Down the Rabbit Hole

by Peter Abrahams

  A big vein throbbed in Dad’s forehead. “He’s the one getting beat most of all,” Dad said, lowering his voice.

  “I’m sure it’s not just—” Mom began.

  “—like a drum,” Dad said.

  The coach took Ty out. He didn’t come back, just sat on the bench the whole game, slouching more and more. Final score: white-and-green 43, Red Raiders 6.

  The ride home in the van was grim, Ty’s face blotchy, Dad’s knuckles on the steering wheel white, Mom’s lips colorless. Ingrid shouldn’t have been there at all, should have been with the Rubinos, on the way to their entertainment center, but Dad had said no.

  “Ingrid’s got a game tomorrow. At least there won’t be the excuse that she didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”

  “It is just a game,” Mom said after a while.

  “It’s a commitment,” said Dad.

  The phone was ringing when they got home. Ingrid picked it up.

  “Ingrid?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Joey.”

  Ingrid was silent.

  “Joey Strade.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  Then came a little pause. Boys had called her before, but only to find out homework assignments. She and Joey didn’t have any classes together.

  “How’s it going?” Joey said.

  “Okay.”

  “Tough game,” Joey said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We got smoked.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d your brother say?”

  “Nothing.”

  Another pause.

  “See how big their number sixty-five was?”

  She’d missed that.

  “Six four, two eighty,” Joey said. “And he’s only a sophomore.”

  “So he’ll be like what, seven hundred pounds by the time he gets out of college?” Ingrid said.

  Joey laughed.

  More pausing. Was this her first real call from a boy?

  “Do you like video games?” Joey said.

  “Some of them.”

  “Like what?”

  She named a couple.

  “Me too,” said Joey. “I just got the new Fortress Xylon.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Haven’t tried it yet,” Joey said. “I was thinking of this weekend. Trying it, I mean.”

  Another pause. It went on and on.

  “Guess I better go,” Joey said.

  “Me too.”

  “See you.”

  “’Bye.”

  As far as a good night’s sleep went, Ingrid would have been better off at Stacy’s on one of their most chocoholic, DVD-crazed nights. First came the memory of Cracked-Up Katie and her raggedy voice, asking what Ingrid’s passion was. Then came Joey, who wasn’t as pudgy as he used to be and had a direct way of looking at you. What color were his eyes? Ingrid hadn’t noticed, and that wasn’t like her at all. Joey. She added him up: not so pudgy, direct look, blunt Indian-feather cowlick, liked video games, laughed at her jokes. Anything else? Oh, yeah: son of the police chief.

  A nervous feeling—suffocation plus weight-in-pit-of-stomach—stayed with her all night. What was the lesson of the flea-flicker fiasco? That maybe people didn’t react so kindly to sharers of supposedly helpful information, that maybe keeping your big mouth shut was the way to go. Toward dawn, when the first faint rays of skim-milky-blue light came through her curtains, Ingrid, rolling over for the billionth time, realized the name for this new feeling. It was dread.

  Ingrid pulled Mister Happy a little closer. He hadn’t been much of a help all night. That was a first.

  five

  SATURDAY MORNINGS WERE never about feeling tired. Even during soccer season, Ingrid could sleep in until ten at least, the A team never playing before noon. But this Saturday morning, after the night of the billion tosses and turns, she could barely get up. Outside her window, leaves were blowing around and the tops of the trees in the town woods were waving back and forth like giants whipping themselves into a frenzy. It looked cold out there, and any other Saturday morning she might have lingered in bed, watching the spectacle and feeling cozy.

  But not today.

  Ingrid went into the bathroom, always tidy and nice smelling on Saturday mornings since Mrs. Velez cleaned on Fridays and Ty slept until noon or even later. There she was in the mirror. Oh my God. Dark circles, hair ridiculous, and what was that, right under where her cheekbone would have been, if she had cheekbones? A zit. And not just a regular zit, but a zit with a blackhead in the middle—a one-in-a-million dermatological freak show, maybe the basis for some researcher’s prize-winning paper. Ingrid went down to the kitchen.

  “You ask him,” Dad was saying. He was at the table, buttering an English muffin. “Why is it up to me?”

  Uh-oh: Mom and Dad, not getting along. Not getting along came with all sorts of telltale signs, such as that narrow-eyed look of Mom’s and that lumpy muscle that twitched on the side of Dad’s face. Ingrid tried to remember: Hadn’t they been getting along lately, at the Booster Club tailgate last night, for example? But maybe not getting along was unacceptable Booster Club behavior and they’d just been pretending.

  Mom was at the counter, spooning coffee into the filter basket. “But you won’t have any problem spending the money,” she said.

  Every word a total mystery. Then they noticed her.

  All smiles. “Hi, cutie,” Dad said. “Bet you had a good sleep.”

  “How much?” Ingrid said.

  Dad laughed.

  “Did you wear your appliance?” Mom said.

  Was there any point in telling the truth about a stupid little thing like the appliance when you were simultaneously withholding information in a murder case? No, she thought. “Yes,” she said.

  “Good,” said Mom.

