Outside the Lines

by Kate Christie

  “Hi from Seattle!” the caption read, and Emma realized Jamie must have set her iPad up in her condo’s living room because there, in the corner, was a slice of window that revealed the Space Needle. The other option was that Dani was still there, and… no. Jamie and Dani were comfortable with each other, but not that comfortable.

  “Love the view,” she typed back.

  “Well, good. ’Cause I love you!”

  They texted until Emma had to board her second and final flight of the day. On the plane, the last thing she did before setting her phone to airplane mode was return to Twitter and submit the abuse report form. She couldn’t do nothing. For Jamie’s sake, if not her own, she had to stay on top of the situation so that this time it didn’t blow up in her face.

  An image of a hydra popped into her mind: cut off one head and another two would grow in its place. That should be the default icon for Twitter users—a hydra, not the little blank egg.

  She turned on her music and closed her eyes. One take-off down, one to go. Boo yah.

  #

  Emma stared at the laptop, struggling to focus both on the game clips flashing across the screen and on what Jo Nichols and Melanie Beckett were saying. It was the first day of training in Florida, but instead of heading out into the sultry mid-June heat, the coaches had set up one-on-one meetings with each player. Emma’s meeting was one of the first. While relieved not to be outside under the Florida sun, she hadn’t been sure what to expect when she walked into the conference room. Video review definitely hadn’t been at the top of her list.

  Jo had had a US Soccer staff member assemble clips of Emma from recent matches, and now the coaches were breaking down her role in the team’s offensive transition. Or lack thereof, to hear Jo talk. Again and again she pointed out opportunities where Emma’s passes out of pressure could have been better weighted or more accurate, where she could have gotten forward during the run of play, where she had chosen to hang back instead of getting involved in a set piece.

  I’m not a scorer, Emma thought, glancing at Melanie, Craig’s defensive coach who Jo had opted to keep on staff. But the assistant was nodding as if she agreed with Jo. As if being one of the best defenders in the world was no longer enough.

  Maybe it wasn’t.

  “You’ve been a valuable member of this team for eight years,” Jo said when the tape ended, “and none of us see that changing anytime soon. However, and I don’t think this will come as a surprise, no one’s position on this team is safe. Everyone is going to have to work to fit into the system I’m asking you to play. I need you to stretch yourself, Emma, to get outside of your comfort zone.”

  Jo was right. What she was saying wasn’t a surprise. But even so, Emma felt herself tense at the coach’s next words: “What that means is that I want you to figure out how you can contribute offensively. Is it taking a more involved role in building the attack out of our defensive third? Getting into the box during set pieces? We need a more disciplined, efficient approach to defense as we gear up for the World Cup. The international game is evolving quickly. My goal is to move this team away from traditional long ball and toward a more technically savvy style. We can’t rely on what worked in the past, Emma. Failing to grow has left us stagnant, and I plan to change that.”

  What she said sounded good. Great, even. Emma just wasn’t sure whether such a major shift in playing style could be achieved in a year, especially so close to the World Cup. But team strategy was out of her hands. Her job—what she’d signed on for—required that she nod and say, “All right. I’ll think about it.”

  “I need you to do more than think about it,” Jo said. “Between now and the end of the pro season, I’m challenging you to find ways to stretch yourself with the Reign. And then I want you to bring those expanded roles, whatever they end up being, to residency camp this fall. Can you do that?”

  Emma hesitated, because honestly, the request was a bit amorphous. Was Jo asking her to score for the Reign, or would she settle for a handful of assists?

  “I can try,” she said finally.

  “Good. That’s all I’m asking, Emma,” Jo said, rising and offering her hand.

  Emma rose and clasped the older woman’s hand, noting her firm grip and her encouraging gaze. Then she nodded at Mel and left the conference room.

  In the hall, Maddie looked up from her phone. “How did it go?”

  Emma kept her voice low as she highlighted the takeaways from her meeting: “Video review, new playing style, and fitting into her technically savvy system. Oh, and no one’s position is safe.”

