Page 50 of Breakout Year

Eitan

u/eerie_erie: We let him know we don’t want him.

u/eerie_erie: You’re a drama queen and so is he.

Eitan stood at the edge of Crooks Field, watching the groundskeepers as they put the last touches on the sidelines.

He called to a few by name, and they looked up and waved, but didn’t come over.

They were busy. It was reasonable to be busy.

They had to tamp down the dirt and lay the chalk lines.

Doing those instead of saying hi had nothing to do with Eitan or anything about him.

It was possible they just loved grass and didn’t follow baseball at all.

He’d been like this all day—jittery. His mom had mentioned it in between cursing out the New York media in a variety of languages and attempting to feed him every corn and egg product in the Midwest. His father hadn’t mentioned it at all.

He didn’t say much generally, just drank his tea and let Eitan’s mom have most of the conversation.

Today, though, he clapped Eitan on the shoulder a few more times than usual, as if he was trying to either settle Eitan or reassure him.

Williams had taken the much more direct route of threatening to pour electrolyte water on Eitan until he chilled the hell out.

Now Eitan was half-tempted to go looking for him, just for the distraction.

Earlier this year he’d been desperate to play in Cleveland for as long as possible.

Now he was making a list of what he needed to get through before he could go—not home, New York wasn’t home—but someplace other than here. Back to Akiva for one last day.

Right now, he just needed to survive workouts and batting practice.

On-field warmups. The game. The inevitable postgame scrum, and a night in a hotel room, alone.

His parents went to bed early, but he’d see them tomorrow before the next game.

It was fine. He could get through a few games in Cleveland.

Surely, there were much worse things in the world.

In theory, each team had a designated time for workouts and various warm-ups.

In practice, there was always a jumble of players from both teams around.

Eitan wasn’t going to let the presence of his former teammates stop him from taking his customary jog around the outfield.

And if he chose to run outside today so no one could accuse him of hiding, so what?

Being on the field meant he actually had to get onto the field.

He’d been standing by the foul line long enough.

He jumped over it, entering on the third-base side rather than the more familiar first-base one when he played for the Crooks.

The dirt still felt like dirt. The grass still felt like grass.

Downtown Cleveland still stood just beyond the scoreboard, though compared with Manhattan, it looked like a city in miniature.

Crooks players emerged from the other dugout.

He hadn’t texted anyone before the game.

They knew he was coming as surely as he knew he would be here.

It was possible they were running through the same mental checklist as he was, counting the time until he was gone.

It was possible they weren’t thinking about him at all.

Still, he wanted to go running, so he went running, a jog that traced its way around the edge of left field, then by the warning track. It felt good to move. His ankle was strong, his lungs capable as he took in cool afternoon air. His heart…

He’d only texted Akiva a few times. Normal stuff: pictures of his breakfast that involved a staggering number of eggs; his neighbor’s cat who he’d seen sitting in a window that morning.

Akiva hadn’t responded. He was probably busy.

Eitan didn’t know how many simultaneous denials he was capable of telling himself, but if he didn’t acknowledge they were denials, then they didn’t count.

He kept jogging around the outfield, closer and closer to a group of Cleveland players.

He’d seen most of them less than two months ago.

They’d been his teammates, his friends. A few texted when he first got traded: condolences and well wishes and telling him to go get paid.

After the press conference…well, he’d apparently been booted from the group chat and so hadn’t heard much else.

Now they were standing around. He could just wave as he passed them by.

No, that was cowardly. If they wanted to ignore him, they could do it to his face.

He slowed his steps, giving the group time to register him his approach.

If they wanted to turn tail and flee to their clubhouse, they could cede the field to him.

He jogged up. Wiped his face on the stretched-out collar of his T-shirt.

For a moment, no one said anything.

“Rivkin, hey,” Connor said. When Eitan had been on the team, Connor had mostly called him E . Guess they were on last names now.

