Ever since Theodore had learned to ride a bicycle when he was five and a half years old, Dolores had been telling him that when he turned twelve, he would be allowed to ride his bike beyond the confines of the two intersections at either end of Frank Street, the street on which they lived. Twelve had seemed so far off when he was five and a half. But now it was here, Theodore was twelve, and he was not going to let his mom off the hook despite Dolores’s recent attempts to walk back her promise. Even her birthday gifts for Theodore – all three of the video games he’d asked for when he’d only expected one – weren’t enough to keep him indoors and off of his bike on the cool April Saturday he turned twelve.

               Dolores stood on the sidewalk where it intersected with the end of their driveway and watched her son pedal eastward along Frank Street. He was slight, but not fragile. He wore glasses, but liked them, always eager to upgrade to a new style. Today, he wore blue jeans, dirty sneakers, and a thin black sweatshirt with the sleeves bunched up around his forearms. He had his phone in his front pocket, Dolores knew, because she’d made Theodore show it to her more than once before he took off. Not that he would have been likely to leave without his cell phone anyway, but having it with him was a condition Dolores had added to their deal. If he wanted to ride beyond the intersections at either end of Frank Street, he had to have his phone with him at all times so he could call Dolores in case of an emergency, he was not allowed to venture beyond the Greenglen neighborhood – the boundaries of which she’d made him identify on an online map of Multioak –, and he had to be home in time for lunch at noon.

               Theodore reached the intersection. He stopped at the stop sign despite the absence of traffic, a safe choice Dolores hoped he would continue to make even when he didn’t know his mother’s eyes were on him. Then he turned left down Hoff Street and rode out of the sight behind the Van Wycks’ hedgerow.

And then where would he go? Dolores wouldn’t know until he came back and told her, which might not be for another – Dolores checked the time on her phone – two hours and thirty-nine minutes. That seemed like an insane amount of time to not know exactly where her son was. Worse, Dolores was not herself very familiar with her own neighborhood beyond Frank Street. She never paid much attention as she drove through it either going from or coming to her home. The neighborhood had always given her the impression of fairly uniform niceness, pleasantness, safeness. If it hadn’t, she would have reneged on her promise to Theodore, or never made it in the first place. But now that Theodore had traveled beyond her ability to perceive him, Dolores wished she had spent the last six and a half years studying Greenglen, memorizing the name of every street, identifying all the locations within it that seemed a bit less nice, a bit less pleasant, slightly – even very slightly – less safe.

Back inside on the couch in the family room, Dolores tried to distract herself from worrying about Theodore by watching an historical romantic comedic drama where most of the comedy was confined to a long corset-tightening scene with lots of shouting and carrying on. She considered calling Theodore, or even just texting him, but she worried that the sound of the ringtone or notification might startle him and cause him to swerve into a tree or in front of a car. When the movie ended, Dolores filled the 45 minutes remaining until noon by assembling a special birthday lunch for Theodore, which was very similar to his usual lunch but with more expensive chips, no required fruit, and a can of pop instead of a glass of milk. Dolores arranged the lunch at Theodore’s spot at the kitchen table and then sat in her spot and watched the condensation trickle down the outside of the pop can as the seconds limped past. Maybe she should have kept the pop in the fridge until he arrived.

At 11:56 a.m., Theodore came through the front door and trotted into the kitchen, sweaty and winded and wind-blown. He pointed at the clock on the oven. “Made it!” He saw his lunch and grinned, taking his seat with a bump and clatter.

“How was it?” asked Dolores. “Did you have an adventure?”

“Yeah, I did,” said Theodore through a mouthful of sandwich. He liked his sandwiches bready. Too much in the middle and he’d reject it. “I met some kids who live over there.”

“You did?” asked Dolores. “Over where?”

“On one of those other streets,” said Theodore. “A few streets away.” He gestured northward from where they were sitting, which disturbed Dolores because she’d spent all morning imagining him south of her since that was the direction she’d seen him turn. Not that traveling north of Frank Street constituted a violation of her rules as long as he’d stayed within Greenglen. But maybe his gesture hadn’t been intended to be precise. Or maybe he was mistaken, although that would be troubling in a different way. Dolores needed to be able to count on Theodore to direct her to him if he called her in an emergency.