  “Sounds about right,” Maddie said as she pushed away from the wall. “See you at lunch?”

  “Yeah. Good luck.”

  “I don’t need luck,” she said confidently, and squared her shoulders before knocking on the closed door.

  That made one of them. Emma knew that she was a good defender, but Jo’s challenge had unnerved her. No one had demanded she learn a new skill in a long time, possibly since college. And while she knew the test would be good for her in theory, she wasn’t sure how it would go in reality.

  As she headed toward the elevator bank, Emma toyed with the end of her ponytail. The federation reviewed national team contracts twice a year, and for the first time in a long time, her upcoming renewal didn’t feel automatic. For once, it felt like her position truly was on the line—maybe because her coach had told her it was.

  Wouldn’t it be funny if Jamie made the World Cup roster and she didn’t? Well, not funny so much as terrible, awful, no-good… Maybe the vending machine near the exercise room had Hershey’s bars. A little chocolate would go a long way right about now.

  She was almost to the vending alcove when reason raised its anti-candy head. With her individual meeting complete, she was expected to attend the afternoon fitness training—outside, in the sort of heat and humidity that routinely brought many a Pacific Northwesterner to her knees. Emma sighed. She missed Seattle already, and she’d been in Tampa for less than a day.

  As she rode the elevator to her floor, her mind returned to Jamie. Text app open, she loaded the photo of Jamie in shorts, baseball cap, and little else, the Space Needle visible behind her. Immediately the knot in Emma’s stomach loosened.

  “I miss you,” she texted, adding a quick selfie with her face screwed into an exaggerated pout.

  She was almost to her room when her phone buzzed. “I miss you too,” Jamie had written back, accompanied by a photo of her lying on Emma’s couch reading on her iPad, a half-empty bottle of red Gatorade on a coaster on the nearby coffee table.

  She had used a coaster. Without even having to be told.

  “I love you!” she typed.

  The reply was immediate: “I love you, too!”

  Who needed chocolate, Emma thought as she entered her hotel room. She had Jamie, and that was more than enough.

  Chapter Four

  “Damn, you are cut,” Meg said, holding Jamie at arm’s length for a big sister once-over.

  “She literally gets paid to work out,” Todd, Jamie’s brother-in-law, said, waiting for his turn to hug her.

  “I know that.” Meg smacked him in the shoulder. “But no wonder the national team wants you back, Jamester. You’re a freaking machine, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the idea,” Jamie said, and followed her sister and Todd out to short-term parking.

  The view outside the Salt Lake City airport—mountains dusted with the winter’s first snow—wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Meg and Todd had been in graduate school for what felt like forever to Jamie; she had a hunch it felt even longer to them. The land of Mormons wasn’t their style, as they insisted each time the topic came up. But their program was good and the state capital had plentiful pockets of non-straight, non-white, non-Mormon residents. For the most part, they were insulated from the city’s Latter Day Saints community, Meg claimed, or else she and Todd wouldn’t have lasted this long in Utah.

  The drive from the airport
took a while, mostly because Meg and Todd’s rental house was relatively far from the freeway. Meg rode with her body almost completely turned toward the back seat as Todd drove them along the surface streets, busy on a Tuesday evening at rush hour.

  “So?” Meg prodded. “How did the season end up going?”

  “We ended up third in the league and made the playoffs—”

  Meg made an impatient sound. “No, dummy, for you, not your team.”

  Jamie shrugged at her sister ultra-casually. “Well, I was named Player of the Week three times, Player of the Month once, and I made the NWSL Best XI, so…” Normally she didn’t brag about herself, but their parents had always encouraged them to use positive self-talk. This, she figured, counted. “Oh, and most importantly? I didn’t get injured!”

  At the beginning of the summer, Ellie’s trainer had suggested she cross-train at a martial arts academy in Beaverton. After three months of kick-boxing and tai chi—which Angie called the old person’s martial art: “I will defend myself only if you hit me verrry slooowly”—she could feel the difference in her timing and flexibility. Her mental focus had improved, too, probably because as her instructor often said, tai chi was basically meditation in motion.

