To say that the Saint Helena baseball team was unstoppable was not biased; it was factual. We dominated every field we stepped on, and the scoreboard in the outfield said it all.

Indiana State: one run. Saint Helena: eight runs.

Voices echoed around the SHU dugout as we gathered our bags. I lugged a couple of bat bags on my shoulder to take to the batting cages, silently cursing the soreness in my leg.

I tried to hide it, but I took every step with a stiff leg and gritted teeth. I refused to be the weakest link on this team.

But some people knew me too well. Especially the upperclassmen who were freshmen players when I was a junior, two years into being a student manager. I'd always done everything I could to hide my pain, to make sure it didn't hinder anything more than it already did, but some people knew me too well. People like Jaden, whose party the next night I had, unfortunately, been sucked into attending. Even more unfortunately, Jaden and I both happened to be from the same town.

Watching men on my team get drunk with my high school classmates wasn't exactly my idea of a good time. But Javi agreed to go, so now, my Friday night plans would involve babysitting Javi and my team, while also pretending not to see some of them get wasted during a game weekend, and avoiding people who have known me since kindergarten.

Joy.

"Good game," I told Hao as he walked past. The catcher nodded and smiled the same wide smile I knew Javi had fallen in love with.

After third-wheeling on more dates than I could count in the last four years, I considered Hao one of my closest friends. I knew he feared that what happened to Javi's baseball career would happen to him if people knew who he loved, so I kept his secret as close as my own. Because I'd watched Javi unravel when he deserved to be a top draft pick, but was never chosen. It didn't take a genius to figure out why.

Cleanup after the game was filled with an excited, almost celebratory buzz. We weren't celebrating anything in particular, but if we kept it up, we could ride our victory all the way to another College World Series championship, and the last of Coach's career.

Coach had a reputation for being tough. He had even doubled down for this current season, applied more pressure to win than usual. Softness didn't earn championships. Coach was good at what he did, and I admired him for it. I wanted to be as revered as him one day.

It was dark by the time we had the field cleared and all the equipment returned to the batting cages. The team dragged themselves back to their cars, exhausted and ready to be back in their beds. I couldn't blame them. I wanted to do the same. Instead, I followed Coach Reinert and the assistant coaches into the athletic offices.

Coach Reinert's office was a museum in and of itself, a shrine to his decorated baseball career. Every time I walked in there, I couldn't help but look at the walls. There was nothing he didn't have: Coach of the Year awards, jerseys and balls from his time in the Majors, framed pictures of him with every player he'd coached into professional ball.

I used to think I would be on that wall. Or anyone's wall, really. Back when I was meant to be more than an assistant. I knew now that I would never be one of those players. Now, my new dream was to have as many photographs as he did.

Coach's prized possession, the thing he wanted everyone to see first when they stepped through the door, was a clear glass trophy on his desk, engraved with his name and the year of his induction into the College Baseball Hall of Fame.

"If we keep this up, we'll clinch at Regionals next month," Coach said to me and the two assistant coaches crammed into his office. "Shaw." I lifted my chin, just in case it wasn't already clear that I was listening. "I need evaluations on our opponents for the rest of the regular season, an updated scouting roster, and today's stats. Everyone else, regular duties."

I nodded with the assistant coaches. On our way out the door, Coach said my name again. I turned, selfishly hoping for some sort of recognition. A pat on the back. A simple "Good work, Shaw." But my wishes were always in vain. Those affirmations were reserved for the guys who could hit a home run or make a diving catch. Not for the person whose job it was to hold a clipboard and refill water.

"The equipment room was a disaster today," Coach said. "Make sure it's in working order before next practice."

Another nod, and then I left.

My desk, a barren wasteland compared to Coach's office, was in the hallway right outside his door. All of my most notable baseball career moments were in the past, so there wasn't much use in putting anything on display. They were just reflections of what I used to be, what I'd lost. I really only had a few handwritten checklists taped to the desk and a framed photo of the team from my senior year as a student manager after their championship win. I was in it, too. Just off to the side with the rest of the coaching staff. A forgotten player.

I went to work, tucked away in my little corner. My medication weighed down my pocket. But, despite the stabbing pain that consumed my leg after a long day on my feet, I didn't take it. I'd pushed through before, and I could do it again.

An hour passed. Then two. Then I lost track until I heard Coach's door click shut and watched him walk down the hallway. I checked the time. Midnight.

A wave of exhaustion hit me, but I wasn't done yet. I worked in solitude, under the fluorescent glow of a light at the end of a dark hallway. I'd done everything Coach asked me to do, but I wasn't truly done until I did everything he didn't ask for. If I waited until I was asked, then it would be too late.

When I finally hit send on the last email, I was done.