               “And were the kids nice?” asked Dolores. “Were they nice to you?”

               “Yeah,” said Theodore. “They’re nice. They’re weird, though. They don’t know how to play baseball.”

“That’s not necessarily weird,” said Dolores. “Maybe they just have other interests.”

“Well, I have other interests,” said Theodore. “But I still know how to play baseball.”

“That’s true,” said Dolores. She didn’t want his birthday lunch to devolve into a meaningless argument.

“Anyway,” said Theodore, “I’m gonna go back after lunch to teach them.”

“Oh, you want to go out again?” asked Dolores. “I thought…I thought that was only this morning.”

“Yeah, I wanna go back,” said Theodore. “I told them I’d be back to teach them baseball.”

“I didn’t know you liked baseball that much,” said Dolores. “You’ve never asked to play little league or anything. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you use the baseball equipment your grandparents got you a few years ago.”

Theodore shrugged. “Well, just because it’s not my favorite thing to do doesn’t mean I can’t teach them.”

“Maybe they’d like to come over here,” said Dolores. “Kind of an impromptu birthday party.”

“What does ‘impromptu’ mean?” asked Theodore. He had moved onto the chips now, deploying his molars against them with violence.

“It means, uh, like, ‘unplanned,’” said Dolores. “Spontaneous?”

“Oh,” said Theodore. “But we don’t have enough space to play baseball here. There’s too much stuff in the way.”

Dolores couldn’t argue with that. She’d spent years nurturing saplings into mature tree-hood, installing flower beds, collecting vintage benches, experimenting with tasteful lawn ornamentation. She had no one to blame but herself.

“I’ll be back before 5,” said Theodore. “And then we’ll go out to eat, right? And I get to pick the place?” He cracked open the can of pop and began to guzzle from it, head tilting back and back and back.

“Yes, that’s right, wherever you want,” said Dolores. “But I have an idea. Set an alarm on your phone for an hour from now. And when it goes off, just text me and tell me what you’re doing. And then set it for an hour from then and text me again after another hour. And just keep doing that until right before you head home, and then text me that you’re headed home. And then head home. And then I’ll see you here at home when you get home.”

Theodore sighed. “Is this a new rule?”

“No,” said Dolores. “It’s just a request from your mom.” She offered a self-deprecating smile.

“All right, fine,” said Theodore. “I’ll text you in an hour. Bye!”

Gone, then, racing his bike back into the cloudy reaches of the community.

 

The hourly texts helped. Every time another came in, Dolores felt her fret levels reset. She was actually able to concentrate on a book long enough to finish two chapters, she got some chores done, and she even spent some time in the front yard frankly appraising her attachment to several tasteful lawn ornaments, all of which she frankly appraised as worthy of continued display on her lawn.

Dolores was washing her hands at the kitchen sink when Theodore texted that he was headed home. It wasn’t even four o’clock yet, which meant Theodore was coming home earlier than expected. Well, that was nice. Dolores went to the porch to await her son’s arrival from within a white wicker chair with a weather-resistant floral-patterned seat pad. When she saw Theodore gliding down the street on his bike, Dolores stood and descended the porch steps to greet him in the driveway. “You’re back early,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Theodore. “The other kids had an appointment.”

“They all did?” asked Dolores. “Are they all siblings?”

“Some of them are,” said Theodore. “Not all of them.”

“And they all had an appointment at the same time?” asked Dolores. “How many kids were there?”

“Fourteen,” said Theodore.

“And they all had an appointment at the same time?” asked Dolores.

“I don’t know,” said Theodore.

“Hey, I just noticed,” said Dolores. “Where’s your baseball stuff? You didn’t take anything with you? No bat, no ball, no glove?”

Theodore wheeled his bike into the open garage, leaning it against the wall in the spot cleared among Dolores’s lawn care supplies. A small, green leaf clung to his shoulder. “No, they’re not ready for the equipment yet. I was just explaining things today. The basics. I’ll take my baseball stuff tomorrow, maybe.”

“Oh,” said Dolores. “So this was just the first lesson of several? Are those kids your friends now? You think you’ll be wanting to go over there a lot?”

“Yeah, probably,” said Theodore. “There aren’t many kids to hang out with on our street.”

“What about Junior?” asked Dolores.

