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i'm still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them.
Jo’s grandma kicks her out when she’s seventeen – well, both her and Greta, because her best friend has been hiding out in her room, sneaking in through the window after dark, for the better part of three weeks. Thankfully, her grandmother has no idea about that part.
Nevertheless, Jo finds herself outside on the sidewalk just before sunrise with what she could manage to pack of her life shoved into two suitcases and Greta perched at her shoulder, the trusty Bird her best friend is.
“Where should we go now?” Greta asks, and Jo doesn’t have an answer for her. They’re seventeen and so incredibly lost; Dana went missing six weeks ago, and it’s not as if they have very much to their name.
What Jo does know is that they can’t stay here. “Why don’t we start by walking?” she offers, reaches out her hand for Greta’s like she has for years and years, casting them both a lifeline, and just as the sun flares over the horizon, Greta takes it. She always will. They’re both sure of this fact.
“Walking doesn’t sound bad,” Greta agrees, trying for a smile, and so their journey begins, Joey and Bird, together, step for step.
***
we argued about jesus, finally found some middle ground.
Jo doesn’t talk to God often, but if she were to, the first pointer she would give Him is to make sure His priests know that confession is supposed to be confidential.
She’s not sure what comes over her, but passing through towards Beacon Hill, Jo looks for God between the walls of a tiny church on the corner of an intersection right across from a tiny grocery store.
Curiously, Jo crosses the street after picking up a soda for herself. Greta doesn’t go in with her, but Jo understands, knows her best friend may never as she watches Greta deliberately hang back with their things and tonight’s dinner, which is really just a pathetic plate of cheese and crackers – they want to splurge on something bigger once they can really settle.
She’s been looking for God everywhere lately, looking for a sign that she ought to believe, but each place she and Greta rest ends up going up in flames, and Jo is tired. So tired. In every town, they have friends who have disappeared. In every town, they map an escape route the moment they settle in – not really settling in at all. And every time, Jo wonders if this will be the last time.
It never is.
So, Jo goes looking for God, and her best friend sits outside. She’s persistent, makes her way back during the week if there’s time, and she even finds her way to mass once or twice; it makes her think of her Nonna, of soft days before seventeen, of the seconds between psalms where Jo swore she knew what it meant to believe in something.
She looks everywhere, until finally, the last place she hasn’t looked is between the screen-walls of the confession booth right at the back. She doesn’t know what overcomes her, what tells her to take a seat, but she does, and like some fucked-up truth serum, she starts to do what she’s meant to in this moment: confess. It hasn’t come so easily in so long: honesty, her secrets, and she knows she’s messing everything up even as the words fly free: about being pulled to her knees for someone other than God, about sweet summer nights and all of the places she’s taken girls where she was sure nobody would see. Not even God.
It’s almost like prayer: this truth, the way her heart pounds when she describes how it felt: to be known, to be seen, to be real. However fleeting.
But it isn’t – it’s not prayer, no matter how much she wishes it were. Things would be so much easier if it were.
Jo looks for God, for his approval, but her priest – who isn’t even really her priest – remains silently disdainful, so terribly disgusted, and she doesn’t find Him. Looking back, she doesn’t know why she ever thought she would in a place like this.
They follow their planned escape instead – Joey and Bird, off to their next destination – and they make it out of town in record time.
“We need to get back on the field,” Greta jokes, breath heaving. “It shouldn’t be this hard to run.”
“We will,” Jo says confidently. “How else are you going to practice not sticking out your elbows?”
“I don’t stick out my elbows!” her best friend cries, indignant, but they both know she does. And they both know it’s taking everything in her not to smile.
***
keep the bad shit in my liver and the rest around my heart.
You have to drink to stay.
It’s the rule in almost every bar that they frequent – no matter the state, no matter the hour. Their people have a lot of rules: the caller, the last-ditch exits, the watchman, the safe places to go. They always need safe places.
Jo and Greta have rules of their own; they are each other’s callers, each other’s last-ditch exits. One of them remains on alert almost constantly. They’re each other’s safe places, too. They have been for longer than either of them can remember.
Drink to stay, signs say by the bar, or sometimes the tender tells them before they can read it. Drink to stay. And they do. They always do, and the warmth and wishfulness that comes with alcohol rushes through them until they’re tipsy and twirling, both of them in the arms of women they will never see again.
As they’ve gotten older, they’ve come to realize that in some ways, it’s better like this, but it also isn’t. As they’ve gotten older, being lonely together has only gotten harder, and they begin to go home with women they wouldn’t mind seeing again, women who live in the towns they are only passing through.
