Dedication
To me at 17, not sure of anything but trying anyway;
get a load of you now.*
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Iva-Marie Palmer
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
The first day I ever gave a shit about soccer was September 4, 1979—the day that Mr. McMann showed up at Powell Park High. You know those moments when everything changes almost at once, like some kind of wave rolls over a room and whatever you had been doing gets washed away as it dawns on everyone that something way bigger is taking place? It was like that.
It wasn’t even like Bobby McMann turned the tide on a particularly boring day. It had been eventful as hell. There’d been tryouts for The Sound of Music in third period. Every girl I knew was bonkers for the movie—the Rialto had brought it back for a special engagement that summer. I’d gone to see it with my best friends, Tina Warner and Candace (sometimes Candy) Trillo, who’d loved it. I was bored. Everyone in it was too nice (except the Nazis, of course).
I hadn’t tried out for the play, but Tina and I had gone to watch Candace give it a go. Candace wanted a part because she was forever on boyfriend lookout, and school plays always seemed to yield a few new couples. She’d told me I should have auditioned because I was almost seventeen and no one had ever touched my breasts. They were small and unevenly sized, though the slightly bigger right one had a Farrah Fawcett quality to it. I wasn’t opposed to them being touched, but I’d never gone to even one school play starring a guy I’d be eager to have doing the honors. Anyway, despite Candace’s spirited performance, Tina and I had our money on Peggy Darnell getting to be Maria because during the auditions, while she was spinning, Julie Andrews–style, her giant, braless, totally symmetrical boobs had busted out of her top, to the delight of our drama teacher.
“Julie Andrews was totally flat in the movie,” someone at the end of our cafeteria table was saying. I couldn’t see who through the mess of smushed paper bags and trays and girls leaning forward so other girls could help them with their hair. We messed with our hair at lunch a lot, in ways our mothers would say was unsanitary. But our cafeteria was a large gymnasium with long tables rolled out in the center for lunch periods, and the room smelled like sweat and feet, so what was a little hairstyling?
“Doesn’t matter—Mr. Doberton is a total perv,” I said knowingly, and took a sip of my Yoo-hoo. I practiced my knowing looks in the mirror sometimes, because I liked hiding how little I actually knew. “He’s probably writing ‘Peggy’s jiggly tits’ on the cast sheet next to ‘Maria’ right now.”
Our table became a laugh chamber. And it was precisely in the middle of that laughter that Bobby McMann opened the double doors to the cafeteria.
At 12:07 p.m., all concerns about who’d been overshadowed by D-cups became moot.
You know those Coke commercials where you see the bubbles pouring mesmerizingly over ice and the liquid ripples like it’s dancing and your mouth gets dry and all you want is a Coke? Even if you’ve never had a Coke, or you’ve just had one?
In a way, I’d just had one. Sort of.
Before I tell you any more about Bobby McMann, whose name I didn’t even know yet, I should explain. See, sometimes, something will stir me up. On that day, it was the back of Alex Noti’s head in fourth-period physics. His neck looked really nice: strong but not too ropy, with his light hair cut in a clean line just below his earlobes. And since he didn’t turn around (Alex Noti’s face would ruin everything), I imagined his neck was Paul Newman’s. The Long, Hot Summer Paul Newman. My weird urge was to lick that line of hair. Fantasy Paul Newman did not think I was weird. His skin was warm and he shuddered as he turned around to see me. Then Paul Newman’s lips were near mine, not even kissing, just breathing into my mouth like he wanted to kiss me, and wanted to get it exactly right. That idea of Paul Newman created this not-bad . . . stirring at my fulcrum (it’s a physics word for the thing a lever sits on, but I think it sounds like a nice way to say “crotch”). I crossed my legs and had to fight off getting too carried away. I know from past at-school daydreams that taking it too far means walking around all day feeling like I have an itch I can’t scratch.
Boys would call it being horny. Girls would call it the same thing, I think, but not out loud.
