Excerpt

Baseball was so entrenched in Emily DeWitt's blood that it was currently causing her the most acute agony she'd ever experienced.

Well, not baseball itself. The game was a balm for most hurts, and the simple feel of a ball in her hand often calmed her when things got to be too much. She was eighteen years old. And the past few years had made her grow accustomed to things getting to be too much. She'd spent many an evening working out a difficult geometry problem or agonizing over her wording in an English essay while absently running her fingers over the well-worn stitching of her mom's old baseball—a foul ball caught at a Cubs game long before she'd ever met Emily's dad.

Emily frowned at the shelf over her desk in her bedroom.

More specifically, she frowned at the empty space on the right end of it, where the line of fake-gold trophies petered out. The left side represented her years in Pee-Wee Tee Ball, crammed first with participation trophies, but quickly shifting to markers of genuinely successful seasons. Emily's team had won a lot once they got the taste of victory, and that flavor had followed her as she progressed up into Little League. The middle portion of the shelf held much nicer trophies representing the best of her kid years.

But then she'd hit middle school, and Mom had gotten sick. The trophies tapered off then, and ceased entirely the year Emily had started at Pattersonville West High School and joined their team, the Unicorns.

To be fair, that first year she hadn't exactly been playing her best. Most of her energy had been devoted to getting through wave after wave of teachers exclaiming how much she looked like her mom when she was a freshman, how wonderful it was to see Meredith's daughter in the good ol' Unicorns jersey, gosh your mom must be so happy to see that, since girls weren't allowed to join the team back in the day no matter how much she begged to be allowed to try out, and how is Meredith doing these days, anyway?

Once Emily got used to delivering a quick "she's dead," and moving on to asking about the homework she found more energy to focus on the game.

But the Unicorns, she'd found, were long past their glory days. In fact, the last time they'd made any sort of consistent waves was a hundred years ago when their star player had hit the series-winning home run and promptly disappeared. Legend said he literally vanished, right as he was crossing home plate. But most people believed Adrien Thorn had really just left town quietly because he couldn't handle the pressure of being scouted for the big leagues.

Emily always felt that Mom believed the more fantastical version. Probably because Mom certainly had believed in the magic of baseball.

But baseball's magic hadn't been enough to help her pull through cancer, and now Emily was afraid it wasn't going to be enough to let her see her mom's dream to fruition. The calendar was moving toward spring now, and Emily stood on the cusp of her senior season. The right side of her trophy shelf remained as bare as it had when she'd started high school.

She had one single season left.

One year to bring Mom's beloved Unicorns to victory, and she couldn't shake the feeling she was already blowing it.

A quick knock on her open doorframe jarred her from her dark musing, and her dad poked his head in.

"Hey, hey, baseball princess," he said, grin wide across his red face. "First game of the season! I made your favorite, blueberry pancakes, bacon, and OJ. Champions can't win on an empty stomach! Come get 'em while they're hot."

Emily bit back a sigh. Now that he'd mentioned it, she did notice the telltale scents of his cooking. Normally, she'd be delighted. This morning, the aroma just made her stomach flop over. "Thanks, Dad."

Dad frowned. "Hey now, what's with the black mood? You haven't even got your uniform on yet."

"I just…" Emily glanced first to the blue and teal jersey still hanging in her open closet alongside all her shirts and pants—a wardrobe fit for picking up a game of catch at any time—and let her mind picture the dark number eleven that, if it could have been, would have been her mother's before hers, then unconsciously her gaze return to the shelf with its accusatory gaping hole. "I'm not sure I believe…anymore."

Her stomach writhed again as she vocalized her internal, baseball-induced pain.

"Ah," said Dad.

He sat beside her on the bed, taking pains to avoid mussing the bedspread.

Silence rang in Emily's room. From downstairs, the murmuring sound of the television tuned to the upcoming White Sox game floated up to join the miasma of suckage. Grief was a familiar visitor in their house, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with each time it stopped by.

Had Emily really just admitted she didn't believe in the magic of baseball?

She'd spent months wrestling with that truth.

Dad must be so disappointed.

She rushed to fill the silence before he could react. "It's just, Mom talked about the Unicorns' Golden Olden Days so ... much ... you could feel how hard she wished she could have experienced them herself. She told those stories like they were old fairy tales. And then she never even got to see me make the team. I don't think I can handle the idea of having wasted four whole years."

Dad broke the silence with a cough, then a breath.

"You know your mom is already proud of you—I am, too. Always. Neither of us will think less of you if the Unicorns don't ever win a trophy. That's not what she wants for you."

"Yes, it is," Emily said, ignoring the way Dad continued to speak about Mom in the present tense. "She wanted a Unicorns trophy as much as she wanted the Cubs to win another World Series. Probably more. Heck Dad, she used to joke," Emily did the air quotes around the word joke, "about being the witch who stole the peasant couple's first born so she could train me up to be a star baseball player. It's a million percent what she wanted for me."

Dad laughed, which ticked Emily off even more.

Completely missing the angry energy she was throwing off, Dad reached over and plucked Mom's ball from the corner of her desk, where it rested when Emily wasn't holding it. He held it in one hand, smiled a much softer smile than his game-day-dad grin, then tossed it up once and caught it again with a quiet smack.

"Your mom wanted you to play your best with a team you love. Nothing more, nothing less."

He stood up and set the ball up on the shelf in the empty space with a fond little pat, then clasped his hand over Emily's pitching shoulder. "That, and she really, really wanted you to beat the pants off that snotty Callie McMasters again."

Emily couldn't hold back a giggle at the mention of her long-time rival. The Pattersonville West Unicorns played McMaster's Marion High Bulldogs today. The Bulldogs were big. It was an important game.

"Yeah. Maybe that's what's got me messed up today. Haven't managed to win against Callie's team since Little League."

"Exactly. And today's as good a day as any to get your mojo back. The Bulldogs may have pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat every game of your high school career so far, but that'll just make today's win all the sweeter. That's the kind of thing your mom's baseball magic is all about."

Emily nodded. "Thanks, Dad."

"Now, come on. You're supposed to be outgrowing this teenage mayonnaise by now."

Emily rolled her eyes, mostly for his benefit. "It's malaise, Dad," she said, repeating their ritual.

"Knew it was one of the two. Come have your breakfast, eh, slugger? I want to spend some quality time with you before I head to work."

"I'll be down in a minute."

Dad gave her one final squeeze—held it for an extra fraction of a second, just long enough to let her know he wasn't making light, but not so long as to overwhelm her delicate teenager senses—and headed back downstairs.

She waited until his footsteps reached the first floor hallway, then reached up and took the baseball down from her trophy shelf.

She let her fingers run along the seam of red threads before setting it back in its place.

She liked the idea of it coming to rest there—once she'd earned it. For now, it belonged on the desk.

Was that self-torture? She couldn't tell anymore. But before setting it on the desk, she'd let her hand curl around it in her best curveball grip, and tried to let the magic her mom had believed in trickle into her, just a little.

It wasn't much. But it worked. Well enough, anyway.

She grabbed her Unicorns cap and set it firmly on her head.

She had a game to win.