The Prince of Fenway Park Read online

  The Prince of Fenway Park

  Julianna Baggott

  This book is dedicated to Red Sox Nation—

  its New Englanders and nomads—

  especially the fans dearest to my heart:

  Phoebe, Finn, Theo, Otis, Dave, Steven L.,

  and Alyson P., the Baggotts and Trossets

  of Massachusetts, the Gallatis of Delaware,

  the Sobels of NYC, the ever-insightful

  Carolyn Hector, Greg “The Closer”

  Ferguson, and Stearnsy-boy, who now has

  no choice but to be a true fan.

  And to the heroic 2004 Red Sox team

  and the heroic players in this book.

  (And, yes, for that Theo, too, of course.)

  Faithfully yours,

  J.B.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  The Future Condo Prince of Baltimore

  Chapter Two

  The Dusty, Golden Box

  Chapter Three

  The Underlife of Fenway Park

  Chapter Four

  Home, of Course!

  Chapter Five

  Under the Pitcher’s Mound

  Chapter Six

  The First Birthday Gift

  Chapter Seven

  The Curse

  Chapter Eight

  The Message Inside of the Curse

  Chapter Nine

  Auntie Gormley Dreams Her Soul Elsewhere

  Chapter Ten

  Oh, the Cursed Creatures!

  Chapter Eleven

  The Pooka and the Banshee

  Chapter Twelve

  The Birthday Party—More Gifts

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Past

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Door to the Past

  Chapter Fifteen

  Meeting the Pooka—Face-to-Face, Eye to Glowing Eye

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Weasel Spy

  Chapter Seventeen

  Teams

  Chapter Eighteen

  A New Coded Message

  Chapter Nineteen

  A Race Through Time

  Chapter Twenty

  The Roster of Twelve-Year-Old Greats

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Recruiting

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Lineup

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Auntie Fedelma’s Team

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Game Between the Greats

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Broken

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Julianna Baggott

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  There was a curse.

  It was reversed.

  And this is the boy

  who did it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Future Condo Prince of Baltimore

  THE BOY WHO WOULD BREAK the Curse didn’t know that he was the boy who would break the Curse. He was just himself, Oscar, who, at this particular moment on this particular day, was watching his mother, who was standing beside her El Camino, caught in the dark exhaust fog at the end of the line of buses. The school day was over. It had been an awful day, the kind that is so awful that it blots out everything else. There was a bruise from a knuckle punch on Oscar’s back that still throbbed, and that hadn’t even been the worst of it.

  Oscar knew about the Curse, of course. It seemed as if everyone was well aware of the Curse that fall, especially in Boston. But what everyone didn’t know was that the Curse itself was so real and tangible that it could be held in someone’s hand. It existed in a dusty golden box. What everyone didn’t know was that the Curse was waiting for the boy who would break it.

  Meanwhile, here was Oscar, his mother waving to him from her spot by the El Camino. It was a wild, flapping wave that embarrassed him, and then she slipped into the driver’s seat and honked the horn. He was going to turn twelve the very next day, and so this meant he would go visit his father, who would be giving him one of his sad presents—something secondhand but made to look new: an old watch with a new, handmade wristband, a freshly washed Windbreaker with someone else’s initials penned onto the tag. His father’s presents always made Oscar feel terrible. He knew his father didn’t ever have much money, but still Oscar hated having to pretend how happy he was about old watches and Windbreakers. It made him feel like a fake.

  When Oscar opened the car door, he saw his suitcase wedged in between the front seat and the dash. It was an ancient suitcase—wheel-less and plaid, with a zipper and plastic handle. His mother had bought it at the Salvation Army the week before. He’d thought it was strange when she came home with it. He didn’t need a suitcase. He never went anywhere. He and his mother lived in a steamy apartment in Hingham Centre above Dependable Cleaners, where his mother worked. He ate at Atlantic Bagel & Deli & Coffee Co., got his hair trimmed at Hingham Square Barber Shop, traveled daily to Hingham Middle School. The farthest he’d ever gone was the forty-five-minute trip to visit with his father in Boston each Thursday at Pizzeria Uno near Fenway Park.

  “What’s with the suitcase?” Oscar asked, trying to position his legs around it.

  “You’re going to stay with your father, just for a month or two. It’ll all work out.” She put on the car’s blinker nonchalantly—as if this were a normal thing to say—and turned onto Main Street.

  But it wasn’t normal at all. Oscar had never spent the night at his father’s place—had never even seen it. His parents had been divorced for as long as he could remember. Oscar stared at the suitcase as if it were the real problem. The suitcase seemed all wrong. He wanted to tell her he didn’t like the idea of being shipped off and not told till the last minute—had his father actually agreed to this?—and that he was a little scared of the whole thing; but all that came out was a small complaint. “It’s an old man’s suitcase,” he said.

  His mother said, “Look. Nothing’s perfect. But let me explain something about love.”

