Free The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane Page A

knuckleball might be like shooting an arrow. There was a target you were trying to hit, but you didn't just aim and fire—it was more complicated than that.
    Last Friday, Molly had been a little afraid to return to practice after the locker incident. She was worried about what Lloyd and his gang were going to do, how they planned to target her next. But they were apparently lying low, at leastfor now. That afternoon and throughout this week, they didn't aim anything at her.
    Today Molly noticed Lloyd and Lonnie talking before practice. They were sitting on the bench together, their heads turned toward each other. Molly was too far away to hear what they were saying. She couldn't imagine what the two of them had to talk about. It wasn't like they were friends. “What was that about?” she'd asked him later while they were shagging balls in the outfield. “You and Lloyd?” Was Lloyd giving Lonnie a hard time about his drawing? Lonnie telling Lloyd to back off? Lonnie wasn't talking. “Nothing” was all he said. “It was about nothing.”
    Molly thought she seemed a little less invisible to some of the other boys. During warm-ups she retrieved a ball for James Castle, and he thanked her. When it was time for pitchers and catchers to work, Ben Malone let her know. “Hey, Williams,” he'd said. “Coach wants us.” She liked to think that maybe she had earned some respect by not cowering, by just coming back for more.
    Molly noticed things had changed somehow between her and Lonnie. Neither mentioned his Saturday visit, their game of catch and their conversation afterward. But things had shifted. For one thing, when it was time to pair up and play catch, they immediately found each other. No milling around, no questions asked.
    As part of her little lecture on the history of the knuckle-ball, Molly had explained to Lonnie how many knuckleball pitchers came to have one catcher who specialized in catching that pitch for that particular pitcher. In the 1960s a guy named J. C. Martin made a living catching the great HoytWilhelm's knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage.
    During this week of practice it became clear that Lonnie had become Molly's personal catcher. Nobody said it, but everyone understood. During the second half of each practice, pitchers and catchers split from the rest of the squad, and Lonnie and Molly always worked together. That was fine with her. Lonnie had even acquired a catcher's mitt of his own. It looked new, or newish. Molly didn't ask, and Lonnie didn't tell. It somehow seemed too personal to mention.
    Though he didn't look like anybody's idea of an all-star ballplayer, Lonnie was getting good at catching the knuckler. Molly liked throwing to him. Maybe it was because he seemed so fearless, so unflappable. Nothing fazed him. He never flinched. Molly had seen a couple of baseball-sized bruises on his arms, but he never complained. If a pitch got by him, he didn't grouse about it, he just retrieved it. When Lonnie was catching, he sometimes made that same humming sound as when he was drawing. Molly believed he probably wasn't even aware of it himself; it was just how he concentrated. When she looked in and saw him—crouchedand ready, masked and padded, but underneath it all, still Lonnie, hair sticking out—it calmed her down.
    On Wednesday night Molly got home before her mother and decided to just go ahead and fix her own dinner. It seemed like a good idea at the time. A way to