It’s not something I’d put on a job application or anything, but I don’t want to lie: I’m good at getting myself off. When I got my first period—this was back when my parents were still together—my mom told my dad we were going out, just us girls, and she took me for pizza. And at the pizza parlor, she didn’t just show me how to use a maxi pad—she also let me have some of her red wine and drew a picture on her napkin of the vagina and told me that I was a woman now and she really wanted me to understand the clitoris, so she circled that part and she even wrote it there in pen. C-L-I-T-O-R-I-S. She told me, “Susan, the men in your life sure aren’t going to care about it, so you’d better,” and I hadn’t realized it but I guess it was an early sign that she and Dad were done. Then she just left it on the table at Vito and Ray’s, a vagina napkin. Which, as first periods go, was slightly less embarrassing than bleeding through my pants.
When we got home, she gave me a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves, and “clitoris” was right there in the index. So was “masturbation.” Not step-by-step instructions, but enough to clarify that those feelings in my fulcrum—feelings I’d felt before, riding a bike or sliding down the banister of my grandma’s house in Wisconsin—could lead to something good. So I read between the lines.
And came up with elaborate footnotes.
It’s not that my thoughts are that dirty. I daydream about being undressed like one of the heroines in a Rosemary Rogers book, or about Han Solo pushing my hair out of my eyes, or Roy Scheider from Jaws squeezing me a fresh lemonade and watching me drink it. The fantasies can be brought on by small aspects of boys I know—like Alex Noti’s neck—but whose other aspects take them out of contention as fantasy material. Candace always tells me I need to give more boys in school a chance, get to know them, but honestly, I feel like I know enough about the boys we know: Most of them stink. And even the okay ones are no Han Solo.
If I wasn’t so proficient at masturbating, maybe behind-the-scenes groping with some bumbling stagehand would sound more appealing to me. And if I were a boy, I probably wouldn’t be so secretive about it. Masturbation and boys went, well, hand in hand. At school, boys had nicknamed stalls in their restrooms the Spankin’ Station (first floor), the Beat-Off Box (second floor), and the Jerkin’ for Jerkins (a stall in the third-flo
or bathroom next to the teachers’ lounge that got its name because visits there were often inspired by the curvy geometry teacher, Ms. Jerkins). I’d actually tried to masturbate between second and third period once, but I couldn’t do it standing up, and lying on the bathroom tile was out of the question. It seemed unfair, in a way, that guys not only could yank their things in almost any position but also had almost-official places to do it right at school. But I guess it’s not that different from how boys can just pee against a wall in an alley if they have to, while girls are expected to hold it until the proper time and place.
Anyway. That day, I’d come to lunch fresh off my Alex Noti/Paul Newman daydream when—BAM—this guy, this man, this vision in tight nylon shorts appears. I’m not even going to describe him in detail just yet, because I won’t do him justice. If I say he was a white guy who had day-old stubble along a cut jaw and hairy, muscular calves, I could just as easily be talking about our plumber, Mr. Mariano. But there he was, in the cafeteria, collapsing the tower of my disparate thoughts—school play, geometry homework, the weekend’s parties, the zit I felt growing right under my lip—into one compact and focused mass:
Who is this man?
I downed the rest of my Yoo-hoo in one slug, not knowingly this time. I definitely knew nothing.
“Wow,” said Tina. Next to her, Candace said, “Wow,” too, but no sound came out of her mouth.
“Who is that?” I watched him stride past tables of girls now agog. Our eyes had to be bugging out of our heads like in a cartoon, because McMann’s shorts pressed along the hard line of his inner thigh, leading my gaze—and everyone else’s—up, up, up to this hypnotic . . . instrument at his fulcrum. With every other step he took, you could see the whole shape of it, even if you were nearsighted and your glasses were broken. I crossed my legs, tight.
“I don’t know,” Franchesa Rotini choked out over a forkful of the, yes, rotini her mom put in her Thermos every Tuesday.
