by Katie Heaney
I tidied the mess of friendship mementos with the list on top. I tucked this stack—our revised and sanitized relationship history—back into the shoebox, and pushed it under my bed. Then I picked up the bag of love letters, carried it into the garage, and dropped it gently into the recycling can. I looked at the bag at the bottom of the can and imagined the garbage man opening it and reading them, and showing them to his garbage-collector friends. I imagined them taped up in some city-government employee lunchroom. I dove back into the can and retrieved the bag. If I’m going to throw these letters away, I thought, I should really shred them first.
I returned to my room, put the bag of letters as far under my bed as I could reach, and sat down at my desk. I opened my mostly empty UNC application, and this time I didn’t let all that blank space—or my as-yet-unrecruited status—overwhelm me. I could be a walk-on. I could even still get the call. So I didn’t get up until I hit submit and my future was safe in someone else’s hands.
* * *
—
Friday’s game was against FC Flash, currently the leading club team and our sworn archenemies. Where Albion girls were gracious, FC Flash ones were vicious. Legend had it their coach made them run five miles uphill every practice, and if someone failed to finish within thirty-five minutes, they had to do it again. I would have felt bad for them if they weren’t also the biggest crybabies in history, faking fouls left and right like a professional men’s team at the World Cup.
My mood going into the game was gloomy, and the only thing that seemed to help was spreading that gloom to others. As Janelle and I sat waiting in the stands I sighed deeply and said I had a bad feeling about this. When she got up to get a hair tie from her bag, I moved over to sit by Kate, and sighed again.
“I feel like we’re going to lose,” I half whispered.
She smiled sympathetically. “I always think that,” she said. “But then we usually don’t.”
“But when we do, it’s usually to them.”
Concern dragged at the corners of Kate’s mouth. “That’s true.”
“Ryan!” I looked up at Ronni, who I thought had just been deep in conversation with Coach. How could she possibly have heard me? I pretended not to know she was calling me over, and began retying my cleats as slowly as possible.
“QUINN!”
I sighed and got up, meeting Ronni on the field. I hung back while Ronni set the rest of the team off on a warm-up jog, yelling “let’s go!” and patting everyone else’s ass encouragingly.
When the other girls were out of earshot, Ronni turned to me, and I braced myself.
“What’s your problem?” she said, more gently than I expected, which only made me crabbier. I deserved to be yelled at. I wanted to be yelled at. Coming from Coach or whoever was captain, I found being yelled at motivating. Someone needed to tell me I was the piece of shit I felt I was so I could convince myself to be better. Ronni knew that.
“Nothing,” I muttered.
Ronni gave me a chance to go on, but I clenched my jaw.
“Okay, well, save it for after,” she said finally. “But right now, you need to pull it together. Act like we’re going to win, because we are.”
But we didn’t win. We lost, humiliatingly, 0–3. I tried, I really did, but after I missed the goal for the seven millionth time, Coach benched me for nearly the entire second half. I spent that whole time just trying not to cry because Coach found crying morally repellent.
After it was over we slumped our way back to the parking lot, spread out instead of huddled close together, the way we were when we won. No one said much of anything, and I was sure they were all cursing me in their heads. It was clear we wouldn’t be going out to dinner as a team like we usually did when we played there. Everyone just wanted to go home. I noticed Ronni hovering behind me, and considered making a break for my truck, but then she’d just be madder. Reluctantly I turned to face her.
“Let’s get something to eat,” she said.
All the tears I’d been pushing back for two hours rushed to the surface.
Ronni leapt forward to grab me by the shoulders. “Don’t cry,” she said, half empathy, half warning. Like I could just change my mind.
“I don’t know what this is,” I said. “It’s just falling out of my face.”
Ronni pulled me up by the arm and clapped me on the back. I sniffled the whole walk to our cars, which she politely ignored.
* * *
—
We went where we always went when one of us (usually me) needed to muffle her suffering with food: In-N-Out. We ordered burgers and fries and milkshakes (strawberry for Ronni, chocolate for me) and carried our trays to a table outside. The sun had set, and it was immediately twenty degrees cooler. I thought about my sweatshirt, and Ruby wearing it, and I realized she hadn’t given it back.
As usual, Ronni and I ate more than half our food before we spoke. I inhaled my shake like oxygen, and when I started sucking actual air, Ronni gave me a look.
“You think you got it all?”
“Sorry.”
“Is it Jamie or Ruby?”
“What?” My heart rate picked up just hearing their names. I reached for my milkshake again before I remembered it was gone. It was all gone. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, which one got in there before the game?” She pointed to her temple.
“Neither,” I said. She cocked her head; she didn’t believe me. But it was the truth, pretty much. “I just had an off day.”
Ronni took a preparatory breath and I looked sadly, again, at my empty cup. “I say this with love, and with the acknowledgment that you are ordinarily a very good soccer player, but you’ve had kind of a lot of off days recently.”
I felt the tears returning and pressed my palms to my eyes. “I know.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad.”
