Chapter Six

“Joshua!”

“I’m coming!” the voice down the hall yelled in reply.

I tipped my chin into the air, eyeing the clock on the wall with a grimace. “You said that five minutes ago! Let’s go or you’re going to be late!” And we all knew how much I hated being late. It was one of my biggest pet peeves.

“Thirty seconds!”

Louie’s snort had me glancing down at him. He had his backpack on, and I knew without looking that it was filled with either the tablet he and Josh shared or his handheld game console, snacks, and a Capri Sun. I didn’t think Louie knew what it was like to not be prepared; he got that from his Larsen side because God knew he hadn’t gotten it from his dad. He had his shit together better than I did, as long as I didn’t take into consideration the number of things he lost after they left the house.

“He’s lying, isn’t he?” I asked him.

Sure enough, Lou nodded.

I sighed again, gripping the strap of my bag tighter. I’d stuffed it with three bottles of water and a banana. Where Lou was the prepared one, Josh was not.

“Josh, I swear to God—”

“I’m coming!” he hollered, the sound of what I was sure was his bag hitting the wall confirming his words.

“You got everything?” I asked as soon as he stopped in front of us, his bag thrown over his shoulder, bulky and heavy. I stopped asking him if he needed help a year ago. Big boys wanted to be big boys and carry their own stuff around. So be it.

“Yeah,” he replied quickly.

I blinked. “You got your helmet?”

“Yeah.”

I blinked again. “So what’s that on the coffee table?”

His face turned pink before he lunged for the helmet he’d left there the night before. Last year, I’d made him a laminated checklist he needed to go through before going to practice. If I’d had to drive back home to pick up a glove or socks again, I would have screamed. Looking back on my childhood now, I wasn’t sure how my mom hadn’t dropped me off at the fire station. I used to forget everything.

“Uh-huh,” I muttered before waving him forward to go through the door first, followed by Lou and then Mac.

Josh was huffing and puffing as we drove to the facility where the 11U Texas Tornado played. In the two weeks since Trip and our neighbor had invited him to try out for his team, he’d been making either my dad, Mr. Larsen, or me go out and play with him nearly daily. I could tell the fire in the furnace of his little heart was stoked and more than ready to go for a sport he’d been playing since he was three years old, running to the wrong base.

We’d both looked up the team one night to make sure they were legit. They were; they’d won a good number of tournaments, too. The last two years, they won State, and they’d done well at Worlds. Sure enough, both Trip and Dallas were shown in several of the pictures posted on their page, tall and obviously tattooed and not looking at all like the kind of men who would coach boys a fourth of their sizes. I’d also learned my boss’s cousins’ full names: Trip Turner and Dallas Walker.

I’d met a lot of parents who ended up coaching their children’s teams because they had been unhappy with who had been teaching their kids in the past, but it was still weird. Trip was a member of a motorcycle club, for God’s sakes. I had no idea if Dallas was or not, but I figured that was a negative because I’d yet to see a motorcycle come down the street. Weren’t bikers supposed to be doing biker stuff instead of spending entire weekends at tournaments and teaching kids values? And what was biker stuff anyway?

The important lesson I seemed to keep forgetting was that you couldn’t always judge a book by its cover.

So, if Josh wanted to try out, I wasn’t going to stop him. All I could do was hope he kicked ass and kept it together. None of us liked to lose. Him especially.

The facility where the team practiced at was about a twenty-minute drive away, located near the edge of town. They shared the space with a softball branch. With only ten minutes to spare before the tryouts were set to start, I rushed Josh and Lou out of the car.

The facility was almost as nice as the one where Josh used to practice. His last team’s practice spot was too far from where we lived now, and even if it wasn’t, we still wouldn’t be going back there. Josh rushed ahead, waving at me as I stopped to fill out the paperwork to register him for the tryout. We’d gone to get a check-up for him at the doctor just a couple of days ago in preparation for this, and I’d brought a copy of his birth certificate. The form wasn’t too long, but it still took me a few minutes to get through it. Louie stood by me, already messing with his game console. Out of the corner of my eye, I found Josh standing by a group of boys about his size. He was such a freaking trip thinking he wouldn’t make friends, but he always did almost instantly. The kid was magnetic.

I finished, and Louie and I made our way outside to the field the team used, taking seats at the bleachers where there were already about fifty other people sitting around, watching the kids. A few adults were clustered together by the entrance to the field, and soon enough they all started filing out, each one with a clipboard. Dallas was one of them… and when I squinted at the sight of the head of blond hair, I was pretty sure that was Trip right by him. And standing a few feet away from both of them was the rude guy who had gotten jumped. What had Ginny called him? Jack? Jackson? Someone Who Didn’t Know How To Say Thank You?