want things to stick.
Beane appears in the doorway and Zito’s wind is knocked out of him, Beane with killer eyes and hard mouth and just fucking radiating rage.
“Get the fuck up,” he says under his breath, because Beane doesn’t talk like that in front of the kids. And it fits, because Beane’s so angry.
Zito stands and tries to sneer but it doesn’t work. His backpack is by the door, near where Beane is standing, carried across campus by some guy that Zito doesn’t know, just like Zito himself. When he bends to get it, the world reels and he pitches forward. Beane grabs his shoulder and hauls him upright.
“All right?” Beane asks, almost like real concern, steel colors at the corners of his eyes.
Zito shakes his head and trembles. He wants to fall onto Beane and not be blamed for anything that his body might do. He wants Beane’s arm around his waist, carried out of here. He can taste orange bright like a sun in his mouth, a sure awareness that he won’t be able to do this much longer.
But he gets his balance back and keeps his head down. Drunk and seventeen years old, he fixes his gaze on the back of Beane’s neck and follows him out of the office, past the principal and the nurse and the kids who came for aspirin and band-aids.
Beane takes him to his car and Zito slides into the passenger’s seat, moving the seat back without thinking about it. They don’t speak as they leave the school, Zito staring out the window, Beane driving fast again. They go through a McDonald’s drive-thru and Beane orders two coffees, asks twice for more sugar. He pulls into the parking lot, handing Zito one of the paper cups.
“I don’t, um. Don’t really like coffee,” Zito says.
“Drink it. Sober the fuck up.”
Zito pours in seven packets of sugar, and has to steady the cup with his other hand because he’s still shaking. He burns the roof of his mouth so bad he can almost feel it blistering. They’re quiet for awhile, watching the palm trees move in the wind.
“So,” Beane says eventually, his face angled away from Zito. “I notice you came to school fucking drunk today.”
Zito swallows coffee and sugar and orange. His throat feels gritty. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Somebody spiked your orange juice or something? Christ.” Beane puts his coffee in the cup holder and his fists lock against the steering wheel. He’s holding himself back, Zito realizes, and Zito can see how uncharacteristic this past month has been for Beane, profanity and near-violence aside.
“Why’d you come back to San Diego?” Zito asks without thinking.
“Oh, nice fucking try, deuce. No changing the subject. Tell me, are you actually this fucked up or is this some idiotic teenage rebellion?”
“I’m actually this fucked up.”
Beane stops, and looks over at him. Zito looks back, wide-eyed and scared, scared all the time these days. He shrugs kinda helplessly.
Beane drinks his coffee, uncurling his fist to tap his fingers on the wheel. “Well, what are we gonna do about that?”
Zito thinks, wanting to find a good answer for him. It’s been so long now, life revolving around eighths and lighters and Munson’s camping thermos. He wonders how Chavez and Munson have managed to keep their shit together, but that’s a stupid line of thought and he abandons it quickly. He thinks about how fucking bored he gets whenever he’s sober.
“I’ll stop drinking so much,” he offers lamely.
“Great. Problem solved.”
“The fuck do you want me to say?” Zito presses his teeth into his lip, takes a breath. “I mean. What do you think I should do?”
“Fuck.” Beane glances at him, strange wounded look. “I don’t know. Be something you’re not, I guess.”
Zito stares at his coffee. “I. I could try that.”
“No. Jesus, this isn’t like. Look. It’s not, like, I say something and then it must be right. I can’t tell you how to act or what to be or anything. It’s not my responsibility. You’re not my responsibility.”
Stung, Zito curls his lip and says, “You’re the one who brought me out here. Told the principal you’d take care of me.”
“That doesn’t mean I know what you should do to fix your fucking life. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m not the guy you should look to for advice about being happy and well-adjusted and shit?”
Beane exhales sharply, looking away again. Zito thinks maybe Beane speaks without thinking, bad habit.
He continues, measured and careful, “I brought you out here to sober you up. Because we’ve got practice in a couple of hours and one thing the scouts really don’t think too highly of is when fucking underage ace pitchers show up lit.”
Zito finishes his coffee, the back of his mouth strafed and tender. He picks at the paper edge, thinking about first grade and being asked to draw a picture of what they’d be when they grew up. Be a majer leeg picher and make a millon dollers. His dad had had it framed.
He thinks about Beane for a minute, feeling rhythmless and cold.
“Billy, I think maybe. Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”
“Baseball?”
Zito shakes his head. “High school.”
Beane breathes out a laugh. “You’re gonna graduate in four months.”
“That’s. Kind of a long time, man.”
“Not really. It’s not even a full season.”
And Beane catches himself again, another thing he’d like to take back, still reckoning things by the life that he lost.
“Why did you come back here?” Zito asks again.
Beane shakes his head, his face downcast. “I’m not gonna tell you that.”
Beane had washed out of baseball at twenty-eight, disappeared for five years, and then resurrected, reoccurred on the fields and in the hallways, the place where he had once had everything. Zito wants to fill in the gaps, put together the pieces of Beane’s history so that he can be sure not to repeat it. But he can’t figure these things out on his own. He can’t just guess.
“For what it’s worth,” Zito says haltingly. “I’m glad you did. Come back here.”
Beane looks at him in surprise, and Zito’s got fresh caffeine in his bloodstream, riding the precarious edge between drunk and hungover, the overexposed morning light sheering in through the windows. Everything’s fucked up and nothing seems real, so Zito puts his hand on Beane’s rough-warm face and leans across the space, fits their mouths together.
Their teeth clack, and Beane grabs Zito’s arm as if he’s gonna throw him off. Zito doesn’t think he’ll survive if that happens, so he presses in, and feels Beane bite his lower lip, but not like he wants Zito to stop. Licking at Beane’s mouth, Zito thinks this has been the weirdest day of his life and it’s not yet noon. Beane growls and kisses him back so hard.
Zito’s got one hand on the back of Beane’s neck and the other on Beane’s leg. He’s pushing up, long muscle and soft denim and Beane’s tongue is in his mouth. He lays his knuckles down over the fly and Beane almost gasps. Zito is going as fast as possible, before Beane can realize what’s happening. He’s got the button open and the zipper down and Beane is saying, “Fuck. Fuck,” every time he pulls away for a breath.
