Free The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

touch and his kiss but not the smell of beer on his breath.
    He let her go and stood up. “I also believe it’s beer o’clock. You want some iced tea?”
    â€œNo, thanks,” she said, and perhaps something prescient had been at work, because as he started away she said: “ Do you believe in anything else? Seriously.”
    His smile had faded into a look of seriousness. He stood there thinking (sitting on the log she remembered being flattered that he would think so hard on her behalf), his ice cream starting to drip over his hand now. Then he had looked up, smiling again. “I believe that your heartthrob Tom Gordon can save forty games this year,” he said. “I believe that right now he’s the best closer in the major leagues—that if he stays healthy and the Sox hitting holds up, he could be pitching in the World Series come October. Is that enough for you?”
    â€œ Yessss! ” she had cried, laughing, her own seriousness broken . . . because Tom Gordon really was her heartthrob, and she loved her father for knowing it and for being sweet about it instead of mean. She had run to him and hugged him hard, getting ice cream on her shirt and not caring. What was a little Sunny Treat between friends?
    And now, sitting here in the growing grayness, listening to the drip of water all around her in the woods, watching the trees blur into shapes which would soon become threatening, listening for amplified shouts (“COME TO THE SOUND OFMY VOICE!”) or the distant barking of dogs, she thought: I can’t pray to the Subaudible. I just can’t. She couldn’t pray to Tom Gordon, either—that would be ludicrous—but perhaps she could listen to him pitch . . . and against the Yankees, at that. WCAS had their Sox on; she could put hers on, too. She had to conserve her batteries, she knew that, but she could listen for awhile, couldn’t she? And who could tell? She might hear those amplified voices and barking dogs before the game was over.
    Trisha opened her pack, reverently removed her Walkman from its inner pocket, and settled the earbuds into place. She hesitated a moment, suddenly sure the radio would no longer work, that some vital wire had been joggled loose in her tumble down the slope and this time there would be only silence when she pushed the power button. It was a stupid idea, maybe, but on a day when so many things had gone wrong, it seemed like a horribly plausible idea, too.
    Go on, go on, don’t be a chickenguts!
    She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano’s voice . . . and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.
    â€œâ€”comes to the belt,” Troop was saying. “ He winds. He fires. And . . .  strike three called, Martinez caught him looking! Oh, that was the slider and it was a beaut! That caught the inside corner and Bernie Williams was just frozen! Oh my! And at the end of two and a half innings, it’s still the Yankees two, the Boston Red Sox nothing.”
    A singing voice instructed Trisha to call 1-800-54-GIANT for some sort of auto repair, but she didn’t hear it. Two and a half innings already played, which meant it had to be eight o’clock. At first that seemed amazing, and yet, given the faded quality of the light, not so hard to believe, either. She’d been on her own for ten hours. It seemed like forever; it also seemed like no time at all.
    Trisha waved at the bugs (this gesture was now so automatic she didn’t even realize she was doing it) and then delved into her lunchbag. The tuna sandwich wasn’t as bad as she had feared, flattened and torn into hunks but still recognizably a sandwich. The Baggie had sort of kept it together. The remaining Twinkie,