Ball Boy
Kat Thanopoulos
Matthew was the manager of his high school varsity baseball team and then he wasn’t. Not because he graduated but because of his attempts at different forms of hypnotism, spells, and drugging.
Just like every manager of high school sports teams, he first tried out for an actual spot on the team. Even if he wasn’t a starter. Even if it was in right field. Hardly any freshmen were starters anyway, he thought. Except Graham Gillespi. Who had seemingly grown a foot over summer break and an impressive arrangement of at least twenty mustache hairs.
Matthew knew he could have tried out for the JV team, but he thought anything less than being amongst the best would be too embarrassing for him. So when he didn’t get a spot, he relinquished himself to the dugout. Permanently. “Manager” had a powerful ring to it. Managing kids like Graham and even the seniors? That would be his foot in the door. Maybe, a ball might roll to his feet and the pitcher would ask for it from across the whole field. And Matthew would throw it perfectly into his mitt, with everyone including the head coach, Mr. Dan Dan they all called him, watching. There would be inside jokes and late nights at the 24-hour diner after games, win or lose.
But Matthew was nothing but a ball boy. A bag boy. A ball bag boy. Yes. He collected balls and carried bags. The most powerful aspect of his position was the clipboard he kept during games to keep track of various nonsense. Nonsense that would've been important to him if he hadn’t begun to feel completely worthless after a week on the job. At least clipboards give a sense of direction to their holders. If he felt awkward or needed to avoid conversation, he’d just flip up the first page on the stack of papers on the clipboard and act like he was checking something important and urgent. He was also in charge of filling the cooler and setting up snacks. With the help of a rotating list of parents that were mostly the mothers. Okay, it was all mothers, aside from Jack Norbut’s dad who only helped out because he was unemployed and divorced.
The snack job was one of the most burdensome of all his duties. And most shameful – he always ended up eating most of the snacks himself. Matthew was terrible at interacting with parents but was required to do so. Sometimes he’d even have to go with them to pick up things like Jimmy John’s sandwiches or Costco value boxes of chips. So he would sit in the front seat next to the mothers and their giant water bottles in cup holders. They would rattle on about how great it was to see Matthew, how she hadn’t seen him since the 6th grade Halloween parade! And how cool it must be to be the manager and how “the boys” must just absolutely love him. Because he’s so sweet! She can just tell, a mother knows. Her son should have more friends like him, maybe you could come over for dinner one night? No that’s alright, you don’t have to. Oh please, it would be our pleasure.
When it was Mr. Norbut’s turn to bring the snack, he took Matthew to the deli. He thought it would be a cool idea to get a giant sub cut up into a bunch of smaller sandwiches. Matthew thought it was an unnecessary spectacle and would probably require more setup and organization from him. On the way to the deli, David – “Call me David, Mr. Norbut sounds so old, doesn’t it?” – revealed that he has tried to get an assistant coaching position for the past two years. This depressed Matthew incredibly. Because he was just like David. Hanging around for the sake of relevancy. Forcing dependency upon the group you’d like to be a part of. The only way to hang around. Knowing that anyone else could do what you do, it’s just that you were the one who said sure first.
It was a breaking point for Matthew. He did not want to be David. Not for a second longer. That night, after the team had taken a loss to their rival school, Matthew ordered a copy of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Googled his way into hypnotism and spell and potion tutorials.
He found the witchcraft community to be far more welcoming than the hypnotists. Also he got bored of The 48 Laws before he even finished the preface. So it was spells he tried first. He bought crystals and placed them around different parts of the dugout and equipment shed. When coach Dan Dan asked Matthew to grab his sunglasses that he had forgotten in his car, he threw some quartz in his glove box.
After a week of the careful placement of certain charmed items around the team, he graduated to having them ingest his spells. He included various types of tea and plant leaves in the Gatorade cooler. The water cooler would’ve given too obvious a change in taste. One recipe required him to use his spit and hair. He did in fact make it, and intended to serve it, but never put it out on the field after getting cold feet about it. If anything was happening, it was subtle or a sort of placebo. The witches were nice, but maybe bullshit. Or maybe he wasn’t born with enough natural power to influence the universe through stuff like rocks, sticks, and feathers. There was also a great lack of recipes with Gatorade as the base. So he moved on to the hypnotists.
Matthew had already begun to act noticeably different when he began his witchery. Speaking more than he usually did, smiling longer, and having a more general sense of attentiveness to the team’s needs. But nobody thought much of it. He was just the weird freshman ball bag boy, after all.
So, he put aside his spells and potions. He swore off manifestation and the “Law of Attraction” which he declared later to be utterly useless, but kept the habit of affirmations. They seemed to boost his confidence. Which he needed according to the hypnotists. But after only about an hour of research, the hypnotism turned out to be mostly dating strategies. However, he thought it could still be applicable. Take from it what he needed and leave behind what he didn’t. Just like the affirmations from the witches and yoga influencers.
Matthew kept up his genial presentation and slowly implemented tactics from the hypnotists. Like this pen click thing, that was really just some Pavlovian strategy. He tried negging. But this proved mostly ineffective on teenage boys on a varsity sports team. Most of them were generally mean to each other anyway. Finally, Matthew turned to science. The stuff that works, that is proven and lab-tested... chemicals. By this point in the season, he had become so separated from the players of the team that he saw them more like sheep to herd than real live human boys. And he liked to be the shepherd. So when Matthew moved on to the real stuff, he didn’t even feel guilty about it. There was a sophomore kid, Dylan, that he knew sold an array of drugs because when Dylan’s locker got searched he asked Matthew to stash the paraphernalia in his. Dylan knew about the search beforehand. He saw the cops and drug dogs out front because he came to school half an hour late. He was too good. The ketamine Matthew put in the Gatorade cooler was able to produce one sprained ankle from a non-essential player, but otherwise only gave the team one giggly and confused practice. The coaches got a little agitated and just sent the boys home early after they ran a couple of laps as a punishment for lack of focus.
Finally, Matthew worked up the courage to put spit in the cooler. All thanks to his daily affirmations and a new friendship with Dylan, who encouraged his exploits. It was spit mostly, but piss one time, and almost semen another. But one of the assistant coaches walked in before he could finish that.
It all ended during a scrimmage game when he put too much coke in the red Gatorade. Nobody died, Matthew didn’t want that. Really. He was careful to test out some of the cocaine with Dylan.
The game was cut short because two boys threw up and the catcher had a seizure. Graham Gillespi came from a health-nut family and never drank the Gatorade due to all the sugar. He was the only one without symptoms. Matthew’s parents were furious. His teachers couldn’t believe it. His court case made national news, but he thought he looked good in the press photos and felt satisfied with himself that he would always be more famous than anyone on that damned varsity baseball team.
Kat Thanopoulos is a Chicago based writer of fiction and poetry. She is the author of the poetry collection, “Normal Behavior.”