“Reynolds.” Eitan didn’t know if there was a touch so brief baseball players didn’t think you could get gay cooties from it, but he extended his knuckles anyway.

A moment later, Connor tapped them, then glanced over his shoulder as if he was already plotting his escape.

Ice semi-broken—or just very slightly thawed—Eitan repeated the same gesture with Hairston, an infielder he didn’t know too well who’d taken over at third base, then considered possible topics of conversation.

Normally they’d just stand around and talk about whatever bullshit.

Baseball was a lot of standing around and talking about whatever bullshit.

“Nice day out,” Eitan said. The weather. He was talking about the fucking weather. He was half tempted to say something like, Hey, do you think it’s going to rain? Also I’m really, really gay, as it turns out.

Connor did that backward glance again. “Yeah.”

Eitan ground his molars together. He wasn’t really someone who believed in clubhouse hierarchies: if you were in the big leagues, it didn’t matter if you went first overall or were an undrafted walk-on.

But he had gone first overall and had been an everyday player since he’d been promoted to the majors, and an All-Star, twice, a Gold Glove winner, once, and one of the only reasons people bothered to buy tickets to see Cleveland play for the past few years.

He deserved to be on this fucking field as much as anybody. “How have things been here?”

Connor heaved a shrug. “You know.”

Eitan did know: the team was bad, the kind of bad that went from being a fluke to a habit.

The kind of bad it felt rude to comment on now that he wasn’t experiencing it along with them.

He didn’t want to say something hollow, that things would surely get better, when there was little guarantee that they would.

Mostly he wanted to know how they’d rode together on team planes and lost money to each other at poker with the kind of friendly debt neither of them kept track of—and now Connor had only a handful of words to say to Eitan, none of them friendly at all.

“Glad to see you’re doing well at least,” Eitan said, before Connor cut him off.

“I gotta go.” No excuse offered. Just a simple statement: given the choice between Eitan’s company and not, he’d rather be elsewhere.

In the intervening months, Eitan had invented any number of reasons for Connor’s silence, beginning with a rigorous adherence to the old anti-fraternization rules that discouraged friendships between guys on different teams and ending with grand conspiracy that the Crooks told players to stop talking to Eitan.

Not this simple, obvious loathing.

Something surged in Eitan’s belly: Anger, sure.

Disappointment, yes. The reminder that he couldn’t force anyone to like him, of course.

Followed by a familiar wash of determination that maybe he could.

If he could just get Connor to see that Eitan was happy—happier than he’d been in Cleveland, when he’d been universally adored and, he was just now realizing it, incredibly lonely—he might soften.

Connor didn’t deserve any of that. He certainly didn’t deserve Eitan’s words.

Eitan’s hands, however, were suddenly curling into fists.

One good punch might be all he got before his inevitable suspension.

It’d feel good. Fuck, given the way Connor was looking at him, it’d feel great right until it didn’t.

Eitan pushed his tongue against the back of his teeth.

“Yeah, man, see you around.” And he glared at Connor until he walked away.

Which only left Eitan and Hairston standing there, looking at one another. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way—” Hairston began, and Eitan readied himself for any number of things that could be contained under a ballplayer’s conversational warning. “How do you get so quick off the jump fielding?”

Eitan laughed. “Wouldn’t want you to use my secrets against me. But ask me again in the offseason, and we can go through some things.”

Hairston’s eyebrows rose up the dark brown skin of his forehead. “You sure?”

“Hit me up when you get to spring training.” Then Eitan realized they might be at different locations—that he might end up in Florida, not Arizona. That he didn’t really have any kind of certainty for the next season. No wonder Akiva had turned down coming to see him play. “Or whenever.”

“Thanks, man, I appreciate it.” Hairston glanced around, and there was something different in that glance from Connor’s. “Maybe I’ll get traded next season.” Said hopefully, as if he’d already packed his bags.

“Can’t recommend that enough,” Eitan said.

Hairston’s eyebrows rose again, this time more knowingly. “New York’s good?”