“Maybe a hands-on sex education teacher?” Arlene Swann suggested, a little on the loud side. “If we’re lucky.”
Walking behind him was the school principal, Mr. Dollard. Compared to the man we were all ogling—whose physique finally helped me understand what “sinew” was, as the tautening of his mesmerized me—Mr. Dollard appeared to be composed of parts this other fellow had cast off for being too average.
But it was Mr. Dollard who stood in the center of the rows of tables and waved his hands so we would all settle down. “Good afternoon, students,” he said, and stiffly pointed to the statuesque figure next to him. “This is Robert McMann. He’ll be taking on coaching duties for our brand-new girls’ soccer team.”
Robert McMann nodded and smiled at Mr. Dollard, then at all of us. It wasn’t only the girls who were watching him—guys were staring, too, but in a different way, like he was a lesson in something they’d never understand.
“I’ll keep this brief,” he said.
A female voice said, “I’d love to see your briefs,” and a nervous titter of laughter vibrated across the gym.
“I love soccer,” he continued. “I love coaching. And I’m looking forward to putting together a team to make the school proud as we join the Powell Park High athletic legacy.” When he said “legacy,” I couldn’t help but glance at the gym ceiling. It was lined with banners for all the boys’ sports teams, announcing the last year any of them had had any real glory. Not one of the dates was after 1970.
“Also, you can call me Bobby, or Coach McMann.” Bobby, I thought, as his name sighed over the length of my body.
“Soccer sucks,” a guy cough-muttered.
Once again, if Bobby heard it, it didn’t faze him; his mouth ticked up in a half smile that only made him hotter. “We’re going to have tryouts tomorrow for any interested young women, and I’ll post a sign-up sheet here in the cafeteria. If you show up, I’ll have much more to share.” He gave a little wave and headed down the rest of the aisle toward the bulletin board.
“Sign. Me. UP,” Tina hissed to me and Candace, and we nodded.
“He’s a dreamboat,” Candace said as Bobby tacked his sign-up sheet between flyers for the Future Business Leaders Club and the Home Economics Bake-Off. “I wonder how long his eyelashes are up close.” Leave it to Candace to think about how long his eyelashes were when the whole cafeteria had seen that he was plenty endowed elsewhere.
I’ve known Candace since kindergarten. Since seventh grade, she’s been on some kind of diet, and even if she could lose the ten extra pounds she wants to, I think she looks better with them. She hates how she looks in Jordaches (or the copies of Jordaches we can actually afford), but when she wears her older brother Frank’s work pants, I think her ass looks really good and I tell her so. She is also totally stacked. Each of her boobs is the size of a softball and has about the same feel as one of those after a few games: firm but with a little give. (Yes, I’ve felt them. When you’ve known someone since you were five and one day you notice that, out of nowhere, her backpack straps are framing what can only be called jugs, you ask her if you can touch one.)
“I bet he loves to eat,” Candace said, still looking at Bobby McMann, with the same expression she’d give a Nutter Butter after she’d promised herself she’d stop eating them.
“Jesus, Candace, you want to cook for him? I can think of four hundred better ideas.”
That was Tina. She transferred to our district from a suburb outside Milwaukee at the end of junior high, not long after her mom remarried. We became friends when we got paired up to dissect a frog in freshman-year bio. She told me later I was the first person she’d met at Powell who didn’t kiss her ass or treat her like garbage, which was the most common Powell Park High reaction to someone whose nicer clothes set them apart as having more money than the rest of us. She also told me that she thought I’d be a weirdo because of my red corduroy pants, because Tina can be a snob. (The pants were fine, by the way.) Clothing aside, it turned out that we had a lot in common. We bonded over the ways we’d found to navigate parental divorce, our shared disdain for Happy Days, and the fact that she—unlike Candace—agreed with me that most of the boys at our school had a good three years to go before one could even consider them dating material. (Of course, Tina had a long-distance boyfriend in Milwaukee to unfavorably compare them all to, and I had Han Solo.)