  That was one reason Shoshanna, her old therapist, had recommended Jamie study martial arts back in high school: to strengthen her mental and emotional acuity. They’d been discussing the rage attack—like a panic attack, but angry—that Emma’s ex-boyfriend’s aggression had triggered, and Shoshanna had explained that when it came to trauma, some people retreat into themselves and become more passive while others grow angrier over time. With some martial arts training, Shoshanna had thought she might feel more empowered and less personally vulnerable even as she learned to channel her anger in a socially acceptable manner. Ten years later, Jamie wished she had taken her therapist’s advice to heart sooner.

  “Way to go,” Meg said, and held out her hand for a high five. “Now that your first season back is in the books, do you think leaving London was the right decision?”

  Jamie considered the question. “A couple of months ago, I wasn’t sure. But now? I’m here, and Emma is too, or she will be soon, anyway. So yeah, I think it was the right decision.”

  Technically Jamie didn’t have to be in Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake, until Friday, but she’d decided to come to Utah a few days early to spend time with Meg. With training camp taking place in her sister’s current home city, it had been too good of an opportunity to pass up. In the five years Meg and Todd had lived in Salt Lake, Jamie had only managed to visit them one other time, and that had been before she’d begun her European football adventure.

  “You’ll have to tell me more about this marginal gains theory,” Meg said. “Maybe it can help me finish my dissertation sometime before the pending zombie apocalypse.”

  “Pending? I didn’t know the status had been upgraded.”

  “That’s because you live in Portland, not Stepfordville.” Meg gestured to the neat houses that lined the broad avenue where they were currently stuck in stop-and-go traffic.

  “Hey, now,” Jamie said, “I heard that Salt Lake is increasingly queer-friendly.”

  Meg’s eyebrows shot up, disappearing beneath her newly acquired razor-straight bangs. “Where on god’s green earth did you hear that?”

  “Reddit.”

  “Oh, Jamie, my sweet summer child…”

  In a practiced little-sister move, Jamie leaned forward and flicked Meg’s arm.

  “Ow! Brute.” Meg turned in her seat, flouncing as much as one could while restrained by a seat belt, and faced resolutely forward.

  “Baby.”

  Meg only folded her arms and ignored her.

  It was funny, Jamie thought as the mountains drew slowly nearer, that here they were in their mid-to-late twenties and they still had the same exact bickering matches. Sisters. Couldn’t live with them, which in their case was actually too bad.

  Meg and Todd’s house was a cute brick bungalow sandwiched between apartment buildings across the street from a café where they said they spent more time than money because the excellent coffee was the only menu item they could afford. The house was small, but it had a guest room, covered patio, small back yard, and—Meg’s favorite feature—a porch swing. The basement where the washer and dryer resided was dark and dank, but it wasn’t nearly as creepy as the laundry room at their old apartment building, Todd pointed out.

  “Definitely a win,” he and Meg said in unison.

  Jamie hid a smile. It always cracked her up when her band-geek sister and brother-in-law whipped out the sports metaphors.

  After the home tour, Jamie stowed her carry-on and soccer duffel in the guest room and then got cleaned up in the tiny tiled bathroom that had nearly made Meg turn down the rental two years earlier. Now that she was here, Jamie could see why. Every surface in the room was covered in tile and grout that, as Meg had moaned more than once since moving in, was a complete and utter bitch to keep clean.

  She dried her hands on a dark red towel that matched the modern art shower curtain and emerged into the narrow hall that led from the bedrooms to the living area. The murmur of voices reached her from the kitchen, accompanied as ever by music.

  “What are we listening to tonight?” she asked as she stepped into the brightly lit kitchen.

  Her sister and Todd were at the counter preparing a spinach salad and a pre-cooked tuna-quinoa casserole. Jamie had blanched at the meal description, but Meg had insisted it was both tasty and packed with protein.