Zito opens his eyes a little bit when Beane drops his head against Zito’s neck, quick painful bites through his shirt, Beane making this odd scraping noise in the back of his throat and Zito’s hand is moving. Around the dark blur of Beane’s hair, Zito can see the street, the simple Wednesday pace of the world outside this car, where Beane is gripping Zito’s shoulder and cursing like Zito’s hand on him is a knife in his chest, twisting.
*
The parking lot of a McDonalds, Zito keeps thinking, as Beane drives him home without a word, as he erases the messages from the school from the answering machine, as he rolls himself a small joint to take the edge off the nausea, as he sits in the alley under the wide sky. The parking lot of a McDonalds.
He can’t get his mind around it. Remembering flashes, little bits like the push of Beane’s teeth against his lip and Beane’s hand wound up in his shirt. Beane’s hot forehead on his jaw, the sounds and bitter coffee taste and the gray street, sunlight and palm trees. This unbelievable thing that’s happened to him.
Zito has resolved to go inside and spend the afternoon jerking off, but Munson and Chavez show up at lunchtime and he has to regroup.
“Dude. Dude.” Munson falls next to him and hugs him around the shoulders. “I suck so bad, man.”
Chavez kicks at Zito’s feet. “C’mon, Munce, nobody made him take that last shot.”
“I dared him,” Munson says, heartbroken by guilt and his hair all screwed up.
Zito looks up at Chavez. “We don’t turn down dares.”
Chavez sighs and sits down next to them, bumping his shoulder into Zito’s. “Are you okay?”
Zito shrugs, then shakes his head. Chavez is smoothing his hand across Zito’s forehead, and Munson’s arm is still around his shoulders. His best friends in the world and he’d die for them without question, and it’s terrible, his chest hurts so much.
“I did something stupid,” Zito whispers. Munson rattles him, Zito’s bracketed and he could fall in any direction and be caught.
“It’s okay,” Munson tells him. “Don’t worry, because it’s gonna be all right. Listen, we need to have a family meeting.” Munson catches Chavez’s eyes and Chavez nods. “No more drinking before school, okay? Only weed. Because, seriously, you passed out and I almost called Principal Doyle a cocksucker and it’s just, really, we gotta be more careful.”
Zito tilts into Munson, clinging to Chavez’s wrist, and says with his eyes closed, “Word.”
They’re like that for a minute, legs sprawled out in front, leaning back against the fence and each other. Zito thinks that if things could just stay like this, easy and without conflict, then he might be okay. Might survive seventeen and none of the bad parts would follow him around anymore.
“Did you get suspended?” Chavez asks eventually.
“No. Billy-Beane, he came and he talked them out of it.”
Zito flushes instinctively, remembering Beane’s mouth and slick hot skin in his hand, and he shifts uncomfortably, half-hard and it doesn’t mean anything. He’s seventeen. Looking at trees gets him hard.
“I knew it. He’s not all bad, Ricky, I told you so,” Munson says, mumbling against Zito’s shoulder. Chavez just shakes his head, his mouth thin and small. Zito places his hand on Chavez’s cheek and sighs.
Chavez and Munson cut their afternoon classes. They watch daytime talk shows and stay as clean as possible until it’s time for practice.
*
On the field, the guys rag Zito for being an incredible fuck-up, and Zito doesn’t let himself look at Beane. His hand feels branded, his mouth swollen. Self-control has never exactly been one of his strong suits.
He thinks of Beane in the car, driving him back home. Zito had kept his hand on Beane’s leg even when Beane tried to hit him away. After awhile, Beane had given up. Zito can still feel the give as Beane shifted gears, his thigh tense and then lax and then tense again. Beane hadn’t said anything and neither had Zito, and the sidewalks rolled, the sky an everlasting blue.
Chavez tells him quietly, his hands wrapped on a bat, eyeblack smeared and streaked on his cheeks, “You don’t look okay, man.”
Zito looks down at the grass. “Long day.” Fucking unending day. He keeps forgetting that he hadn’t even slept the night before. Chavez claps him on the shoulder and Zito feels better for a minute, but then he can see Beane out of the corner of his eye, shouting at the outfielders, back, back, easier to come in than go back, and Zito’s lungs contract painfully.
Beane neglects the pitchers, and Zito wonders if he’s being avoided. He knows it for sure when he joins the infielders and Beane immediately leaves for the batting cage. The temperatures are climbing. Zito’s itching right out of his skin.
As they walk back to the gym, shoulders sloped and hands dirty, Munson says something about going to the arcade, and Chavez has his thumb hooked in Zito’s belt loop. The sun is setting at their backs.
“I can’t, man,” Zito says, lying. “I’ve got to get home and figure out if my parents heard anything from the school.”
Munson and Chavez nod, good idea, take care of business. They shower and change and say good-bye in the parking lot, but Zito just lurks around in the shadows by the trees until the team has dispersed, and then heads back into the gym, down the cramped corridor to where Beane’s little office is, the yellow light burning.
Zito smooths down his damp hair with his hand, rubbing a finger quickly across his teeth. He steps into the doorway and Beane is at his desk, studying the notebook he carries, scrawling things in the margins. Bent over like this in the faded light, his elbow on the desk and his hand in his hair, he looks like any other kid at this school, studying for midterms, for the SATs, for the life ahead.
“Hey, Billy.”
Beane jerks and his head snaps up. His expression flashes briefly through panic and something else, before settling back, default blankness with his eyes very hot.
“What are you still doing here?”
Zito moves his shoulders and puts his hands in his pockets so he won’t fiddle with the hem of his shirt, won’t look quite as young as he knows he is.
“I figured I’d stop by. See you.”
Beane sits back, the chair creaking. The office is full of old green filing cabinets and ruined equipment, ripped chest protectors with the stuffing spilling out white, baseball stitches unraveled, oil and grass stains and the thick heavy scent of leather. Beane fits right in, a broken piece of the game.
“Look, kid, about this morning-”
“I want to do it again,” Zito cuts him off. He is brave, he is invincible. He needs something good to come from his youth; it might as well be this. Beane’s eyes widen a bit. “I want to do it a lot. All of it, like. Everything.”
