More foam mascots.
Not just any mascot, and not any of the Fireballs mascots either.
“Cooper’s standing in a pile of dicks!” Francisco shouts behind me.
I grab one of the squeezy bratwursts—they’re four-inch Thrusty stress balls, modeled after the rocket-powered bratwurst mascot for the Copper Valley Thrusters hockey team across town—and throw it at him.
“Nice one, Frankie! Now I know who’s at the top of my TBGB list.”
“I helped, Cooper,” Diego yells. “I want on your TBGB list too!”
“Dude, you already shit glitter just by living,” Luca says to the catcher. “Don’t ask to go on Cooper’s to-be-glitter bombed list.”
“But then I’d match Happy Max.”
Max’s eyelid twitches.
I fling a Thrusty stress ball at Max too. “The team that glitters together are winners together, Happy Max.”
“I sincerely wish I had doubts about if you got laid last night,” he mutters.
“Maybe I meditated with my ice sculpture and found baseball enlightenment.” Shit. Walking through a locker room full of stress balls isn’t as easy as walking through an actual ball pit. Is it bad luck to squish your sister team’s mascot? Even if it’s a stress ball? Well, a stress dick?
Nope, I decide.
Not gonna letanythingruin my mood today.
And for the record, it’s not about getting laid.
It’s about living in the glow that is Waverly’s attention. She’s a giant sparkly rainbow of happiness who’s been having a few clouds dull her shine lately, but she’s trusting me to help her find her full megawatt radiance again.
You know that feeling when you touch a light switch in the dead of winter and it shocks you and brings you to life?
That’s how I felt the first time I met her. Like,whoa. This womanhassomething, and the parts of me that want to be the best mecravebeing near her. And then we spent a few days talking and laughing and banging and laughing and talking and banging, and I would’ve given up baseball for her.
For a hot minute, I really would’ve.
She was this Hollywood princess, raised in the shadow of her mom’s memory, with more talent in her pinky toenail than I had in my entire baseball god body—yeah, I had ego about my skills on the field even back then—and yet she wasreal. Down to earth. Relatable.
I could see her rocking a concert in front of a hundred thousand people and then going home with me to eat gold nuggets and potato pirate swords in my dad’s restaurant while we chatted with all the locals about Shipwreck gossip.
And that’s what makes her a star.
She makes everyone she encounters feel like she’s their best friend.
Like she can fit fully into their world without even trying.
So maybe this is all a dream and I’ll wake up again and realize I’m not more special than anyone else. That I’m merely the guy she’s shining on today, and one day, she’ll decide I’m not worth the hassle.
Again.
But today?
Today I’m gonna live the fuck out of being in this dream.
I do a quick-change into my promo jersey, swim through the stress balls, tell the janitor I’ll clean them all up in an hour, and head upstairs to the PR department.
They gather questions from kids looking for advice on everything from how to get out of eating their vegetables to what to do when their siblings annoy them to how to get me to come to their birthday parties, and I answer on camera for broadcast across Duggan Field between innings and on our socials a few weeks later.
