Dangerous Play

by Emma Kress

  He snatches his jacket off the ground. “You’re a bunch of fucking dykes.”

  “Because we don’t want you?” Ava asks.

  He backs away, head jerking with rage. “All you girls do is tease and then—”

  “Wait.” Kiara puts her finger to her chin. “I’m confused. Am I a dyke or a tease?”

  He punches the door. “Fuck you.” He runs off, stumbling in the uneven mud, and we laugh. So he runs faster. And we laugh harder.

  He was scared of us.

  “That felt good. Really good.” Ava smiles.

  “Homophobic dick. It would’ve been better if we’d kicked his ass.”

  “I don’t know, Dylan,” Cristina says. “He was drunk too.”

  “Honestly, I don’t care.” Liv looks right at me.

  I crouch down next to Bre. “Are you okay?” I brush some hair off her forehead.

  Her eyes are foggy, but she says something. I lean close. She lurches to her side. I jump away just in time to miss her vomit.

  “Now that was worth sneaking out for.” Dylan grins.

  We lean down to lift Bre to her feet. She’s going to be okay. She’ll wake up tomorrow with a killer hangover and a bad hair day. But she won’t have any bruises. There won’t be a Before and an After.

  We did that.

  EIGHTEEN

  SATURDAY, I WAKE UP FEELING like I’m back in that hollowed-out building, standing on the sill of the broken window, a breeze at my back. I wake up like the end of a fockey game when the ball smacks the wood at the back of the goal, like I can splinter anything with the right hit.

  I skip downstairs as Mom’s pulling out of the driveway on her way to work. I put on the pot of coffee, grab the cleaning bucket, and run back up to get started. I’ve got it down to a science: A basic clean every Saturday and I cycle through the nonessential stuff. Today’s extras are the fridge and ceiling fans. I do every room top to bottom but Dad’s, where he’s still sleeping. Then I tackle the fridge, taking everything out, soaping it all top to bottom, and putting it all back. I make a shopping list for the week’s dinners while sipping my coffee. By the time I’m done, I expect Dad to be awake. But he isn’t.

  I try to relax at the kitchen table, cradling my mug like I’m someone on a coffee commercial. But instead, I’m thinking about Dad up in his room.

  This is the thing about Dad being sick that people don’t get: the worries. Sick isn’t even the right word, but they haven’t invented the right word. Right now, he’s up there. Where I can’t see him. Where anything could be happening. He might want something but not want to bother me. He might not be able to get out of bed. He might want distraction. Then again, he might just need sleep.

  Or he might have fallen and knocked himself unconscious.

  I try not to creak the stairs, and open his door softly.

  “Zo?”

  “Morning, Dad. Just checking you’re okay.” The room is dark. I open the shades.

  He squints at me in the new light. “I could do with your help, honey.”

  I walk fast to his side. “Of course. What do you need?”

  “I think today’s a walker day.”

  “Got it.” I turn to fetch it from the basement.

  “Wait. Help me to the bathroom first? I have to pee like a—”

  “Ew. Stop talking.” I come back to the bed. Like always, I make my legs solid, engage my core, and lean over him. The workouts help with this too. “Put your arms around my neck.” He does and I reach under his back to pull him to sitting. His breath is quick and shallow.

  “My legs,” he says. “Quick.” I tug his ankles out from the covers and ease them to the ground while he puts a steadying hand on my shoulder. He takes a few long breaths.

  “Okay?”

  He nods. “Okay.” I reach my hand under his shoulders around his back again but he shakes his head. “Give me a second.” So I pull the chair by his bed around so the back faces him. He puts his hands on it. Takes a few more breaths.

  Maybe he’ll never get better. Maybe it’ll only get worse.

  He pushes into his hands and I help him stand, tucking myself under his arm so he can lean on me as we walk to the bathroom. I feel his muscles trying to work under his thin T-shirt.