Beane turns his eyes upwards and stares at the ceiling for a minute. Zito can see that he’s hanging on to the edge of the desk like it’s the only thing keeping him in place.
“That is not going to happen.”
“Why not?” Zito asks stupidly, and Beane laughs caustically, dropping his disbelieving gaze back down.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” He licks his lips, staring somewhere just over Zito’s shoulder. “Do you realize that what we did this morning is a fucking felony? I mean, do you get that you’re honest-to-god jailbait?”
“I’m eighteen in May,” Zito says, feeling frantic and wanting something or anything, hold him still, hold steady.
“And I’m thirty-four in March. What’s your goddamn point?” Beane snags his head to the side, snarling. “Fuck. Listen to me. This job, this team, this is, like, last fucking chance for me. You don’t know what it’s been like, it’s, it’s been five years. I have nothing left except this, and I’m not gonna fuck it up over you.”
Zito crumples against the doorframe a little bit, pressure behind his eyes. There are cracks in the industrial cream-colored linoleum, scuff marks and cleat dents. Nobody has ever wanted to risk anything for him. He’s a best friend and a one-night stand and a mistake in the parking lot of a McDonalds. Sick and tired of this shit, of being less than real and not worth the trouble.
He lifts his head, calling up the night when Chavez had hit him and lied to him, forces heat out through his eyes. Sick and tired of going down without a fight.
“All that is just circumstance. It shouldn’t matter.”
Beane laughs again, awful sound like metal scraping on stone. “Circumstance? This is my fucking life, Barry, it’s not just a timing problem. Something happens, we get caught, I lose my job and maybe go to jail and you, you get a summer’s worth of therapy to decide that you were a victim and it was just an experimental phase, and then it’s right back to college or the draft or whatever the fuck. Won’t hurt you a bit.”
Zito shakes his head angrily. “First of all, fuck you and your ‘experimental phase’ bullshit. I’m very very gay and that’s not gonna change. Second of all, you obviously remember nothing about being seventeen if you think this isn’t gonna hurt me. Looking at you hurts me. And finally, you haven’t said anything about not wanting me.”
Beane just stares at him, his mouth slightly open. Zito rubs his eyes and counts to five.
“Billy,” he says carefully. “I know you’re right about most of this stuff. And I know you’re smarter than me and you’ve already lived the next fifteen years of my life, and I, I get that, okay? I’m messed up like you wouldn’t believe, man, but I know what this is.”
Beane’s eyes flicker. “What’s that?” he asks low.
Zito sighs. “Self-destruction with positive side effects. As opposed to what we got now, which is just regular self-destruction.” He tries to smile. “Since when does Billy Beane let other people tell him what to do, anyway?”
“Jesus.” Beane puts his hands up over his face. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Yeah, well. Takes one to know one.”
Beane snorts a laugh, and Zito watches his shadow thrown big on the back wall, his shoulders shivering vaguely, or maybe that’s just the light. He swallows and crosses the room, walking silent on the outsides of his feet. Beane doesn’t look up until Zito is on his side of the desk, until Zito is sinking to his knees again.
Closing his hand in Zito’s hair, Beane warns him, “Don’t,” but his voice is unsteady.
Zito moves his head, feeling the tug of Beane’s hand, small wires of heat running down the back of his neck. “I’m gonna,” he answers, pulling Beane’s legs around and working his belt open. “I want to. You want me to.”
His fingers skate across the skin of Beane’s stomach and Beane breathes out sharply. “God. There’s a fucking reason you’re illegal, you’re gonna kill me.”
Zito grins, bites the inside of Beane’s knee. Beane’s grip on his hair loosens, still there, but guiding him forward now, down and in. It’s happening now, gathering low in his stomach, his mouth dry. He sucks a mark onto the place once covered by the waistband of Beane’s shorts, feels Beane’s hips jerk under his hands.
And he can hear Beane muttering and swearing, one hand in Zito’s hair and the other touching Zito’s mouth in astonishment, moving when he moves, keeping time.
*
Munson calls Zito’s line at six in the morning on Friday, the day of their first game. The telephone ringing takes form as a landmine in Zito’s dream, and he’s covered in shrapnel, filthy and bruised, agreeing to meet his friends for breakfast before school.
He sits on the grass of the front lawn, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up. Lavender sky, the moon a half-cup and still visible over the rooftops. Chavez is asleep in the backseat of the car, covered with beach towels like they’re trying to smuggle him across the border. Baseballs roll around under Zito’s feet.
They go to the diner and have pancakes and lakes of coffee, sweetened and creamed to pale. Zito keeps saying, “Listen,” and Chavez keeps telling him, “Shut up.”
Skipping English class, not high and not drunk, not altered in any way, Zito goes down to Beane’s office and dozes with his head on Beane’s desk, papercuts spidering across his fingers and the undersides of his wrists. Beane shows up after lunch and pushes him against the closed door and kisses him as if there’s blood in Zito that he can’t live without, until Zito can’t think straight and can’t remember anything that has existed before this. Beane holds onto Zito’s belt and draws away, and then tells him to get the fuck back to class.
And that afternoon, in the floodlike desert wind, Chavez’s flyballs ride over the fence and the thinness of the air cuts channels for Zito’s curveball. They win without really trying, and Zito is watching Billy Beane.
Zito is waiting for Beane at the deaf edges of the parking lot, lighting matches one-handed, closing his eyes singularly and in sequence to make the stars move across the sky.
*
After their Saturday practice, when Beane carefully does not meet Zito’s eyes, they’re hanging out in Zito’s garage, slung like socks over the chair and couch, debating whether or not to go to a certain party being thrown out on Canyon Road by a kid they don’t know very well.
“I heard there’s gonna be kegs,” Munson says. He tosses a baseball on a long high parabola to Chavez, who’s lying down with his head near Zito’s leg.
“Excellent. It’ll be busted after an hour.” Chavez whips the ball back, savage twist of his wrist like always, making the ball duck abruptly and only Munson’s decade of practice enables him to catch it.
Zito’s head is back, face tilted towards the ceiling. Billy Beane had licked his ear and explained hoarsely about all the things he wanted to do to Zito, and Zito had come so hard he’d cracked his knee against the glove compartment, a new bruise in the same shape as the old ones.
