Dangerous Play

by Emma Kress

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  For my mom, Susan, and my dad, Jack, who helped me believe I could change the world.

  For my daughter, Mazie, and my son, Max, who will.

  ONE

  THE AIR FEELS DIFFERENT OUT here—wilder, freer. In a few minutes, our girls will jump out of windows and leap off roofs all over town. Ava already has. She’ll be here soon. I could leap off this roof, swing around the elm branch, and let go into a tight flip before landing on the ground. It would totally get a 10 from the German judge.

  But the soles of my shoes stick to my bedroom floor, and my hands hold tight to the window frame. I’m not Ava.

  And I don’t do rooftops.

  I tuck my head back inside, shut the window, and head to my parents’ room. I lean my note on Dad’s nightstand but send one of his pill bottles rattling to the ground. So much for subtle.

  Sure enough, his eyes open, narrow and cloudy. “Sorry,” I whisper, grabbing the bottle. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Hey, Zoe. Mom home yet?” He turns to check the other side of the bed, but his face tightens, as if a burst of pain radiated across his back.

  “No, no.” I guide him back onto his side. “It’s still early.”

  He checks the alarm clock: 11:28 p.m. He smirks. “You leaving me another note? Most teenagers just do the respectable thing and sneak out.”

  “I am totally sneaking out. We’re just having a conversation first.” I check the notepad I put by his bed. “It looks like you could take another pain pill. Do you want one? More water?”

  “I’m fine. You have fun at that frat party now.”

  “Sure, Dad.” I kiss him on the forehead. “Don’t be surprised if I come home pregnant.”

  “Don’t forget drunk and high!” He sticks his thumb up.

  I close the door on his laugh.

  Rushing back to my room, I grab my stick and backpack, and tap my Tar Heels poster for good luck before dashing down the stairs and out the front door.

  * * *

  When I slide into the big van’s passenger seat, Ava smiles at me. “I’ll bet you a giant plate of Tully’s chicken tenders and mozzarella sticks that you left a note.”

  I refuse to look at her. “Shut up and drive, Cap’n.”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n.” She laughs. “I’ll also take payment in anything cheesy … Doritos, nachos, pastelitos, Cheetos. What do Os have to do with cheese?”

  We drive down sleepy streets, windows open, gathering our team of girls dressed in black who tumble out of their windows, forward roll down their front lawns, and pile into the back of the van, their sticks clanging against the metal floor, their laughs bouncing off the roof. The girls bump into one another when the van turns, limbs tangling.

  We take Lakeview Road, with its small one-story houses packed tightly on one side and the expanse of lake on the other. The lake is big enough that you can’t really see the other side, especially at night. A ways down, the road winds away from the lake, and the only people with access to the view are the ones who can pay for it. But here, it’s open to all of us.

  We pull into the empty lot of the beach. North of Syracuse, this is about as close as we get to a real beach. I pretend the lake with its dark water and dark beyond is the ocean, that I’m someplace better and warmer than here, and that I’m on the edge—the very edge of everything old and new and just beginning. I breathe in the air thick with water, lake weeds, and tumbled earth and let the warmth of it soak in.

  Tonight it’s nothing but us, sand, water, and moonlight.

  We scramble out of the van, and the lake bounces our laughter back to us. Four girls plant goals with glow-in-the-dark flags, while others volley the glow-in-the-dark ball back and forth on the flat of their sticks. I slide face paint across Ava’s cheeks, the neon-blue streaks bright against the night.

  “Blue team here!” Ava shouts, and she paints her team as they come to her.

  Liv marks me with my favorite color. “Green!” I call, and my group clumps together, marking one another’s faces. Our individual features fade away, and we become darkened bodies with glowing stripes in school colors that crinkle when we laugh.

  “What do you say, Cap? No rules?” Dylan wiggles her eyebrows, her peroxide-blond hair catching the moonlight.