Drink to stay, and Jo does, one night, in Manhattan. Grabs a nightcap with a pretty girl who is shockingly unlike any pretty girl that Jo has ever danced with. She’s brown-eyed and brilliant, her blonde hair cast in gold across the pillow as she pulls Jo into bed with her. But that night, they only kiss, cups of tea balanced carefully on both of their right palms, each of their left hands holding the other’s face close.
As dawn breaks, Jo pours herself more hot water, and the woman watches her, eyes bright in the early morning light.
***
i'm terrified that I might never have met me.
They don’t stop seeing each other – Jo and this woman she thinks she could stay for, even for a little while – and Greta doesn’t stop seeing women either, though they’re different every week.
Jo’s girl comes to her games sometimes. She can see her out of the corner of her eye whenever she’s up to bat, and Jo walks her home every night. Kisses her. Fucks her against her front door while her girl whines Jo, Jo, Joey into her ear and holds on tight.
It’s the realest that Jo has ever felt.
And then, one night, it’s abruptly over, before Jo even really has time to end it. It’s the night the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League calls; the phone rings and rings, and at first, both Jo and Greta only stare at it. Nobody ever calls them.
But the dialer seems insistent, and finally, after a thirty-second staring contest where they both seem to be daring the other to pick up the receiver, Jo snatches it up.
The words come quickly, and they aren’t really an offer, mostly because the man, Marshall, seems aware that this isn’t the kind of thing you refuse.
Greta seems to agree, and Jo knows she should too. But her girl. Her girl. She’s never gotten to say that before.
“It’s pro-baseball,” her best friend says, and Jo knows she’s right, even as she thinks about all the girls they’ve stayed extra days for when it was Greta: in Paris, in Houston, everywhere they’ve been.
But Greta is right. And Jo tells herself this is different. It’s baseball. Pro-baseball. They'll be ball-players. It’ll be real. Maybe Jo can learn how to feel real on third base again. Maybe this could be their chance – their chance to finally, truly have a home.
Jo doesn’t say goodbye to her girl, the one who isn’t hers anymore. Instead, she heads to a new town, one that she hopes, in time, she will be able to call her own.
***
now i’m suffering in style.
Vivienne doesn’t have anything very nice to say about any of the Peaches, but Jo can see every flicker and jolt of pain in her eyes as she speaks. She recognizes the practiced nature of Vivienne’s words, how she floats through the room not because she wants to, but because she has to.
Autonomy.
She is left alone to be and to be with whom she wishes. Jo wants that.
I travel the world.
She meets women in secret bars just like Jo and Greta, but it is safer. Each time, she does not wonder if it is the last time, Jo imagines a life like that: where she might live instead of survive, where she might stand under stars in a city that isn’t hers because she chose to visit, not because she had to.
I keep a younger man.
And he is not interested in Vivienne, but he is protected by her. Jo recalls one of the first bars she ever visited, sitting at the counter in her brand-new shirt she only managed to buy because she lied and told the cashier it was for her brother. We have to take care of our own, she’d said, and Jo can see it now: the way Greta and Carson pull Jess to safety, how Jess steps in front of Greta, in turn, when Alan gets a little too close to her.
She knows that Vivienne is taking care of their own by keeping a younger man. By keeping him safe.
I keep my freedom.
Freedom. That’s all Jo has ever wanted.
So she slides on the skirt and the blouse, adds her own personal flair by rolling up the sleeves, and Vivienne turns away accidentally when Jo decides that the mascara just isn’t for her.
***
everyone's growing and everyone's healthy.
Jo watches Greta fall dizzy in love with the farm girl, Carson Shaw, and she’s happy for her best friend.
She hasn’t seen Bird take a full breath in almost ten years, but in the quiet moment, Jo watches her, sees she’s breathing again, and she’s never felt more relieved.
Yes, she’s happy for Greta. But she’s also happy for what it means. If Greta, Jo’s Greta, can learn to trust again, to land in someone else’s nest, things must be getting better.
The world must be changing.
Jo’s heart soars at the thought. A changed world. And she’s around to see it.
***
why's pain so damn impatient? ain't like it's got a place to be.
Jo knew it was a bad idea – going to the bar. She knew, but she went because it was Greta, because it was her teammates, and she’s never had more than two friends that were queers like her at once in her whole life.
She knows she could be angry, that she should be, but instead, that night in jail, she prays.
Part of her knows the night will be over soon; it’s never more than one night, not for people like them, mostly because the departments that really care enough to catch them never have the space for it anyway. They’re always catching people, but they rarely actually put them away, mostly because nobody is doing anything wrong. Jo knows this.
She knows she isn’t wrong for this. For how she loves. They may as well tell her off for the way she breathes. She knows she didn’t choose this. But she wouldn’t be different, either.
