But then, with a few minutes to go, I had possession. The ball had come to me when a Wisconsin defender stole from Arlene but kicked it too hard, bypassing their midfielder. I’d been covering the whole field and my sides ached from running, but I took two seconds to map a path to the goal, by dribbling down the far right side of the field.
I knew my moves were clumsy and it took every ounce of focus for me to keep the ball from getting away from me. But we could still win, if I could just get near the goal.
I was closing in on the goal and uselessly sucking in air. My muscles were ragged and limp. I planted my left foot and craned my right leg back for the kick, but the same defender who’d been hounding me appeared at my side. I pulled the ball away just as she swiped at it.
Across the field, on the goalie’s right, Tina lifted her hand, signaling for a pass. I had a clear enough path to her, but I wanted to fix things with Bobby. He’d put faith in me and I’d let him down. I’d full-on lied to him, right after he’d shared a piece of himself with me. A goal wouldn’t get me forgiveness, but it had to be worth something.
The defender swiped at me again. I had to shoot now. Feeling like I couldn’t waste any more time, I didn’t bother setting my place foot and went for the shot.
As I made contact with the ball, I felt the hollowness of my kick. It was weak, and the goalie saw it coming. She easily batted it from the goal.
The game was over, and we’d lost.
We lined up to slap hands and say “Good game” to our opponents. After we finished, Dana jogged to a trash can under the bleachers, where she puked.
“God, we sucked,” Marie muttered as we trudged toward our bench.
“I wanna go home,” Arlene whined. She leaned on Sarah, who wasn’t up to holding her. They tottered clumsily toward the bus.
“I feel like I drank a bottle of hot pee,” Dawn said, kicking a clod of mud from her shoe.
“Hot pee sounds better than schnapps,” Franchesa said.
“I’m gonna be sick again.” Dana gagged and ran back to the trash can.
At the bench, the smile Bobby had worn exchanging post-game pleasantries with the other coach was gone. We stood in a cluster near him. We all were waiting for him to tell us how we’d wasted our one chance. But a cascade of angry words would have been better than his silent disgust as he packed up the team’s gear, hefted the bag onto his shoulder, and stalked toward the bus without even telling us to follow.
We waited until he’d put some distance between us to march behind him. None of us spoke. The only sound was our cleats crunching against the ground.
Bobby didn’t look at us as we climbed the bus stairs. And he didn’t ask for a navigator on the way back to Powell Park.
Twenty
When I’d finally gone to bed the night before the game, I’d been buzzed, but still with a vision, inspired by the talk with Bobby: I’d kick the perfect winning goal and my team would surround me and be cheering so loudly I wouldn’t be able to hear anything beyond their voices. Then, as they parted, Bobby would be regarding me with admiration. He wouldn’t pull me to him and kiss me on the mouth, but I’d know he’d thought about it. Afterward, I would come home to tell my mom that we’d won and that we should order pizza. (Drinking had made me hungry.)
There was another version where Bobby suggested we go back to the motel and he’d admit he couldn’t stop thinking about me and couldn’t wait any longer to be with me. That one I’d had to squelch because there’d been ten other girls in the room.
The reality was a bus ride home with a sullen Bobby at the wheel. Our hangovers had settled in on us in varying degrees, but our disappointment and shame seemed uniform and consistent, and we were silent most of the way, even when we stopped halfway home at a McDonald’s. Bobby ordered a black coffee and sat at a small table by himself. Some of the team ordered fries and burgers, more to absorb the nausea than for hunger, and ate in silence. Yesterday’s excitement was gone, and if we still felt like a family, it was a dysfunctional one.
I skipped the food. The idea of wolfing down grease as Bobby drank his coffee and ate granola he’d brought with him felt like yet another shameful choice in the face of his virtue. But mostly I had no appetite.
Not only had I wasted my chance for a winning game—or even a game I could say I’d tried my best to win—but I’d lied to Bobby. We all had. I knew then that it wasn’t losing Bobby I cared so much about; it was that we gave up our chance to win before we even got on the field. I knew he felt this way because I felt it, too.
