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and his shirt and pants, but it’s so dark in the middle of this nowhere that he barely knows how bad he looks. He can taste blood, but he thinks it’s from his cut lip.
    Soon he’ll realize that a couple of ribs are broken and it’s not just his lip bleeding.
    Tomorrow he’ll see crimson-splattered Nike shoes and jeans and a shirt. His right fist will show bloody scrapes from trying to fend off his father. Punching the side of the house and the railing on the deck didn’t help either. He will see the black eye and the J-shaped gash along his cheek.
    But mostly Cory will see those eyes that finally know. That finally understand.
    He can count on one hand the amount of times his father’s hit him. But earlier tonight, everything that happened—with Mom screaming and crying and eventually taking off with Clay in the car and Cory standing off with his father—it was pure and utter insanity.
    The games had gotten to him. Cory was starting to feel big, and maybe his dad thought he didn’t have many more chances to make his son feel small. The old game of standing beside the barn and taking in the blistering pitches no longer worked. Cory would hit every single ball. He’d try to stop the grin from washing all over his face. Every single hit was a message.
    You’re not better than me, you foolish old man.
    But on this night, the old man was better than him. Because Cory decided to make a stand, and he got beat up. Badly.
    His father shoved him back once. Then moved in and punched him over and over and over again. With punches that felt like they’d been stored up inside for a long time.
    When Cory finally fell to the floor and bent over and spit out blood, something clicked.
    Good old Dad stood there looking at him in horror, his drunken eyes suddenly sobering up and realizing. Then he spoke Cory’s name, but it was all done.
    Cory needed help standing up, but then he stood before the monster and asked if he was done. His father started to cry like a baby, and Cory just cursed at him. Then he walked out the door.
    He doesn’t care about baseball or Emma or this farm or Okmulgee. All he wants is to get far, far away. He is going to walk to California and start a new life.
    But sometime around midnight, Cory stops on the side of a lonely two-lane rural highway. He sits down and puts his arms around his legs and begins to cry. Everything leaks out. Everything.

Chapter Nine
    Error
    Cory wasn’t sure if it was the collision with the tractor or the ambulance ride to the hospital that sobered him up. If he was forced to blow in a Breathalyzer, it would surely reveal that he was technically inebriated. But as he sat in the chair in the lonely waiting area in the hospital, he felt the cold, hard slap of reality striking him across the face again.
    He already felt hungover, even though the buzz hadn’t completely worn off. And Cory knew all too well that not all hangovers are created equal.
    He could still remember his first and last encounter with Jack Daniel’s in high school. It hadn’t been pretty. The last thing he remembered was sitting in the backseat between two pretty girls while holding a bottle between his legs. The next memory was ten hours later, when he woke up in his boxers in the basement of one of those girls’ houses. The parents knew, of course. All the parents knew, including his own. He’d gotten in a lot of trouble for that one, but the worst thing had been how bad his head and stomach felt.
    Cory hadn’t blamed it on himself, however. He blamed it on the awful taste of the whiskey.
    There was a time while playing baseball in college that he’d decided to drink only wine one evening. His stomach was beginning to hurt from all the beer he’d been drinking, so like an idiot he decided to try to drink cheap wine instead. As if he was drinking beer. That had made the Jack Daniel’s hangover seem like child’s play.
    Now he sat in a hospital waiting room, the throbbing in his head minor compared to