My Life as a Diamond Read online

  Text copyright © 2018 Jenny Manzer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Manzer, Jenny, author My life as a diamond / Jenny Manzer.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1831-6 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1832-3 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1833-0 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8626.A6927M9 2018 jC813'.6 C2017-907670-1

  C2017-907671-X

  First published in the United States, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933731

  Summary: Talented baseball player Caspar Cadman has a great arm and a big secret. He used to live life as a girl called Cassandra.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Tanya Trafford

  Cover design by Julie McLaughlin and Teresa Bubela

  Cover artwork by Julie McLaughlin

  Author photo by Helene Cyr

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  21 20 19 18 • 4 3 2 1

  Orca Book Publishers is proud of the hard work our authors do and of the important stories they create. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or did not check it out from a library provider, then the author has not received royalties for this book. The ebook you are reading is licensed for single use only and may not be copied, printed, resold or given away. If you are interested in using this book in a classroom setting, we have digital subscriptions that feature multi user, simultaneous access to our books that are easy for your students to read. For more information, please contact [email protected].

  http://ivaluecanadianstories.ca/

  For my sister, Patricia Kathryn Manzer (1967–2017), beloved aunt and dedicated reader.

  And for all the kids like Caz, who are brave enough to be their true selves.

  See you at the ballpark.

  Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

  —George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr.

  If everyone had to be perfect all the time, nothing would ever get done.

  —Coach Vij

  Contents

  The Tryout

  First Inning

  Second Inning

  Third Inning

  Rain Delay

  Fourth Inning

  Fifth Inning

  Sixth Inning

  Seventh Inning

  Timeout

  Mound Visit

  Put Me In, Coach

  Eighth Inning

  Ninth Inning

  Acknowledgments

  An Excerpt from “Kings of the Court”

  One. Game Face

  It all started with a haircut. A week before my tenth birthday, I came from home from school and told my mom I wanted my hair to be cut—like, now. My hair suddenly felt like this heavy, weighted thing, not right on my head at all. I always wore it in a single braid, and it kept thump-thumping me on the back when I ran, like someone tapping me on the shoulder.

  “You have baseball practice,” my mom said. I always had baseball practice. I was on two baseball teams—one for regular kids and the other for players who were really good. I don’t mean to brag, but it’s the truth. Even when I was five years old, I could throw a ball almost to the end of our street.

  “We can make time,” I said. “It won’t take long.”

  She must have known by my tone that I was serious, because she agreed, and we drove to The Chop Shop at the mall. My hands were trembling a little bit, the way they did when I practiced pitching and lost track of time. But some days you just know something.

  The Chop Shop was one of those cheapo hair places, but it had special seats for kids—red race cars for boys and a splashy pink for girls.

  “Hi, Cassandra,” said Elena. She had been cutting my hair since I was three. There is a photo in our family album of me having my first real haircut with her. She’s dabbing my nose with a big brush that sweeps away the hair, and I am laughing.

  This day, though, I was not laughing. I sat down in one of the regular black chairs for adults before she could ask which kids’ seat I wanted.

  “Just here for a trim?” she asked, taking out the elastic band from my braid. She raked her fingers through my long brown hair. The salon smelled of the citrus shampoo I usually enjoy having lathered into my hair. But there was no time for that. I remember thinking, This is it.

  “No,” I said. “I’d like to cut it all off.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Short and sassy? Like short hair, don’t care?” she asked, glancing at my mom in the mirror.

  Short hair, don’t care was what all the celebrities tweeted when they chopped off their hair. Even I knew that. My mom held her purse in front of her chest. She looked as if she were preparing to be hit by a wild pitch.

  “I do care. I want it short,” I said and crossed my arms. I was already wearing my baseball uniform. Red and white. Number 3—my lucky number.

  “Okay, you’re the boss. I’ll just take a few inches off to start, in case you change your mind,” said Elena.

  I heard the scissors slowly close over a chunk of my hair, and the first piece fell to the floor. Elena started working faster then, whistling under her breath, her fingers deft with the scissors.

  “Still good?” asked Elena, stopping to look at me in the mirror. She smiled. She had round cheeks with lots of pink rouge, and shiny red-blond hair that she sometimes wore curly and sometimes wore flat, as if she’d ironed it. I’d always liked Elena. She often wanted details about my latest baseball game.

  “Keep cutting, please,” I said.

  My mom’s eyes got bigger as more and more of my hair covered the floor tiles. The growing pile reminded me of the grass trimmings left behind after my parents cut the lawn.

  “Cassie, are you sure?” Elena asked. “Mrs. Cadman, is this okay?”

  I was so sure. I was like Mike Trout soaring up in the outfield to make one of those amazing airborne catches and stop a home run. It was time to do something. Take a jump.

  I guess I’d never thought about the other player, the one denied the run. The one who shuffles back to the dugout. The one who is disappointed because they imagined it would turn out differently. I hadn’t thought about my mom.