  Thanks to Mom’s nurse know-how and Dad’s construction friends, the bathroom is fully accessible with a walk-in shower and bars along the walls. But I don’t leave until his breathing steadies and he tells me to go. Then I run down to the basement and bring up the walker, careful not to scuff the walls with the wheels.

  When I get to his room, I do a quick swipe of the ceiling fan because I’m supposed to and can’t focus on anything else until he calls for me.

  When he does, I wheel the walker toward him.

  He grabs on and walks slowly back to the bed. “Bob said you killed it this week. Lymesburg and East Ridge didn’t have a prayer.”

  “I don’t know about that.” But I smile anyway. Because he needs distracting and so do I. So I arrange his pillows, tuck him back into bed, and pull up the chair.

  “How are your 3D skills coming?” he asks.

  “Oh Dad. You should’ve seen a lift I pulled. I faked left and lifted right and it was so quick the other player went sprawling in the other direction.”

  He laughs. “What about your jabs? You been practicing those?”

  “I kind of forgot about that move for a while but I used it in the East Ridge game and it totally derailed their offense.”

  He smiles, crossing his arms over his belly. “That’s my girl. I miss watching you play,” he says.

  “I miss that too.”

  “After your season, maybe we’ll buy some turf for a corner in the basement. I’m sure I can get it at cost. I’ll set up my chair down there and watch you play.”

  “I’d love that.”

  He wiggles his eyebrows. “You won’t love it when I tell you everything you’re doing wrong.”

  I laugh. “Truth.” Except he’s wrong. I’d love it. We find a USA versus Canada field hockey game and watch it together. We pause it to talk about spacing and speed, and I run and get my stick and practice a combination move one of the players does.

  And everything is perfect. Except for Dad’s pain and the fact that we’re in his room instead of our backyard.

  When it’s time for another muscle relaxant and he dozes off, I leave quietly.

  I text Ava.

  ME: I need me some parkour. Stat.

  AVA:

  AVA: It was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  The playground’s draped in that dusk-blue light and even though everyone’s wearing different clothes, we all look like we belong to the same team.

  Ava passes around a Tupperware filled with puff pastries.

  “What are they?” Dylan asks.

  Ava clicks her tongue. “These, my deprived friend, are quesitos. Naturally, they are stuffed with cheese. Like everything should be.”

  Ava drags me onto the spinning merry-go-round while Dylan, Nikki, and Kiara sprint around us, laughs tumbling out of our sugarcoated lips. We’re turning, turning, turning, our faces and limbs blurring together into a whirl of us. Cristina takes a spinning panoramic photo that will undoubtedly end up on the school’s wall the way her photography always does. And I’ll see it and remember we were here.

  Then we play.

  We stand on swings and march atop bars. We skip over railings and flip beneath bridges. We jump and leap and fly and use everything exactly the opposite of the way it was intended. With every leap, I erase a line drawn by the designers and thousands of unimaginative feet that followed the paths laid out for them.

  Nikki’s perched on the back of a bench, drinking water. I sit beside her.

  Every muscle feels sore. But it’s an alive kind of sore.

  We sit, watching our team fly across the structures, their features blurred, their bodies fierce. And I want us to stay like this. Exactly like this.

  I turn to N
ikki. “You know how we told you about Declan’s party last night? About that dick Jeremy Halker?”

  She nods.

  “What if”—I look back at the girls cheering as they leap—“what if we did more of that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we went around”—I take a breath—“saving girls?”

  She tilts her head at me. “What, like superheroes?”

  I shrug. “Kind of?” She raises an eyebrow, but I meet her gaze. “I hate what they did to you. To me.”

  “Me too.”

  “All the guys who think we’re there for the grabbing. Who feel entitled to us.”

  “It’s not all guys,” she says quietly.

  “No, I know. There are good ones. My dad. My uncle.”

  “Grove?”

  I look at her. “Maybe?” I lean forward. “But there are a lot of assholes too.”

