Characters in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

… That was Boyz To Da Maxx; she and Pepsi thought Boyz To Da Maxx were yummy, especially Adam. She remembered the patch of sun on the floor. She remembered her Titanic poster on the wall.

… her teeth were probably as green as Arthur Rhodes’s, that creepy little kid who lived up the street from Pepsi …

Tom wanted to know all about her, it seemed—her favorite classes at school, why she thought Mr. Hall was mean for giving homework on Fridays, all the ways Debra Gilhooly had of being such a bitch, how she and Pepsi had planned to go trick-or-treating as Spice Girls last Halloween …

He’d run the computer club like it was his own private kingdom; he’d had friends—nerds, yeah, but they went around in a group and the bad kids didn’t pick on them. At Sanford Middle there was no computer club and he’d only made a single friend, Eddie Rayburn.

… a farmer named Elias McCorkle in the year 1905; these marked the wood-drag trail he had made as a young man …

… today arrested Francis Raymond Mazzerole of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and questioned him for six hours in connection with the McFarland girl’s disappearance.

She tried to tell herself she ought to be grateful she hadn’t broken her arm or fractured her skull, also grateful that she wasn’t allergic to stings like Mrs. Thomas’s friend Frank, but it was hard to be grateful when you were scared, scratched, swollen, and generally banged up.

She made mud with her fingers, taking a great deal of pleasure in the process (it was Gramma Andersen she thought of, making bread in Gramma Andersen’s kitchen on Saturday mornings, standing on a stool to knead the dough because the counter was so high).

She ate some of the leaves as well as the berries, and her mother had been right about them, too—they were good even if you weren’t a woodchuck. Zippy. The two tastes combined made her think of the jelly Gramma McFarland served with roast chicken.

She probably looked like Pepsi Robichaud’s grandmother, the one who was deaf and had arthritis so bad she had to use a walker. Granny Grunt, Pepsi called her. Trisha got down on her knees, planted her hands, and drank like a horse at a trough.

Her Dad admired Gordon because he never seemed to lose his nerve—“Flash has got icewater in his veins,” Larry McFarland liked to say—and Trisha always said the same thing, sometimes adding that she liked Gordon because he had the guts to throw a curve on three-and-oh (this was something her …

Walt from Framingham wanted to know why Tom Gordon always pointed to the sky when he got a save (“You know, Mike, that pointin thing” was how Walt put it), and Mike the talk-show sports idiot explained it was Number 36’s way of thanking God.

… He looked like Mr. Bork, the science teacher at Sanford Elementary who had taught them about the plants and animals of northern New England …

Tom wanted to know all about her, it seemed—her favorite classes at school, why she thought Mr. Hall was mean for giving homework on Fridays, all the ways Debra Gilhooly had of being such a bitch, how she and Pepsi had planned to go trick-or-treating as Spice Girls last Halloween …

… a kind of whiplash injury, like the one Mrs. Chetwynd from up the block had gotten when some old man had rammed her car from behind as she waited for a traffic light to change. The old man hadn’t been hurt a bit, but poor Mrs. Chetwynd had been in …

The light, even when it was dim and filtered by heavy tree-cover, hurt her eyes, and she talked nonstop—mostly to Tom Gordon but also to her mother, brother, father, Pepsi, and all the teachers she had ever had, right back to Mrs. Garmond in kindergarten.

… They’d made such a mess of Mrs. Robichaud’s makeup that Pepsi’s Mom had actually screamed at them to get out of the house …

… She had overheard her Mom and Mrs. Thomas from across the street talking about someone who was allergic to stings …

Only to Moanie Balogna and (once) to her girlfriend, Pepsi Robichaud, had she said more. She told Pepsi she thought Tom Gordon was “pretty good-looking.”

Of the entire family, it was Pete McFarland who slept the most uneasily in the small hours of that late spring morning; he was in the room adjoining his parents’, groaning and pulling the bedclothes into a tangle as he turned restlessly from side to side.

Quilla Andersen (she had taken back her maiden name and you could bet Pete hated that, too) had the courage of her convictions. Once, while staying at the Malden house with Dad, Trisha had heard their father talking to his own Dad on the phone.

They were no more than sixty feet apart. It had come for her. Run, called the God of the Lost. Run from me, race me to the road. This bear’s body is slow, not yet filled with a summer’s forage; pickings have been slim. Run. Perhaps I’ll let you live.

“Don’t tell me,” Trisha said, “you come from the Subaudible, right?” “Actually, I am the Subaudible,” the man who looked like her father said apologetically. “I had to take the shape of someone you know in order to appear, because I’m actually quite weak.

… Tom Gordon hat more firmly on her head. It was full dark now. In the bottom of the eighth, Nomar Garciaparra hit a two-run shot into the screen on top of the Green Monster. The Red Sox took a five-to-four lead and Tom Gordon came on to pitch the top …

It stepped back and kinda lost its balance. I knew right there was the only chance that little girl had, so I lifted up my gun and I shot.” No trial, no fine. What Travis Herrick got was his own float in Grafton Notch’s 1998 Fourth of July parade.

Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. At ten o’clock on a morning in early June she was sitting in the back seat of her mother’s Dodge Caravan, wearing her blue Red Sox batting practice jersey (the one with 36 GORDON on the back) and playing with …

Of course she was a hundred and fifty miles from Boston, maybe more, but— The talk-show idiot was on the line with Walt from Framingham. Walt was on his car phone.