“I know.”
“Although I would have preferred to win.”
I laughed, and when I uncovered my eyes I saw Ronni grinning back at me.
“Halle played like shit too, you know,” I said. “She should’ve stopped that last one.”
“Oh, don’t get me started.”
I dragged a cold french fry back and forth through the sea of special sauce at the bottom of the paper tray.
“I don’t know if I’m gonna get in,” I said.
“UNC?”
I nodded.
“You haven’t heard?”
I shook my head. “I sent in my application, finally, but…I don’t know.” The more time that passed, the more arrogant it seemed for me to think I could just show up and they’d let me play. Did I even want to play for a school that didn’t want me?
“There’s still some time,” said Ronni, but it was obvious she barely believed herself.
“Not much, though.”
“What about UCLA?”
“Still wait-listed,” I said. “But even if they do end up wanting me…” I trailed off. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself at UCLA, and maybe that was the problem. I could be a Bruin, and wear a blue-and-yellow jersey with my name on the back. Knowing I wasn’t anyone’s first choice.
“They have a great program!” Ronni added. “Sydney Leroux went there!”
I knew that, of course, and Ronni knew I knew. She also knew that Sydney Leroux had never been wait-listed, and that Sydney Leroux would have been Sydney Leroux no matter where she went to college. If I didn’t play for UNC, or Stanford (not that I’d ever been that delusional), or any other top-five team, I would just be…me.
I scraped at my empty cup with my thumbnail, refusing to meet Ronni’s eyes. “I’ve wanted to go to UNC my whole life,” I said.
“I know.” She paused. “But.”
“But what?”
“But it isn’t only up to you.”
Ronni took a deep breath and leaned in closer. “I have had a crush on Luke Bailey since sixth grade.”
That made me look up. Ronni never talked about boys at school.
“Him? Really?” Luke Bailey was the captain of the water polo team, and looked exactly like what you picture when given that information: tall, muscular, and tan, his skin and his hair the same shade of gold. Blue eyes. No brain.
“He’s hot, okay?”
“So I’m told.” From the way straight girls acted around him, it was obvious Ronni was far from alone in her opinion, and that’s what made it so shocking. “Wow. Luke Bailey.”
“I know,” she said. “And for the longest time, probably into sophomore year, I kept hoping that someday, he might ask me out. And then I got tired of waiting, so I asked him out.”
“WHAT?” I shouted, then clapped a hand over my mouth. “Does Alexis know about this?”
“No, and if you tell her I’ll straight-up murder you.”
“I won’t,” I said. “What happened? When was this?”
“May twelfth, sophomore year,” sighed Ronni. “He and Kristen were on a break.”
“Oh my God, that’s right.” I remembered the girls huddling in the hallway, the cryptic Instagrams, the widespread sense that Love Was Dead. “So what did you do?”
“I slid into the DMs,” Ronni said.
“Wow,” I breathed. Ronni Davis was the bravest girl in the world. “What did he say?”
She grinned. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” she confirmed. “And I know he saw it, because it said ‘seen.’ ”
She burst into laughter, which meant it was okay if I did too.
“What a dick,” I said.
“Eh,” she said. “He’s all right.”
“You’d still say yes, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, one hundred percent,” she said, and we cracked up again.
“How can you not hate him after that?” I asked when I’d caught my breath.
Ronni shrugged, wiping the leaked mascara from under her eyes. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He doesn’t owe it to me to like me back.”
“But he should,” I said. “You’re the best.”
“I tend to agree.” She grinned.
We sat in silence for a minute, and I thought about how unfair it all was, which I knew wasn’t the point Ronni was trying to make. But she was the best: soccer captain, smart, loyal, beautiful, generous. Shouldn’t someone like Luke be dying to be with her? And shouldn’t it be easy for the program of my dreams to pick me, the second-best forward in Southern California after Ronni (at one point, anyway)? Shouldn’t it count for something that I’d never once, in all my high school years, thought of any other school as mine?
“She likes you, you know,” said Ronni. I looked up.
“You think?”
“Yeah,” said Ronni. “It’s obvious.”
“We held hands,” I said. Ronni’s mouth fell open, and she whipped my arm with the back of her fingers. “Ow.”
“When was this?!”
“Saturday,” I said. I leaned back in self-defense. “After the game.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“It’s true. Two times, actually.”
“WHAT?” Ronni exclaimed so loud that people at the other tables looked over to see what was so shocking. For once, I didn’t care what they saw or heard. If even Ronni said Ruby liked me, it had to be true.
I texted her as soon as I got home. Since Monday, we’d texted a little every night. Not enough, in my opinion, but some.
Two things
1. I think you guys should have another show at Triple Moon
2. I think we should have a picnic at the beach
For the first time ever, she wrote back right away. Like maybe she’d been waiting all day for me to text her.
Deal.
