No, you definitely do not. You’ve been lied to. You have the least calming presence of anyone I’ve ever met.
She replied,Thank you?
I laughed, then began typing so quickly that I didn’t really know what my fingers were going to say. Before I could stop them, I’d sent,Shouldwe do it again? Tonight? I know another place but with empanadas.
Bubbles now. There and gone. There and gone. And then, finally,We’reactually goingto the Mets game. Rain check?
I stared at my phone for a second and then sent:You’re going to a baseball game? On purpose?
Yeah, she wrote.Apparently.
And then, she added,Wehave two more tickets. Last-minute thing. Come with?
I wrote:Why do you and Lola suddenly have four tickets to a Mets game?
Not Lola, she replied.Danny. The guy I’m seeing. He got box seats from his work. He’s next to me right now, says he wants tosussup the competition and that you should come. Curious what other guy’s been keeping me up all night.
I stared at my phone again. For a brief moment, I considered throwing it against the wall. Instead, I inhaled and continued the conversation.Is this the guy you dress like Taylor Swift for?
That’s the one,she said, and then inexplicably added several emojis: a cowboy boot, a rice ball, an octopus, and what I was fairly certain was a leek, but could’ve also been a stalk of celery.
You know I can’t say no to the Mets, I typed.
Or me, she wrote.
Or you, I wrote, with an eye-roll emoji it took me two minutes to locate. By the time I did, she’d already added this:
Bring someone, okay?
I thumbs-upped her text, trying to decide what could possibly be worse: showing up with some girl on my arm or Arthur in a Keith Hernandez jersey, baseball mitts on both his hands.
15
Katie
The baseball game was... basebally. I’d been to a thousand of these things—had sat in better seats than these with agents, with reporters fromESPNorSports Illustrated, my dad practically salivating. And, for a flash, during warm-ups, I swore I saw my brother on the mound.Michael Caruso, a muffled radio announcer would’ve said.Hometown boy. Six-foot-four right-hander out ofStonyport, New York. First-round pick, second overall, straight out of high school. Turned down Vanderbilt, SMU, just about everywhere else you can think of for a chance to play ball with his childhood team.I erased the mirage with a swig of canned margarita and chased that by asking Danny to explain the difference between a ball and a strike.
Tyler showed up in the middle of the third inning with a beat-up Mets cap on his head and a leggy blonde—she was a literal model, I recognized her from the Lulu’s website, kill me now—hanging off his shoulder. Danny stood up to shake his hand at once.
“Hey, man. Thanks for coming out.”
Tyler scratched his neck, then extended his palm. The model was holding a bag of peanuts and looking around suspiciously, which, fair.
“Thanks,” he said. “This is... this is great. I’m Tyler. And, uh, this is Naomi. Naomi, this is—”
“You’re so pretty,” I said. Tyler’s head jerked back.
“It’s my job,” she said, deadpan, and with the slightest flip of her hair.
“Oh, I just—I didn’t mean...”
Danny put his hand on the small of my back. “Anyone else need a drink?”
Tyler shook his head no, then whispered something into Naomi’s ear. Probably something like,Be nice. She really likes sparkly things. She’s like a toddler begging for a sequin backpack at a suburban Target. Naomi laughed, squeezed his biceps, and said, “A drink sounds great,” and then she and Danny disappeared, and it was just Tyler, me, and the two blue plastic seats between us as the summer sky began to dim.
“She seems nice,” I said.
“I think she gets tired of everyone commenting on how pretty she is.”
