Free The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King Page A

however, had turned into what Pepsi Robichaud would likely have called “total sploosh.”
    Trisha sat listening to the game and slowly ate half of her tuna sandwich. It awoke her appetite and she easily could have gobbled the rest, but she put it back in the bag and ate the splooshed Twinkie instead, scooping up the moist cake and the nasty-tasty white creme filling (that stuff was always creme and never cream, Trisha mused) withone finger. When she had gotten all she could with her finger, she turned the paper inside out and licked it clean. Just call me Mrs. Sprat, she thought, and put the Twinkie wrapper back into her lunchbag. She allowed herself three more big swallows of Surge, then went prospecting for more potato chip crumbs with the tip of one grimy finger as the Red Sox and Yankees played through the rest of the third and the fourth.
    By the middle of the fifth it was four to one Yankees, with Martinez gone in favor of Jim Corsi. Larry McFarland regarded Corsi with deep mistrust. Once, while talking baseball with Trisha over the telephone, he had said: “You mark my words, sugar—Jim Corsi is no friend of the Red Sox.” Trisha got giggling, she couldn’t help it. He just sounded so solemn. And after awhile Dad had gotten giggling, too. It had become a catch-phrase between them, something that was just theirs, like a password: “Mark my words, Jim Corsi is no friend of the Red Sox.”
    Corsi was a friend of the Red Sox in the top of the sixth, though, getting the Yankees one-two-three. Trisha knew she should turn off the radio and conserve the batteries, Tom Gordon wasn’t going to pitch in a game where the Red Sox were three runs behind, but she couldn’t bear the thought of disconnecting Fenway Park. She listened to the seashell-murmur of the voices even more eagerlythan to the play-by-play guys, Jerry Trupiano and Joe Castiglione. Those people were there, actually there, eating hotdogs and drinking beer and lining up to buy souvenirs and soft-serve ice cream and chowder from the Legal Seafood stand; they were watching as Darren Lewis—DeeLu, the announcers sometimes called him—stepped into the batter’s box, the bright banks of lights casting his shadow behind him as daytime gave up overhead. She could not bear to exchange those thirty thousand murmuring voices for the low hum of mosquitoes (thicker than ever as dusk advanced), the drip of rainwater from the leaves, the rusty rick-rick of the crickets . . . and what other sounds there might be.
    It was the other sounds she was most afraid of.
    Other sounds in the dark.
    DeeLu singled to right, and one out later Mo Vaughn got hold of a slider that did not slide. “ Back back WAYYY BACK! ” Troop chanted. “ That’s in the Red Sox pen! Someone—I think it might have been Rich Garces—caught it on the fly. Home run, Mo Vaughn! That’s his twelfth of the year and the Yankee lead is cut to one.”
    Sitting on her tree-trunk, Trisha laughed and clapped her hands and then resettled her signed Tom Gordon hat more firmly on her head. It was full dark now.
    In the bottom of the eighth, Nomar Garciaparra hit a two-run shot into the screen on top of theGreen Monster. The Red Sox took a five-to-four lead and Tom Gordon came on to pitch the top of the ninth.
    Trisha slid off the fallen tree to the ground. The bark scraped against the wasp-stings on her hip, but she hardly noticed. Mosquitoes settled with immediate hungry intent on her bare back where her shirt and the tatters of the blue poncho had rucked up, but she didn’t feel them. She gazed at the last held glimmerglow in the brook—fading tarnished quicksilver—and sat on the damp ground with her fingers pressed to the sides of her mouth. Suddenly it seemed very important that Tom Gordon should preserve the one-run lead, that he should secure this victory against the mighty Yankees, who had lost a pair to Anaheim at