At that point, the night had been too long for me to feel any sense of relief. All I wanted was to go home and fall into bed, but as I went to shut down the computer, I saw one new message waiting for me.

Emails were truly relentless. Just as unforgiving as running drills in the rain. But I didn't run base touches anymore. Assisting and administration were my drills now, training me up to be a worthy professional coach one day.

I wanted nothing more than to close up for the night, but the knowledge that there was still work to be done nagged at me until I clicked it and replied. After hitting send, I quickly shut the computer down so nothing else could slither in.

As I trudged through the building on tired feet, I pretended that the muscles in my leg weren't screaming. And when I could no longer ignore it, I pretended there was nothing I could have done to prevent it.

Then I would do it all over again tomorrow, along with a party I was very much not dreading.

— — —

After the game the next day, I was in my car, driving to exactly where I didn't want to be. The dull ache and occasional sharp pains left over from the day before were manageable, and nothing out of the realm of what I usually tolerated.

It could have been worse. It had been worse. I could deal with this.

As I drove down the interstate, the city's tall downtown buildings and concrete maze of exit ramps turned into rickety old barns and spacious crop fields. All familiar sights of where I grew up.

Thirty minutes after leaving the city, I pulled off the interstate. Growing cornfields stood on either side of the road like prison bars emerging from the ground until I rolled into Hometown, Missouri. The place I, ironically, called home. Or used to, at least.

The little downtown square was made of old red brick buildings and didn't take up more than a couple of blocks. It was dated, rundown, but recent efforts to modernize had left their marks. Like the town made every effort to hide its scars and missing pieces under new road signs and a fresh coat of paint. I passed Town Hall, the local pizza place, the funeral home that everyone was destined to end up in one day, if they were lucky. The unlucky ones were a different story.

To visitors, it was a quaint place, somewhere you drove by and said, "Oh, how cute," until you kept driving to somewhere bigger and better. To the select few who grew up here, like me, it was a graveyard filled with ghosts and with memories of my childhood. Back when my friends and I thought we owned the town without a care in the world. Memories that were easily overshadowed by things I would rather forget.

My Hometown home, the one I grew up in, was nothing more than an old house with peeling light-gray siding that had once been stark white. It wasn't much. Like the rest of Hometown, it had its fair share of memories, for better or for worse. But I found time between games and practices to come home every week, because the people who lived there, my mom and sister, still needed me.

When I walked through the front door, I wasn't surprised to find the house in worse shape than I had left it last week. I couldn't blame my mom and sister, though. Not with how hard my mom worked on night shifts. And teenagers weren't exactly known for their cleanliness. Cassie was cleaner than most twelve-year-olds, but there was no way I would ever put the responsibility of keeping up an entire house all on her.

Armed with a plastic garbage bag and a vacuum, I started in the living room. There wasn't much to pick up. My mom and sister were clean people, but life and messes happen.

I tidied up what I could. Wiped down the coffee table, straightened out the couch, vacuumed the carpet.

As I wrapped the vacuum cord back up, a pair of socked feet shuffled along the thin carpet. I turned to find Cassie standing behind me, her backpack hanging from her shoulder by a single strap.

"Hey," I said. "Going somewhere?"

Cassie shrugged and tucked a strand of curled blonde hair behind her ears. She was a quiet, lanky girl. She always had been, even before our lives turned upside down. Our mom often joked that I took all the athletic genes and left the creative ones for Cassie, and she was right. While I spent my youth on a baseball field with my friends, Cassie spent hers in the art room at school or the library. I got lost in the game. She got lost in a sketchpad.

We had not lived together since I left for my freshman year at Saint Helena University. I was afraid that I wouldn't know her after too much time away. Every time I saw her, it seemed like there was something new to learn. Teenage girls were elusive and ever-changing creatures, ones that I never learned to read. My own sister was no exception.

Last week, I learned that Cassie had discovered online makeup tutorials. Now her eyelids were caked in bold colors that girls her age tried so desperately to pull off.

It terrified me to know that Cassie was growing up without me, learning how to live life on her own. I couldn't be there to clean up her messes, to tell her I'd snap the fingers of the first kid to ever break her heart. But no matter how old she got or how many new things there were to learn about her, she was still Cassie, the baby sister that I helped raise. We may have been polar opposites, but I was a part of her, and she was a part of me.

Cassie stared at her feet, like she was embarrassed. "I'm going to a thing at school," she said.

I looked her up and down like a parent would. Something was off about her. Had she already had her heart broken? Was that why she was acting so aloof? My chest tightened at the thought. I was not prepared to follow through on my finger snapping threat.

"What thing?" I asked, edging out the caution in my voice.

She huffed and rolled her eyes. She had acting like a preteen down to a science.