  I tilt my head at her. She’s always pushing it. “Save it for parkour. Tonight’s all about fockey.”

  Liv knocks her stick against Dylan’s. “Besides. Your version of no rules might involve someone losing a leg.”

  Dylan smiles, twisting her stick in her hands. “I just think these sticks would look better with a little blood on ’em.”

  Liv laughs.

  We knock sticks and run to position. “Sticks Chicks!” Our two centers tap the ground beside the ball and click sticks three times before each tries to strike it. Green wins the ball and takes off, and Blue swears as we whoop toward the goal.

  Sticks beat shins, faces eat sand, and arms throb from whacking the sand dunes that rise and dip around us. Beach hockey makes for some mad conditioning. After months of training plus a summer of midnight games, our bodies are weapons-grade. And it doesn’t matter what’s happening at home or that school’s starting soon because beaches and moonlight make everything better. When we break for water, we’re panting, but smiling.

  Last fall, we finished yet another sucktastic season of field hockey where we lost nearly every game. So in a radical move, Coach made me and Ava co-captains, seeing as we were the only players who’d ever tried anyway. For ten months, we handpicked and trained a new fockey team for the coming season. This fockey team.

  “Not a bad group,” Ava says.

  I look at her. “We made this happen.” We click sticks. “Coach is going to shit herself when she sees a full-blown team show up on Monday.”

  “Ew.” Liv crinkles her face at me. “I haven’t met the woman yet. I definitely don’t want to see her shit herself.”

  I smile, but I’m thinking of our team, of Coach’s face. Because of us, we’re powerful enough to get to States and bring the scouts. The sureness of it fills me up as big as the lake, until my feet can’t stay still. I race across the sand, slamming it with my stick. “Fockey time!”

  Blue takes it first, but Green steals it back, and the ball soars to me. I tap-tap it over the sandy divots, their edges hard in the moonlight, their dips like black holes. The goal flags wave at me from the other end: an invitation. I run against the wind, lifting my stick high to drive the ball over the dunes and between the flags.

  Something blurs my vision.

  An animal storms onto the sand. No, not an animal. A girl. My stick connects with the ball all wrong and it arcs through the air and splinters the flag post.

  “Hey!” someone yells at her. “What’s your problem?”

  “Who runs out in the middle of a game?”

  “I—I’m sorry.” The girl’s out of breath and twitchy. “I didn’t…” She looks behind her and I follow her
gaze, squinting toward the parking lot, to the houses I know squat beyond. But the night is too close, too dark, and I can’t see anything. A car door slams in the distance and she jumps. “I—I have to go.” She turns.

  “Are you okay?” I reach out my hand, but she flinches before I even touch her.

  “I have to go.” She looks back into the blackness, then at us, then back again, pressing her hands down her shirt again and again like she’s trying to press out the wrinkles. “I—I’m sorry about your game.” And just like that she takes off down the road, the opposite way from where she came.

  It isn’t like running or jogging. It’s more like crashing.

  “They said ‘venti coffee?’ She said, ‘twenty coffees.’”

  “That’s a walk of shame. Did you see her shirt?”

  “I know! It was buttoned all wrong. Someone was gettin’ busy.”

  “I think her name is Nikki. We had Health together last year.”

  “Nikki Cassavetti?”

  Ava looks toward the goal. “Shit. Our flag broke. Nice going, Cap’n.”

  But all I can think of is the girl. Nikki. Of the way her eyes didn’t seem to see anything at all. The way her white shirt blazed against the night. The way she shuddered and ran. And I wonder where she was running to—or what she was running from.

  “No goal, no problem. Let’s swim.”

  We strip down to our underwear and splash into the cool water, laughing, diving. Our shouts dance across the lake with the moonlight while our sweat and paint wash away in the dark water.

  But every time I slip under and the voices dull above me, the cold dark closes in.

