by E K Ballard
“Jamie--” she started.
“Don’t worry, I got it,” Jamie said as they approached the ticket window. “I couldn’t let you pay for something you didn’t want to go to, could I?”
“Thank you, Jamie. I don’t want you to think you have to pay for me all the time.” Kristin got quiet.
“Hey,” Jamie said. “I want you to be with me. I’d pay for you a million times over just so you could be with me once. Do you get it?” Jamie had pulled Kristin over to the side of the ticket window.
“Jamie, my parents won’t let me get a job at the store, and…”
“Good,” Jamie interrupted. “If you worked there, you wouldn’t be able to help me study. How many hours a week do you think you help me?” Jamie asked.
“I don’t know. We just work together. I don’t see it as me helping you.”
“Kristin, I have never gotten the grades I am getting now before you came along. Do you think that’s a coincidence?”
“I just helped you get organized,” Kristin said.
“You do more than that. People who do what you do get paid to do it, so if I decide I am going to pay for you to get into a game, or eat pizza, or go to a movie, or whatever, just go and don’t argue. I don’t want to go anywhere without you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Let’s sit up top.” They climbed up to the top of the stadium and sat down. Jamie took out a blanket and said, “Stand up for a second.” Jamie folded the blanket and laid it on the metal bleacher. “Is the metal too cold when you sit down?”
“No, it’s fine,” said Kristin.
“Good. Stand up one more time.” Kristin stood. Jamie wrapped first the smaller blanket, and then the larger blanket around both of them and they sat down. Jamie put her arm behind Kristin’s back and pulled her in close to Jamie. Kristin leaned in to Jamie and was happy and warm as she watched the marching band play and the cheerleaders’ routines. The stands were full as the teams were introduced and ran out onto the field.
Kristin noticed a lot of people were huddled together under blankets. They didn’t stand out from the crowd. Lissy and Sam found them right before the game started and crowded in next to them with their own blankets.
The noise level in the stadium rose after the national anthem was finished and the teams took the field. Kristin didn’t know much about football, but she listened to Jamie explain what was happening. She was just happy to be covered in blankets with Jamie, warm and content.
“Which one is Hank?” asked Kristin.
“He is #67. He is standing in the huddle next to the quarterback.”
“What is Hank supposed to do?”
“He plays offensive line. He is supposed to block the other team’s defensive line.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he has to keep the other team from getting to the quarterback and create running lanes for the running backs.”
Kristin watched, but she didn’t know what to look for.
When the crowd groaned, Jamie explained, “They didn’t convert on fourth down.”
“So is it fifth down?”
Jamie laughed. “There’s no such thing as fifth down.”
“Here comes Farley for the extra point,” said Jamie to Kristin after Stowe scored. Kristin watched as the players took the field. Farley looked up at the uprights, took three steps back from the placeholder’s hands and two steps sideways. The ball was snapped; the holder caught it, put the ball down and spun the laces in perfect position for the routine kick.
Farley approached the ball, swung his leg back, and kicked the ball low into the outstretched arms of the other team’s defense.
Kristin looked at Jamie. “Wasn’t he supposed to kick it through those thingies?”
“The goalposts? That’s the idea.”
“Whoops.”
“Are you having fun?” Jamie put her mouth close to Kristin’s ear to ask.
“As much fun as I could possibly have at a football game,” Kristin replied. Jamie took her hand and pulled her closer with the arm that was around her shoulders.
Halftime ended with Stowe in the lead 6-3. Kristin couldn’t get over how crazy the fans were over the outcome of a football game. It seemed like the whole town had come to the game. They never had anything like this at Sarasota Academy.
Farley missed another kick and the crowd started booing.
“I bet drinking last night isn’t helping his game,” said Kristin.
“He was pretty trashed,” agreed Lissy.
The crowd suddenly jumped to its feet and Kristin couldn’t see what was happening.