We made it back just before two, and as we gathered our things, Bobby said, “Practice usual time and place on Monday.” His tone was cold, but a few of us glanced at each other, surprised. We were on his shit list, but he hadn’t flushed us yet.
“Well, we kind of fucked that up,” Tina said as we walked to her car.
“I know,” I said. “He really hates us.”
“He’ll be fine,” Tina said. “Anyway, I know we probably don’t want to talk about last night, but I will say I’m glad you met Todd.”
“He seems great,” I said to her, thinking of what Jeff had said about their relationship. “I’m glad you guys found each other.”
“Me too,” Tina said. She stopped walking as if struck by something she forgot on the bus. But she turned to me instead. “You know why I didn’t tell you that we haven’t had sex yet?”
That was not the question I’d been expecting her to ask. “Because you feel sorry for me since my outlook for having sex is whatever they put on a weather map when there’s somehow no weather at all?”
“Don’t joke,” Tina said. “It was a serious question. And I didn’t tell you because I wanted to see if you’d ask. Like, the way I ask you about Joe, or see what you thought of Jeff last night.”
“I don’t know . . . ,” I began, but trailed off. “Jeff was nice. We didn’t talk long.”
“Yeah, you didn’t talk long, but he told Todd that in that time, you covered a lot of ground. Like if we’re really in love, or if we just love our high-stakes secret romance. Jesus, Susan.”
“I know you’re in love. I think I was jealous, or felt bad because I didn’t know more about you guys,” I said. “But I have always wondered, how it works for you.”
Tina held up a hand. “I don’t mind that you’ve wondered. But you’ve never even asked me about that, Susan.”
I didn’t have any answer for that. I couldn’t look her in the eyes.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not sure if you know what friendship is.”
“What?” I was tired and sore, but Tina’s comment sent a defensive charge through my body. “What are you even talking about? I’ve been friends with you since ninth grade. And Candace since kindergarten.”
Tina cocked her head to the side. “And as soon as she started dating a guy you think is a dork, you started avoiding her.”
“I’m not avoiding her,” I said. “She’s got her football girlfriends.”
“I get it, and that sucks. But you’re acting like a brat—like you’re trying to push her away.”
Tina opened the car door and got in. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to give me a ride anymore, but after a moment she reached across and threw the passenger door open. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Get in.”
“It’s not like Candace asks about soccer,” I said. As my body hit the passenger seat, I registered again how sore I was.
“Just like you don’t ask about George. Or Todd,” Tina said. “Honestly, it’s not that I think you’re jealous. But anytime something doesn’t make sense to you, you decide you just don’t care about it. Being a good friend is more than just sitting at the same lunch table and going to the movies.”
“I don’t want to get into the Candace stuff,” I said as she started the car. “But there are . . . other reasons, maybe, I don’t bring up Todd.”
“I’m waiting,” Tina said. She loosened her grip on the gear shift.
“It’s because you�
��re my friend with such a handle on things,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t imagine you needing anything from me because you’re four hundred times more together than I am.”
Tina squinted at me. “Why do you think that?”
“You’re looking at colleges, you have a boyfriend, and you’re strong enough to deal with all the challenges with the distance and your mom, and like, you’re tall, and hot, and I’m me. Like, I don’t even know why you’re friends with me.”
“All right, I’m stopping you there before this turns into a pity party. But I’m your friend, which means I’ll tell you what you need to hear, even if you don’t deserve it. One, you know you’re plenty hot and you could have had Jeff if you wanted him. Two, Suzie Q, everybody you know is a mess. Even me.” She released the clutch and pulled out of the lot.
“If you’re a mess, how come I’ve never once heard you grind the clutch when you drive?” It was another joke, but it got Tina to smile.
“Well, like the college thing. I want to go, don’t get me wrong. I even like that my mom mails away for brochures from places I’ve never heard of. But that also means pressure. Like, she looks at everything I do like it might make or break my chances. Last week, I was leaving for school and she made me take my blouse off so she could iron it, like she thinks at any minute some college dean might see me and write me off because my shirt’s wrinkled.”
