Today, I’m very much wishing I’d thought it all the way through.
Duggan Field is available that daydoes not meanthe players will be away, as I assumed it did.
Or, at least, that theprivate event, stay outsigns all over everywhere would mean the players wouldn’t be wandering through. Or that they, too, had beentoldby management to stay away.
As if that would’ve worked.
Nothing stops Cooper Rock.
You’d think I would’ve learned that by now.
I want to take you out.I cook. I wasn’t good for you then.
“Ballpark sucks that bad, huh?” Levi says as I join him at home plate.
I realize I’m scowling and quickly take my face back to neutral. “You try wearing bowling balls in your ears.”
“I think he did that fifteen years ago,” Ingrid, his girlfriend-slash-love-of-his-life, replies with a smile. I adore Ingrid. She’s a total hot mess in all the best ways. Like right now, her dark hair is falling out on one side of her ponytail, undoubtedly the work of her son, the youngest of her crew, but she’s patting it like she knows and doesn’t care. “I saw pictures.”
“Levi woreearrings?” Zoe, his eldest stepdaughter-to-be, gasps.
“Anyone can wear earrings, but I don’t know why they’d want to,” his middle future stepkid, Piper, replies. She’s obsessed with hockey and is extremely disappointed in all of us because we didn’t bring in any of the Copper Valley Thrusters hockey players for cameos in the video.
Stu, our video director, approaches. “How about some payoff for a long day?”
“Define payoff,” Levi replies.
Stu grins at him. “Take the pitcher’s mound. You want the kids in the shots? Time for fun. Waverly, you know how to hold a bat?”
“Sure.” I take the wooden baseball bat from him and grip it the same way I’ve seen—ah,peopledo.
Yeah.
The way I’ve seen otherpeoplehold bats.
Not any particular people. Whose games I’ve watched too many of over the years, because I’m a sap who still wishes people well even when they hurt me, and who has a massive sucker streak for lovable losers, especially when my best friends cheer for those loveable losers.
See also: part of me was happy to hear that Geofferson, who got most of our friends in our split, got a role in the next Marvel movie.
Okay, fine. Full disclosure here. I was happy that he’s a supporting henchman, and not a primary henchman. It’s like I get to revel in seeing him show his true colors on-screen, and not even being the primary henchman is like the biggest insult to what Geofferson wants to do. Secondary henchmen are throwaway roles. Primary henchmen go on to star in slasher films.
Also?
There’s something about holding this baseball bat that makes me feel powerful. Maybe I need to release one or two more of those breakup songs I wrote last year and pull a Carrie Underwood in my next video.
“Beast mode,” Levi says as I test the weight of the bat. “Try not to take my head off when I pitch it to you, okay?”
I laugh. “I amnotgoing to take your head off.”
“Right. You’re standing there like you’re going to the World Series, and you’re not going to take my head off.”
“I canholda bat. I can’tswingit.”
He takes a baseball and a glove from the production assistant, then waves the glove at me. “C’mon, killer. Let’s see it.”
Levi Wilson is the big brother I didn’t know I needed when I got into the music business. My mom was huge before cancer took her from us when I was in third grade, and Aunt Zinnia had been critical to managing her career and talked to me about it all the time, so I thought I knew all the important parts already.
I did not.