“Junior Kimple?” asked Theodore. “He’s fourteen, Mom, he doesn’t want to hang out with me anymore. Besides, the kids over there need me. They don’t even know what baseball is. They’d never heard of baseball before.”

“What?” said Dolores. “They don’t know what baseball is? What does that mean? You told me they just don’t know the rules. Are they from another country or something? Do they speak with an accent?”

“No,” said Theodore. “I don’t know how they haven’t heard of baseball before. They just haven’t. Not until I told them about it today.”

“Are they really young?” asked Dolores. “Are they homeschooled? Do you know what religion they are? Do they dress strangely?”

Theodore looked at her like he was the parent and she was not, one of Dolores’s least favorite of his facial expressions. “No, Mom. Well, some are younger than me, some are the same age, some are a little older. But no to the rest of it. Unless maybe some of them are homeschooled, I don’t know about that, but none of them said they were.”

“But you asked?” asked Dolores.

“No, I didn’t.”

“But you don’t know any of them from school?”

“I think maybe some of them go to my school,” said Theodore. “Some of them looked kind of familiar.”

Dolores reached out and plucked the leaf from Theodore’s shoulder. She held it in a cupped palm, examining its shape, its size, the specific shade of its greenness. “I don’t recognize this kind of leaf,” she said with a tremor in her voice.

Theodore laughed and flicked the leaf out of Dolores’s hand where it caught a breeze and blew away, lost among the greenery of Dolores’s front yard.

 

Theodore threatened Dolores with Newsworthy Burger as his birthday dinner restaurant pick, but he was just teasing, thank goodness. He ended up choosing Baxtre’s, which was unexpected because it was a dim sit-down place primarily frequented by the elderly, but maybe his choice was an attempt to express a newfound degree of maturity. On the sign outside the restaurant, “Baxtre’s” was spelled with an “r-e” at the end, but it was spelled with an “e-r” on the wait staff’s uniforms, but then it was back to “r-e” on the menus.

Dolores tried to enjoy her meal and tried to converse with Theodore on his preferred subjects, but she couldn’t get the neighborhood kids who had never heard of baseball out of her thoughts. They troubled her.

“I don’t want you to hang out with those kids anymore,” said Dolores, cutting Theodore off in the middle of a discourse about how video game graphics that looked good to him when he was nine no longer looked good to him.

It took Theodore a moment to catch up to the abrupt conversational shift, his puzzled face hovering above the small pile of vegetables he’d scraped off his hamburger. “The kids I met today? Why not?”

“There’s just something that doesn’t seem right about them to me,” said Dolores. “They give me a bad feeling.”

“You’ve never even met them,” said Theodore.

“Just from what you’ve told me about them,” said Dolores.

“But I’ve hardly told you anything,” said Theodore.

“Well, you’ve told me enough,” said Dolores. “It bothers me that they’d never heard of baseball until you told them. That’s like if someone had never heard of, oh, I don’t know, um, hamburgers.” She gestured at what would probably prove to be the final bite of burger pinched between Theodore’s thumb and index finger. “Sure, maybe someone might come from a family where they don’t eat hamburgers. But how could they live their lives without seeing someone else eat a hamburger, or at least hearing about hamburgers?”

“I’m sure they know about hamburgers, Mom,” said Theodore. “Everyone does.”

“But everyone knows about baseball, too,” said Dolores. “That’s my point. Baseball is very common. It’s a very popular sport, even in other countries. How could those kids live their lives and never hear another person mention baseball? Like, they’ve never seen a baseball game playing on a TV in a restaurant? Look, there’s a baseball game playing on the TV in this restaurant right now.” She pointed to the TV mounted above the small bar. And she was right. It was showing a baseball game. “They’ve never been to a park while a little league game was going on? Like, you know me, Theodore, you know I’m not a baseball fan. There are probably tons of baseball rules I don’t know. I’m sure there’s baseball terminology I would not understand. I don’t know if I could name more than seven or eight major league teams. But I know what baseball is, and I can’t really remember not knowing what it is, which means I’m sure I learned at a very young age. For a kid your age – and you said some of those kids are even older than you – but for a kid your age to have no idea what baseball is, that’s odd. That makes me feel like something’s off. Something’s wrong. And that makes me uncomfortable about you spending time with those kids.”