  TWO

  THE NEXT DAY, I PUT on my work shirt, and I remember Nikki’s buttons, glaring and wrong, as I do up mine, shiny and right.

  When I pull up to Big Bob’s Scoop Dreams, Liv’s there already, which is great. But so is Eileen, Uncle Bob’s fourth wife, which isn’t. Eileen’s like one of those sweaters that looks fine but is super-itchy and tight once you put it on. I’m just waiting for Uncle Bob to figure that out and move on like he always does. Until then, I avoid her as much as possible. Right now, she’s stacking flats of flowers, bags of soil, and goodness knows what else to “pretty things up.” I wait until she’s gone around the corner again before I park in the back and go inside.

  This is what Eileen doesn’t get: Scoop Dreams is exactly perfect. It’s an ancient shack made of thin, splintered boards weathered a deep brown, with squeaky service windows that open onto a gravel lot. The only newish-looking thing is the lit-up logo of a cow asleep on a crescent moon that can be seen for blocks. Being run-down is part of its charm.

  Also, it sells the best ice cream in town. Some say the state. Dad’s convinced it’s the best in the world, not that he’s biased. Big Bob, the owner, is his little brother. Well, nobody would call Uncle Bob little, but he is younger.

  There are perks to having an uncle who owns an ice cream stand. Since Dad’s construction accident a few years ago, we could practically bathe in the amount of free ice cream my uncle gives us. Even better, Uncle Bob had the good sense to hire me and Liv to work the stand. He also pays me more than he should, which means that—at least in the summer—I have enough money to go to the movies now and then.

  Outside, Eileen stoops low and snatches a tuft of grass from the gravelly lot with a grunt. Like living takes an obscene amount of effort.

  Uncle Bob has amazing taste when it comes to ice cream. Wives? Not so much.

  Liv and I lean on the counter, shoulder to shoulder, enjoying sample spoons of Uncle Bob’s latest s’mores recipe. We’re watching the traffic collect and pass at the light like waves when I see the girl from last night—Nikki—waiting at the corner and I straighten. But then the girl turns. It’s not her.

  I move to the sink and run some water over the scoops.

  “Anywhere in the World?” Liv asks. I don’t remember when we started asking each other where we’d go if we could be anywhere else in the world, but over the years, the question’s been whittled down to just four words and we’ve traveled the globe in our answers.

  “Easy. Holding a house-size trophy at the State Championships.”

  Liv laughs. “Typical. But I said anywhere, not any time. We need to make the team first. Do you think we’ll all make it through tryouts on Monday?”

  I glance back at her. “Yeah, I do.”

  I want everyone to make the team. Because we have to be good this year. Really good. If we don’t make it to States, the scout from UNC Chapel Hill won’t come. And if she doesn’t come, she won’t realize she can’t live without me. And if she doesn’t realize she can’t live without me, she won’t hand me a full ride. And that’s the only way I’ll ever pay for college.

  Liv grabs two spoonfuls of cookie dough ice cream and passes one to me. “Here’s to a winning season, Captain Alamandar.”

  “We better win, or Coach Webb will never forgive me for stealing you from cross-country.”

  Liv tosses her empty spoon into the recycling. “I’ve got news for you, Zo. Coach Webb will never forgive you. Period.”

  Liv wants to be some international-humanitarian-diplomat-rock-star and she’s applying to supercompetitive schools—Georgetown, Stanford, even the London School of Economics. And any school would want to see her long-term commitment to a sport—as well as the diamond-studded recommendation that Coach Webb could give.

  But I love that I get to spend a season with my best friend. I’ve always loved fockey—the intensity, the rhythm, the skill. The only thing that was ever missing was a good team and my best friend. And now I have both. Besides, even Liv said her shift to fockey will show spontaneity, which is apparently lacking in the average applicant to the LSE. I can handle Coach Webb hating me. I can even handle—sometimes—the idea that we’ll be at different colleges. But I will never forgive myself if I screw up Liv’s chances as well as mine. It’s just one more reason to make it to States.

