Aaliyah was at the far end of the dugout reorganizing the bat rack, her back mostly to the group. She wasn't listening on purpose; she couldn't help it.
"What about off-speed?" another player asked. "Davis has been working on that curve."
"Davis telegraphs it every time," Ethan said. "You can read it from the box. He drops his shoulder."
That was actually correct, Aaliyah knew. She'd watched Davis throw; she'd noticed the shoulder drop herself.
"Nobody's striking Ethan out," Preston declared, settling the question with the finality of someone who had never considered being wrong.
Aaliyah kept her hands on the bat rack. She was arranging them by length, smallest to largest. Her fingers touched the grip of a 32-inch model, and she stilled for just a moment. She didn't plan what she said next. It came out the way truths sometimes do: not from deliberation, but from the place where knowing becomes too heavy to hold quietly.
"I could strike him out in three pitches."
She said it at a normal volume. Not loudly, not performing it—just said it the way you'd state a fact about the weather.
And for a half-second, there was a silence that she recognized immediately as the silence before something breaks.
Then the dugout exploded.
The laughter wasn't quick and over. It built, rolling from one end of the bench to the other, players nudging each other, phones coming out before anyone had consciously decided to record anything.
Ethan uncrossed his arms and looked at her for the first time with the expression of someone who has been told a mildly entertaining joke. "Three pitches?" he repeated, and let the absurdity of it hang in the air.
"Three pitches," Aaliyah said again, still calm.
Coach Darren Whitmore appeared from the mouth of the tunnel, drawn by the noise. He was a big man, heavy-set, with a face that had spent forty years expressing certainty. He'd played minor league ball in his twenties, made it close but not quite, and had spent the decades since coaching the next generation with the particular intensity of someone channeling an old ambition. He was not a gentle man. He had a narrow sense of who belonged in baseball and a wide vocabulary for communicating who didn't.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"The clubhouse girl says she can strike me out in three pitches," Ethan said with the casual amusement of someone reporting a funny headline.
Whitmore looked at Aaliyah. His gaze was not curious or even particularly hostile; it was dismissive in the specific way that dismissal becomes its own form of cruelty—the kind that doesn't bother to be angry because it doesn't bother to take you seriously enough.
"You?" he said.
"Yes, sir," Aaliyah replied.
"You're here to organize the equipment."
"I know. And I can still strike him out in three pitches."
The laughter around them had shifted slightly—still there, but sharpened now, waiting to see how this would go.
Whitmore's expression tightened. "You don't belong on this field," he said simply and plainly, the way you'd state a rule of physics. "Not as a player, not as anything except what you were hired to be. You understand me?"
Aaliyah held his gaze. "Give me one chance."
Someone across the dugout made a sound that was half-laugh, half-disbelief. Phones were still recording.