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1 - She’s sitting behind home plate: the ticket had been a belated graduation gift from her senior project advisor, for a job well done and for saving his ornithology club.
When the sky goes dark and the rogue umpire turns on Joshua Butt—half-crouched behind the plate not twenty feet in front of her, catcher’s mask in hand—she feels it like a swift-moving thunderstorm: the smell of ozone, heavy and damp in the air; a barometric change measured with her knees and phantom feet; a brilliant burst of vengeful fire; and then Joshua’s gone, leaving nothing but leaden silence.
Nobody looks away.
2 - Their glove is on the ground, still smoking. Gita moves fast without thinking about it, scrambling over the low wall separating the fans from the field, eyes on the blackened leather.
Rivers Rosa, on the mound, glares. Gita turns to the umpire, whose eyes glow with a similar fiery hatred Gita knows she can’t do anything about.
She flips it the bird.
Over the deafening silence of the crowd, she can hear it in the back of her mind: a quiet static and the sound of a fire alarm. The voices of people who need help, asking for her.
Chicago.
3 - Chicago sings to her with birds in the rafters and the smell of snow on the wind and the feeling of Joshua Butt’s bat in her hand, perfectly weighted, just the right size. There’s a three, hand-engraved in the knob.
“You’ll do fine.” Isaac Johnson. He’s taller than the pictures make him look. “You played before?”
She did, when she was a kid. It’s not the same, but it is, in the ways that matter: clay infield, sunny blue sky. She squares her shoulders and stares Isaac in the eye—has to tilt her head back to do it.
He nods.
4 - The team is silent as they file off the field. Declan Suzanne, shaky and exhausted, has his arm slung around Baby Triumphant’s shoulders; Baby pointedly ignores her, their face set in the hard lines of a soldier too long at war, haggard and grim.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks Rivers Rosa. When she was eight she got a sticker of Rivers on her homework, with a thumbs up and the words Great job, ace! Nobody’d realized the Siesta wasn’t going to end for a long, long time.
Rivers doesn’t look at her. “Shut the fuck up.”
5 - Later, after the game, her mom calls her to say how proud she is of her, how fearless she’d been, how brave. Her mom says that she’s always welcome to come home on siesta, for dinner and celebration, but she understands if Gita can’t.
Her right hand is still locked around Joshua Butt’s bat; it’s heavy, but she can’t set it down. She doesn’t feel proud, fearless, brave. It was just: what needed doing. A dreadful, beautiful burden, same as it ever was, weighing solemn-sad on her shoulders, a thousand pounds of feathers.
Gita clears her throat, and doesn’t reply.
6 - It’d been her parents’ tradition to go to at least one Blaseball game every year. Her father liked to tell a story: he caught the home run Declan Suzanne hit in the Season Five Championships with a popcorn bucket. He had it signed, and put it in her crib when she was born, so she could love the game the same way he did.
In lieu of calling her himself, he sends her a box of his old Firefighters memorabilia: jersey, hat, posters of the team. The ball is there, too, with one signature penned in careful cursive: Joshua Butt.
7 - Nobody talks about it. Declan, determined to make up for his poor performance and lock-jawed silent, goes On Shift and doesn’t come off. Lou and Rivers fight like tomcats in the kitchen when they think nobody can hear. Wesley disappears for hours on end and comes back with fishbone trophies, still bloody, teeth bared.
Nobody handles the paperwork piling up on the kitchen table, or the hundreds of letters from people all around the city collected in paper snowdrifts. At midnight, when everyone else is presumably asleep, Gita wheels herself to the table, picks up her pen, and starts writing.
8 - Rivers comes into the kitchen at five in the morning, carefully combing out her damp curls, and does a double-take. “Newbie. You know you don’t have to do that, right?”
Gita looks down at the thank-you letter she’d just finished and shrugs, discreetly wiping her eye with the back of her hand. “Seemed like the right thing to do,” she says. It’s a bit like penance, she thinks; thank-you letters hand-written apologies for not being Joshua Butt.
“Yeah,” Rivers says, sounding surprised. The Firefighters had visited Gita’s elementary school when she was eleven. “Yeah. I get that. Want some help?”
9 - It’s not acceptance, not really. But the Firefighters filter in, one by one, and join her at the table, picking up condolence cards and reading them aloud. Most thank Joshua for their tenure as a Firefighter, for their contributions to science, for their smile, unfaltering in the harshest of Chicago’s winds.
Gita knows she doesn’t belong here; she’s not the person the Firefighters expect to see when they turn to look at her. But Isaac puts a hand on her shoulder when he hands her coffee, and Rivers hands her a tissue, silently, when Gita starts to cry in earnest.
10 - It’s Isaac who stays behind while the rest of the team carts the letters off to be mailed out again.
“You want to help?” Isaac says.
“Yeah, of course.”
Isaac smiles, ever so slightly. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re a Firefighter. Of course you want to help. Lemme give you some advice?”
Gita swallows, looks up at Isaac. When she was twelve her father went on strike; during the strike he’d taken a selfie with Isaac Johnson, and he doesn’t look a day older. “Yeah?”
“Be only yourself, Gita,” Isaac says. “And keep your chin up. You’re already doing so well.”
11 - There’s her name carefully stenciled on one of the Fire House’s home lockers; there’s her name on the back of a jersey like she’d secretly dreamed; there’s her name on the chore list and on the shift schedule and emblazoned across the front of a bunker jacket that fits like a second skin.
There’s Joshua’s mitt, and Joshua’s bats, and Joshua’s careful handwriting in the administrative binder that nobody’s touched yet, and the ball signed by Joshua safe in her new room.
Gita listens to the crackle of the Dispatch and thinks: it’s not mine yet. But it could be.
12 - Play must continue.
Clay infield, sunny blue sky. It’s bitterly cold, frost glittering on the outfield grass; breaths puff into the air in faint white curls. Autumn is winter mourning summer, her dad used to say, and maybe the cold that seeps into their bones is the way Chicago mourns the loss of her third baseman.
I’m not Joshua, Gita thinks.
I know, say the birds that nest in the rafters; I know, say the people in the stands; I KNOW, says Chicago, AND I LOVE YOU ANYWAY.
Gita takes a deep, shaky breath, and her place at third base.