“Thanks, Coach,” he said.
But first, there was something else I had to get off my mind. “Has anyone been talking about Maisy today?”
He looked confused, and I realized my mistake. She was only Maisy to Daisy and me. We had a secret. I was so excited that she was coming to my game tonight. Was that childish? I didn’t care. I’d dated plenty, was always dating. But when was the last time I’d genuinely liked a woman this much? I wasn’t sure.
“The baby,” I corrected. “You know, the one we found in the dumpster?” I half smiled at him.
“I hardly remember,” Drew quipped.
I looked up as someone tapped on my open door. It was Emily, the head cheerleader, in her uniform. I sighed but gestured for her to come in. “Hello, Emily.”
Emily was the girl that everyone has in their high school. She has perfect, shiny blond hair and perfect straight, white teeth, and perfect straight, shiny As. She’s the captain of the cheerleading squad (insert volleyball team, tennis team, whatever is the queen bee position atyourschool) and the editor of the yearbook and volunteers and nevergets in trouble but is at every party and manages to be the most popular girl in school while also being nice. So you want to hate her but you can’t. And what she wanted from me was nice and it was thoughtful. And I knew she wanted it because it was something new that she had orchestrated that she could talk about on her college applications next year. At least partially, anyway. And I respected that about her.
“So…” she said.
She didn’t have to fill in the rest. I knew why she was here. Drew looked up at her and smiled. She looked down at him.
“Emily, look,” I said, “have you ever seenA League of Their Own?”
“Sure,” she said, nodding, her ponytail and the ribbons in it bobbing up and down.
“You know how there’s no crying in baseball?”
“Oh, we won’t cry,” she said. “I promise.”
“Right,” I said. “But just like how there’s no crying, there’s also no cheerleading.”
Drew shook his head at me like he was disappointed.
“Oh, you have an opinion on this?”
“Coach, come on. What could it possibly hurt to have extra people cheering for us at our games? I mean, if you ask me, it’s kind of discriminatory that basketball and football get all the cheering, and we’re like third-class citizens with no cheerleaders.”
I crossed my arms. “Wait a minute. I pour years of my blood, sweat, and tears into you, and you side withEmily?”
She sat down in the chair beside him, and I knew this wasn’t ending anytime soon. Or, at least, it wasn’t ending until Emily got what she wanted.
“Why is this so darn important to you?” I asked her.
She pointed at Drew. “What Drew said. Baseball players need love too.”
We all cracked up, and she blushed. “That’s totally not what I meant,” she said. “But look, I’m losing four seniors next year, our freshmen aren’t exactly up to snuff, and we need the practice. Please, Coach?”
“Coach, why won’t you let the girls cheer?”
What I couldn’t say was that I didn’t want them to cheer because they weredistracting. The last thing a field of teenage boys needed was a dozen girls in short skirts and crop tops jumping around on the sidelines. But cheerleading was a sport too, and these girls worked hard and had some state championships under their belts to prove it.
I sighed. “Fine. You win.”
Emily jumped up and squealed and leaned over to hug Drew. “Thank you!” she said to him shinily.
“Him? What about me?” I asked with faux hurt.
She shook her head. “Nope. You would never have said yes if Drew hadn’t talked you into it.”
I nodded. “Accurate.”
“Hey,” she said. “How’s Sarah?”