  “Well, it’s her hair,” said my mom in a tiny voice, like she couldn’t get enough air.

  When Elena was done I ran my hand over my hair. It was cut to just below my ears, but not buzzed or spiky, so it felt smooth and cool. I ran my fingers along the bare skin on the back of my neck. My head felt light and free. My mom picked up a piece of my hair from the salon floor and tucked it into her purse. Our eyes met in the mirror, but we didn’t say anything. She went over to the counter where Elena was ringing up the cost of the haircut. Elena was singing along under her breath to the pop music piped in, cheerful as ever, like it was no big deal that I’d just had all my hair shorn off. Lots of ball players wear their hair long, flowing down past their helmets. A few have bald or shaved heads, like Albert Pujols or Adrián Beltré. But t
hey all have their own style. Now I had mine.

  In the car on the way to practice, I knew I had something else to say.

  “Mom,” I said, “I’d like you to call me Caz, like my baseball nickname.”

  “Cassie, this has gone far enough. You’re my daughter, and I named you Cassandra. Your friends can call you Caz, but I’ll call you Cassie.”

  “Cassie is a girl’s name, Mom. I don’t want a girl’s name.”

  My mom darted into a spot at the ballpark, crookedly, her hands gripping the steering wheel. She cranked up the parking brake.

  “Cassie, you are a girl.” She stared at me, looking confused, as if fog were steaming a window between us and she couldn’t quite see me. My mom has soft brown eyes and shoulder-length hair the same shade as mine. She wears one little swipe of lipstick, and that’s it.

  “Mom,” I said, my breath heaving out and making a whooshing sound like a fastball past your ear. “I don’t think I am a girl.”

  And not long after that almost everything changed. I decided my new full name would be Caspar. My dad got a new job flying planes for an American company. We moved from our house in Toronto all the way to Washington State, a place with lots of rain and hardly any snow. I left my own baseball team, the Leslieville Lightning. I left my favorite major league team, the Toronto Blue Jays. My dad let me see one last game at Rogers Centre, and I cried when the players came out—and even for ACE, the Blue Jays’ mascot, with his number 00.

  That was what happened to me when we moved. My dial was set back to 00. We went thousands of miles away, where nobody knew us. And only my mom, my dad, my dog and I knew I had ever been called Cassandra.

  The Tryout

  There were things I missed about home. I missed my best friend, Matt. I missed some of the boys on my house-league team, the Lightning—but not all of them. Definitely not all of them. I missed the ballpark where I’d played since I was four, starting with T-ball. I moved on to baseball when I was five, joining a group of seven-year-olds. I’d worked my way up to play on the Red Devils, an all-star team. They named a hot dog (“The Devil Dog”) at my local ballpark after the Red Devils, because we were that good. I was the only girl on the team, but everyone was cool with it because of my arm. That girl’s got some arm, they always said. The hot dog was epic. There was nothing better than eating one after winning a game. So there were good memories, as well as the bad. We moved to our new house in Redburn at the end of June, just after school ended, making a clean break, my mom said.

  “Mom,” I said. “There’s nothing to doooo.” She was busy unwrapping dishes, all that stuff we didn’t use a lot, like the fancy bowls and plates my parents got as wedding presents.

  “You can help me unpack.”

  “That’s boring.”

  “Yes, it is, Caz,” she agreed, frowning. My dad was working. At least he just did short little hops, not overnight flights. He’d be home for dinner.

  She seemed to be getting used to my new name. Back home we’d gone to see a therapist named Miss Linda. We’d talked all about “comfort zones” and “next steps.” I had always preferred to wear Adidas pants and hoodies and board shorts, and so I’d officially packed away the sundresses and barrettes for good. Mom had helped me stuff everything into a giant garbage bag, and then we’d dropped it off at the Salvation Army. Sometimes people have to do brave things.

  Summers were cooler in Washington State than at home in Ontario. I was also still getting used to the green money. I worried that one day I would accidentally give someone twenty bucks for a bag of chips.

  The weather was cool, and it was spitting rain. The TV newscasters were calling it “Junuary.” I looked up the forecasts on the Internet, and at home it was nothing but sunbursts. But I didn’t really want to go back, not after what had happened.

  I trudged downstairs to our rec room. My dad had promised he’d get us a Ping-Pong table for the new house, and a foosball table too. I could invite my friends over, he said. If I ever made any friends. I turned on the TV to watch a DVD of the Blue Jays in the playoffs and plunked myself onto the couch, pulling my cap down on my head and folding my arms over my chest. What was the point of anything without baseball?

  “Caspar, no,” my mom called from the kitchen.

  “No, what?” I asked. She was probably going to tell me to get outside. We’d been in Redburn for five days. I’d stayed inside almost the whole time, like some strange person on one of those reality TV shows.

  “No more TV. Out,” she said. “Take J.R. for a walk. Go find the park. It’s close, and it’s got a ball diamond. I can’t believe you haven’t checked it out yet.”