  Oscar didn’t want to talk about love. He knew what she was going to go on about: Marty Glib, the Baltimore King of Condos. His mother had met him in an online chat room; and whenever she talked about him, she fiddled with the beads on her necklace. He’d come up on business a few times; and his mother had gone on dates with him, meeting in restaurants in Boston, so Oscar had never seen him. More importantly, Marty had never seen Oscar—did his mother arrange it that way on purpose?

  Oscar caught his reflection in the side mirror. His own face sometimes surprised him—the fullness of his lips, his dark eyes, his small nose, his freckles on his dark skin, his tight, black hair. Oscar wondered if his mother had told Marty everything about Oscar, if his mother—a pale woman with straight, reddish hair—had mentioned that she had a mixed-race child. Oscar’s parents had adopted him when he was a baby—a bald, creamy-colored baby. Oscar had always wondered if they’d really known that they’d adopted a mixed-race child or if it had sunk in slowly as Oscar grew up. He didn’t doubt that they loved him—his mother in a jittery way, his father with a distracted sincerity. He just wasn’t sure if they felt somehow tricked, and if they blamed him a little, as if he’d been the one to do the tricking. Now Oscar wondered if his mother was tricking Marty Glib, too.

  His mother had been different ever since meeting Marty Glib. Oscar’s mother was in love, and this was her excuse for lateness. Love made her dawdle in department stores. Love made her flighty. She’d promised to sign up Oscar for the Hingham Little League; but love made her miss the deadline, and so he’d missed the season. He went to the games, watching fro
m the sidelines. He could feel the running sensation in his legs, the stinging reverberation of the bat in his arms. But he could only watch. Oscar still fumed about it each time they passed Hersey Field on Thaxter Street, which was usually a couple times a day. In fact, on this awful day he was wearing his jersey from the summer before—ROCKETS was written on the front, TARZIA AND GILBERT TRASH, their sponsors, was written on the back. Oscar was a good baseball player, and without him the Rockets stumbled. The uniform shirt was a little tight now. He’d outgrown it and was picking at the frayed hem on the drive into Boston as his mother explained that love had made it necessary for her to spend a few months in Baltimore with Marty Glib, the Baltimore King of Condos.

  “I’m bringing that big framed picture of you and me on the water slide,” she said, “so he’ll get used to the idea of you being around.”

  Oscar wasn’t sure what this meant exactly. How could someone get used to him being around because there was a framed picture of him? Was this her way of telling Oscar that Marty would know he existed, know he was of color?

  Oscar’s parents never mentioned that he was half black. People stared a lot, trying to figure out how Oscar and his parents fit together. The bold ones would try to get an answer by saying things such as, “My, isn’t he handsome!” “What beautiful skin.” “What pretty brown eyes!” His mother always called this “fishing.” She’d say, “Why do they have to fish like that?”

  His mother always said the same thing to the fishers, right away. “Thank you. He’s adopted.” Oscar was tired of this answer, especially the way it seemed like a relief to his mother—she said it in an airy sigh. And Oscar always wondered if she was embarrassed that people would think that she was his birth mother, that she’d been with someone who looked more like Oscar, and here was the proof.

  Oscar’s father would just say, “Thank you,” or “He is a beaut, isn’t he?” And that was the end of that, which Oscar preferred.

  What didn’t help was that just this year it seemed as if the white kids he’d been friends with in elementary school didn’t have as much to say to him anymore, and there weren’t many black kids in Hingham Middle. Occasionally a Hispanic kid would ask him something in Spanish, assuming he spoke it. He’d just shrug. There were a few nice kids he wouldn’t have minded chumming around with, like Steven Lannum and Alyson Perry. But he wasn’t sure how to make friends. He felt kind of stuck in his life—trapped.

  The problem now was Drew Sizemore, a mean kid in Oscar’s class. He liked to pick fights, and just that afternoon he’d leaned forward in the line for gym and whispered in a quiet but menacing chant right behind Oscar’s head, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” The chant came from the Yankees fans. Toward the end of September, Pedro Martinez had said in a press conference after a 6–4 loss to the Yankees, “I just have to tip my hat to the Yankees and call them my daddy.” That wasn’t so bad in itself. Oscar understood what he’d meant; there was a certain humility about Pedro that he liked. But now the playoff series was on; and just that Monday the Yankees fans had started chanting “Who’s your daddy?” while Martinez was pitching. Drew Sizemore had hooked onto it and turned it on Oscar.

  Oscar hadn’t said anything. His father was Malachi Egg, who lived near Fenway Park. His father was someone who sat across from him in a pizza parlor, a man he didn’t really know very well. But Oscar knew that he wasn’t who Sizemore was asking about. Sizemore had seen Oscar’s mother. He knew she was white and that Oscar wasn’t, or at least not completely. He was asking about Oscar’s real daddy, who Oscar didn’t know. Oscar ignored him. Sizemore didn’t like to be ignored. He punched Oscar in the back with a knuckle punch.

  When Oscar had turned around, Drew shoved him. Oscar fell backward, knocking down Alyson Perry, who was a really nice girl with braces who wore her Girl Scout uniform to school sometimes. She knocked down Steven Lannum, a die-hard Sox fan, who was wearing a sweet new Pedro Martinez jersey. And Steve knocked down the next person, who knocked down the next—a domino effect—until all of the kids were sprawled on the floor.