So that night, Jo prays – surrounded by the brothers and sisters that didn’t make it out either. Jo’s never had siblings, but she knows they’re related because they all breathe just like her, too.
Jo prays that the world might change for all of them. That was her mistake in Boston: she prayed for forgiveness, but she need not be given it. And besides, that God she was looking for in Massachusetts was never hers to begin with.
As expected, the concrete cell doesn’t dissolve immediately; there is no divine intervention, but Jo is sure, in this moment, that God exists. She finds him: in the faces and names of her people; they talk the whole night, and come morning, they are set free. Perhaps they will see each other again, or maybe they won’t, but this night of bleeding and brokenness formed the most tragic kind of congregation, the kind that will never really adjourn.
When she limps out, escorted, Jo doesn’t expect to see Beverly at the station, doesn’t expect to see the sorrow in her eyes, but she does.
We have to take care of our own.
The world is changing. Jo knows it in this moment, even if she knows Greta can’t believe it.
If it wasn’t, Beverly wouldn’t be here at all.
***
at the end of the day, i know there are worse ways to stay alive.
Jo spends her birthday in a single room at the Blue Sox house, one-hundred and eighty-two miles from the only person she ever knew how to call home and the place she was starting to think she might be able to settle down.
She’s a Leo – she’s always been proud of it – but this time, the turn of August feels like a cruel twist of fate, one where Jo is still nursing lingering injuries and the summer is more sweltering than sweet.
Eyes on the ceiling, Jo thinks about this time last year, how she and Greta didn’t know it would be their last year together. She thinks about their birthday traditions: splitting a grocery-store dessert, usually just one slice of cake, and sitting at the top of whatever baseball-field stands they’d come across in whatever city they’d decided to stop in for that month or week or even a singular day.
Jo thinks about Greta with frosting all over her lip, how her best friend almost looked young whenever one of their birthdays rolled around. How the sugar always made Greta’s eyes brighten. How Greta would sing happy birthday to her, and Jo would think, even if it was just a singular moment, that she really was – happy.
It was easy to be happy with Greta, and Jo thinks that it still would be, that there is nobody she’d rather spend her birthday with. Despite everything, Greta is still her best friend; and she always will be–
A knock at the door pulls Jo from her thoughts, and a voice that follows makes her sit up.
“Jo? Are you in there?” One of her new teammates. Was it Donna? Diane? Doris? It doesn’t matter.
Quickly, she clears her throat, swallowing the salty tears that were starting to build. “Yeah! Yeah, I’m here,” she answers quickly.
“Would it be okay if I came in?”
“Oh!” Jo wipes at her face quickly. “Yes, of course. Door’s unlocked.” She doesn’t know why she said that; it’s not like their doors have locks in the first place.
The woman is in her room almost instantly, like she’d had the knob half-turned before Jo had even agreed to her entering.
“I heard it’s your birthday,” she offers, and she’s holding a cake. A real, actual cake. They must have a bigger oven downstairs that Jo missed. “I thought I'd make you something.”
“Wow,” Jo says, going breathless, her throat tightening a little. All she can really think is Greta would love this. “Thank you. I–”
“It’s no problem,” the woman answers. “It’s from all of us. Welcome to the team.”
Jo smiles up at her, strained, her laugh lines barely crinkling. She knows she should be more grateful; she knows they’re trying to be kind. But she misses the Peaches. Her friends. They were starting to feel like family.
But the Blue Sox are nice. Jo likes nice. She shouldn’t complain. Besides, they baked her a cake.
***
it's a start.
South Bend wins, but that means Rockford loses, and Jo never thought she’d know something more important than winning, but that was before – when she and Greta were always on the same team.
The Blue Sox win, and Greta and Carson and the rest of the Peaches carry her home, and Jo thinks that this is the way things should be: being carried home by the girls, Greta saying love you, Joey with more feeling than either of them have cared to say it in years. It was always easy to say it; and it’s not that it meant less, but they just meant it more with each passing year until they didn’t have to articulate just how much they meant it.
Greta kisses the side of her head, and Jo leans into it, thanks God or luck or whomever in this moment, for this moment, and she knows her best friend doesn’t believe in any of those things, but she’s sure that Greta believes in her, now, and that’s enough.
She doesn’t know where either of them will be next season, if they’ll be together or if they’ll be scattered again to different teams, but she does know how real she feels when her foot finally lands on home plate.
Ballplayers. Greta’s voice echoes in Jo’s head. And they are. It’s real. They’re real. For the first time, they’re living their dreams, everything they could have ever wanted, and Jo knows, unequivocally, that there are so many worse ways to stay alive. And, somehow, she knows, too, that she’ll never have to go back to that.
Freedom: it’s hers.