“You’re a very negative person, Ricky.”
“Thank you, Munson.”
Chavez shifts a bit, and Zito absently slides his hand into Chavez’s black hair.
“Where’s this kid from again?” Chavez asks. From the corner of his eye, Zito can see Munson shrug, rubbing the ball between his palms. Chavez’s hair slips like water.
“Transfer. Back east, I think. Or the Midwest. Something.”
“I don’t think we should be trusting people we don’t know.”
“We don’t know anybody, dude,” Zito mumbles. Chavez tips his head to look at him, his mouth a line and Zito can never tell when his pupils are blown because his eyes are too dark.
“I’m sorry, are you a part of this conversation? Thought you were fucking asleep.”
Zito can feel his face fall, biting down on the inside of his lip. He puts his head back, wondering where Billy Beane is now, what he’s doing, what kind of stuff he has up on the walls at his house, how he fixes sandwiches, what he looks like when he’s shaving, where he puts his pocket change when he comes home, and what he thinks about when he can’t fall asleep.
Munson is telling Chavez to stop being a fucking asshole, and then they’re fighting, the terrible married-couple fights that they have rarely but that always make Zito want to put a fork in his eye.
He’s stroking Chavez’s hair without really being aware of it. They smoked a joint in the alley, dulling their already vague inhibitions, and all three of them know too much about each other. It’s way too easy to find the sore spots.
“And fuck you, Munce, because no one asked you to take fucking sides and anyway, what’re you gonna do about it-”
And then, thank god, Zito’s mom is knocking at the door. Chavez falls immediately silent. Roberta sticks her head in and smiles at them. Zito smiles back desperately.
“You boys want some dinner?”
Zito’s fingers tighten in Chavez’s hair and Chavez hisses like a slit tire. He keeps his expression bland and repeats on a loop, pay attention, pay attention.
“We’re okay, mom, thanks.”
She smooths a patch of silver hair back behind her ear. It seems impossible that she can’t feel the tension, the way Munson is clenching his teeth, her son’s hand in Eric Chavez’s hair. It keeps occurring to Zito over and over again, like getting kicked repeatedly in the ribs, that his parents really know nothing about him.
“Well, I’ll leave some in the oven in case you change your mind.” She’s still smiling and Zito’s paranoid, she must be able to see it. But she’s only half-laughing and saying, “Eric Munson, you need a haircut,” and then wishing them well, disappearing.
They’re quiet again. Zito touches Chavez’s forehead and his fine eyebrows. Chavez blinks up at him with muddy fucked-up eyes.
“Hey,” Munson says, and it’s a physical effort to look over at him. “Do you guys think I need a haircut?”
Zito looks down at Chavez, wanting some direction about how to respond, and Chavez is laughing without sound, looking like he’s about to cry.
They go to the party on Canyon Road. There are black crows on the power lines, and Munson is leaning between the seats to pass the glassy back to Zito. His face is orange-lit by the streetlamps, and Chavez is shouting at the other cars on the highway, weaving in and out.
Zito is often sure that they’ll die before they graduate, twisted metal or too much liquor, drowned in the ocean. It’s not invulnerability that makes kids like them act the way they do-it’s the exact opposite.
People are spilling out onto the lawn, red cups with white insides and long chains of colored plastic beads. Munson leans back against the car and sucks the last out of the pipe, before knocking it against the heel of his hand and tucking it in his pocket. Chavez is looking at Zito and Zito doesn’t know why.
They’re into the breach, angling with shoulders and turned hips, and the color and the noise banishes even the idea of lucidity from Zito’s mind. He knows some of these people, far from all, and there are kegs in the backyard, true enough. Munson’s already sitting in the grass, talking with a couple of underclassmen. Chavez has disappeared.
Zito meets the kid whose party it is, the transfer student from Chicago, as it turns out, and he’s very tall and so drunk he can’t speak. Zito ends up propping him against the wall, telling him semi-hysterically that when Billy Beane says his name it feels like his chest is going to explode.
The kid’s head bobs and he’s got one hand fisted in Zito’s shirt, stony knuckles, his chest hitching. His eyes are swollen and blue, his mouth this perfect thing. When it seems like he’s going to fall, Zito levers him up and walks him step-by-step down the hall, pushing open doors to reveal closets with neat-stacked towels, extra sheets, bedrooms crawling with limbs and torn clothes.
They end up in a little brother’s bedroom, Power Ranger posters on the walls, skinny twin bed under the window. The party noise drains and muffles, and Zito drops the transfer student onto the bed, tight hips and Zito’s hands sliding up under the kid’s shirt, wanting to lick his ribs. They’re moonlit.
Zito can do anything, because the kid is blacked out already, has been for hours, and he gets confused, if the memory is gone, did it really happen? So thin Zito can feel bones popping under skin. The kid’s mouth moves slowly, and Zito leans down close, hears him whispering something about can’t pitch in this heat, can’t take California anymore.
The kid passes out, and Zito sighs, rolls onto his back. There are green glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. His head is spinning and he misses Billy Beane like he’d miss his left arm.
After awhile, the door cracks open, splinter of hallway light, and then closes again, and then Chavez is saying, “Would you look at this.”
Zito flinches. “I wasn’t. Wasn’t doing anything.”
“Fuckin’ hope not. They got names for people like you.”
Sneering, Zito wishes he could lift his head. He can hear the kid breathing shallowly next to him, and he thinks about staying in here for the rest of the night, just to make sure the kid lives through the night. Chavez comes across the room and tugs the kid’s shirt down, hiding his flat stomach and the trail of gold hair, and Zito feels weirdly bereft. Chavez sits down on Zito’s other side, black-haired angel in the silver light through the window.
Zito rubs his face with his hand, distantly aware that it’s that time of the night.
“Munce found a girl,” Chavez whispers, though there’s really no reason to. The Chicago kid is closer to dead than asleep. The party is miles away. “Some fucking freshman, can you buy that?”
Chavez puts his hand on Zito’s stomach, under his shirt. His thumb itches low near Zito’s belt.
