Conviction Read Online Free Page B

like shadows and tower across the whole room.
    Nothing was supposed to go like this. I’m supposed to be focusing on pitching. After we won State last year, I felt good about it for about a month, and then however bad I wanted to win
before I wanted it twice as much because now I have to prove it wasn’t a fluke and prove my worth to anyone who ever doubted it. Right now I should be worrying about how we’re going to
beat Brantley, not worrying about my dad locked up with a bunch of criminals in a cell or about my brother getting dragged back here because of me. I’ve always held out hope that Trey and my
dad would patch things up someday—that’s what God promised me, wasn’t it?—but I also always thought it would be something I did that would make Trey come back. That
I’d get drafted and he’d think,
Hey, maybe I should take a break from holing myself up with groceries all the time and go watch Braden play pro ball
, or that he’d just wake
up one morning and realize he missed me, the same way I’ve felt about him all these years. It wasn’t supposed to be a social worker calling to guilt him with a bunch of documents and
legal warnings.
    I lean over to retrieve the bottles from the vending machine, and when I straighten, one of the officers walks by. The bottle slips from my hand and clatters to the ground, hissing like a live
grenade, and my heart feels like it’s about to pump itself clear out of my chest. My palms are damp.
    I need to get it together. Seeing random cops walk by at the airport is nothing compared to the rest of all this.
    I look around to make sure no one’s watching, and then I close my eyes again and duck my head. The thing I believe about God most of all is that sooner or later he brings everyone to
justice; I believe he protects and rewards the people who follow him and punishes the ones who don’t. And I’m scared that part of what I felt when the social worker was over was God
telling me that he brought this on us to test me—that I won’t be spared his anger unless I prove my devotion to him.
    Get us through this,
I pray, and I wait to see if I’ll feel that same warning from him again. I don’t.
Protect us. I’ll do everything the way you’d want me to,
and I won’t slip up even once. I’ll be as good as I know how to be, I’ll work as hard as I possibly can, I won’t slack off or get distracted, even with all of this. And if I
do all that, and I throw my best and beat Brantley when we play them, then let that be my sign from you that I was wrong and that all this isn’t because you’re testing me. And please
let everything be okay.
    I down my water in two gulps and crush the plastic bottle in my hand and force myself to walk by the cop to throw the bottle away. When I get back near the gate, there’s a younger version
of my dad coming down the walkway, with a gray T-shirt and a mostly shaved head and a wrestler’s build, and there’s a feeling like a snake uncoiling in my stomach—that’s
Trey.
    He’s carrying two big bags, and when he makes his way over to us, he sets them both on the ground and says quietly, like he’s tired, “Didn’t know you
were coming, Braden. Hey, Kev.” I take a step forward to hug him at the same time he sticks out his hand and I take an awkward step back that feels like a whole-body stutter. I shake his hand
instead, and Trey says, “You got tall.”
    “Yeah.” I can feel my face reddening after that aborted attempt at a hug. I was never short, but I hit a growth spurt right before high school. I got our dad’s pitcher’s
build, the five o’clock shadow because I get bored of shaving, the tan even in winter from all the baseball, wheat-colored hair from the baseball, too. Trey got our dad’s eyes and
jawline, and he looks…older, I guess, different in that way that makes you wonder if maybe this is how a person’s always looked and you just aren’t remembering right. I say, “I
guess taller than I