Homecoming was now less than two weeks away, which meant people at school were starting to act insane. In the bathroom between classes I saw a junior being comforted by her friends and assumed the person she’d hoped to go with had asked someone else, but from the stall I overheard that he had asked her, just not creatively enough. It seemed he’d set a precedent the year before, filling her car up with balloons while she was at work at the mall, and now, she said, he could barely be bothered to ask her directly. “He just assumed I’d go with him,” she whined. Her friends murmured sympathetically, rubbing her shoulders and petting her hair as I washed my hands and pretended I wasn’t there.
Equally distressed was Alexis, who’d been dropping hints with no fewer than four different boys for weeks. She seemed to regard them like colleges: there was the reach (Anthony Millard, a second-tier but still popular water polo player she’d been friends with as a child), the targets (Eddie Soto, her chemistry lab partner, and Aaron Gray, the boy she let copy her Spanish homework), the safety (Jacob Ramos, who was gay and went to private school, where Alexis had gone to be his dance date on two separate occasions). Church boy—once a promising Plan Z—was eventually deemed inferior even to going alone. While all her options had initially expressed at least tentative interest in taking Alexis to homecoming, she worried she was “starting to lose them.” The way she said it, it sounded like they were terminally ill.
“Jacob owes me, and he knows that,” she said, catching me up after lunch one day. “But the other night he said he might have to go to a funeral.”
“He might have to go? To a funeral?”
“I know,” she said. “But what can I say to that?”
As for me, I still wanted to ask Ruby, obviously. Our picnic was set for Sunday, which felt twenty years away. I’d hoped for Saturday, but she was busy, and I had soccer every other night, and I knew if I met her afterward she’d be all I thought about during practice. For my team’s sake, and especially for Ronni’s sake, I was trying to keep girls and soccer separate.
So I would see her Sunday, and if it went well, maybe I’d ask her to homecoming then. It wasn’t much notice, but Ruby didn’t seem like the type of girl who’d need weeks to prepare. Though she also didn’t seem like the type of girl who would go. So I’d feel it out when I saw her. I told myself I could always pretend I was asking as friends, but even the thought humiliated me. Everyone, but everyone, would see right through that. But then, what if she agreed as friends, and the dance itself changed things? As I considered and reconsidered every possible outcome, I began to sympathize with the crying girl in the bathroom. There really was so much that could go wrong. Maybe it was safer just to skip it after all.
But still: my last homecoming. One of my last high school dances. That meant something to me, even if I didn’t want it to.
I was zoned out in Civil Liberties that afternoon when the first thing went wrong.
One moment, Mr. Haggerty was babbling on about discourse and debate, and the next, he ruined my month. I came to as he said the most hated phrase in the high school English language: “I’m going to have you count off.”
This was unexpectedly formal from a teacher who’d never adopted a seating chart and who allowed us to choose freely to sit in slight variations from where we’d sat on the first day of class. Today, by evil, unfair chance, Jamie was seated two desks back, so that when Mr. Haggerty had us count off one or two, Jamie and I were both ones.
Guess what number Ruby was.
“Okay, so…now let’s have you pick a partner in your number group,” said Mr. Haggerty, who apparently hadn’t really thought this through beforehand.
I made a show of pretending to scan my fellow ones for options before turning, inevitably, to Jamie.
“You wanna…?”
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She sighed. “Sure.”
Our project was to choose one of six contemporary political debates, and to have the partners argue opposite sides using well-researched opinions. In front of the rest of the class. For five whole minutes—a decade in presentation years. The topics were first-come, first-served, and only three groups could argue each. The next thing I knew, Mr. Haggerty was taping the sign-up sheet to the whiteboard, and Jamie and I were racing toward it like we were taking back Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. Behind us, everyone began to rise slowly from their desks and mosey over.
“Can we do climate change?” Jamie asked.
“No,” I said. I knew Jamie would get to argue the progressive side of any issue we took, and I did not want to be stuck pretending the earth wasn’t obviously melting.
“Abortion?”
“Ehhhh.”
“Guns?”
I made a face.
Jamie sighed, and wrote our names under Federal Legalization of Marijuana, the least awful of our many awful options. Then we stood back and watched the rest of the sheet fill up. Ruby and I exchanged eye rolls, and I felt Jamie notice. Ruby was partnered with Hailey Metcalfe, who was so excited about it she looked like she might levitate off the floor.
When everyone was signed up we returned to our seats, and Mr. Haggerty peeled the sheet off the whiteboard. He read off the groups and their corresponding presentation dates.
Guess which group Mr. Haggerty chose to go first, the next Tuesday. Here’s a hint: after a two-second delay, the stoners groaned and sank into their seats. I could feel Jamie growing more and more smug behind me, until climate change was called dead last. When the bell rang and the luckier groups pranced out of the classroom, Jamie hovered by my desk as I packed up my things. I prepared for her I told you so. I’d tell her I preferred our competition to the try-hards who chose climate change. But I didn’t end up needing to. All Jamie said was “When do you have time to work on this?” Knowing Jamie, I couldn’t very well say what I wanted, which was Monday night.
“I could probably do tomorrow night,” I said. “After practice.”
