Sobbing, she walked down the driveway leading back to the main road. She heard a beep from her phone and tried to wipe the tears away to make out what it was. There was another text from Annie.
“You and Ryan making out yet?” it read.
Lucy threw her phone back into her book bag, upset. She wiped another tear away with the back of her hand. Right now, making out with Ryan was just about the farthest thing from her mind.
The next day was game day, and Lucy knew she should have been nervous. After all, it was only her second game. But how could she be nervous when there were bigger things on the line than winning? Like everything.
First of all, she was a total laughingstock. She couldn’t bear the thought of facing Ryan, Regan, Kendall, or anyone. Charlie hadn’t spoken to her in days, and now Pickle clearly wasn’t going to either. Lucy had sent her a lengthy e-mail trying to explain everything last night, but Pickle hadn’t responded. She had even blocked Lucy from her buddy list and taken her off her MySpace friends. Same went for Max, who was loyal to Pickle. And Benji—he wanted nothing to do with her either. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Martie was pissed. Maybe it would work out in her favor and she wouldn’t get called on in class, because God knew she hadn’t even cracked open her English homework, not with her entire life falling apart.
Martie began passing back their Madame Bovary test as Ryan slid into a seat, late. Lucy couldn’t even look at him.
She stared straight ahead, feeling at an all-time low. It was as if she were sitting under a dark cloud of angst. She couldn’t imagine being more humiliated.
What she didn’t know was that she was still about to suffer the biggest humiliation of all—on the football field.
Her first heartbreak occurred when she looked up in the stands, just after “The Star Spangled Banner,” and noticed that Pickle, who was a fixture at every football game, was not there. Neither was Max. Or Charlie. Or Carla. Or Heather. Or anyone else from the girls’ soccer team. The very girls who had decorated her locker and waved handmade banners for her last week. Any cheering section she’d had was gone.
And that included the cheerleaders. Clearly, Kendall had obviously had it in for her, and with Regan as her lapdog, doing virtually anything and everything she asked of her, Kendall had succeeded. Lucy didn’t know what the story was or why Kendall would want to humiliate Lucy in front of Ryan and everyone else—and the truth was, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Lucy knew what kind of girls these were. Mean ones. She now understood why Charlie had been so hurt that Lucy had befriended Regan. It was the ultimate slap in the face. Lucy thought of a few people she’d like to slap in the face, but managed to restrain herself. Any aggression she had would be taken out on the football tonight. She’d just picture Kendall’s face on one side and Regan’s face on the other and enjoy kicking it as hard and far as possible.
With Beachwood losing the coin toss, Lucy had to kick off first. She took the field with her ten defenders who were poised to charge down the field. She set the tee down, more toward the left side of the field than right, because that was what Coach Offredi had instructed her to do. She put up her right hand, signifying that she was ready. The referee blew his whistle. She dropped her hand and kicked a respectable, if a bit short, kick to the Carter twenty-two-yard line. The Carter halfback caught Lucy’s kick in full stride and sliced through the leading pack of Beachwood cover men before being brought down by an onrushing safety at Beachwood’s forty-five-yard line, while Lucy hovered safely out of harm’s way back at the thirty-five-yard line on the opposite sideline. After the play, she jogged back to the bench.
“LET’S GO, DE-FENSE,” the cheerleaders sang and clapped in unison.
Lucy couldn’t help but steal a glance at Regan, her right foot balancing precariously on the palm of one of her teammates. Lucy thought that if the girl happened to drop her, it might not be the worst thing that had ever happened. What was the worst she’d get? A broken arm? Or worse, a broken ego? A concussion? Maybe it would knock some sense into her. Lucy felt sick looking at her, and as she glanced from the cheerleaders to the field, everything looked blurry. It was as if she could no longer see things clearly. And in fact, that was exactly how she felt.
Suddenly, she was jarred back to reality by the crowd’s excitement. Stepping in front of a Carter wide receiver, Nick intercepted the ball and streaked down the sidelines with no one between him and the Carter goal line sixtyfive yards away! The moment he crossed the line, he raised the ball over his head with both hands, jumped high into the air, and spiked the ball back between his legs. The crowd went wild!
“PAT unit!” Coach Offredi yelled. In a haze, Lucy stood up and jogged onto the field behind Benji and Caleb. She barely remembered kicking the ball between the posts, but the sound of the cheers let her know she’d successfully done it; Beachwood now led, 7-0.
But by two quarters in, Carter had made up some ground. As they left the field for halftime, the scoreboard read BEACHWOOD 7, CARTER 6.
In the locker room at halftime, Coach Offredi yelled out phrases like “Draw blood!” and “Kill!” and “You have twenty-four more minutes to beat the crap out of them!” Try putting that on a T-shirt, Lucy thought as she tried desperately to focus.