“Yeah,” Zito breathes out, concentrating on Chavez’s hand, squeezing his eyes shut and it’s no good, he can see everything.
“So I said, like, dude, she’s fourteen,” scrape of his palm in an arch above Zito’s belly button, “and he’s all, she’s a very mature fourteen.” Chavez starts unbuckling Zito’s belt. “And someone saw a coyote in the street.”
Zito sucks in a breath. Chavez’s other hand alights to work Zito’s jeans open. He turns his head to the side and his face is inches from the Chicago kid’s, seeing his eyelashes flicker like spider legs, spikes of his blonde hair folding on his forehead. His lips are parted a little bit.
“They were, like, trying to throw rocks at it.” Bending down, Chavez runs his lips down Zito’s jaw, smelling heavily of metallic keg beer. He rubs Zito through his boxers, the gel he put in his hair on the way over smearing on Zito’s cheek. Zito’s back arches slightly, staring at the Chicago’s kid’s mouth. “But I told them to knock it off. Because, like, it’s not the coyote’s fault they built big fucking houses all over. He was probably here first.”
Chavez closes his teeth on Zito’s earlobe. His voice is a vibration, making the hair on Zito’s arms stand up. “And you, you. You’ll fuck around with anybody, won’t you?”
“Lucky for you,” Zito mumbles, moving into Chavez’s grip. His throat thickens, cataloguing the ways that Chavez’s hand is different, minutely smaller and less worked, not tight enough, not fast enough. Not hurried in any way, because they’ve been doing this for years.
Billy Beane goes so quick, terrified of getting caught, also probably scared to recognize what it means to be jerking off a curfewless seventeen year old in an alleyway halfway between the school and home. He makes the whole thing feel like stealing third, trusting speed to protect them.
Zito’s strength fails him. He rips away from Chavez, rolling away and the only direction he can go is into the Chicago boy, pressed all along his body, bare and hard against the boy’s hip. Their foreheads knock together, and Chavez is saying in shock, “What the fuck?”
Zito clutches at the bed, the guy’s shirt, his shoulders drawn up high, as if this can keep him safe. “Get out,” he says hoarsely, his lips moving against the unconscious boy’s. “Leave me alone.”
Chavez’s fists land on his back, and Zito huddles as close as he can get to the Chicago boy, clinging to him like Zito’s the one who’s deadweight.
“He’s fucking unconscious, Z,” Chavez spits at his back. Zito shakes his head, digging his teeth into the already tender inside of his lip. He’s not fucking around with this kid, he’s just using him as a human shield.
“Get out,” he says again, and this time Chavez goes, jerking off the bed and tripping over the carpet, cracking into the wall with head or hands, calling him a motherfucking cocktease and not fucking worth it.
But Zito’s heard that one before.
*
It must have happened slow, Zito figures. There was no decision arrived at or anything like that. They didn’t call family meeting and then vote on adding ‘smoke lots of pot; drink to excess,’ to the free time boxes of their daily schedule. They went from weekends to Wednesday mornings over the course of two months, but they still went by inches.
Summer after sophomore year, when he and Chavez still couldn’t look at each other, and Munson was oblivious of all but the worst indications. There were a lot of worst indications.
Down by the canal, all day on a Sunday, sweating, doing what he could not to notice Chavez in jean shorts and nothing else, Chavez diving sometimes. So fucking hot, smoking something that burned seemed a wonderful idea. Double shots to wash the taste out of their mouths were a stroke of fucking genius.
Realizing at some point that at four in the morning on a day that started twenty-two hours prior, Chavez would sometimes backslide right onto him, hands mouth eyes like nothing was different, this strange rough gift in his life. Zito was always fucked up himself, so he could say it was like a dream, remembered like déjà vu, transference. Something.
Mostly, though, controlled substances were a way to get through nothing to do. They were sixteen years old and this stuff happens sometimes.
*
Beane takes Zito out the east road, through the suburbs until the billboards fade and the streetlamps get spaced out farther and farther until they’re gone. The stars grow thick in the sky, broken yellow line of the highway and Beane’s hands on the wheel.
“This is pretty far,” Zito notes. Tension makes his muscles tight, kicking at his backpack on the floor.
“You’d rather we go back to the fucking alley?”
“No, no. It’s cool. Wherever.” Zito flexes his hands. Wherever, whenever, whatever Beane wants to do to him. He’s okay with it.
Beane rattles his fingers and exhales through his nose. He hasn’t really looked at Zito since they got in the car, which is probably for the best, considering how fast he’s driving.
“We used to come out here,” Beane says. “Nobody’s around, we could be as loud as we wanted. Sleep in the back of the cars, wake up hungover as shit when the sun came up.”
Zito pushes his fingers together, wishing there was more of a moon. There’s nothing to see out there, black as all hell and Beane narrating the pieces of his former life that are very similar to Zito’s present one.
“We go up to six stories a lot,” he contributes weakly. “Did you ever do that?”
“Six stories?”
“The, um, the parking garage downtown? By the old movie theatre?”
Beane’s quiet for a minute, before saying, “They built that seven years ago.”
Zito stalls out, frustrated. He’d thought for a moment that actual conversation beyond sniping and cursing might be possible between them, but, fuck.
Beane is magic, and he finds a road off the highway that’s really just tire tracks in the dirt. Several hundred yards down, he pulls over and turns off the car, and it’s perfectly silent, perfectly dark.
Zito clears his throat, and takes off his shirt. He twists it between his hands, looking over at Beane, but he can’t see anything.
“Jesus,” Zito whispers. “I’m, like. Blind.”
Beane shifts. “Did you just take off your shirt?”
“Yeah.”
Then Beane is rustling, leather-metal sounds of his belt opening, sliding nearer to Zito. “Good,” he says, shockingly close to Zito’s ear, and opens his mouth on the knob of Zito’s shoulder, his hand hot on Zito’s bare chest.
They neck for a little while in the front seat and Zito gets caught up, it’s all so high school and shouldn’t Billy have grown out of this already? He wants to be cool and all-knowing and not a fucking teenager anymore, wants to have something he can give that Beane has never had before.
They get out to move things to the backseat, and Zito’s eyes have adjusted, though the desert is flat and dark and the sky is the exact same. He can barely tell the difference between the two, missing the clear line of the horizon, the vanished moon.
