Becky's Kiss by Nicholas Fisher Read Free Book Online

soaked the pan, cleaned the counter, and took out the trash. After kissing Mother goodbye on her way out, she went to her room and hacked out the rough draft of a reflective narrative Mr. Marcus had put on the schedule, then surfed the net for ammunition for a possible compare or contrast that was looming in October. Next, she showered and padded softly down the hall of the dark house, noting that Daddy had never come home. Of course. He was at the bar. New town. Old news. They probably had the Phillies game on there, and she felt her eyes filling. Stood up two nights in a row? He’d promised they’d get to know this team together, and she couldn’t think of anything lonelier than watching it out on the porch all by herself.
    Back in her room, Becky didn’t remember falling asleep but she did, and in her dream she was no longer a klutz. On the contrary, she was suddenly quite nimble and coordinated, watching in amazement while her hand performed intricate tricks with a baseball. Her index and middle fingers were pointing straight ahead and spread like a peace sign, and the ball was resting there in the crook made by the backs of her knuckles.
    Then she flicked the ball in the air a couple of inches and caught it in the fastball grip of her dream the night before. Artfully, she rolled the ball back over the tips of her fingers and fingernails, returning it to the front knuckles, only to flip it in the air again and catch it in the Cutter grip, Four Seam yet slightly off center in the hand. Then it was resting on the back of her knuckles again, just to be tossed into the air, spinning in a different direction, caught in the ‘Slider’ grip, and then she was doing the trick faster, flicking the ball from the backs of her knuckles to a new grip, faster and faster, like a circus trick, like juggling, like a magician in perfect rhythm, and the background was moving a bit.
    She realized that her dream self was walking while doing this amazing and strange little ritual, and she flicked and gripped and flicked and gripped, and starting chanting in her head, “Four Seam, Cutter, Slider, Curve…Vulcan Change, Sinker, Splitter, Slurve.”
    Her dream-self came to a mirror, and the image in the glass was Danny with a clever little smile and a baseball bat on his shoulder. His color was high and his crystal blue eyes sparkled with excitement.
    “Dare you to throw it,” he said.
    “Really?”
    “Bring it.”
    She wanted to tell him that he had the most beautiful and delicate face she’d ever seen, all daring lines, hollows, and arches, like something you’d see in a French painting. She wanted to tell him that the sweet etchings at the corners of his eyes and the sharp angle of his jaw made her feel fragile, like she was about to walk straight into one of those guilty pleasure romance novels that everyone laughed off at recess but couldn’t wait to get back to the minute they could sneak home to the bedroom with a snuggly blanket and a hot cup of cocoa. She wanted to tell him all of these things, but all that came out in the end was,
    “Ready or not…”
    She threw the ball and Danny drew back his bat, the barn she drew in art class fading in as a background behind him. Then was the sound of shattering glass.
    Becky screamed. For the mirror stayed intact, proven by the unchanged image of the barn in the background.
    It was Danny that shattered, his likeness splintering to jagged slivers that spider-webbed, scissored, and then fell away.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter Seven
     
    Becky got over the shattered image of the boy soon enough. She was a big girl, and like last night’s dream, she just had to shake off the residue. But it was that first part that kept lingering, bothering her in terms of a strange fact she couldn’t make sense out of no matter what twist of logic she tried . I mean, ‘Vulcan Change?’ Really? She’d looked it up on Google the minute she’d woken, and there it was, a slowball grip buried in the palm,