Tina laughed to herself, and I mumbled. “It’s nice that she cares, though.”
“Yeah, of course it is. But if she cared less, maybe I wouldn’t be hiding Todd from her. Do you know that I make him lie when he calls my house? If he gets my mom or stepdad, he has to pretend to be ‘Billy, Tina’s lab partner,’ or ‘Roger,’ who I’m tutoring in English. . . .”
I thought about the first time I’d met Tina’s mom. Tina hadn’t been nervous to introduce me at all, and her mom had invited me for dinner within the first ten minutes. I knew it was different—a friend versus a boyfriend—but still, I said, “Your mom is cool. Do you really think she’d have a problem with Todd? I mean, I know she gives money to Reagan but . . .”
With a sad laugh and a head shake, Tina cut me off, but gently. “She wouldn’t love Todd’s politics, but they wouldn’t be a big deal to her if they were going to lead somewhere she can imagine. All the guys my mom wants me to date? They’re college-bound, goal-oriented guys with plans. The reason I love Todd is he’s not those things. He’s smart and he works hard, but he’d rather go pick litter out of rivers than go to college. And I can just hear my mom saying, ‘What kind of life will he give you?’”
I could hear Tina’s mom saying the same thing. Once she’d asked about Tonia, out in California, and when I told her my sister was a free spirit, Mrs. Tate (her second husband’s last name) had looked horrified.
“You don’t have to introduce him as Todd, a guy with no plans,” I said. “He could just be ‘my boyfriend, Todd.’”
Tina nodded. “I know. I’m a shitty girlfriend. He introduced me to his parents. He had talked me up so much that his mom and dad practically kissed the ground I walked on when they met me.”
I was gaining more and more respect for Todd.
Tina drummed on the steering wheel. “I keep wishing I would wake up and just not love him anymore, so I don’t have to do anything to disappoint my parents. Did you know, once I went out with one of the guys my mom invited for dinner? Just hoping that I’d like him a lot and it would mean I could break it off with Todd and date someone my parents would be thrilled with?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
We were at a light. Tina raised her eyebrows at my question. “Would you have cared?”
“Sure,” I said. Then I paused . . . “But I might have thought, ‘Tina will know what to do.’”
“Yeah, right. I felt so guilty about it that last night, when I could have been making out with him, I told Todd about the date, just to see if it would make him mad.”
“He still came to our game,” I said. “He must not have been.”
“He was glad I opened up to him,” she said. “I was disgusted with myself and he got me to forgive myself, when I would have been furious if he did the same thing.”
“I’ve never seen you furious before,” I said, thinking of Tina’s calm when handling the bitchy girls at our school. And even the way she was handling me, her shitty, shitty friend.
“Yeah, maybe I do hide that stuff a bit. But I don’t want you to take what I seem like for what I am like. And when Candace quit the team—and this is stupid and kind of bitchy, but I’ll tell you anyway—I thought, ‘Now Susan and I will have something.’ Like we’d have a thread that you and Candace didn’t.”
“We do. And you’re not second. I’ve known Candace forever, and I hate that she bailed on us for some guy, but it’s not like you’re my backup friend or something.” The words came out fast, and as I said them, I knew that I did treat Tina like my backup friend. But it was mostly because I’d had more practice with Candace. “Look, I’ve spent a lot of time hearing all of Candace’s innermost thoughts on everything,” I continued, “and maybe that’s why I’m annoyed she just took George because he was the first guy who wouldn’t ditch her immediately. But you’re totally right about you and me. The way I’ve been . . . it’s not how a friend should act, and I’m sorry. If you give me a chance, I promise to do better.”
“Some of it’s my fault, too. I don’t exactly volunteer all my information,” Tina said.
“You mean like Candace, and her tirade when the pep club put her on sign-making duty for the football B team?”