But Beane is crawling on top of him in the backseat and Zito puts one foot on the headrest of the shotgun seat, presses his hands down on the window, bent back over his head, and is happy to be flexible, stricken by Beane between his legs. Beane is silhouetted black on black against the ceiling, stripping off his shirt and tucking it under Zito’s head.
“Fuck,” Beane mutters, one hand flat on the ceiling as he hovers above Zito. “Not your first time, right?”
Zito tries to shake his hair out of his eyes, but his head is wedged against the door, pillowed on Beane’s shirt. “If it was, would you stop?”
Beane sucks on Zito’s collarbone and slides his fingers over Zito’s hips, under his jeans. “Probably not.”
“Well, all right, then.” He helps Beane get him out of his jeans, thrown in the front seat where Zito’s backpack, Zito’s glove, Zito’s homework and the notes from his parents, all reside.
“Tell me. Shit. Tell me you didn’t do this for the first time with some. Someone like me,” Beane says raggedly, and Zito is so glad that he can’t see Beane’s face at the moment.
He hooks his arm around Beane’s neck and pulls him down, kisses him, his leg around Beane’s back.
“No,” he whispers against Beane’s mouth. “No one like you.” Beane’s hand is on him and moving back, and Zito can hear the wicked sound of their breath, skinny slivers of gasps and cut-off groans, and he can hear himself almost moaning, “I wish to god it had been,” can feel Beane’s teeth digging into his shoulder when he says that.
With his head keening back, he sees his own hollow handprints in the steam covering the window.
*
Back at school, their notoriety has increased with the start of the games, and they can’t smoke in the parking lot during lunch anymore. Everybody is watching them now, so Munson steals the custodian’s keys to the gym and they go up the fireproof stairs, up the metal rungs of the ladder to the trapdoor on the roof. There’s a three foot ledge running all along the edge, and they sit with their backs to it, perfectly hidden from view.
Chavez is still angry with Zito, and Munson is in between, transferring the conversation like a conduit. It’s making him look tired and confused, his eyes bright red from the smoke.
“So, like, now she thinks I’m gonna take her to prom,” Munson says, passing the jay to Chavez. “I mean, dude. I can’t take a freshman to prom.”
Zito laughs into his knees, his arm slung around his shins. Tasting denim and dirt, looking out across the crushed gravel and vents sticking up, there’s thick sunlight on the back of his neck, dampening his hair.
“This is all your fault,” Chavez says, and Zito starts, clinging to his ankle. It takes him a moment to realize that Chavez isn’t talking to him. “You understand, this girl was eleven when you were getting your first blowjob.”
There’s a lot to think about there. Primarily, how does Chavez know when Munson got his first blowjob, or really not that, because they’re best friends, long before Zito showed up, they speak in tongues and know each other back and forth. Better than that, then, the fact that Zito wasn’t even fucking born when Beane got his first blowjob.
Munson pokes Zito’s head, and Zito holds up his hand without lifting his face from his knees, feels Munson gently fold the jay into his fingers. He takes a slow sideways pull, so goddamn hot out here in the desert by the ocean, crawling through him like a blood disease.
“You need to stop living in the past, Ricky. Age is just a number. More important, I think she might be kinda crazy.”
“Fucking around with you? No doubt about it.”
Muffled thwap as Munson smacks Chavez. Zito is just gonna be quiet and content with his little stub of a jay and his dreams of winter. He’s not gonna get involved in this at all.
“There’s, like, gotta be a balance,” Munson says thoughtfully. “I can overlook the fact that she’s a freshman, but in return, she’s gotta not call my house six times a day.”
“Or you could just not fuck a freshman. God. You realize that there are people with, like, driver’s licenses who might want to fuck you.”
Awkward silence. Zito is watching the cherry burn steadily, wispy trails of smoke and the filtered sounds of the kids down in the quad drifting high around him. If he looks up, he’ll see Munson looking at Chavez with that strange cornered expression on his face, and Chavez looking back all defiance and bad ideas. Zito has never really been completely clear on what’s happening between the two of them, if anything.
“I’m going back down,” Chavez says, and stands, feet crunching, knees popping. Zito raises his head, absently passing the joint back to Munson. Chavez is pushing his lighter back into his pocket, brushing ash off his shirt.
Munson blinks and turns his wrist, the light catching the face of his watch and bulleting into Zito’s eyes.
“It’s only a quarter till.”
“I’m wrecked. I’m. I’m kinda tired. Think I’m gonna go take a nap in the library.”
Already walking away, Munson tries to catch him, calling, “You’re still gonna cut sixth period with me, right?”
But Chavez is disappearing piece by piece into the trapdoor, swinging down and it’s like he’s being eaten up, legs, stomach, shoulders, head, grasping hands. Munson looks over at Zito, hurt and annoyed.
“The fuck’s his problem these days?”
Zito shrugs, yawning. He tilts into Eric Munson, closing his eyes for ten or fifteen seconds at a stretch, huge eyes and too much sun.
“You think he’s really upset about that girl?” Munson asks worriedly.
“I think he’s upset about anybody you fuck around with that’s not him,” Zito says without thinking, and immediately bites his tongue so hard it bleeds. A bird wings past close to them, shrieking and then gone, and it’s quiet enough to hear the crackle of the paper burning.
“That was a joke,” Zito tries. He grins at Munson, who’s staring at him, petrified. “That was my real funny, high-as-fuck joke, Munce.”
Munson brings the joint to his mouth, his hand trembling slightly. “Not funny,” he says with his voice full of smoke.
Zito sighs and puts his head back on his knees. “Everybody’s a critic.”
They stay up there until the second bell brangs down and to the left, and they’re late again, slipping down the ladder, bruising their shins. They’re running out of excuses and patience and time, time most of all.
*
Zito waits for Beane like he has for the past few weeks, in the parking lot after practice, after Munson has hugged him good night and Chavez has snarled at him over Munson’s shoulder, through the headlights. Zito is beaten down by Chavez chipping away at him, his eyes ringed from not sleeping hardly at all anymore.