“But I’m teaching them,” said Theodore. “They won’t be weird anymore because of me. I’m trying to do something nice for them, except you’re telling me I can’t. What if there was something I didn’t know and it made me weird and a kid wanted to help me out by teaching me about it, but his mom wouldn’t let him because she thought me not knowing made me too weird to deserve help?”

Dolores didn’t know what to say. In a way, she was proud of Theodore. Less for his altruistic desire to teach the neighbor kids baseball than for his burgeoning debate skills. She couldn’t think of a logical way to express her unease. She fully believed in her parental right to demand obedience whether she could explain her reasoning or not, but Theodore was old enough to resent it, to hold the grudge for years, maybe. It was the kind of thing Dolores could imagine popping out of him again when he was an adult and she was elderly, flung back at her in a heated moment.

“All right, all right,” said Dolores. “You can keep teaching the kids in that other part of the neighborhood about baseball. But I want you to be wary. Do you know what that means? I want you to keep your eyes open for other things about them that might also be strange, but in a more concerning way.”

“Like what?” asked Theodore. He took a tiny bite of what should have been the final bite of burger, reducing it to at least one more bite of burger, possibly more if the next bite proved to be even smaller.

“I don’t know,” said Dolores. “You’ll just have to be observant. And if something seems wrong, trust your gut. Just get on your bike and ride home.”

“I can do that,” said Theodore, and he tossed the remaining morsel of burger at his open mouth where it bounced off of his upper lip and landed on the floor.

 

The following morning – a Sunday robed in semi-gloom – Dolores made the point, not stridently, that it probably wasn’t worth it for Theodore to go hurrying off to continue his baseball tutelage because many or some or – who knew? – maybe all of the kids from that other part of the neighborhood might be at church.

“That’s fine,” said Theodore. “I’ll just ride over there and check. I can teach whoever’s around. If no one’s around, I’ll come home.” He was out of bed and dressed and nourished earlier than Dolores had ever seen him on a weekend morning. And this was after she had allowed him to stay up late playing his new video games. “And look,” said Theodore. “I’m taking my baseball equipment today.” He showed Dolores his backpack, the handle of a bat sticking out the top with zippers holding it in place from two sides. The ball and glove were all inside the bag, presumably.

“Ah,” said Dolores. “That’s a big step. I hope they’re ready for it.”

“I guess we’ll see,” said Theodore, missing the irony, which Dolores supposed was for the better.

“Just remember to come straight home if you notice anything amiss,” said Dolores. “What I mean is-”

“I know, I know,” said Theodore. Then, he left.

 

Dolores had assumed that the texting-every-hour agreement was understood to be ongoing, so when Theodore had been gone for an hour and ten minutes and had not texted her an update, she began to worry. Should she go look for him? Get in the car and drive around until she found him? The neighborhood wasn’t that big, she didn’t think it would take too long. And she wouldn’t freak out when she found him and everything was fine – because surely that’s what would happen – but she would just calmly request that he text her every hour while in other parts of the neighborhood from now on, being sure to take the fault for the confusion upon herself because she hadn’t specifically stated that the practice would apply beyond yesterday afternoon.

But then, while Dolores was still pondering her next move, Theodore walked into the house with his backpack slung over one shoulder, the bat handle protruding at the same angle. “Hey, Mom. Sorry I didn’t text. I forgot until I was most of the way home and I figured it just made sense to keep riding instead of stopping to text you that I was, like, a few minutes away.”

“Why are you home so early?” asked Dolores. “Did you notice something else that seemed strange about the kids that disturbed you?”

“Nah,” said Theodore. “They had another appointment.”

Dolores still found this appointment thing strange, too, but she decided not to press the issue. She was happy Theodore was home. Maybe that other part of the neighborhood and those other kids were already beginning to lose their luster.

Theodore kicked his shoes off and carried his backpack with him upstairs. Soon, Dolores heard the cacophony of one of his new video games coming from his room. She was about to call for him to close his bedroom door to dampen the sound when she heard someone open the storm door and knock directly on the front door.