  Coach O’Donnell had shouted at Oscar, called him forward, and said, “You’ve bought yourself a one-way ticket to the principal’s office.”

  Oscar had never been sent to the principal’s office before. Coach O’Donnell had filled out a form with Oscar’s name on it. He called the office through the intercom that was screwed to the gym wall and told them that Oscar was on his way.

  Once Oscar had rounded the first turn in the corridor, he unfolded the form. His name had been printed in messy letters at the top. Under COMMENTS Coach O’Donnell had written: Oscar Egg is a violent presence this afternoon, and he needed to be removed for the safety of the class. This stung. It wasn’t true. He hadn’t gotten violent. It had been Drew Sizemore’s fault, and he could feel the hot bruise on his back from Drew’s knuckle.

  The principal was away at a conference, the secretary told him. She pulled out his chart and thumbed through it on the counter. The phone rang; and when she went to answer it, Oscar glanced at his chart, all official and typed up: his homeroom number, his parents’ names, his address, his birth date. It was all the regular information. He almost looked away, but something at the bottom of the form caught his eye. There was a code for race, and the tidy letters were all lined up: Black. He’d never seen it written before. There was a spot for it on the MCAS, the standardized tests they had to take every year, and Oscar usually left it blank. The previous year he’d lightly marked both white and black and then smudged them on purpose, which seemed the most honest answer he could give. But here it was, decided for him. Black. He was black.

  Oscar hadn’t been sure what to do with that information. The secretary came back and told him to have a seat. He sat in the office the rest of the afternoon. When he got a hall pass to go to the bathroom, he looked at himself in the mirror. Oscar hadn’t only read about the Red Sox. He loved Jackie Robinson, too, and had read a bunch of books about him. Oscar wondered what Jackie—the first black ballplayer in the major leagues—would have done today on the way to gym class with Drew Sizemore chanting in his ear, knuckle punching him in the back. Oscar pulled his full lips into a tight line. He patted his hair. Why did his mother always keep it so short? Was she trying to hide something?

  Even though his parents never mentioned his background, he was always waiting for them to. And so all of his conversations with each of them—always separately—were strained and heavy with the weight of something that was always just about to be said but then never was.

  His mother took the stop-and-go route through Hingham and Cohasset and all the south shore towns along Route 3A. Fiddling with the air-conditioning vents at a red light alongside the ocean in Wollaston, she finally got to her point: “Your father doesn’t really know you’re staying with him. But you’ll ask. He can’t say no to you.” Oscar guessed that this meant she’d already asked and he’d said no to her. And because his mother already had Oscar’s suitcase packed and her time with Marty Glib planned out, it didn’t matter what Oscar’s father had said. He’d have to take Oscar home with him. Wouldn’t he?

  “What about school?” Oscar asked, trying to come up with a logical obstacle.

  “Your father will set you up in a new school, temporarily. This is all very temporary,” she said, waving her hand in the air as if brushing away the problem.

  “A new school?” Oscar said.

  “Well, not right away. You can get used to living with your father first. Maybe have a little vacation from school altogether.”

  Oscar liked this idea, but still he felt as if it was all too rushed. It wasn’t thought out. It didn’t seem like a real plan.

  “Did you quit your job?” he asked. The reason they lived in the apartment over Dependable Cleaners was because his mother worked there.

  “They said they can’t guarantee the job’ll be there when I get back. But maybe I won’t need it,” she said.

  “What about our stuff?” Oscar asked.
“I don’t have my books with me.”

  “The only one you ever have your nose in is that Red Sox book. Well, I’m sure you have it memorized by now,” she said, looking out the window, fiddling with her necklace.

  She was right. Oscar pretty much did have all of the stats and stories memorized. Not having his favorite book was the least of his problems. He was going to have to ask his father if he could live with him. His father made him feel uncomfortable. He was pale and had bony shoulders. He slouched. He always seemed to have a terrible cold and a hacking cough. He was downtrodden. The waitress never got his order right—and he never asked her to take it back. But he never ate the food, just pushed it around on his plate nervously. He always looked overheated, sweaty, as if he had a fever. He was blinky, and he flinched a lot. He looked lost a lot of the time, as if he was surprised to find himself where he was. And when he looked at Oscar, even if he was smiling, he looked so terribly sad that Oscar sometimes wanted to cry for him.

  When the subject of his father’s place came up, his father would tell him he was lucky that he’d never been there. “Dangerous. Filled with tough customers,” he’d say. “Cursed. If I could get out, I would.”

  It was this comment that made Oscar wonder if his father was a gangster. It was a strange thought. Even Oscar knew it was strange when he first thought it. But Oscar’s father would never talk about his job. In fact, Oscar had no idea what his father did for a living. Once when Oscar mentioned Career Day at school, his father simply said, “I work the ground. I keep it the way it’s always been. Who would want to hear about that?” Oscar figured “work the ground” meant that his father had a specific turf, and “keep it the way it’s always been” meant protecting it.