Ten minutes into the practice game, the coach wanders over to the bench where Sean sits staring after Cordero. Propping a foot up beside Sean, Barrett nods out at the field and asks, “What do you make of the new guys?”
I like that hot one in center field, Sean thinks, but he keeps that to himself. Instead he shrugs, like he’s not sure one way or another, and mutters, “They alright.”
He says it ghetto, a’ight. Cordero has him talking whack—Sean finds himself slipping into urban slang whenever he’s around black guys, and since he’s all about dark meat, he tries to hang with them as much as he can. His parents hate it whenever he comes home on break, as do his professors when he speaks up in class, but the coach is used to players’ slang and doesn’t tell him to talk proper. “A few of them a
