You & Me, Truthfully

Carter Knows Something About Baseball

Carter Knows Something About Baseball

For the entire day, I was moping around school, daydreaming through my classes, and rudely dismissing my friends because my mind was too consumed with the thought of Carter. It was only when lunchtime began that I realized I shouldn't be letting this incident bring me down. As far as I was concerned, Carter didn't know that I knew, so there wasn't any reason to be sad about something I didn't know about. If Carter wanted help, he would've asked for it, so calm down, Kyle.

"Ay, Montgomery!" I heard one of my best friends, Jesse, holler from across the cafeteria. I had to divert from my routine walk to our usual table to meet up with him near the corner of the room. Before I could ask why we weren't sitting at our usual spot, he said, "Couple freshmen took our table."

"I don't know why you didn't just force them to leave," Evan, my other best friend inserted. He smacked Jesse at the back of his head, and rolled his eyes rather rudely.

"They're girls, Ev," Jesse stressed as though it should've been obvious. "You can't just be a dick to girls."

"Why? You do it all the time," Evan countered.

Jesse's nose crinkled in irritation just before he threw a solid punch at his friend's shoulder. That back-and-forth exchanges continued until Jesse realized that I wasn't joining in on the fun. His cure-all remedy was to nudge me hard enough to throw me off my chair. "Kyle, what's with the long face?"

"What?" I attempted a chuckle to get my friends off my back as I shot to my feet again. "What long face?"

"That one." He poked my cheek.

"Nothing. I'm just thinking about how we're gonna cream Stone Ridge tonight." It was a lie, a horrible one at that, but my friends had no reason to question me.

"Hell yeah!" Evan cheered in which Jesse went along to trash talk Stone Ridge's baseball team; meanwhile, I checked out of the conversation and scanned the cafeteria, instead. I didn't know what I was looking for, although it seemed to me that I might have been looking for Carter. My subconscious had the sudden urge to protect the boy from any further danger, but it was too late for that.

And fulfilling my wishes, my eyes landed on a table in the far corner of the room, away from everyone else, that was completely vacant aside from one boy dressed in a blue flannel. He was sitting by himself and reading of book of all things. I found myself wondering what he was reading and other things like what kind of books he was into, what music did he listen to, what did he like to do as a hobby? Then my mind ventured into the darker thoughts like, who was that man in the alley, why was he hurting him, why didn't Carter do anything about it—why didn't I do anything about it?

I was pulled out of my thoughts when Jesse waved a hand in front of my face. "Seriously, dude, what the hell are you looking at?" he asked in a slightly irritated voice.

I sighed. "That guy over there, Carter, he's new and he's sitting by himself."

Jesse didn't even bother to look at the boy I was referring to; he continued to stare at me with those intense green eyes of his. "So?"

"We should invite him to sit with us."

Jesse's eyes sparked with something I didn't recognize, and then he scoffed in utter disbelief. "Man, it must suck to be the most loved guy in school. You're too nice, Kyle. Sometimes, you need to grow some balls and accept that high school is about a social hierarchy. People like you and me are at the top of the pyramid, people like him are at the bottom. We don't interact."