Throwing Like A Girl

What the hell am I doing here? I asked myself as I adjusted the glove on my hand.

The guys around me seemed to be thinking the exact same thing as I took my place in front of the coach, adjusting my shorts while bending down to get ready for the ball. My ponytail flopped over shoulder and I flipped it back with a neck twitch that bordered on epileptic as the baseball made a metallic sound against the bat.

It was a grounder, a few feet to my left, and I shuffled quickly to get in front of it, scooped it up, and fired it back to the extremely tall guy catching for Coach Hastings.

“Nice job, Bree,” said Jordan Pennington, the only guy on the team who didn’t hate and/or look down on me the instant I stepped onto the field. He held his glove out for me to bump as I headed for the back of the line.

“Thanks,” I replied quietly, pushing my bangs back under my hat as I took my place in line behind the captain, Evan Collins.

After a few more rounds of grounders, Coach Hastings called us all into the dugout and ended practice. He chose a few of the guys to help take down equipment and sent the rest of us to the locker room—or rooms, since I’m involved—to shower and such.

I skipped my shower and headed back toward my dorm, since it was nearly six o’clock already and I had a mountain of homework.

“Hey, Bree, how was practice?” my roommate, Allie, asked when I opened the door.

I tossed my athletic bag onto my bed in response, collapsing into my desk chair.

“That great, huh?”

“Yeah. The guys still hate the very thought of a girl on their team,” I told her as I pulled my geometry book from the backpack I’d dropped off before running off to practice.

“That sucks.” Allie was a volleyball player and didn’t have to worry about making guys on her team like her, since there weren’t any. I, on the other hand, had twelve guys to charm into treating me as a teammate.

I’d only been Allie’s roommate for two weeks, having transferred to Florin Preparatory School for baseball season. The softball team I’d been a part of for two years at my previous school, Rockwell Prep—notorious for cutting sports (particularly girls’ teams) in favor of art and science funding—had been cut last minute. A few of my friends and I had tried to go out for the boys’ baseball team, but the coach wouldn’t let us. The boys on the team hadn’t wanted us to, either—even my own boyfriend, Taylor, the star catcher on the team.

That had led to a rather nasty breakup between the two of us, ending with me managing to nail him in the nuts with my bat.

I’d convinced my parents to let me transfer to Florin, the school my brother had graduated from the year earlier. Florin didn’t have a softball team, but that didn’t bother me. I wanted to piss off the Rockwell coach—and boys—by whooping their asses as a part of their rival team. Coach Hastings had made me prove myself to him alone before he let me join, but that had been nothing. I’d been throwing a softball for as long as I could remember, and only a few tweaks were necessary to make it work for baseball.

The hard part came when I had to meet my teammates at the first practice.

“Cheerleading practice is in the gym, Barbie,” Evan had said to me when I’d showed up on the field in athletic short shorts, decorated team softball tee, crazily patterned knee socks, and blonde hair up in a high ponytail, not to mention my usual rubber cause bracelets and wish bracelets adorning my arms.

“I’m here for baseball,” I’d replied, entering the dugout. Coach Hastings hadn’t arrived yet, but I started doing the same thing I’d done for the past eight years: set my bag down, dig out my cleats and put them on, find my glove, grab a ball, go stretch and warm up by throwing.

Most of the older boys had started to laugh.

“No friggin’ way,” Evan had said.

“Yes friggin’ way,” Coach had told him, having appeared out of nowhere. “Boys, this is Bridgette Throckmorton. She’s on the team now.” He said it in a definitive way that indicated the end of the conversation.

That had shut them up.

But their contempt for me still showed in the way that Jordan was the only one who talked to me. In the way that nobody threw me back my ball if Jordan overthrew while we warmed up. In the way that I was condemned to the very end of the dugout.

“Yeah, it really does,” I said to Allie as I started on the math problems.

Allie left maybe half an hour later for dinner, asking if I wanted to go. I told her I had too much homework and ignored my growling stomach, drowning it with water instead.

During a break in my AP English homework, I got distracted by my bracelets. The rubber bracelets: the pink breast cancer one, the blue “NO COMPROMISE” one for the Andy Roddick Foundation for kids, the orange ASPCA one for animals. Then the Taylor Swift leather LOVE LOVE LOVE one, the two simply beaded rope wish bracelets, and the handmade friendship bracelet from my girls when they found out I was leaving.

I ran my fingers over each of them, lingering over the wish ones and remembering the wishes I’d made on them. The one with green and yellow beads for luck and confidence and the one with blue and red beads for knowledge and power. Both wishes were for my time at Florin; hopefully the bracelets would fall off before my time was over.

It bothered me a little that I was changing schools right before my senior year, but it bothered me more that college scouts wouldn’t be able to see me play—that was what I was banking on to pay for college. I knew I was good enough to get a scholarship, but it wasn’t any good if no scouts saw me.

I pushed up my bracelets and got back to work. I needed stellar grades to get a free ride, even with softball.