Everyone huddled together. “This is what it’s about,” Coach Offredi told them. “Time to finish the job. This is where it counts!” He’d been talking so ferociously, he was out of breath. “Now let’s go out there and WIN!”
As Beachwood ran onto the field to start the third quarter, Lucy took a seat on the bench. It was Carter’s kickoff to start the second half.
On the field, Ryan called out the coded play. “Red 60, Red 60, hut-hut!” On the second “hut,” Caleb snapped the ball. Ryan took the snap and dropped back, looking around for an open receiver, as two Carter linebackers blitzed through the line toward him.
“Get rid of it,” Coach Offredi screamed from the sidelines. “GET RID OF IT!”
Ryan looked around desperately. Lucy could almost see the wheels turning in his head. Should he just run it himself? But before he could make a choice, both linebackers hit him at almost the same instant. BAM! And BAM! He was sacked.
Coach Offredi threw down his clipboard, pissed. “I TOLD YOU TO GET RID OF IT, CONNER!” he screamed.
God, that man was loud. Lucy wished she could tap him on his walrus shoulder and say sarcastically, “Oh, wait? Did you want him to get rid of it?” She guessed that sort of humor wouldn’t go over too well, but it was the type of joke she and Annie made to each other all the time. She looked back toward the stands, to the spot where her friends weren’t. It made her miss Annie all the more.
And suddenly, she saw something. She blinked quickly, hoping she was mistaken. No—this couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t.
sixteen
She spun back around to face the field, putting her head in her hands.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Lucy muttered. “This isn’t happening. Please tell me this isn’t happening. . . .”
Nervously, Lucy glanced over her shoulder again. Her dad was staring at the cheerleaders, confused. He was obviously looking for her. Little did he know, he simply wasn’t looking in the right place. When the cheerleaders set down their pom-poms to take a water break, he approached.
“Oh my God,” Lucy gasped, horrified. She cringed through her face mask as she saw Kendall explaining something and pointing toward the Beachwood bench, right in her direction. Of course, Kendall had no problem selling her out. Lucy tried to hunker down in front of Benji.
“Hide me,” she begged Sascha, who was sitting on the bench next to her.
“What’re you doing?” he asked, annoyed. “Lucy, seriously, get up. Coach Offredi is gonna kill you.”
“So is my dad,” Lucy insisted. She panicked. “I can’t let him see me. I have to hide. I have to . . . um . . . yes! I have to pee.” She sprang off the bench and sneaked as inconspicuously as possible to the nearest opening in
the chain-link fence surrounding the field. Once she was through it, she bolted toward the locker room, unsure whether her dad had seen her make a break for it or not.
Bursting through the doors of the girls’ locker room, she ripped off her helmet and frantically paced, not sure what to do. She couldn’t go back up there. But she had to. She couldn’t leave in the middle of the game. Her teammates were depending on her. But her dad would kill her if he saw her. She tried to think fast.Was there any way on the planet that Kendall and Regan hadn’t ratted her out? Maybe out of guilt . . . or some sense of loyalty that didn’t exist . . .She shook her head, knowing she was a goner. Of course they’d told. Kendall had probably done it with a big smile plastered on her face. Nothing would make her happier than finding yet another way to make Lucy’s life hell.
She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was matted down. Helmet head definitely wasn’t her best look. She put her helmet back on and took a deep breath. She couldn’t hide out down here forever. Sooner or later, she was going to have to face her dad. But did it really have to be now?
When she emerged from the locker room , she heard a voice.
“Stop right there, young lady.” Young lady? Where was “kid?” She realized it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that her dad was standing there. At the top of the stairs. With his arms folded across his chest. And the look on his face wasn’t a good one.
“You lied to me,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me for weeks.”
Lucy rubbed her lips together. She didn’t know what to say. She had been lying to him for weeks.
“I know,” she admitted. “And I’m sorry.”
Her dad shook his head. “Cheerleading,” he mumbled to himself. He looked at her. “And I was stupid enough to buy that.”
“You weren’t stupid,” she said protectively. “You just . . . trusted me.” She looked down at her mismatched cleats, feeling terrible.
“And you betrayed that, Luce. You do realize how grounded you are? And how serious this is?”
She sighed. “I know.” A lecture was coming, but now just wasn’t the time.“It is serious, and I know I’m grounded, like, for life and we should . . . you know . . . talk about it. Maybe after the game?”
He interrupted. “I don’t give a damn about the game!”
“Well, I do!” she said, defiantly. That was it. She couldn’t take it anymore. She’d tried to be nice. She’d tried to be accountable for her actions, but no more. Beachwood was on the field. Without her. This conversation had gone on long enough. “My teammates are up there—and they need me!”