“Shit! Essex just scored!” exclaimed Jamie
The announcer called out the players who scored while the game resumed.
“It’s okay, if we score a field goal, we win,” said Jamie. “Plenty of time left in the game.”
Stowe moved the ball down the field and, with five seconds left, called a timeout.
“This is it,” said Jamie. “If Farley hits this kick, we win.”
Farley approached the holder and said something. He measured off his steps for the third time that game and turned and looked at the uprights. The ball was snapped, the holder placed it, and then it slipped out of his hands for a split second. The holder recovered, but Farley hesitated, and even though the ball was placed, he lost his rhythm and he shanked the ball feebly into the end zone, where the Essex players fell on it in a heap as the clock ran out. Essex won, 13-12.
The Essex players, coaches, and fans ran out onto the field in celebration. Both teams shook hands and Jamie looked for her parents. She saw them leaving the stands and heading out to their car. She didn’t think she’d be able to catch them, so she, Kristin, Lissy, and Sam started walking towards the exit by them.
“Jamie!” called someone. Jamie looked in the direction the voice came from. It was Celeste, who pushed her way through the crowd to Jamie. Kristin stopped, too, and waited for Jamie. Lissy and Sam kept going, not noticing Jamie had stopped.
“Hey, Celeste,” Jamie said.
“Jamie, did you get the message that Detmer wanted us to have a captain’s practice today?” Celeste asked.
“Not until it was too late,” said Jamie. “Why? Did you call one anyway?”
“Yeah, everyone was there but you,” said Celeste. “He was really pissed off you weren’t there.”
“Oh, well,” said Jamie, perturbed that Celeste had called the practice. “I needed to rest my knee anyway.”
Celeste said shortly, “You should have been there, Jamie. You’re a captain.”
Jamie narrowed her eyes at Celeste. “I didn’t tell you what you should have been doing as a captain when I was running the bleachers for you and the rest of the team this summer.”
“In fact,” Jamie continued, “I think it’s pretty shitty that you called the practice when you won’t even be playing tomorrow. You haven’t played in three weeks, so who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing?”
Celeste turned and walked away, saying nothing. Jamie watched her go and then turned to Kristin. “Where did Sam and Lissy go?”
“I don’t know,” said Kristin.
They made their way towards the exit with the rest of the crowd. Kristin still had a blanket wrapped around her, and Jamie was standing behind her, shuffling forward with the crowd, when Kristin heard a familiar voice.
“There’s that slutty fucking piece of shit again.” She looked up and saw Paige and her friends standing in the bleachers above them. Jamie heard it too and stopped.
“Hey, you! Fucking whore! Did you come back for some more?” Paige called down to Kristin. She made a sound like she was going to spit on Kristin.
Paige’s friends laughed. Before Kristin could say anything, Jamie had jumped up, grabbed onto the railings, and pulled herself up on the stands and stood directly in front of Paige. She glowered down into Paige’s face.
Paige was surprised and took a small step back. “Hey, Jamie,” she said.
Jamie leaned in close to Paige’s face so only Paige could hear her and said, “Paige, if you ever touch Kristin again, I swear to God I will fucking kill you.” Jamie looked into Paige’s shocked features with an expression of pure hate that gave Paige chills.
“What?” said Paige, clearly intimidated.
Kristin moved against the wall so she was out of the stream of people. She tried to hear what Jamie was saying to Paige, but it was too loud in the stadium. She only saw the fear on Paige’s face.
“Do yourself a favor, and pretend she doesn’t exist, because the next time you call her a name, or say she’s fat, I’ll make your life fucking miserable. Got it?” Jamie’s voice shook with anger.
“Yeah, Jamie, sure,” said Paige.
Jamie clenched her jaw and took another five seconds to glare fiercely into Paige’s eyes. Paige looked away, shaken by the encounter with Jamie. Jamie put her hands on the rails and used her arms to drop gracefully back down to Kristin. She landed on her good leg and got her balance. “Let’s go,” she said.