Tina laughed. “Yeah, like that,” she said. “And maybe it’s because you’ve been friends with Candace so long that I hate feeling worried I have to compete. Like I’ll bring up some issue of mine and you won’t be interested and I’ll be hurt.”
“I’ll be interested. And I’ll ask more questions,” I said. I couldn’t help it as my lips rose in a grin. “Like, after last night, are you still a virgin?”
Tina swatted me. “Yes. Technically, anyway. My damn confession took up the time Todd and I needed to get it all the way on.”
“He’s a good guy, though,” I said. “That he listens.”
“He really is. His friends are, too. But I still don’t get why you passed Jeff to Arlene. Unless . . .” She put her finger on her chin. “It’s that Joe guy, isn’t it?”
“No! But something did happen,” I said. Then I spilled out the whole story of the practice as his house and the almost kiss and his “habit” comment. “And I guess it was proof that he’s exactly like I thought. Girls and life are a game to him. I want someone more mature, or something.”
Tina gave me a knowing look. “Just admit you’re holding out for Bobby.”
I blushed, thinking of how cute he’d looked talking excitedly about the history of soccer.
“Not Bobby,” I said. “Or maybe someday Bobby. But someone like Bobby . . . who’s the whole package, inside and out.”
“And in his pants?”
“Yeah, but I’m trying to be respectful after the shitty thing we did. We blew it.”
“Maybe we’ll get another game,” Tina said. “And we can make it up to him.”
“I’m so glad no one saw us play today.”
“Todd did! But he loves me no matter what,” she said. We pulled up to my house, and she put the car in park as she leaned her head back against the seat and looked over at me. “Anyway, I’m going to let you continue to admire how much I have my shit together on the outside, and you’re going to remember that I’m a person with feelings and ask me questions so that I can lose that same shit once in a while, okay?”
I held my hand up like I was taking an oath. “I vow you can lose your shit on me anytime,” I said. Then, even though I still had to read the stupid Dickens book, I added, “Do you want to come in? I can show you a picture of the dusty peach dress I’m wearing for my dad’s wedding.”
“After the schnapps, I don’t wan
t to think about anything peach-related for a while. No offense.”
I hefted my bag off the floor of the car and put it in my lap. “I never even got to tell you about walking around the motel with Bobby last night. In my pajamas.”
“Did you try out any of your Cosmo strategies?”
“Well, I didn’t have a bra on.” I thought of how easy it had been to talk to him. “We had this kind of . . . nice conversation.”
“Like we’re having now?”
“Yeah, except I kept wondering if he had on underwear under his track pants.”
“He definitely sleeps in the nude.” Tina closed her eyes, as if imagining it.
“So he was naked like two hundred feet from all of us.”
We paused to think about that.
I got out and put my bag on my shoulder, then leaned into the car and said, “I’m sorry, Tina, for being a bad friend,” before I walked to my door.
“I’m sorry I’m such a badass.” She waited until I’d opened the door to drive away.
Inside, I unpacked my stuff from the weekend, and even though the conversation with Tina had ended well, I still felt like a crappy friend, plus a lousy person and a letdown of a soccer player. Putting my dirty uniform in the wash to Tide away all the grime of the game was like washing away all the hard work we’d done to get there. The practices and the car wash and the lessons with Joe.
What if we didn’t get another chance?
The headache that had seemed to be fading when we’d finally gotten off the expressway returned with a vengeance thanks to whatever was still polluting my system. With the dull pain came a renewed sense of despondency.
I heard my mom’s key in the front door and the rustle of grocery bags. Instantly, my stomach rumbled at the promise of food. Also, at the promise of Mom’s attention, which might feel good after the laborious self-loathing I’d put myself through. A mother’s unconditional love was supposed to make everything better, right?
I moped down to the kitchen, watching as Mom unpacked the grocery bags, taking out elbow noodles and tuna and a bunch of celery, cans of soup, and the store-brand pop that tasted like the offspring of Coke and RC (and not a child its parents were proud of).
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