by Emma Kress
I gently close his door, grab my stuff, and pause before the mirror. I smooth my ponytail before running out of the house and into Liv’s waiting car.
She takes one look at me. “Your dad having a bad day?”
“So much for my game face.”
“Your game face is perfect. I just…” She gives my hand a quick squeeze.
“Thanks, Livvy. You’re the bestest.”
“Distraction?”
I smile. “Fock yeah.”
“First, it’s game day. Second, this year we don’t have to take the bus. And third—” She reaches behind her and hands me a bakery bag. I peek inside.
“A Geddes Bakery half-moon cookie?” She knows me so well.
She smiles and pops the clutch. And when I see the sad sacks at the bus stop, I smile too. With every turn, we put a little more distance between me and home. And each time she shifts gears feels a bit like a hiccup and a bit like freedom.
“I love you, Liv Liu,” I scream into the open sunroof.
She laughs as the car jumps into third.
* * *
After we park, Liv and I act like each other’s mirrors and smooth out our wrinkles. As we walk toward school, we pass a few guys leaning against the hood of a car.
They nod at us. “Damn,” one of them says, stretching out the word like a snake.
“Why don’t you sit on my face?” says another, and they all laugh.
We walk faster. I hike my bag higher on my shoulder, and the breeze circling my upper thighs makes me shiver. I cross my arms over my chest.
I look at Liv, arms crossed, jaw tight. When she catches my look, she rolls her eyes and loosens her arms. “Do you think,” Liv says when we’re out of earshot, “those guys actually think that sounds inviting?”
“Do you think,” I say, “those stupid-ass racing stripes make their cars go faster?”
We push through the wide glass doors. Almost immediately, we collect the team like magnets. For the first time, we’re all together wearing our uniforms and it’s perfect. In our crisp shirts and bright skirts, it’s like we’re in color and everyone else is stuck in black and white.
We make our way to block one, peeling off to separate corners of the school. Liv, Michaela, Bella, and I all head to AP US History, which we get to take with Mr. Mac, our favorite teacher from last year. Best of all, when the bell rings, it’ll be nine hours away from our first game. Nine hours until the best season of my life.
Mr. Mac stands outside his door, the fluorescent lights bouncing off his shiny white bald head. “Dobson! Liu! Salamander!” He calls to us like he’s on the field, barking at his varsity soccer boys. The corner of his mouth creeps up. “Oh no, Morrison,” he yells at Michaela, “you hang with these yahoos now?”
“These yahoos are my teammates, Mr. Mac.”
“Well, well,” he says as his eyebrows rise with something like interest. “You’ve assembled quite the team this year, Salamander.” He’s always called me Salamander and couldn’t believe it didn’t catch on—that no one else was as clever as he was.
“We might even beat your boys,” Liv taunts, as she passes him into the class.
He crosses his arms. “Them’s fighting words, Liu.”
“I know,” she sings.
He smiles and turns back toward the hall, calling out more names into the masses.
The rest of us push into the room. But I stop short and everyone bumps into me. And I blush for about a hundred different reasons.
Reasons one through ninety-nine lean on the wide windowsill looking out at the fields, just the way I probably would have if he weren’t standing there. He’s trimmed away his dark curls, but I know his silhouette, his stance, his arms.
Grove.
He starts to turn, so I pivot—and almost crash into Liv. She just shakes her head. Which only makes me blush more. Someone smart should invent a pill for Awkward Crush Syndrome. Clearly, I’m the poster child.
I slip into a desk next to Liv. In addition to panicking that Mr. Mac will call on me at random all semester—because talking in front of a whole class is like a pop quiz on steroids—I get to worry about Grove witnessing my tongue-tied stammering day after day. Perfect.
He tucks his books under his chair, and his T-shirt slides up his arm.
I let my eyes linger on the muscles that peek out. Hmm. We’ll be here. Together. All. Year. Long.
Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.
* * *
After the bell rings, the team comes together again. It’s like we’re all strands of yarn and gradually, as we walk the halls, we knit together and become something. Something bigger.
Ava nudges Dylan. “You know you’re supposed to keep your stick in your locker, right?”