  “So what, between classes we’ll just go all vigilante? Like, excuse me while I get my textbook from my locker and bash you with it?”

  “Noooo.” I look at the team, how the darkening sky cloaks us in a different kind of uniform. “Maybe we wear black. Do it at night. It’d be safer.”

  “So you want to play dress up?” She smirks. “Cristina and Quinn will love that.”

  “It’s not about dressing up.” I watch the girls flying and falling and laughing and jumping, and it just feels bigger, or more important, than that. Or, like it could be important. “I want to not feel so powerless, to fight back.”

  “Oh.” She picks a bit of nothing off her leggings. “That.”

  “What if we could do something about it? Like help other girls?”

  “I went online, you know, after…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It happens to a lot of girls.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  She’s quiet for a minute. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  Liv and Ava join us, panting for air. “Are you two plotting something?”

  I look at Nikki. She nods.

  I turn back to Ava. “Yeah,” I say. “Gather the team. I’ve got an idea.”

  NINETEEN

  WE MEET, SHELTERED BY THE rope bridges and monkey bars, our hoodies wrapped tight against the October air. The merry-go-round squeaks in the breeze, a cat calls in the distance, a tree creaks in the woods. I stand on the end of the slide.

  My mouth dries up, but I talk anyway. “I love the feeling we get when we play fockey or do parkour.”

  “Invincible.”

  “Powerful.”

  I sit on the edge of the slide. “What if it doesn’t have to end?”

  Ava sits up, the spinning circle squeaking to a stop. “What do you mean?”

  When Ava and I first began to build the team, we started slowly—first by talking about our killer workouts. Then, bit by bit, we unfurled the idea. But this feels bigger than hockey.

  “I’ve been noticing things,” I start. “At school. Like how guys just feel like they have a right to us. To girls in general,” I add quickly.

  “What do you mean ‘they have a right to us’?” Sasha says.

  I don’t know, I almost say. But I do know. I take a breath. “The way they’re always talking to our boobs. The way their eyes just roam all over us like we’re for sale or something.”

  Silence.

  I rush on. “Yesterday I saw this guy just reach out and squeeze this girl’s butt. Like it was his to grab.”

  “Gross.”

  Dylan stretches for one of the monkey bars. “She means they’re the ones with all the power.”

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “What are you suggesting?” Michaela asks.

  I feel like if I say it out loud, Michaela might say no and then everyone might say no. I shake out my hands. “I just know they shouldn’t have power over us.”

  A motorcycle revs a few streets away. A small animal rustles in the brush nearby. The night sounds collect in the silence. Maybe I never should’ve said anything. Maybe we can pretend I never did.

  “One night,” Kiara says, “I was babysitting, and the dad drove me home.” She pauses and a small shudder crosses her shoulders. “He put his hand on my thigh. And we were driving fast—too fast for me to jump out of the car—and his hand just kept traveling up and—” She shakes her head, her lips tight. Dylan crosses to sit beside her. Kiara is always sure, always fierce, but right now, she’s more open than I’ve ever seen her. She looks up. “I was scared. Really scared.” Dylan wraps her arm around her shoulder.

  And that’s all it takes. Like a trickle that widens into a stream, one by one, the stories release. A forced kiss. A prolonged touch. A blowjob she didn’t want to give. A string of pressuring texts. Small moments that snowball into an everyday fear—the onslaught of comments and calls, stares and gropes, day after day after day. Unwanted, uninvited, unwelcome.

  The cold air fills with the sounds of our stories.

  * * *

  That’s how we’re all crouched outside Billy Jackson’s house an hour later. Our hair is braided and tucked beneath our hoods. Across our faces, we’ve tied pieces of cloth ripped free from an old black T-shirt Sasha had in her car.

  Billy lives at the edge of a development, fields stretching beyond his house, waiting to be turned into cul-de-sacs and trim lawns. Nearby sit the beginnings of a house. There are no walls, just rows of wooden studs, and we can see from one side of the house to the other.