“What are the four hundred better ideas?” I asked her, because I loved when Tina got into list-making mode. She’d tick things off on her fingers, all businesslike, and shut you down with a look if you didn’t agree with her.
“Drop my books on the ground and wait for him to pick them up. Make him pose like Michelangelo’s David. Watch him mow the lawn. What do you got, Susan?” Tina raised an eyebrow and flicked my empty Yoo-hoo bottle closer to me with one of her shiny fuchsia nails. (Her nails are always done, because her mom owns a salon, and she says Tina’s impeccably neat appearance is like free advertising.)
I probably had four thousand ideas, but I was saving them for my poor Holly Hobbie sheets, which had witnessed some very un-Holly-like activity over the years. “Well, after Candace cooks him a nice lasagna—”
“Shut up, men love food!” Candace said.
“—I’d put on a record. Maybe Earth, Wind and Fire, or Peaches and Herb.”
“Peter Frampton,” Candace said.
Tina shushed her. “He ate your lasagna. This is Susan’s turn! She gets to pick the music.”
“And then I’d say, ‘Do you want to take off your shoes . . . ?’” In my head, I came up with some good stuff, but out loud, my fantasies emerged gangly and awkward. Sort of like how I’d made out extensively with fantasy Eddie Van Halen, but in real life, I’d kissed exactly two boys and both times had been disasters. One of them had moved away the next day, and I’d been relieved.
“What are soccer shoes called, anyway?” Candace asked.
“Who cares? Susan was about to get to the sensual foot rub,” Tina said.
“They’re cleats.�
�
Without turning around, I knew it was Mr. McMann.
He was standing right behind me. And had probably heard about the foot rub.
“Whuu . . . why? Hi! Hello.”
I’m sad to report those were my first words to Bobby. Every girl at the lunch table looked up at him like he was Jesus at the Last Supper, complete with the fact that we were going to be eating him.
“Cleats. You’ll need them if you make the team.” He looked right at me. “And I’ll work you so hard, you’ll need all the foot rubs you can get.” He sort of saluted us and grinned, with teeth. They were perfect, even this close up. Not stained or crooked or too little for his face. His dark eyes were deep set and ever so slightly hooded beneath his eyelids, which did have the long lashes Candace imagined. His chiseled jaw was balanced by full, almost pretty lips, and his nose was just a bit crooked with the slightest bump in its bridge—it suggested Han Solo danger and adventure, even if I knew he might have broken it just walking into a wall. United, his features told me he was thoughtful and that he knew how to do important things, like read a thick book, change a tire, or kiss prolongedly. He was the first real-life guy who had no visible flaws to disqualify his positive attributes, which didn’t stop when he turned around. As he walked off, his shorts hugged his butt like it was a package wrapped by an overachieving Christmas elf.
“Susan’s wriggling in her shorts,” Tina said, making me even redder in the face. I picked up one of my greasy cafeteria fries and ate it, trying to look thoughtful about something else besides Mr. McMann’s sex walk through the cafeteria. “You should have asked him if you could try out right now. You’re dressed for it.”
“Oh my God, she is!” Candace said. “It’s like you’re soul mates!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked them, even though the phrase “soul mate” fizzed in my chest. If Bobby and I were soul mates, that meant we could also have sex, right?
“Your shorts,” Candace said. “Aren’t those sort of what soccer players wear?”
I looked down at my bare legs. It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, but in Chicago, you clung to summer, which meant wearing as little as possible for as long as possible. My shorts were the same elastic-band nylon shorts that I’d worn every other day since the eighth grade. Not the same exact pair; I had three pairs from Sportmart—one red, one blue, one green—each with white piping around the legs. I didn’t wear them because I played sports. I first bought them because they were cheap and I could pull them on over my swimsuit to ride to the Powell Park pool.
Gimme Everything You Got Page 1
