Cecelia was in an irritated mood as she walked home from school. She'd explained to the coach that she did do sport. Cheerleading was a sport. He wouldn't have a bar of it. All the girls had to try out for the new girl's baseball team he was putting together. All girls included cheerleaders, he said. I'm eighteen and in my last semester Cecelia had protested, not that it had done much good.
So she'd tried out for his silly team. She demonstrated that her woeful batting ability was equalled by her abysmal catching skills. The highlight came when he suggested she might be a pitcher.
Her first pitch had been straight but hadn't quite reached the batter. Throw it harder the coach had said. So she'd thrown it harder and the ball had sailed high and fast and in the wrong direction. Try again, said the coach. So she'd tried for a third time and her grip slipped, the ball went straight up and managed to come down behind her.
The coach had waxed sarcastic after that. There might be a worse player than her, somewhere in the world, he'd told her, but he would pray each night that he never met them. He had been the one who insisted that she try out, not her. If he wanted some forward flips she could do them. Cheerleading and acrobatics were fine. Throwing a ball? Who needed it?
Arriving home, Cecelia was strolling down the driveway when she nearly tripped. The fact that she'd tripped on her younger brother's baseball seemed to add insult to injury in her present state of mind. Muttering to herself about inconsiderate brats she picked up the ball and threw it down the yard as hard as she could.
She watched, irritated, as the ball sailed off at an angle, vanishing over the fence and into the neighbour's yard. Mike can just go and fetch it himself, she was thinking, when there was the sound of a crash and the tinkling of broken glass. With the sound of breaking glass came another sound.
"What the fuck?" cam an infuriated cry. "Mikey, you unspeakable little turd."
Before Cecelia could make good her escape there was a scrabbling sound from the fence and the head of their next door neighbour appeared over the top of the fence, a furious look on his face. Cecelia winced. Sam looked rather formidable at the best of times. This was plainly not the best of times.
She and Mikey had nicknamed Sam the Unlikely Hulk. You take a man with the height, bulk, and muscles of the incredible Hulk. You then place a hand on his head and compress him, knocking a good foot off his height but keeping all that beef and muscle. That was Sam. He looked as though he could bench-press a refrigerator - for his warmup.
"Where is he?" came the enraged demand. "I'm going to strangle him. I'll string him up by his thumbs and buy a stockwhip, just for him."
"He's not here," said Cecelia in a very small voice. "There's just me. It was an accident. Um, did something break? The ball didn't hit the house."
"No, it didn't. It scored a bullseye on the pane of glass I was carrying. Do you know why I was carrying a pane of glass?"
Cecelia shook her head.
"I didn't think so. It was because I needed that pane of glass to replace the window that Mikey broke yesterday. He didn't even give me a chance to install the blasted thing. I warned him that the next break was going to cost him. Where is he?"
"Um, at football practice, I think," Cecelia said.
Sam looked at her hard. No Mike meant someone else threw the ball. Easy enough to guess who.
"Come around here," he snapped. "Damned if I'm going to yell at you over the fence."
Sam vanished. Cecelia chewed on her lip. Should she go around and confront him or not? She'd better, she supposed. Otherwise he'd come around and complain to her parents. Dispiritedly, she dumped her bag next to the door and headed around to get her lecture.
Sam gave her a full voltage glare as soon as she turned up.
"I was doing the repairs myself because it's cheaper than getting a glazier in and the insurance excess is probably more than the pane of glass. Of course, the second pane of glass isn't covered by insurance as it wasn't on the house when it got broken."
Cecelia let him rant. Keep him talking and he'd eventually wind down and she could escape.
"What the hell were you doing with the ball, anyway?" he finally demanded. "I didn't think you were a baseball fan."
"Get real," Cecelia snapped indignantly. "As if! I nearly tripped over the ball and so I tossed it down the yard."
"Maybe so, but why choose my yard?"
"I didn't choose your yard. The ball just happened to go there."
"You mean that you threw the ball into your own back yard, quite a big yard at that, and missed?"
A hard done by look was all that Cecelia could manage. She was so over this. He might find the whole thing amusing but she didn't. As it was her father would probably dock her pocket money to cover the cost of the glass.
"I guess you can consider yourself lucky you're not Mikey," Sam told her. "I promised him a hiding if he was careless enough to break another window. I'd put you on the same warning but I doubt you'd be lucky enough to hit a window if you tried. Or the house," he added.