  Smoke curls against the bruised sky. Forty people or so are clustered around a small firepit back in the field. They’re far enough away from the houses to escape the cop call.

  “Are we ready?” Cristina asks in a loud whisper.

  “Nice stage whisper.” Liv shakes her head. “Do you want them to hear you?”

  Cristina shuffles closer to us. “My voice doesn’t come with volume control. Much like my beauty.”

  We muffle our laughter.

  Ava leans toward me. “What do you think? Want to try to get to the house?”

  We run quickly, our bodies low—just like we’re playing fockey, our feet fast while our sticks kiss the ground. It’s like all along we were training for this.

  Once inside the skeleton house, there are no walls to shelter us, and our shoes are loud on the floor, but nobody from the party seems to notice. I creep toward the unfinished stairs and climb to the second floor. Above, the rafters slice the sky, and my arms itch to swing from them. Instead, we cluster near the opening to what will likely be a two-story living room below. We can still see the party outside, people gathered in the firelight.

  I sit between Nikki and Liv.

  We stay still for a long time, listening to noises from the party. My butt starts to feel sore. The whole thing feels seriously anticlimactic. A few hours ago, we were parkour gods leaping free. Now we’re huddled in a half house, still, silent, and bored as hell.

  “At what point,” Michaela asks, “is this called stalking instead of saving?”

  We all look at one another. It does feel like a bit of a bust.

  “I don’t know. It’s not like I want something to happen,” I whisper.

  “We need a bat signal,” Quinn says.

  Dylan shakes her head. “I’m sure wherever we go there will be dicks being dicks. It’s not like there’s a shortage of assholes at our school.”

  We laugh a quiet kind of laugh. Because of course that’s how we all ended up here in the first place. But maybe this is the one party without a dick quotient.

  That’s when I hear the giggle. I hear a deeper voice, and Nikki goes rigid next to me. I look at her. Brett, she mouths at me. Sure enough, as I peer down, I see Brett Jamison leading some giggling girl up into the house. She’s got to be a freshman.

  We’re frozen. Their steps are loud on the flooring below. She’s laughing and he’s clomping. She twirls into the open space below us. He puts his arms on either side of her as they lean against an almost-wall, but then sh
e laughs and slips through the studs to the other side. He catches her again, and this time she slips beneath his arms. On the third time, they kiss.

  This is an awkward I didn’t anticipate. I definitely do not want to be sitting up here spying on sex. If Liv and I were playing Anywhere in the World, I would literally say: anywhere else. Liv and I widen our eyebrows at each other and I know she’s thinking exactly the same thing: We’re trapped.

  I’m going to have to sit here, afraid to move on this loud floor, listening to sappy sexy times between a giddy freshman and shithead Brett Jamison.

  That’s when I remember Nikki.

  TWENTY

  I PUT MY ARM ON Nikki’s shoulder, and she starts shaking. I pull her closer, as though I can hold her together. But it’s a lie. I can barely hold myself together, let alone someone else, and it’s my fault that we’re here, and she’s having to see this and—

  “Brett!” The girl’s voice isn’t playful like before. “Please,” she says. “Please.” There’s rustling. He’s saying things, but I can’t hear him and I can’t see him. And then loudly the girl says, “No.”

  I look at the others.

  We hang off the edge and use the ceiling joists to flip down to the first story. We race toward the other side of the stairs, toward Jamison, toward the girl.

  We don’t say a word, but the house announces us.

  “What the—” Jamison spins around, his pants falling to his ankles.

  The girl looks at us for a second, clutching her shirt across her chest. She snatches her sweater off the ground and runs.

  We surround him. Here, we’re shielded from the party. Here, it’s just him against all of us. Eyes wild, he crouches to pull up his pants, and Nikki springs, planting her foot in his bent back. He tumbles beneath the open staircase.

  I jump up, grab on to one of the staircase treads, and swing into him. He stumbles. Dylan body checks him from the other side and he crumples to the ground.