“Skipped homeroom. Never made it to my locker.” She cocks her head at me. “Don’t worry, Cap. I won’t lose it.”
I lean in to Ava. “That’s not what worries me.”
She laughs.
We’re passing the science wing when we see Kups and a bunch of his friends clustered by the drinking fountain. Lance Kupperton is a football player who can pass for a sturdy appliance, but a “smart” appliance he is not. I have no clue how he made it to eleventh grade.
“Heeeeey.” Kups leans back, taking us all in. I just keep walking, like always. We all do. “Gimme some fries with that shake, Cristina!”
I hold my books a little tighter. His originality stuns me.
Cristina slaps her own ass, spinning around to blow him a kiss. “You couldn’t handle my shake, Kups.”
“I could!” Robbie says, the people-pleaser of the football team.
“Dylan,” sings Kups. Right there. The red do-not-touch switch. Not her. She’ll just make it worse. “Ooooh, girl.” He whistles. “You clean up niii-ce. Who knew those legs were hiding under those white-trash cargos?”
I risk a look behind me. Dylan exhales. Good. I speed up.
CRASH.
I whip around. Dylan has her stick thrust up under Kups’s chin. What the hell. My adrenaline spikes like we’re on the field, but this isn’t a game with refs. This is a hallway in the middle of our school and Dylan decides to pick a fight on game day. On our first game day. With football players.
I’m so pissed I almost want Kups to take her down.
FIVE
KUPS PUSHES DYLAN AWAY—HARD—AND SHE falls into Robbie and Eric, who catch and hold her. Kups cracks his neck, first one way, then the other, and takes a step toward her.
“Let her go!” Ava rushes in, and we follow, filling the space between them.
Kups towers over Ava. If Ava gets hurt, I swear I will punch Dylan myself. I look around. If we all get suspended, we’ll have to forfeit. But there’s no teacher in sight.
“You mess with one of us, you get all of us.” Ava’s lip curls.
Kups looks down at her and laughs in her face. But he nods at Robbie and Eric, and they release Dylan. Kups smiles as we back away, his teeth slick.
“I get you all, huh?”
I turn away—we all do. Together, we’re something bigger.
“That’d be one sweet orgy!” I see his reflection in the closed glass door at the end of the hall. He’s pumping his pelvis back and forth and the guys around him laugh.
Ava spins around, cupping her hand to her mouth. “Go fuck yourself.”
“Why?” Kups laughs. “When you girls are so ready and willing?”
We keep walking.
“Don’t pretend you don’t want to!” he calls. “I see you, Nikki Cassavetti, you slut. I heard about you and Jamison.” He whistles again. I glance at Nikki, and her face turns gray. “That was sweeeeet. And if—”
I block out his words. I concentrate on the squeak of my sneakers, the hum of the water fountain. We just need to get through that door.
“Don’t be such bitches,” Eric yells. “I know our mascot’s a dog, but you don’t need to take it literally.”
They high-five and howl as we turn the corn
er. We walk quickly. I search for a room—any room—until I finally see one without a teacher and we pile inside. Bella and Quinn stand by the door. Nikki slumps in a chair and Dylan paces.
Dylan’s whole body is a storm waiting to burst. So is mine, but unlike Dylan, I know how to control myself. I dig my nails into my palms. She endangered our team. She endangered our game. Hell, she endangered my scholarship, because if I can’t play, I can’t get scouted. I look at Ava, but she’s got her worried eyes on Dylan. Of course Ava’s worried about her pick. The girl who skips class and treats in-school suspension like it’s her living room. She may be fierce on the field, but if she wrecks my—
Liv puts her hand on my arm and just looks at me. I know what she’s thinking: Dylan has a rough life. But you can’t just beat people up no matter how rough your life is. You suck it up and walk on by. You don’t throw someone—Kups of all people!—against a locker in a crowded hallway. And you definitely don’t drag your teammates into a fight with a bunch of football players.
“Dylan.” I try to make my voice quiet, calm. “We can’t get into a fight with every guy who whistles at us in the halls. They all do that.”
