Basics [A Sandlot Story]

2 || Curiosity Killed the Cat

Ty was roused from her semi-stupor some half an hour later, when the hurried slapping of feet on pavement rushed by beneath her tree. Her first thought was a sort of surprise at her sudden awareness of her surroundings, for she'd never been one who was easily interrupted whilst reading. However, it came to her attention that other than the occasional bird call and the distant drone of traffic on the highway, the street was virtually silent, so the sudden noise really shouldn't have shocked her. Even still, she almost fell out of her tree when a boy dashed past.

Huh, she thought absently, quickly marking her place in her book. She shouldn't have thought of it as her tree. She hadn't even been there for an hour.

Glancing down, she was surprised further at the fact that it was Scotty racing down the street, feet hitting the hot pavement at what could be called lightning speed - well, in comparison with his normal pace anyway. Frowning to herself, she tucked her book between a fork in the branches, intending to return for it later, and she slid down the trunk to follow her little brother at a more leisurely pace.

She wasn't concerned about losing sight of him. The street was fairly straight, and he wasn't exactly the fastest runner in the world, so if need be, she could catch up with him. She followed him for a while, before he took a sharp left and disappeared through a row of overgrown bushes.

Ty stopped, looking left and right, up and down the street. Why would he turn here? There was nothing there but a few tangled shrubs, some sporting little white flowers, all clumped together in a nondescript community garden bed. She waited a minute, internally debating the pros and cons of following her little brother.

Cons - He'd likely be very annoyed with her. They'd had arguments in the past surrounding her instinct to protect him, and though Ty agreed that he needed his independence, she also worried for his safety. He probably wouldn't speak to her for a few hours, maybe a day.

Pros - Tylah Jorden Smalls was insufferably curious, and following Scotty through the bushes and down the rabbit hole, so-to-speak, would certainly sate some of her queries about his strange behaviour this morning.

In the end, the pros outweighed the cons.

Ducking through the branches, Ty pushed her way through the underbrush and into a little dirt laneway, coming face-to-face with a corrugated iron fence. To her right, she could see Main Street, running perpendicular to the lane, which extended a little way to her left. Behind her, a hedge made of the tangled garden bed she'd squeezed through lined the other wall. She brushed her hands off on her jeans and turned away from the street, convinced that if Scotty had intended to go up to the shopping strip, he would have stayed on the sidewalk.

And she was correct. A short walk later, the lane opened up to a dusty baseball diamond, complete with a rickety dugout and a rusty net behind home base. Scotty stood on the edge of what she thought must have been the outfield, although she couldn't be sure, because in that vicinity a few knee-high weeds had begun to push up from the patchy grass and blur the lines of what was part of the field and what wasn't. He clutched his plastic mitt to his chest, and he watched a group of teens and pre-teens play a game almost apprehensively, as if he were afraid to ask to join in.

Ty understood why he was afraid. Scotty's hand-eye coordination skills amounted to almost zero. If he were to join, he'd probably end up being pegged in the face by a stray ball.

Leaning on the fence, against all of her instincts and her urges to shout to him and ask him to come home, she decided to avoid interfering. It would humiliate him, and he would forever be labelled as the kid who's older sister constantly hovered over his shoulder. She couldn't do that to him, not with the fresh start he'd been offered. He would hate her. So she stood and watched, a guarding presence, while simultaneously doing some snooping of her own.