Nate was washing up in the boys’ room at school when he saw it: a crude drawing, scrawled in Magic Marker on the wall above the paper towel dispenser. The picture showed a stick-figure man, with a downturned mouth and crazy hair, lying facedown on the ground. The exaggeratedly curvy figure of a woman was standing over him, a gun pointed at his head. And next to them were the words Chance’s Farm: Cows and Nuts.

Underneath, in a different-colored marker, someone else had already contributed another picture of a similar stick-figure man sitting behind bars, with his arms tied around his body like he was wearing a straitjacket. Nate Chance’s dad is a psycho, it said. There was a third drawing too: this one of Naomi, obviously, but with a bandana over the lower half of her face and the words Wanted: Jewelry Thief. Someone had scribbled next to it Stole Pauline Calhoun’s charm bracelet!

Nate pulled down a towel and dried his hands. He wet the towel some more and ran it over the marker, but the words and images didn’t go away. He would have crossed them out, only he didn’t have a marker himself. He went back to class.

Fourth period was gym. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you boys that Little League tryouts are this Saturday,” Mr. Johnson told them. “We’re counting on you all to show up.”

Last year, Nate had pitched. He wasn’t always the starter, but by the end of the season the coach had said he had the most reliable arm in the league. “We’re going to be facing some pretty tough competition from over in Leopold next season,” he’d told Nate after their final game. “But if you keep developing your curveball and get a little more accuracy, we’re going to give those boys a run for their money.”

So that had been the plan. Nights back during baseball season, when he and his dad drove home from the field together after games, they would talk about the pitches Nate had thrown, going through the at bats of every single player on the opposing team. His dad had been a pitcher too, and even after the injury that had messed up his leg, he could still throw a great curveball and slider. For a while they’d worked together on Nate’s pitching every day.