“You know”—she stops pacing—“I stopped being surprised at the things people did a long time ago.” She points at me and her finger’s shaking. “But there are levels. Whistling is whatever. But taking my stick and—”
“What? What did he do?”
“He lifted her skirt with her own stick,” Kiara says. “It’s—”
“He did more than that!” Dylan’s hands clench into fists. “He stuck it”—her voice is low and shaky—“between my legs and pulled up.” Her jaw tightens. “He tried to fuck me with my own damned stick. In the middle of the fucking hall.” She looks at the ceiling. “What gives him the right? What gives any of them the right?” She kicks a desk over.
I sink into a chair. They’ve taken my stick and lifted my skirt. But they never did that. “I’m so sorry, Dyl.”
“Why the fuck are you sorry?” She paces again. “They’re the ones who should be sorry.” She makes fists with her hands. “I tell you. They will be so sorry they ever messed with me.”
A fight is the last thing we need. We’re not even one game in and her temper’s already jeopardizing our season. Kups was clearly in the wrong. We just need to tell someone what happened.
The door opens, and Bella and Quinn whip around. It’s the dean. She’s short, thin, and about as warm as a Syracuse blizzard.
“Dylan?” Her voice is a bored sort of bossy. “Come with me, please.” She looks at the rest of us. “You should not be in an unsupervised room. Get to your next class.”
Dylan shakes her head. “Tell me you talked to the assholes who started this.”
“Dylan.” The dean’s lips tighten. “Now.”
Dylan struts to the door, and even though she wears the same uniform as me, with her bleached hair and snake tattoo coiled around her arm, she looks more ready for a fight than the field. “Typical,” she says. “I defend myself and—”
The dean puts a hand on her back.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.”
The dean puts her hands up, but her eyebrows go up too, like Dylan is just so ridiculous. Like this whole thing is just so ridiculous. And yeah, she shouldn’t have picked a fight, but Kups was in the wrong first.
“Wait!” I say. The dean turns. Shit. I don’t even know her name. I’ve never had any reason to speak to her. I can’t believe I even opened my mouth. But Dylan just looks at me, and I wonder if anyone in her whole life has ever stuck up for her. “She was just defending herself. They—”
“We’ll look into it.” The dean nods. “You girls get going. It’s pizza day. That’s always a good day.” She smiles at us like we’re eight years old. Like it’s nothing. Like what happened to Dylan doesn’t mean a thing. The door clicks shut.
“Pizza day?” Cristina says. “Did that seriously come out of her mouth?”
“Dylan’s screwed,” Bella says.
We walk down the halls in a loud, buzzing kind of silence. The metal lockers slam and the fluorescent lights hum and so many, too many, people talk and push and shout. And even though school is always like this, it’s different.
Dylan’s words play in my ears: What gives them the right?
SIX
I’M IN ENGLISH, STEWING ABOUT Kups, Dylan, and the game against Sommersville tonight. Not paying attention to the grand introduction to Shakespeare’s Hamlet Mrs. Hastings is trying to deliver. Thankfully, she talks to the ceiling instead of to us, so when my phone vibrates, I check it. It’s a team text.
AVA: Just walked by ISS. DYL INSIDE. WTF??
KIARA: That is SO wrong.
LIV: Was Kups inside too?
AVA: No
QUINN: WTF???
I raise my hand to use the bathroom. Mrs. Hastings just waves her hand at me, not bothering to sign a pass. In the hall, a teacher smiles at me, not bothering to ask for my nonexistent pass, and it occurs to me that Dylan probably always gets pass-checked. I walk quickly toward ISS. Sure enough, Dylan slumps in the back, scraping her pen back and forth across the desk. Kups is nowhere in sight. My phone’s still buzzing, but I ignore it and keep walking.
I’ve never been to the dean. Most of my classes don’t even have the sort of kids who get called to the dean. It always seemed like the right kids got called out. But then again, I’d never paid much attention. Until now. I knock on the door right below her name: Miss Eldrich.
“Yes?” she calls from inside.
I open the door a crack.
A guy with shaggy hair and a band T-shirt is draped across a chair.
“Yes?” she says again, impatient.