When they got back to the car, they put the blankets in the back and got in. Jamie got the Jeep started and pulled out, and then noticed Kristin staring at her.
“What?” Jamie asked.
“What did you say to her?” asked Kristin.
Jamie kept driving. “Don’t worry about it. Let me know if she ever speaks to you again.”
“We are supposed to be low key about us, remember?”
“Kristin, if you think I am going to stand by and let anyone speak to you the way she did, you are crazy.”
Chapter Thirty-One
When they got back to the house, Kristin looked at Jamie’s knee. It looked better, so they decided to not to ice it anymore. They put The Crucible on but before it could start, Jamie began kissing Kristin.
“Where did you learn to be such a good kisser?” asked Kristin. Jamie opened her eyes and smiled. “Well?” prodded Kristin.
“I plead the 5th?” said Jamie.
“Oh, come on, tell me,” said Kristin.
“I’ve been kissed before,” said Jamie. “Once or twice.”
“Tell me!”
“I have been kissed by three people if you count Mike Franco who kissed me in 4th grade and I kicked him in the balls on the playground.”
“You kicked a kid for kissing you?” Kristin said.
“Yeah. He came up to me out of the blue at the playground and just started kissing me. I pushed him away and said, ‘What’d you do that for?’ and he said, ‘Because I wanted to’ so I kicked him. He was fine eventually.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“No, none of the adults saw it, just the kids.”
“I bet no one tried to kiss you again.”
Jamie laughed. “Not for a few years.”
“Okay, so what about the other two?”
“Let’s see, Lisa Dowd kissed me in 9th grade, and that was a disaster.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t even know she liked me. She was a senior and she and I played on the soccer team together. I guess she had a thing for me.”
“So you have been kissed by other girls?” asked Kristin.
“Mike Franco was the only time a guy’s lips touched me,” Jamie responded.
“So you’ve always…”
“Liked girls? Yeah, I knew from a pretty early age that I wasn’t into guys.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“When did you realize you had a thing for me?” Kristin asked shyly.
“The first time I saw you, when you and your friend were playing volleyball at the beach.”
“You saw me at the beach?” Kristin was surprised.
“I did, and I thought that you and your friend were a couple, and I was so jealous.”
“You were?” Kristin had no idea this went back so far for Jamie.
“Uh huh. And then I heard that she was a friend from Florida just visiting and I thought just maybe…but then, you went and met Hank and Farley at the river that night, so I went just hoping I’d get a chance to say hi or something.”
“And then my cousin went off and got drunk and made a scene.”
“Correct.”
“So you have liked me since before school started?” Kristin asked.
Jamie nodded into a pillow. “Yes. For two months, I have gotten to Algebra early so I could see you. I stared at your hair every day in Lit and wished I could reach out and touch it.”
“Huh.” Kristin was flattered.
“And then,” Jamie said with a grin, “every time I said something to you I was so nervous I would either say something stupid or I was afraid I would say something stupid. What did you call me once? Obtuse?”
“That was when you were insulting Sarasota Academy.”
“You and that gifted school,” said Jamie. “What about you? When did you decide you might, you know, like me?”
Kristin ran her hands up Jamie’s arms in a caress. “I noticed you physically at your first soccer game and then that day in the library, Dylan told me you were a lesbian, and I guess I just started having feelings for you then.”
“So you never thought about, you know, being with a girl before?”
“Not until you came along,” Kristin said. “So back to Lisa Dummy.”
“Dowd. After soccer ended, I played basketball and she came to all of the home games and I never thought anything of it. Then in the spring, I played softball—”
“No wonder you don’t have any time to do your homework. I can’t believe that you spend so much time chasing balls.”
“You have such a nice way of making what I find important sound like nothing.”
“So when did she kiss you?” Kristin was getting impatient.
