You Should Be So Lucky

by Cat Sebastian

But they exist, and Mark noticed they exist, and Eddie can look at the words printed on the page and at Mark’s perfect penmanship and know that he isn’t alone.

This urge to be kind to a relative stranger is unfamiliar and disconcerting, as if he’s discovered in himself a hunger for raw meat or an enthusiasm for vaudeville.

I’m not saying things happen for a reason—I hate that. I’m saying that things happen. And it doesn’t have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide.”

That strangeness is something he’ll have to carry with him and something he’ll have to carry alone.

He feels like every part of him is wrapped around Eddie, like they’re tangled up in something dangerous and lovely and terribly, terribly precious.

It’s slow and often seems pointless. It’s beautiful, when it isn’t a mess. There’s a vast ocean of mercy for mistakes: getting hits half the time is nothing short of a miracle, and even the best fielders are expected to have errors. The inevitability of failure is built into the game.

It had felt so real it was nearly tangible, taking up actual space in his chest. He hadn’t known then that it would grow, that it would put down roots and fill up all the spaces inside him, fusing with flesh and bone until there wasn’t any way to separate it from the rest of him.

They fit together so well, and they’re just familiar enough with one another’s bodies for an embrace to feel like belonging.

When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.

“Baseball is not a game that makes sense, my friend,” Ardolino says after the game, clapping him on the shoulder. “It has never made sense, and it never will.”

But there’s nothing natural or peaceful about hitting a projectile that’s coming at you at nearly a hundred miles an hour. There’s a violence that baseball, at its best, disguises in a way that other sports leave out in the open. Baseball has a way of looking like fun even when it’s grueling. Eddie thinks that he had to get to the root of the ugliness in order to play the game again. He had to see it for what it is.

“I think I like making people happy,” Eddie says, and it’s probably something he ought to have figured out years ago, not just as the words leave his mouth. It could be a stadium full of fans, or a city full of people who need someone to root for, or it could just be the man standing next to him, and maybe that’s enough.

“I love you,” Eddie says without really pulling away, so the words are half swallowed by Mark’s mouth. “You’re a nightmare,” Mark returns, in precisely the same tone of voice.

A current of anger runs through the article, weaving it together—Connie Newbold’s anger at the men who told her she should let someone else run her team, Tony Ardolino’s anger at the bigots who make his teammates’ lives harder, and Eddie’s simmering anger at himself.

Now he knows who he is and what he wants, and he knows exactly how high a price he’s willing to pay for those things. He’s tired and he’s angry, and his contentment is something heavy and sharp, a prize that he fought for.

They both know you can be happy and afraid all at once; maybe that’s easier to do when you aren’t alone.

“The thing about writing is that in order to produce something anybody will be interested in reading, you have to be interested in writing it, and I wasn’t interested in anything at all for a while there.”

He knows you can’t be a decent writer if you use kid gloves, but he thinks you can be both honest and generous, and he also thinks this isn’t something he would have been capable of two years ago.

“I love you.” He kisses Eddie then, because otherwise that phrase is going to linger in the air, true but somehow inadequate. He has a professional aversion to phrases that refuse to get the job done. “I’m going to keep loving you,” Mark says, and that’s much better.