“Excuse me. Sorry to interrupt, but”—I try not to look at the boy, though I feel his stare—“I just wanted to talk to you about, you know, what happened earlier.”
“What happened earlier exactly?” She flicks her pencil against the desk a few times.
“Um”—I look at the boy—“before? In the hall?”
She sighs. “Miss…”
“Alamandar.”
“Miss Alamandar, this is a large school and I’m a busy woman. Please get to the point.”
I exhale. “I’m not sure I should talk about it in front of someone…”
The guy in the band T-shirt grunts. “Because I give a shit about—”
“Mr. Anderson.” He slumps farther. “In that case,” she sighs again, “wait outside.”
I nod and shut the door. There aren’t any chairs, so I slide my back down the bank of lockers and sit on the floor. The tile is cold against my bare thighs. I rub them. I pull out my phone and open the team group chat.
ME: Outside deans. Going to tell whole story.
Texts light up my phone like fireworks on the Fourth of July, and they light me up too. We really are a team. I tighten my ponytail. Once I explain, everything will be fine.
I think of the Sommersville defense and the way those girls have always seemed twice my size. I wonder if that’s how we’ll look to them this year. Especially if Dyl plays sweeper. But I need to get her out of ISS for that to happen.
Footsteps squeak down the hall. I look up to see Ava, Liv, Bella, Quinn, and Kiara walking toward me. My smile feels bigger than my cheeks. “You came.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Kiara says.
“Besides, missing Calculus isn’t exactly a sacrifice,” Quinn says.
We all just stare at her. “You’re in Calculus?” Ava asks. “Aren’t you a junior?”
“Shit, you’re smart,” Kiara says. “I’m barely squeaking through Pre-Calc.”
Quinn shrugs. “I like to keep my nerds close.”
I shake my head. “I kind of love you, Quinn.”
“Thanks,” she says with a wink. “I kind of love you too, Cap.”
Miss Eldrich opens the door. Band-shirt boy shakes his hair free from his face and pushes past us. She gestures into her office. “Ladies?”
; We follow her inside. There are only two chairs, but I don’t want to sit anyway. I guess none of us do, because we just line up against her back wall where she has a calendar of the Syracuse University basketball team. Behind her desk, there’s a poster of a stick figure—literally a guy made of twigs—pushing a giant rock up a slope that reads: Don’t give up.
“That’s a great poster,” Liv says, and I want to hit her for making me want to laugh.
Miss Eldrich brushes her blond bangs off her eyes and gives me a barely there smile. “Miss Alamandar, is it? I see you brought some friends.” She pushes forward on her desk chair, and the wheels rumble against the floor. “Will the whole field hockey team be joining us?” She smiles like she made a joke.
We don’t laugh.
“Miss Eldrich,” I say, “I just thought you might want a little more information about what happened earlier between Dylan and Kups—I mean Lance Kupperton.”
She looks at me and then at the others. “I know what happened.”
Ava steps forward. “Then why is Dylan the one in ISS?”
“Shouldn’t you ladies be in class instead of tracking the revolving door of in-school suspension?”
“Did Kups get ISS too?” Kiara gives her a stare-down.
“It’s none of your business, and it’s certainly not possible for me to discuss the discipline of other students with you.” She neatens the papers on her desk. “Is that all?”
I try to swallow. “Miss Eldrich,” I say slowly, “it’s really important that you understand that Kups took Dylan’s stick and lifted her kilt and—”
“Athletic equipment remains in lockers. That’s school policy. And there’s not much of that skirt to lift, is there?” She raises her eyebrows and looks at our thighs. I tug down my kilt.
“This is our uniform.” Ava’s face reddens.
“Miss Eldrich.” Quinn’s voice is even, like she’s trying superhard to stay calm. “He shoved her stick up her—”
“We have video. It clearly shows Dylan Johnson slam Lance Kupperton up against a wall, using her stick to choke him. Thanks to the quick thinking of his friends, she was pulled off before she could do any real damage. If anything, she’s lucky if ISS is all she gets. Lance’s parents may want to press charges. Lance, meanwhile, is a solid student. He volunteers regularly at the Summer’s End Retirement Community. He’s—”
