Butterscotch -42- Cupcake (Patreon)

Rory held up at second after a run-scoring single advanced him—with his lack of speed, it wasn’t worth trying for third. The Wave Riders initiated a pitcher change because their guy’s confidence was shot. The girls and I hugged each other and squealed.

I overheard the coaches near the Titan’s bench discussing whether to pull Rory for a pinch runner. But if they did that, he couldn’t pitch the bottom of the eleventh. And they’d need to replace the next batter, too, who was their catcher—to make it worth pulling Rory, they needed a better bat at the plate. Finally, they decided to keep a winning team together and see what happened.

The catcher popped out, back to the new pitcher, and the home team came in to take their last at bat, unless they could tie it again or, better, actually win it.

Rory sent them down in order with two more strikeouts and a caught foul to end the game. Titans win.

The teams did the ritual where the losers walk past the winners on their way to the showers, giving fist bumps and nods and smiles. The locker rooms under the stands did have showers, apparently, but most of the players didn’t even use the lockers but just headed to their own cars to go home.

The Titans’ girls, including me, hugged each other, traded phone numbers, talked about our guys and one by one left the stands to go home with someone. I kept anxiously watching the locker room doors for Rory until it was just Jordan and I, wandering down to the ladies’ rest room.

“Stop stressing, Cupcake,” Jordan told me, smiling. “Hollywood has not forgotten you. As if.” She stood in front of a mirror, touching up her eye makeup.

“I know, I know,” I said. “But last month I was just a high school student. Rory’s kind of…a big thing in my life now.”

“Huh?”

“Well, he’s good looking, um, generous, his family is rich, and uh, he’s nice. Really nice to me.”

Jordan’s grin got wider. “Kinda bowled you over, huh?”

“Uh, yeah. To be honest, I haven’t dated as much in the last year of school as I have this weekend.”

She turned to look at me. “I find that hard to believe. A cutie-pie like you?”

I giggled and took refuge in the large end stall where I could remove my cover-up. I don’t know why I was misleading Jordan by letting her think—well, I didn’t know exactly what she thought, but she didn’t know I’d been living as a boy two days ago. I guess I got a kick out of everyone thinking I’d always been a girl.

“This is all a tremendous disguise,” I said through the stall door while pulling the cover-up dress off over my head. “I’m really a huge geek, and—and all my guy friends in school were even bigger nerds than me.”

“Computer geeks? Any of them named Bill Gates?”

“Worse, gamer geeks,” I said, trying to keep the dress from snagging on my tiara and pulling my fall loose. “No more useless sort. Even radio geeks can be helpful in a disaster.”

She laughed at that.

Once the dress was off, I rolled it carefully to stow in my satchel-sized purse. The thin fabric rolled up small, and fit easily in my bag. Mom had shown me this trick, rolled fabric wrinkles less than folded stuff. I left the stall and joined Jordan at the mirror, assessing damage to my hair and makeup.

“You were wearing that under your cover-up?” she laughed. “Rory taking you dancing?”

I felt my heart flip like a salmon on a fish ladder. “That’d be nice,” I said, trying to maintain cool. I got out my makeup kit and added some drama to my eyes.

Jordan started laughing again.

“What?” I asked.

She tapped me on top of my head. My tiara. “You really are a princess, aren’t you?”

“Toldja,” I said, smugly.

While we were still laughing, we heard Rory’s voice from the door. “Babe? You in there?”

Both Jordan and I called out, “Yes!” Then burst into giggles. Well, I giggled, Jordan laughed like a big girl.

I started jamming stuff back into my purse. “Be right out,” I called.

“No hurry, Babe,” said Rory. “I’m just here chilling with your friend Andie.”

I looked at Jordan and she looked back, lifting one eyebrow. I can’t do that so I knew both of mine were up. I grabbed my stuff and dashed out the door to find Rory saying goodbye to Andie and another Titans player.

“Hey, Princess, wow!” he said to me. “I like the new dress. I can’t believe you got changed that fast.” He bent over to put his face in range and I stood as tall as I could for a kiss.

“You rat,” I whispered. “You didn’t say Andie was out here with her boyfriend.”

“Well, that wouldn’t have made you jealous, huh?” he said. His short hair was brushed up with product into spikes and he’d changed from his gray baseball uniform into black pants, leather sneaks with no socks, and a pale blue, short-sleeved guayabera-styled shirt. The fabric of the shirt was translucent and he looked hot and hunky in it.

I leaned against him. “Double rat,” I said. “I’ll get you for that.”