  J.R. eyed me. He looked kind of sad himself, the way golden retrievers can. He was no longer a puppy, even though he acted like it. The initials were short for Jackie Robinson, the great baseball player. My dad had told me all about him. J.R. seemed confused that we had moved. I guess all the smells were different.

  “You want go out, buddy?”

  He did. He trotted to the front door, his fluffy tail dusting the furniture as he went.

  “Caz,” my mom said as she poured herself, like, her eighteenth cup of coffee. “If you meet people in the neighborhood, say hello.”

  “I will, I will,” I muttered. J.R. looked so happy to go out that I nearly felt happy too. I’d be just another boy in the neighborhood. A boy with a secret. But maybe all boys had secrets.

  The rain had let up a bit, and sun tried to burn through the gray beard of clouds. Redburn was a suburb of SeaTac, which was a suburb of Seattle. We were in a sub-suburb. We’d moved here because Redburn was a small, friendly place, my mom said, close to my dad’s job at the airport. Wikipedia had told me that Redburn has a population of sixteen thousand. It said nothing about baseball teams.

  J.R. and I walked for a couple of blocks, past all the parked minivans and lawns as green as billiard tables, and I watched my sneakers move forward. When we lived in Toronto, I never spent much time at home—or alone—because I was usually at practice or at school. Since I had no friends to play catch with in Redburn, I’d been throwing a baseball against my rebounder net, over and over. It helped settle my busy brain.

  J.R. and I headed to the local park, following my mom’s instructions. J.R. acted like he was a puppy again, bouncing along and smelling the flowering bushes. We’d had J.R. for most of my life. My mom used to have a framed photo of me from kindergarten on her dresser. I was wearing a pink dress, my arms wrapped around J.R., who was about a year old. That might have been the last time I wore pink—or a dress, for that matter. Not without a fight anyway. When we unpacked in Redburn, I asked her to put the picture away. I didn’t want to see old photos from before.

  I sat down on a bench, regretting that I hadn’t brought my glove. My hand felt bare without it. I wished my dad would come home to play with me. I stood up to boot a baguette lying on the ground out of the reach of J.R., who would have downed it in a second. He was getting a bit chunky, Mom said. Someone must have dropped it when they were having a picnic, because the trash can was full of paper plates and empty wrappers.

  J.R. sniffed around the bench while I stared at the empty ball diamond. Someone had weeded it. It was ready to go. I wondered when summer ball started. Tryouts were already under way back home in Toronto.

  “You play?” I heard a voice say. The voice belonged to a boy. He looked about my age, but he was a bit shorter. He had a sprinkling of freckles on his nose and wore a navy-and-teal Seattle Mariners cap.

  I felt my Jays cap. I owned two, but today I was wearing my favorite—it had mesh at the back to keep your head cool. Not that you needed it in this kind of summer weather.

  “Yeah, I play,” I said. Oh, I was supposed to say hello, I remembered. I couldn’t tell if he was nice or not. I wished people just came with signs that told you whether they were friend or foe, because I really needed a friend.

  “I’m Hank Ottenburg.” Then he kind of fake coughed into his hand while muttering some
thing.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’m the best hitter there is around here.”

  “Re-ally?” I asked. “And what position do you play?”

  “I do it all, but I’m known as a hitter. Actually, I’m known as The Hitman.”

  “Hank the Hitman.” I tested it out, trying not to laugh. The last thing I needed was to earn an enemy my first day out. I had a definite feeling Hank was making things up as he went along.

  “You can call me Slugger,” he said.

  “I think I’ll call you Hank,” I said. “I’m Caspar Cadman. You can call me Caz. You know, like Yaz.” Yaz was the nickname of Carl Yastrzemski. When you’re as good as Yaz, you become the answer to a trivia question. Answer: Legendary left fielder for Boston Red Sox. Aka “Captain Carl.” Greatness personified.

  “Caz, hand me that baguette.” Hank squinted, even though the sun was thin and lemonade pale.

  “You hungry?” I asked. I wasn’t sure about Hank yet. Poor J.R. thought I was going to throw the bread for him, like a stick. A string of drool streamed out the side of his mouth.

  “Just do it,” Hank said.

  “That sounds familiar,” I said, but Hank didn’t laugh. I tossed him the baguette, which was now coated with dirt. Who brings a baguette to a ballpark anyway? Ballparks are for hot dogs. What kind of place was this?

  “Now throw a rock at me,” said Hank, holding the baguette like a bat.

  “What?”

  “Not at me, but like a pitch.”

  I picked up a smooth stone from the ground and lobbed it underhand at Hank. He swung at it, lips pursed in concentration. He missed it. He wasn’t even close. J.R.’s ears perked up, his shiny eyes fixed on the bread.

  “See that?” Hank said.

  “See what? You missed it.”

  “But my cut, man, my swing.”

  “Maybe they should call you Swinger Hank then,” I suggested. This kid was weird, going all braggy-pants when he really couldn’t hit.