“They need you? They don’t need you,” he scoffed. “Lucy, this is a boys’ sport, that boys play—you don’t belong out there!”
“How would you know? You just forbid me to play! Without even hearing me out—”
“Oh, I heard you—and the answer was no!”
Lucy threw her hands in the air, exasperated. “It’s like I have no rights or something. I barely have a say in my own life!”
“That’s not true—” her dad started to say.
“Yes, it is!” Lucy exploded, interrupting him. All the emotion she’d been trying to contain for months—for years—came pouring out of her. “You just—you decide these things, like, arbitrarily! Without any consideration for what I want. I’m the one who agrees. I’m the one who doesn’t argue, who tries to make everyone happy, but it’s not fair! When do I get what I want?You decide I can’t play football, then that’s it, end of discussion, and I’m supposed to tell Coach I’m not playing.” Tears formed in Lucy’s eyes as she continued to rant. She pushed her hair out of her face.
“You decide we’re moving across the country, and next thing I know, I’m packing my whole life into suitcases and leaving all my friends! You decide it’s time to pull the plug, and just like that, Mom’s gone!”
“Lucy, I—”
“No!” Lucy yelled. She angrily pushed by him and headed toward the field.
He firmly grabbed her arm. “Lucy, we’re going home.”
She ripped her arm from his grasp. “You can go wherever the hell you want,” she spat. “But I’m not coming with you.” She ran back to the field, leaving her dad shocked and stunned.
As she approached the sidelines, it quickly became apparent that her dad was only one of her many problems. Her teammates were scurrying around frantically, while Coach Offredi lectured Benji, gesturing wildly. As soon as he saw Lucy, his tack changed.
“What the hell?” he asked, stomping over. “Where the hell have you been?” His walrus mustache was so close to her, she could barely stammer out a response. Even his mustache looked pissed.
“I’m sorry. . . . I just . . . I just . . . it was a . . . um . . .” She had to think of a lie he couldn’t get mad about—well, at least any more mad a than he already was. His face was so red, Lucy half expected steam to shoot out of his ears as from a boiling teapot.
“It was a girl . . . thing,” she said quickly.
“For ten minutes?” he asked incredulously.
“You know, a . . . um . . . feminine issue,” Lucy stammered. Coach Offredi’s eyes widened. Obviously this wasn’t a subject he was particularly comfortable talking about.
“Listen,” he said, pointing a fat finger in her face. “I don’t care what kind of issue it is—you don’t leave the field without telling me. We just got a delay of game called on us.”
Delay of game? Lucy didn’t know what that meant. Except that maybe that . . . the game was delayed?
“They gave us a five-yard penalty because you weren’t here!” he barked.
“Well, why didn’t you just call a time out?” Lucy retorted.
Coach Offredi put his hands on his hips. He looked more and more walrusy with each passing second. “Are you talking back to me?”
Lucy shook her head no and looked at the field. Five yards didn’t seem like such a big deal. “We had a fourth and five on their twenty! But with that down penalty, we’re back to their twenty-five, which means, Little Miss Feminine Issue, that you have a forty-two-yard field goal to kick!”
This time it was Lucy’s eyes that went as wide as saucers. She had to kick the twenty-five yards on the field . . . plus the ten yards of the end zone, plus the seven-yard set behind the line. She’d never kicked a ball that far in her life. And all because of her stupid five-yard penalty.
“Now get out there!” he ordered, practically shoving her onto the field.
Lucy glanced up at the scoreboard, trying to figure out what she’d missed. Apparently a lot, because Carter was up by two, leading the low-scoring game. If she could score this three-point field goal, they would overtake Carter by a point and would just have to try to hold them off in the fourth quarter and run out the clock.
Lucy lined up behind Caleb and Benji and the rest of the field goal unit.The lights shone down upon her. The crowd seemed to go silent. Her heart felt like it would pound right out of her chest. A sense of being totally overwhelmed flooded over her, almost like a wave. She didn’t know if she could kick the ball that far. In fact, right now, with her dad watching, she didn’t know if she could kick the ball at all.
She looked up toward the goalposts. They looked a million miles away. But as she looked up and past them, she couldn’t help but think of her mom. She tried to imagine what her mom would think of this. She would have laughed at Lucy’s pathetic lie to Coach Offredi. . . .
“You didn’t use the period excuse!” she could picture her mom saying. “That’s just wrong,” she would laugh. “But good going!” She would have been able to talk to her mom about everything. She would have been able to ask her mom to convince her dad to let her play football; then she wouldn’t have had to sneak around and lie. If her mom were here, everything would be different. They would have still been in Ohio, she would have been with all her friends, and she wouldn’t have been standing in the middle of a football field with a pissed-off coach and about forty pissed-off teammates staring
her down.
Playing With the Boys Page 19
