Moonshot - Alessandra Torre Page 0,4

from. I don’t expect you to be celibate. Just think next time you feel like unzipping your pants.”

He stood, lifting a baseball cap and pulling it on. “You think, too, Floyd. Get me in pinstripes, or I’ll find an agent who can.”

7

Packed over a six-month season, there were 162 baseball games every year. That was 162 times players warmed up, 162 times they walked onto a field and risked their career with swings, steals, and plays. Eighty-one times we stepped off a bus and onto an opponent’s dirt. Eighty-odd times we dealt with opponents’ fans, their jeers, their shitty locker rooms, the cloud of contempt that surrounded a visiting team. Especially when that visiting team was the greatest ball club in the world, the team every player wanted to be on, every fan wanted to secretly root for. It could be hell being a Yankee. But then we had home games. Times in the magic, an entire city’s energy swirled in the air—the love strong, powerful, and coursing through our boys’ lungs, fifty thousand souls storming to their feet for no purpose other than to celebrate our awesomeness.

It was one hell of a schedule. Exhausting by the time it ended. And that tally didn’t include the playoffs—an extra twenty games to cap off the season. The most emotional games all year, each win celebrated in full fashion, assuming we got there. Assuming we pulled a constant stream of Wins.

But then again … we were the Yankees. Did I need to dignify any other possibility?

I sat in a corner of the equipment manager’s office and stared at a page in my biology textbook, the chapter on Population Ecology. Boring stuff. I doodled a flower in the right margin of the page, then stopped. Refocused and read the paragraph again. This office was the worst place to study: absolutely empty and quiet, especially this time of day. An hour before the team arrived, my freak of a father the only player in these halls. Everything was already set for the game, the balls mudded this morning, uniforms delivered from the cleaners and hanging in lockers, our food deliveries still three hours out. It was a tomb, which was why Dad loved to stick me in there. Good for biology, bad for my entertainment. I wrote down a few notes, reading over the sentences a few times to make them stick, then turned back to the book.

I wasn’t a brilliant girl. Ask me a question about baseball and I’d ace your test. Put a math equation before me and my eyes glazed over. I used to have a tutor. Dad was focused on A’s, thought that was crucial to my success. Three tutors quit before he gave up. Now, I taught myself, scanning in assignments to a home-school company in Jersey. They graded my work and required me to be present for exams four times a year. They also decided, at the end of the year, if I’d learned enough to graduate. It was May. One more month, four finals, and I’d be done with high school forever. I’d ditch my book-bag at home, say sayonara to books, and fully commit my time to the pinstripes.

I already had a contract penned for after graduation. Equipment Staff Assistant Manager. Not the most glamorous title in the world, but it’d keep me on the team bus. I wasn’t really sure what the next step would be. Denise in Marketing had been trying to get me to intern up top with promises of a more permanent job. But I couldn’t imagine breathing in the air of an office and not the field. I couldn’t imagine looking out a window and down onto the action.

My graduation both loomed and beckoned. I was probably the only teenager in the city who didn’t want to grow up.

8

If fans leaving a game looked closely on the subway, they might see Frank Cinns. Our back-up third baseman pulled on a maintenance shirt and cap and turned invisible. He lived in Manhattan, as did Madden and Tripp, but their deep wallets used drivers to get home. Brooklyn held another five or six, a few preferred the Hamptons, but Dad and I lived in Alpine. Dad liked to drive, and used the twenty-mile trek to clear his mind after a game. I typically fell asleep. Something about the hours of intensity followed by the quiet hum of road … it was my lullaby. That and the nineties country music Dad lived by. A