He’s been working at first base a lot recently. Beane calls out sometimes, “Barry Zito, pickin’ machine,” and Zito’s face burns and his mouth gets dry and he’s dizzy, stumbling on the short grass.
There’s a tough salted breeze tearing notebook paper and candy bar wrappers across the asphalt. All but three cars are gone, Zito’s, Beane’s, and the night security guard’s. The school is shuttered and still, spooky the way things get when there’s no one around. Zito thinks about writing Beane a note to leave under his windshield wiper, a sad little face asking ‘where were you?’ but instead he just hunches his shoulders and crosses the parking lot, eyes peeled for the guard.
The light is on in Beane’s office window, and the side door to the gym is unlocked. Zito detours into the bathroom, finding his way by memory to the sink, not bothering with the light. He washes his hands and rinses out his mouth and tries to fix his hair, blind.
Beane is at his desk, and of course it’s déjà vu, circled light and Beane’s head cradled on his hand. Zito forces himself to remember the differences, last time he stood in Beane’s office after hours like this, he hadn’t gone down on Beane and hadn’t been fucked by him and hadn’t known that Beane liked to go out to the desert, places without horizons.
Also, there’s a bottle of Jack Daniels and a short tower of Dixie cups, one set upright near Beane’s elbow. Zito coughs, and Beane looks up, his eyes foggy in a way that Zito knows very well.
“Drinking alone? And you call yourself a role model.”
Beane’s lip curls, making Zito’s stomach turn over slowly. “Yeah, I turned twenty-one a while ago, maybe you hadn’t picked up on that. Don’t need to listen to your shit.”
Zito leans on the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. Beane checks him out much more blatantly than he usually does, and Zito lifts his eyebrows. “You’re already drunk, aren’t you?”
“I am, fuck. Allowed to be drunk. Fucking seventeen years old, already half an alcoholic, you think you can fucking talk to me?”
Flinching, Zito looks down at the floor, wanting to protest. He hasn’t been drinking nearly as much as he did before he passed out in class; he’s almost strictly herbal these days, or at least, on weekdays. There’s a joint tucked behind his ear, in fact, under his hair, but he’s saving that for later, after Beane drops him off.
“I’ve just never seen you drunk.”
Beane flicks his hand through the air, scowling. “You haven’t seen me a lot of things. Haven’t seen you first thing in the morning. Haven’t seen you sleeping. You haven’t seen me play baseball.”
Zito blinks. “Wait, what?” He’s confused because somewhere in there it seemed like Beane might want to have seen him sleeping.
“You don’t know anything about me,” Beane says, enunciating carefully. “You have coerced me into a relationship that is fucked up and unproductive and totally immoral.”
“Coerced?” Zito half-shouts in disbelief. The echo rebounds off the linoleum.
“Yes,” Beane shouts back at him. “Because everyone knows I’m fucking weak and you show up and you want to blow me and what the fuck, I’m supposed to turn down someone who looks like you do, a fucking kid who looks like you do?”
Stunned, Beane glaring at him and crushing the Dixie cup in his hand, Zito knows that this is what he wants from Beane most of all, anger and anything sharp, all things bright, a slam into him and out of the dull, muffled life that waits for him somewhere on the other side of summer.
“So I’ll be fucking drunk and you don’t talk to me like I’m the one with the problem,” Beane continues, losing his focus a little bit, slurring at the ends of words. “Goddamn it. Get over here, already.”
Zito is moving before he can think, thinking about tethers and magnets and how fucking destroyed he’s going to be when Beane is finished with him. He starts to go to his knees, but Beane grips his shoulder and kisses him instead. Beane stands in the middle of it, his tongue in Zito’s mouth, and it’s so strange to feel him rising, Zito’s back straightening. He clenches his hands in Beane’s shirt and they’re almost exactly the same height. It’s like it’s meant to be.
But Beane is drunk, very drunk, drunk enough to pass out at nine o’clock in the morning, in the middle of class, and he sways as they pull back. Zito holds him steady, his heartbeat jamming in his chest.
Beane takes the bottle off the desk and takes a long drink. Zito ducks his head and places his tongue against Beane’s throat to feel him swallowing, hearing the click and almost tasting the liquor through his skin.
“Why didn’t you come out to get me?” Zito asks, his lips still on Beane’s throat. “You knew I was waiting.”
Beane’s hair brushes on Zito’s cheek, his hand in Zito’s back pocket. “I’m having a midlife crisis.” He chuffs a laugh. “Actually, I think you are my midlife crisis.”
“So?” Zito lifts his face, touching his thumb to the puffy skin under Beane’s eye. “That means I can’t get drunk in your office with you?”
“I was trying not to corrupt you,” Beane says, but it’s got to be a joke and Zito kisses him, not at all sure how to deal with this baseless diving sensation in his stomach, the way he’s so happy right now he almost wants to die.
“Well. Just for clarification’s sake? You probably should have thought of that before you fucked me.” Zito grins, and Beane groans, hides his face in Zito’s shoulder. Zito touches his back and says with his voice thick, “I was already corrupted, anyway, man, you know that. Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
Beane nods, tired in the sides of his mouth and the slowness of his movements. He fumbles getting the cap back on the whiskey and slides it into the brown paper bag it came in. His hands are totally off Zito by the time they get into the hallway, and they stay that way all the way to the car.
Zito is strangely endeared to the fact that he doesn’t have to move the driver’s seat back at all in Beane’s car, though, at this point, the passenger’s side is almost always set for him. He thinks he’s probably the only one riding around in Beane’s car these days.
Beane is slumped down, sipping occasionally at the bottle of whiskey. From the side, in the streetlamp dark, with his face turned a bit towards the window and his hair mussed, falling across his forehead, Beane looks a little like Eric Chavez. Something in the line of his jaw.
Swallowing, Zito says, “Tell me about being in the major leagues.”
Beane snorts, the paper bag crinkling as he twists his hand. “You don’t want to hear about it.”
“Of course I do.”
“Then ask Randy fucking Jones, why don’t you,” Beane says sharp, and Zito tries to remember how Beane knows that he’d trained with Jones, if he’d told him or if Beane was just checking up on him. Zito feels stupid, he could have asked Randy all about Billy Beane, even if they haven’t really talked since the summer after sophomore year.