  I wish I hadn’t eaten that last spoonful.

  Just then, a green Triumph pulls into the lot.

  I squeal and scrunch low. The 1978 green Triumph Spitfire. Convertible. I know nothing about cars. But this car. This one I know.

  “What the—” Liv starts, then she looks out the window and smirks. “Oh.”

  “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.” She nods. “Mmmm mmm, that boy is looking goo-ood. If I wasn’t already—”

  “Shut. Up.” My face feels hot. Grove Williams is here.

  “I mean, break me off a piece of that—”

  “Olivia Liu,” I whisper-beg, pressing my face against the freezer to cool down. Some people are blessed with the ability to flirt with crushes. Then, there’s me.

  His car stops on the gravel. Staying crouched, I half crawl, half waddle around the machines so I can squeeze into the small space in the back of the shack.

  Liv laughs harder. “You look like a penguin. A short, drunk penguin.” His car door creaks and closes.

  I pull my feet in close. I can’t risk him spotting even my right toe. Not that he’d recognize my toe. Or any other part of me.

  “Hey,” he says. Oh. My.

  It should be illegal to say the word hey like that. It’s like his words come from a whole different biological place than for the rest of us. If I melt any more, I’ll endanger the ice cream.

  “Hey,” Liv says, and I hear her trying not to laugh. “What can I get you?”

  “Ummm…” He’s probably reading the menu. I look up and see it through his eyes. It’s old but pretty in a worn kind of way, with vines and flowers around the sides. He and I are looking at the same words. The same swirls. Right now. “How about a Shaken Cookie?”

  “Chocolate chip or Oreo?”

  “Chocolate chip, of course.” I hear his smile. Oh, I hate Liv right now. I want to see his smile. Or make him smile.

  “Of course,” Liv repeats.

  “Zoeeeeee?” Eileen calls in her high-pitched, sq
ueaky voice. My name is ugly in her mouth. And two syllables too long. And she seriously needs to work on her timing.

  “Um.” Liv steps toward me to fix Grove’s shake. “I think she’s around back?” My legs cramp. This is what I get for playing beach hockey last night.

  “She is not around back, Olivia,” Eileen huffs. I can sense her hands on her hips. She is a hands-on-hips kind of woman.

  Please let him leave. I twist the bottom buttons of my work shirt.

  “Where is she?” Eileen sighs. “I wanted her help with the manure.”

  Liv kicks me but doesn’t look down. “I’m sure Zo will be happy to help you with your, um, manure problem.” She kicks me again. “You know, when she gets back.”

  Eileen’s feet crunch away on the gravel. Liv looks down at me and widens her eyes.

  “Manure, huh?” Grove says. I love the way I can hear his smile. Not everyone can smile with their voice.

  Liv makes her way to the counter. “Sorry. Just try not to think ‘manure’ while you eat.”

  “I’ll try.” Grove laughs. “You’re Jake Montag’s girlfriend, right?”

  “For about a year.” As if she doesn’t know exactly how long, down to the minute. She’s probably fiddling with the tiny globe-pendant necklace that Jake bought her for her birthday.

  “I think I saw you guys at some of our games last year.” I hear the ding of the register, the clink of the coins, the scratch of paper money. I bet his hands are a calloused kind of soft. I hear something papery go into the tip jar.

  “Oh wow,” he says. “This is good.” Something slaps the counter. His hand? I wish my ears could see. “All right, thanks a lot. Say hi to Jake for me.”

  “I will. Have a good day.”

  His door slams, the engine turns, the wheels crunch the gravel. Liv’s feet appear in front of mine. She looks down at me. “You are six kinds of pathetic, do you know that?”

  “Is he gone?” I whisper.

  She peers out the window. “He’s pulling out of the lot now. It’s the sexiest pause before merging with traffic I ever did see.”