Two could play at this game. When she didn't answer, I scoffed in my best impression of a teenage girl, which made her eyes practically roll into the back of her head.

I loved my sister unconditionally. I truly did. But the less tolerance she had for my mere existence, the more I thrived on pestering her. It was my duty as her big brother. The older she got, the easier it was to get under her skin. But also, there was a party tonight. With college-age kids and alcohol. A dangerous combination that made my pulse skyrocket at the thought that my sister would be out on the same night.

I wanted to ask if it really was a school thing, just to make sure she wasn't getting into worse trouble than anyone I would be around, but Cassie was not a liar. She either told the truth or withheld it, and there was definitely something she wasn't saying.

I raised my eyebrows, held her there with my stare until she caved.

"Okay, Mom," she said. "They're putting on an end-of-year play at school. Auditions are tonight. It's nothing, I swear. Don't make a big deal out of it."

The muscles in my face relaxed until they turned into a smile. My creative little sister was trying out for the school play. Of course, she was. She was the artsy one, after all.

Even though having no interest in sports was nothing to be ashamed of, I blamed myself for her aversion to athletics. Because at one point in her life, she wanted to be like me. She carried a baseball in her backpack, stole my ballcaps every day, followed me to impromptu games with my friends. But after the injury that took away my future as a pro baller, she never talked about sports again. At just five years old, she avoided the topic like it was a curse, and I couldn't blame her. She had a front row seat to my suffering before I learned how to push it down.

"Good luck," I said, a smile still curled at the corners of my mouth. "They'd be crazy not to cast you."

Cassie nodded at her feet, her eyes downturned. Her big toe dug at the carpet.

Shit. I said something wrong, and I had no idea what. Strike one for Big Bro Cam. I walked over to her, knelt down so I wasn't towering over her. Teenage girls would be so much easier to navigate if they came with a manual. Or, better yet, a playbook. At least then I could follow some semblance of strategy instead of flying by the seat of my pants.

"What's up?" I asked.

She bit her lip like she was holding back what she wanted to say. Strike two on me for not knowing what the hell to say or how to ease her mind. I could give her some analogy about taking the plate in the ninth inning, down by one run, two outs, and a man on base. But she probably wouldn't know what I was saying.

"Are you nervous?" I asked, my eyes desperately searching her face for a hint of what I'm supposed to say. "Because you're going to crush it. I know you are."

Finally, she whispered, "You're supposed to say, 'break a leg.' But it's okay, you don't have to. I get it."

I grinned, and for the briefest second, I saw a smile pass across her cheeks, too. And then I ruined it by wrapping my arms around her shoulders.

"Ew," she whined with all the disgust she could muster. But instead of squirming away, she hugged me back. She could pretend all she wanted that she was too cool for affection. Underneath that makeup and teenage sneer, I saw the same five-year-old girl who thought I walked on water.

"Break a leg," I said. I let her go, then added, "Butthead."

Cassie wrinkled her nose. "You're so weird."

I laughed, and she tried to hide hers. Before she opened the door, she gestured to the living room and said, "I'm sorry about... that."

Now it was my turn to shrug it off. "It's alright. It's not your job to take care of all this."

"It shouldn't be yours, either."

I showed her a half-hearted smile. She was right, but I'd been cleaning up the messes in our lives since before she was born. Taking care of Cassie was my job. To look after her and protect her from the world. To let her be with her friends and audition for school plays without worrying about what was happening at home.

I did all of this so the same burdens I carried throughout my teenage years never fell on Cassie's shoulders. All in the hope that she wouldn't grow up to know just how screwed up a person's life could become. Cassie would never know what it was like to lose everything she loved.

When Cassie left, I kept cleaning until my phone buzzed with a text from Javi.

Where are you? I'm not going in alone.

A sigh left me with the weight of a rock. I couldn't hide in my mom's house anymore. Time to get this over with. To put on my metaphoric babysitter hat and my actual, physical black one. I would need to keep it close, especially tonight.

The strangest thought flickered through my mind. Would Norah be there? If she was, would she be wearing the same dress from the bar? I remembered how she wore that dress with confidence. Like it was made just for her to show everyone how strong, capable, and beautiful she was. God, was she beautiful. That dress told everyone that she should be the most important person in the room. And she was, at least to me.

She said she would be there tonight. At the time, I'd hoped she was making jokes or empty promises, because I needed to stay as far away from her as possible. She was the definition of danger with a softball bat. But I hadn't seen her since the gym, and something occurred to me that sent my heart racing, made my palms sweat, interrupted every other thought I had.

No matter how much I tried to push it to the back of my mind, the thought persisted. A terrifying, career-ending thought.

I hoped she would be there, dancing, having the time of her life. At the very least, I wanted to see her dance again, even if she wasn't dancing with me.