Answering, Dolores found a man of her height on the porch. His pants were too tight to allow his hands easy admittance to his front pockets, but he’d jammed them in there anyway. His hair was not thinning, but was quite wispy. A gray truck was parked at the curb in front of Dolores’s house, partially visible beyond her yard’s many obstructions. “Are you his mother?” asked the man. He was upset. “Theodore’s mother? I followed him here. I saw him park his bike in that garage.” He pointed to his left, which was indeed the direction one would need to move from where he stood to encounter Dolores’s garage.

“I’m Theodore’s mom, yes,” said Dolores. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“He’s not welcome on our street anymore,” said the man. “And I speak for all the parents over there.” He pointed with a ferocity that was nevertheless vague. “Keep him away from our kids!”

Dolores no longer heard Theodore’s video game noise behind her. He had probably muted it to eavesdrop. “What did he do?” asked Dolores. “What are you so angry about?”

“He’s teaching them things!” said the man, almost spitting. “Abnormal things! Bizarre things!”

“You’re talking about baseball?” asked Dolores. “That’s why you’re mad? Because he’s teaching the kids baseball?”

“I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know what it is,” said the man. “Maybe you all are fine with that kind of thing over here on this street. But in our part of the neighborhood? No. No. Absolutely not.”

“You don’t know what baseball is either?” asked Dolores. “You’ve never heard of it before? But it’s just a sport. A very popular sport. Like, a game. An athletic game.”

“I know what sports are,” said the man. “Don’t condescend to me.”

“You know what sports are but you don’t know what baseball is?”

“Basketball,” said the man. “That’s a sport. Football. Soccer. Tennis. Cricket.”

“You know cricket but you don’t know baseball?”

“Do not condescend to me,” said the man, jabbing his ring finger, of all fingers, in Dolores’s face. She could have bitten it if she had wanted to, but she didn’t want to, although she wouldn’t have minded if someone else bit it. “Just keep your son away from our kids or there will be consequences.” At that, he turned and stomped down the porch steps and through the yard to his truck, pulling a petulant U-turn in the middle of the street and driving away.

After Dolores closed the door, she heard soft footsteps on the stairs. When Theodore appeared, he was nervous. “Am I in trouble?”

“Um,” said Dolores. “Well, a little bit, at least. Because you lied to me about why you came home early last night and then again today. It wasn’t because of any appointments, was it? It was because parents told you to leave, right? Either that guy or a different parent?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Theodore.

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” asked Dolores.

“Because the kids want me to come back,” said Theodore. “And I figured if I told you why I came home early, you wouldn’t let me go back and try again. Those kids over there still want to learn more about how to play baseball. They want to master it. So yesterday when one of the kid’s moms chased me off, we planned to try it at a different place today. But then that guy who was just here found us at that new spot today and chased me off again. But I guess he followed me, too. That’s what he said? I didn’t notice him, otherwise I would have tried to lose him. Or tried to lead him to the wrong house.”

“Your dedication to helping those kids is commendable,” said Dolores. “And that man is ridiculous. Truly ridiculous. But yeah, you can’t lie to me twice and get away with it. I’m gonna have to ground you from riding your bike for a while.”

“But what if I just promise not to go back to that neighborhood?” asked Theodore.

“Well, that’s a given,” said Dolores. “Even when you get your bike privileges back, you’re never going back to that neighborhood. But that’s not really a punishment. That’s just the rational thing to do, especially since they don’t even want you there.”

“The kids do!” said Theodore, his voice impassioned.

“But their parents don’t,” said Dolores. “And they make the rules. At least we got a clue about how the kids didn’t know about baseball. Their parents don’t either! Now, how did the parents reach middle age without finding out about baseball? I can’t even begin to imagine.”

“So am I grounded from my bike or not?” asked Theodore.

“Grounded,” said Dolores.

“OK,” said Theodore, accepting his sentence without further protest. He seemed to understand that justice had been served. Within minutes, he was back in his room and the video game racket again filled the house. Dolores wondered if she should have grounded him from his video games too, but no, it would be good for him to rediscover the pleasures of sticking around home.

“Theodore,” she called. “Can you close your door, please?”

But Theodore couldn’t hear her.

