Expelled(22)

“Poke,” I correct him.

“Where are we going?” he asks, buckling into the front seat.

“You’ll see.”

Five minutes later, we’re pulling up in front of Sasha’s big fancy house. And though I basically prayed the entire drive over that her dad wouldn’t be home, he’s the one who opens the door.

“Good evening,” he says to me. His voice is polite but cold, and I detect its mocking undertone. His eyes shift to Jude. “Hello there, new youngster. Tell me, are you also a delinquent? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Yes, sir,” Jude says brightly. “I mean, accused but not actually guilty. Just like your daughter, sir.”

Professor Ellis raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Good habits formed in youth make all the difference,” he says. “Aristotle said that. And you, being the young, bipedal mammals that you are—proto-men, shall we say?—would do well to keep that in mind.”

I don’t really know what he’s talking about, and Sasha, who has appeared behind him in the hall, rolls her eyes at his back.

“Do you want to go to the game with us?” I call.

Both Sasha and Jude look at me like I’ve gone insane.

“The baseball game?” Jude asks. “At school?”

“Why in the world would we want to do that?” Sasha says.

“Because I feel like experiencing an all-American pastime,” I say. Though honestly, I never had any interest in going to a game until it was forbidden for me to do so.

Professor Ellis turns to his daughter. “I don’t think you’ve been to a high school sporting event before.”

“Yeah,” she says, “and that was on purpose.”

“You should probably keep it that way,” he says. “Good evening,” he says to us, and he starts to close the door.

But Jude holds out his arm to stop it. “Don’t knock it till you try it, honey.”

Sasha gives him a funny look. Then she looks at her dad. She straightens her shoulders. “Fuck it,” she says, grabbing a sweater and water bottle before slipping past her father. “Let’s go.”

“Watch your language,” Professor Ellis says. He catches her arm as she goes by. “And don’t be out too late,” he adds gruffly.

“Don’t worry,” she says, shaking him off, and then she starts running to the car, yelling “Shotgun!”

Her dad stands backlit and imposing in the doorway, watching us go.

“Thanks,” Sasha says once they’re all buckled in.

“For what?”

“Thinking of me tonight.”

I almost laugh then, because she has no idea how much I think about her.

I doubt that Palmieri, Dekum, or any of their minions would recognize my mom’s Honda minivan, but I park a few blocks from the field anyway. It’s twilight, and the big floodlights are blazing. Arlington’s baseball team is number three in the state, so the stands are packed.

We slip in through a side gate as the announcer calls the names of the players. They jog onto the field, waving at their fans like they’ve already won.

“I should be out there, too,” Jude says wistfully. “Before the national anthem, I always did my special little shimmy dance.”

“Well, tonight you’re below the stands with your delinquent friends,” I say, pulling him along until we’re all hidden underneath the aluminum bleachers. “And lucky for you, I brought snacks.”

Jude snatches the bag of Kettle chips out of my hand as the opposing team makes the first pitch. We watch as Jonas Adair, a senior, slams the ball into right field and makes it all the way to third base. The next batter brings Jonas home and gets himself to second. By the time the first inning is over, we’ve got six runs to the other team’s zero. Above us, the crowd stomps their feet, cheers, and throws popcorn into the air, which falls down on us like snow.

I can’t help feeling excited, too, but whether it’s about our team’s near-guaranteed victory or my trespassing with my friends I can’t be sure. Probably it’s the latter, though, because the fact that I could even consider calling Sasha Ellis a friend is still mind-boggling to me. I watch her as she takes a swig from her water bottle and then grabs a handful of chips. In the shadows, her pale skin almost seems to glow.

Then, over by the concession stand, directly in my line of sight, I spot Palmieri. For a second, I stop breathing. He orders a popcorn—he doesn’t pay for it, I notice—and when he gets the big tub, instead of returning to the bleachers, he just keeps standing there, tossing kernels into his mouth by the handful.

I tell myself that it’s dark under here. There’s no way he can see us.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a sports fan,” Sasha’s saying to Jude. “I thought you just liked dressing up in tiger drag.”

Jude says, “Yeah, the costume’s my favorite part, I’m not ashamed to admit it. But it’s my job to be enthusiastic about Arlington athletic endeavors.”

By this point, our team’s up by so many runs that the coach puts in our worst players. The bases are loaded when Simon Ripley, a sophomore who’s eighty pounds soaking wet, steps up to the plate. The pitcher fires a fastball. And by some crazy miracle—yes, it would seem that they are possible—Simon hits a freaking homer.