Jamie pulled Kristin down to her. “Are you jealous?” she asked teasingly.
“Yes. Finish your story.” Kristin lay next to Jamie with her head on her shoulder. She picked up Jamie’s hand and started massaging her palm and fingers.
“That feels good. Okay, so she was always coming up to me and talking to me and going to my softball games. Then, at this party at the end of the year she was really drunk, and she came up to me and kissed me in front of, like, half the school. Someone took a picture of it and posted it online, and everyone saw it. She ended up having a breakdown of some sort over it. Kids were texting really mean stuff to me, so I got rid of my phone.”
“So that’s why you don’t have a cell phone?”
“It’s one of the reasons. They’re just intrusive.”
“Huh. Did it eventually die down?” Kristin picked up her other hand and started on it.
“Yeah, but the worst part of it was I really thought we were good friends. I never thought of her as, like, a girlfriend or anything, I thought she liked me just because. Then I lost all of her friends that I thought were mine too.”
“So then what?”
“I went up to Weymouth for the summer and stayed with my brother Jack and got a job at the summer camp.”
“Okay, so what about the other?”
“Oh no, it’s your turn now.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, you aren’t such a bad kisser yourself. Was there a class for gifted kissing at your school?”
Jamie rolled over and put Kristin underneath her and began kissing Kristin’s face. She kissed her eyes, her chin, her nose, and then her neck. Jamie kissed her mouth, and licked Kristin’s lips and inside of her mouth. They kissed while Jamie gently lowered her chest to rest on top of Kristin’s chest. Jamie finally rolled off Kristin and they both lay on their sides, looking at each other.
“So you were telling me about where you learned to kiss like that,” said Jamie.
Kristin didn’t say anything.
“Come on, I told you about Lisa,” Jamie urged.
“Do you really want to hear this?” Kristin asked. Jamie nodded. “I don’t want to tell you if you are going to get angry.�
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Jamie took Kristin’s hands. “At you? Or someone else?”
“Anyone.”
“I won’t get angry,” said Jamie.
“I’ll tell you, but after this, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Jamie saw Kristin was serious. “Okay.”
“I started dating this guy Billy Marks back in 9th grade. He was a really cute boy that all the girls liked, and he was pretty nice. We dated from February of last year until this May, so we were together for a little over a year.
“We would go out in small groups with our friends and we held hands and kissed a lot. He felt me through my shirt a few times, but it was pretty harmless stuff. One night, he wanted me to go to his neighbor’s house because their parents were out.”
Kristin stopped talking and looked down at Jamie’s shirt. She had been so ashamed of what happened next, she wasn’t sure she wanted Jamie to hear it.
“Are you okay?”
Kristin nodded and continued. “He took me in this bedroom and we started making out, and before I knew it he had his hand up my shirt. I didn’t tell him to stop and the next thing I knew my skirt was pushed up and my underwear was off and his hand was between my legs and he was putting his fingers inside me. It felt like he jammed two or three fingers up me, and he kept ramming them into me, deeper and deeper, and it hurt so badly I started crying and told him to stop, and he did.
“He made me bleed.”
Jamie lay absolutely still and silent and listened to Kristin tell her the story.
“When we left, he saw he had blood on his hand and he freaked out, and I couldn’t stop crying. I think he felt really bad afterwards, because he kept apologizing to me. We went out a few more times, but it was never the same. He didn’t want to touch me anymore and I didn’t want him to touch me. A few weeks later, I told him I was moving and we broke up. He started seeing someone else right away.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Jamie could think to say. Jamie gathered her in her arms and held Kristin to her. Kristin lay in Jamie’s arms and listened to the beat of her heart. Jamie brushed Kristin’s hair back so she could see her face.
“Kristin?”
“Yeah?”
“I will never, ever hurt you on purpose, and if I ever do anything that hurts let me know.” Kristin nodded. “We are going to take this nice and slow, okay?” Kristin nodded again.