“I wanna hear about it from you, Billy.”
Rolling his head on the window, Beane gives Zito a long look with his mostly closed eyes.
“You shouldn’t say my name like that.” Zito’s about to ask what he means, but Beane’s continuing, “Major league baseball. It’s, it’s like, here’s this thing you always wanted. The only thing. And you’d do anything, I did everything. Everything they asked me to. Run. Throw. Hit. Here’s a wall to run into. Here’s warning track that feels like fucking crushed glass when you dive. Here’s minor league buses and fucking motel rooms with rats and no hot water. Here’s wooden bats that splinter if you miss even a little bit.”
Beane exhales heavily, taking a drink. Zito would ask for some if he thought that there was a chance in hell Beane would agree. He thinks of pitching to Munson and Chavez on the T-ball field at Poway Community Park, long afterschool afternoons when over the two-trunked elm tree meant a home run.
“And they keep telling you all the things you’re gonna be,” Beane goes on, drunkenly folding his fingers in and out. “Until it’s like, this is the only possible life. There’s no other way. And then you get there. Nothing’s like you thought it would be. Nothing’s easy. I had this one thing, and then it wasn’t there anymore. It’s the only possible life and I can’t do it.”
There’s nothing much to say about that, and they drive for a little while before Beane blinks at the street and says, “Where the fuck-turn around, deuce, you needed to take a left like two miles ago.”
Zito sighs and hooks a great sweeping u-turn in the middle of the road. “You need to navigate better than this.”
“I navigate fucking fine.”
Tapping his fingers on the wheel, bleary neon signs streaking past, Zito asks, “That’s what you think’ll happen to me? That’s why you think I should go to college?”
Beane’s quiet, screwing his hand on the paper bag around the neck of the bottle. Zito is sneaking peeks at him, unused to the size of Beane’s car, the whine of the brakes when he pushes down too fast.
“You won’t get drafted,” Beane tells him eventually. Zito thinks that it should hurt to hear that from Beane, but weirdly enough, it doesn’t really. “Or, not very high. Not first round, that’s for goddamn sure, not the second, and probably, probably not at all. High school pitchers, they’re looking for power. They figure they can teach everything else.”
“I already know everything else.”
“You’re getting it backwards. You throw eighty-five miles an hour on your best day. No curveball in the world changes that. They don’t care about kids like you.”
This should really hurt more than it does. Zito thinks about college, UCSD like his mom wants, USC near his sisters, somewhere further up the coast where people won’t know him. Four more years to be irresponsible and made blameless by his youth. He looks at Beane all blurry and rough in the passenger seat, and thinks that he’d like to stay local.
“What about the others?”
Beane tells him to take the turn he missed, and then says, “Chavez’ll go high. First round, but he’s an infielder, so. Duncan might, too, but I heard him talking to some of those scouts and he’s an idiot, he wants too much money. Munson.” Beane shrugs. “Munson’s got an awful lot of holes in his swing that he hides pretty fucking well, but that won’t hold up. Scouts are already starting to pick up on it. He’ll be lucky to go in the second round.”
Zito jerks a little bit. Chavez and Munson have planned their whole lives around draft day, three months away now. It hasn’t occurred to Zito yet, what’ll happen if they don’t go near each other. If Chavez goes in the first round and Munson the second, Zito’s not sure if that’s a blow that their fragile, deeply committed friendship can weather.
Beane smirks at him. “Nobody stays together. That’s what the fucking game does to you.”
Zito doesn’t want to think about that, the upcoming summer that they will spend in the aftermath of the draft, whatever the draft brings them. He can see it so clearly, Chavez slick with sweat and Munson cheerful, resentful, pitching at Chavez’s head. They’ll come over to help him pack for college and Chavez will want to fuck him while Munson is in the kitchen fixing lemonade or something stupid like that. Chavez will use their past against Zito, and every time Chavez smiles, Zito will be able to see the shutdown in Eric Munson’s face.
He asks softly, “What did the game do to you?”
Beane is answering his questions, for once. Zito can get all the answers he wants right now, before they get to Beane’s place, where he has never been.
Beane finishes off the whiskey before he answers, flipping the empty bottle into the backseat. He swipes the back of his hand across his mouth, grimacing and swallowing hard.
“It broke me.”
Zito doesn’t ask him anything else.
*
Beane lives in a two-room apartment above a liquor store, smaller and shabbier than Zito expected. Beane sees the look on his face and mutters something about five years on the skid, signing bonus long since spent, something like, anybody who still lives with his parents needs to shut the fuck up about it. Zito hasn’t even said anything, but he’s never been very good keeping things off his face.
And he likes it, anyway, the scratches in the walls and the clean counters. He likes the bed with mismatched sheets, blue and gray, and the TV Guides stacked under the short leg of the table, and the boxes of baseball cards, and the dented punching bag hung by chain from the ceiling. He likes the way Beane relaxes when they’re inside and the door’s closed.
Streetlight and neon bleed through the blinds, green stripes on Beane’s chest. He’s too drunk to fuck Zito properly, but Zito still gets off, because he’s still seventeen years old. Beane passes out, a mess with his arms folded under his head. Zito watches the dust settle on Beane’s back for awhile, then gets up and fixes his jeans and retrieves the joint from where it fell from behind his ear, when Beane ripped his shirt off him. He climbs out the window onto the fire escape.
San Diego glows. There’s a man down on the corner, working carefully through a six pack of beer, crushing the cans between his hands and dropping them down the sewer grate. Zito smokes his joint and wonders where Munson and Chavez are right now, if they could ever guess where he is.
He goes back in, looks through the boxes and drawers and closets. He finds warm-up T-shirts for the Mets and the Twins and the A’s, team pictures with faces X-ed out like yearbook photos, a copy of finalized divorce papers that are wrinkled and stiff with dried liquor. There are signed baseballs and he tries to make out the names by the light of the window, but it’s no use.
Zito hides little bits and pieces of himself, receipts and old baseball tickets and his keyring. He cuts the button off his jeans with Beane’s penknife and leaves it in the bedside table. Climbs back in bed next to Beane and sets the alarm clock for five in the morning, enough time to catch the bus back home before school.
*
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