He laughed. “Where’s your big hat? The sun is still up. You need some new freckles?” He was right, it was barely five p.m.—I’d left my hat in the bathroom stall and had to run back in to get it.

“I’ll wait out here,” he said, unnecessarily. “Oh, hey, Jordan.”

But I heard her just laugh at him as I hurried back out.

We did some more smooching in the shade of the stands before heading out to where the truck was parked. “I thought we’d eat nearby and wait for traffic to clear some before heading toward home.”

“Okay with me,” I agreed as I waited for him to unlock the truck and help me into the over-tall seat. I was going to have to stay conscious of wearing such a short skirt but the looks my legs were getting from Rory were worth it. And he did keep glancing at me.

I put the big hat on the back seat, no risk from the sun since all the windows in the truck were heavily tinted, and the hat interfered with my and Rory’s views. I didn’t know any of the roads around here and could enjoy being totally lost.

“What kind of food you want?” Rory asked. “We had Italian last night, so seafood?”

“What do they have around here that we can’t get at home?” I asked. “Wasn’t there something said about Joe’s?” Joe’s Crab Shack, I meant, a trendy seafood bistro.

He looked thoughtful for a moment. “We’ve got a Joe’s closer than Newport back home,” he said. “How about Santa Rosa-style barbecue?”

Santa Rosa was a town in central California, about halfway to San Francisco. “What’s that? It’s not messy like the rib place on Centenella, is it?”

He shook his head. “Nah. You add sauces at the table but the meat is slow-cooked over red oak in a big brick oven. That’s the name of the place, Brick Oven Barbecue. No place like it in L.A.”

“Okay,” I said happily. Eating crab it had occurred to me was always messy and I didn’t want anything on my new dress. “What makes it Santa Rosa style?” I asked.

“The red oak fire and what they barbecue. Santa Rosa was settled by Portuguese, so they always have a few linguiça sausages and it’s real cattle country, so they do brisket and tri-tip, but they have pork and chicken, too. And homemade pies.”

“Sounds good.”

We got there with a short trip down Pacific Coast Highway, then through side streets in a town I never heard of before. The place turned out to be a tiny upscale diner in a strip mall with only three businesses; the barbecue was wedged between a storefront gym and one of those industrial-grade optometry shops.

“How did you find this place?” I marveled as Rory helped me down from the truck.

“Guy at school lives nearby,” he said. By school he meant UCLA where he had a scholarship to play baseball. “You want your hat?”

I shook my head, “We’re going to be inside, I don’t need it and I don’t want to forget and leave it on a table somewhere.”

He grinned as he reached into the truck and retrieved my purse. “Yeah, you are pretty forgetful,” he said without a trace of humor in his voice.

I hmphed at him then let him help me up a steep flight of stairs from the parking lot to the sidewalk. The restaurant looked even smaller than it had from the street but there were tables available and we were soon seated.

The waitress seemed a bit giggly, but she couldn’t have been much older than me with that adolescent ‘I’m trying to find myself’ vibe. Like I had room to talk about that.

Rory didn’t even look at the menu. “I’ll have the three-choice combo plate, brisket, linguiça and pulled pork and she’ll have the two-choice combo plate, chicken and tri-tip. Uh—salad with blue cheese, and corn on the cob for sides. Water to drink.” He looked at me to see if I objected to anything but I didn’t. The waitress turned to go, giggling for some reason.

“This way we can sample all of their entrees,” he explained. “No bread unless you ask for it, did you want bread?”

I shook my head, turning to watch the waitress talking with someone behind the counter. She kept looking back in our direction, and it took a moment for me to realize, she was looking at me, not my boyfriend. What the heck? A teenage American girl who was not mesmerized by a hunk like my Rory?

“What—?” he said at just about that time and I turned my head back to see three kids approaching our table. One of them had a pen and a notebook ready. They looked like high school kids, younger than me.

The nerdiest looking boy spoke first, “Uh—Miss Bock,” he said. “It just made the news today that you’re going to be playing Jean Grey in Marvel’s reboot of the X-Men and I want to say, I think you’re going to be terrific in the role!” The second boy tried to hand me the notebook and pen, and the girl made a noise that was half giggle and half asthmatic whistle.

Shit. They were making sort of the same mistake Armand made on Melrose. I must really look like this Heather Bock person! I didn’t know what to think about that!

My life is like a soap opera, sometimes. A story that’s not incomplete so much as it is neverending. Heather Bock? Jean Grey? It’s confusing when someone mistakes me for someone else, but I think I like being me.