 

The next day when Dolores got home from work, Theodore was not at the house. His school supplies had been dumped on his bed, and his backpack was gone along with, it seemed, his baseball bat, baseball glove, and baseball. But his bike was in the garage. Which meant Theodore had opted for a letter-of-the-law interpretation of his grounding and had most likely walked to meet up with the kids from the other part of the neighborhood. And if he was abiding by the prohibition again bike usage, then he was probably also abiding by the prohibition against returning to that other part of the neighborhood and the prohibition against leaving Greenglen, which meant he had probably arranged to meet the kids in yet another part of the neighborhood.

Dolores thought back to the previous day’s conversations with Theodore, trying to remember if she’d ever forbidden him from teaching those other kids baseball somewhere other than their part of the neighborhood. She was pretty sure she hadn’t. It had been implied – or she certainly thought it had – but she’d never made it explicit. Nor had she followed through on her plan to establish with Theodore that hourly texts were to be the new standard. She texted him to ask where he was, but when he hadn’t responded after fifteen minutes, Dolores decided the time had come to get in the car, find him, and have a discussion both frank and stern.

She had put on her jacket and one shoe when she heard a car pull into the driveway. When she opened the front door, Dolores was greeted by the sight of a uniformed police officer escorting her son up the front walk. The policeman, not Theodore, held the backpack of baseball equipment. Theodore looked neither contrite nor ashamed, but hunted, as if he might bolt at any moment.

Dolores spoke first. “Oh, Theodore. Why couldn’t you just let it go?”

“Ma’am, this is your son?” asked the policeman as he ushered Theodore up the porch steps.

“Yes, Theodore is my son,” said Dolores. “But surely this isn’t necessary, is it? He didn’t do anything illegal, did he? It’s not like he’s abducting those other kids. I’ll talk to him, but it’s not illegal for a kid to teach another kid baseball.”

The policeman, with dark stubble sprouting halfway down his thick neck, shook his head, his anger a thin veneer over his disgust. “Is that what you think he was doing, Ma’am? Teaching those kids baseball? I’ve been a little league coach for six years, Ma’am, and what I saw him teaching those kids was not baseball, no matter what he claims it was.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dolores. “You’ve got his baseball stuff right there. What is he talking about, Theodore?”

Theodore looked at the porch floorboards, his face wiped of color. He stood very still, but Dolores could see his toes flexing again and again through the fabric of his sneakers.

“He had them dig tunnels,” said the policeman. “I don’t know how they got them dug so fast. What do tunnels have to do with baseball? There’s no tunneling in baseball.” He turned to Theodore. “And what were they singing? Was that even singing?”

Theodore said nothing.

The policeman turned back to Dolores. “They had a garbage bag full of vitamins. Different kinds all mixed together. They tried to keep me from looking inside. He won’t tell me what it was for.”

Dolores felt nausea clawing at her.

“Some of the kids were…I don’t know how to describe it.” The policeman pinched the bridge of his nose. “Some of the kids were filling socks – not the ones they were wearing, but different socks – they were filling socks with dirt from the tunneling and, uh, sort of…” At a loss, he trailed off.

“Bunting,” said Theodore, his voice both low and defiant.

“That’s not what ‘bunting’ is!” shouted the policeman, shaking Theodore by his shoulder. “What was that bag of vitamins for? Answer me!”

“For the shortstops,” said Theodore. He looked up and met the policeman’s eyes. “For all of the shortstops.”

“Theodore,” said Dolores. “Listen to me. Look at me, Theodore.”

He did.

“Do you not know how to play baseball? Do you not know what baseball is?”

“I know what it is,” said Theodore. “I know how to play. How could I teach the other kids if I didn’t know?”

“I never taught you,” said Dolores. “I just thought you knew. I assumed you picked it up somewhere. In P.E. at school or…or...”

“Dad taught me,” said Theodore.

After a brief internal battle against panic, Dolores managed a temporary stalemate long enough to say, “But you don’t know your dad.”

Now it was Theodore’s turn to look confused, and the look was so genuine that Dolores’s extremities went numb, a grinding sound, no, a grinding feeling filled her head. She barely heard Theodore when he said, “What? Yes, I do. I know Dad. How would I not know Dad?”

And then it came to Dolores, the pieces sliding into place after years of clumsy tumbling, the shapes never quite aligning. Oh yeah. Oh yeah! Tunneling, singing, dirt-filled socks for bunting, a bag of assorted vitamins for all the shortstops: baseball.