  Meg stared pointedly at Jamie over the top of her glasses. “I don’t know. What are we listening to, James?”

  She screwed up her eyes. “Let’s see. That’s a pentatonic scale, isn’t it? So, Chinese folk?”

  “Well done,” Meg said approvingly.

  When your sibling was a doctoral candidate in music, you tended to pick up a few things. Same with having an athlete sibling—Meg knew more about soccer than she’d ever wanted to.

  The casserole ended up being good, Jamie had to admit. Not just significantly better than some of Meg’s other pescatarian experiments, but so delicious that Jamie had thirds while Todd watched wide-eyed.

  “Sorry,” she said around a bite. “I’ve only had a protein bar and some pretzels since noon.”

  Meg’s head tilted. “Why didn’t you pack more food for the flight?”

  “Um…” Jamie bit her lip. How to explain why she’d ended up packing last minute for residency camp? It wasn’t like she had lacked prep time. Her pro season had ended with a loss to Kansas City in the semifinals ten days earlier. After that, she’d headed up to Seattle to hang out with Emma before the NWSL championship match that the Reign had hosted on Sunday. She still couldn’t believe they’d lost. They’d been at home and they’d had the best record of anyone in the league, with only two losses the entire season. Their second loss had come at Portland in the last regular season match, a victory for the Thorns that Jamie supposed she could live with.

  With nothing to keep her in Seattle after the finals, Emma had come back to Portland with Jamie. Ellie and Jodie were in LA for a quick post-season getaway, leaving them the house all to themselves. Instead of packing, they’d spent the last day and a half watching movies and eating take-out as Jamie did her best to distract Emma from her angst over losing to Phoebe Banks and Jenny Latham’s team. While Jamie couldn’t wait to get to residency camp, Emma hadn’t exactly been thrilled at the idea of two weeks with Jenny and Phoebe lording the win over her

  Meg lifted an eyebrow at her hesitation. “Emma was with you, wasn’t she?”

  “Maybe. Whatever.” She felt her ears heating up and tossed a sliced carrot at her sister.

  “Hey!” Meg gave her their mother’s withering parental glare. “This is a classy house. We do not throw carrots here.”

  Todd lifted a spinach leaf dripping with balsamic vinaigrette. “What about leafy greens?”

  “Those are fine,” Meg said, an
d sipped more wine.

  “Classical, maybe, but classy?” Jamie shook her head. “Not a chance.”

  “A music pun—nicely done.” Meg nodded sagely, her tone approving.

  Jamie rolled her eyes. Meg had been mothering her practically since the day she’d been born, according to their parents. Personally, Jamie hoped there would be a mini-Meg or mini-Todd running around sooner rather than later. Not only did she want a chance to be the fun aunt, but it would be nice to have her big sister’s maternal energy concentrated on someone who needed it.

  After dinner, they did the dishes together like in the old days, Jamie washing and Meg drying. Todd had offered to clean up so that they could have sister time together, but they’d looked at him like he was crazy. Doing the dishes was the ultimate act of nostalgia for the Maxwell sisters, who had grown up hearing their parents inform guests that they didn’t need to buy a dishwasher because they already had two. Naturally, they’d purchased an electric dishwasher as soon as Jamie left for college.

  “My bad,” Todd said, and wisely retreated from the kitchen. A moment later, Jamie heard piano music drifting in from the living room, upbeat modern classical to accompany their kitchen clean-up.

  As they washed and dried, Jamie asked her sister about Salt Lake and the university, her dissertation progress and Todd’s doctoral committee. They discussed their parents’ health and well-being—their dad’s blood pressure was increasingly worrisome while their mom’s arthritis was making painting and sculpting a challenge. Meg told her about Todd’s parents, too, who were a bit older and in the process of deciding which of Todd’s older brothers to move closer to after retirement. Todd’s parents still didn’t understand how he could have picked music school over dental school. Everyone in his nuclear family worked either as dentists, hygienists, or dental assistants. Except one sister-in-law. As an orthodontist, she was considered almost as much of an outlier as he was.