  Pure logic. But to her surprise, Ingrid felt bad just the same. And again that feeling of dread awoke inside her, suffocation in chest, heavy weight in stomach. What kind of a world was it where if a good person did one tiny bit of wrong, everything fell apart, while bad people smoothed their way through heaps of wrong? Was that like math, some complicated equation between good and evil? Hold it right there, girl. Math sucks and you suck at math: Be real.

  Ingrid opened the fridge. On a normal Saturday morning she’d be starving, in the mood for Mom to rustle her up eggs, bacon, toast, but today she found herself just staring at what was in there.

  “Ingrid?”

  She felt Mom’s feelers out.

  “Yeah?”

  “Look at me.”

  Ingrid turned.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure? Because you look a little—”

  “She just told you she was fine,” Dad said.

  Mom faced him, eyes narrowing like cocked weapons. The top of Dad’s robe had opened a little, exposing some of his rusty-blond chest hair. He tugged it closed.

  “I was talking to my daughter,” Mom said, one of those over-the-top things Mom sometimes said for no reason Ingrid could make out. Dad picked up his plate and went into the dining room.

  Was this the moment to spill the whole Cracked-Up Katie thing? Maybe not perfect, but that heavy weight inside wouldn’t go away. Ingrid opened her mouth. Nothing came out. It was so quiet, she could hear the drip drip of the coffee in the pot. An irrelevant thought came out of nowhere: Maybe it was time to get a new dog. Flanders, who had disappeared three years before, would lie under the kitchen table at awkward times like this. Offering him a treat had been a good way to break the silence. Under the table now lay a single dustball, missed by Mrs. Velez.

  Ingrid ate plain yogurt and a banana for breakfast, finishing neither, and the silence continued, unbroken.

  Club soccer, maybe to show they had nothing to do with school soccer, like they were above it, didn’t wear the red of all the Echo Falls school teams, sporting instead a shade of green Ingrid loathed. Lima-bean gre
en, dried-snot green—the worst. Which was why she treasured her bright-red Puma cleats with the glittery red laces almost bright enough to hurt your eyes, ordered special, red cleats that Coach Ringer had frowned on at first, but Assistant Coach Trimble must have stepped in because now half the team was wearing them, swearing they were the fastest shoes on earth. Ingrid loved those red Pumas—red Pumas, size seven. But right now, she couldn’t find them.

  She tried all the usual places. The mudroom—footballs, baseballs, bats, gloves, soccer balls, jackets, including Ty’s brand-new varsity jacket with Ty on one arm, 19 on the other, and RED RAIDER FOOTBALL on the back. The front hall—antique hat stand with no hats; oil painting of the actual falls in Echo Falls, painted by a semiknown nineteenth-century painter and inherited from Grammy when she died, a few years before Ingrid was born; a deep-blue marble floor, devoid of shoes. Then her bedroom, the landing between the garage and the kitchen entrance, the laundry room, where her uniform was washed and folded on the dryer. No red Pumas.

  “Anybody seen my cleats?”

  No answer.

  A complete mystery.

  “Time to get in gear,” Dad said.

  “I can’t find my cleats.”

  Dad came into the laundry room. He thought. When Dad thought, his eyes shifted to one side and up a little, like he was looking in a rearview mirror. “When was practice?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Didn’t it get canceled?”

  Ingrid felt her own eyes shifting too. “Yeah.”

  “So maybe they’re still in your backpack.”

  Back to the mudroom, backpack hanging on a wall hook. Ingrid looked through, found crumpled assignments and lots of wholesome snacks Mom had put in during the week, all uneaten, given Ingrid’s preference for chips and candy bars in the cafeteria, but no red Pumas.

  “There must be old ones around somewhere,” Dad said, losing patience.

  Ingrid had old ones, a size too small and black. She squeezed her feet into them.

  “Feeling fast today?” Dad said as they got in the TT and it slowly filled with his forest smell.

  “Yeah,” Ingrid said, although she couldn’t remember feeling slower.

  “Keep working the ball in the corners.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And use that left-footed little fake on the red-haired girl. She overcommits.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Left-footed fake.” A tricky little jitterbug thing she’d never executed properly, not even in practice.

  “Good girl.”

  Coach Ringer, the last of the original founders of the Mid-State League—going back to when bears roamed free in Echo Falls—was a short round guy with a droopy mustache and a drippy nose on cold windy days, like this one. He always wore a black-and-gold hooded sweatshirt that said TOWNE HARDWARE on the back, SCREWS FOR YOUSE SINCE 1937, the dumbest slogan Ingrid had ever seen. Assistant Coach Trimble was tall and lean, wore running tights and a UConn soccer jacket, looked like she could do something amazing, like outrun a deer or kick the ball right through you.

  Coach Ringer liked to gather the team around him in a tight circle for a pregame pep talk, of which there were two kinds, a long rambling one if they’d been losing and a short confusing one if they were on a roll, like they were now, winners of three in a row.

  “Hey,” said Coach Ringer. “Listen up.”

  They all stopped talking, or at least talking loudly.

  “Today,” said Coach Ringer, “I want you to remember one”—he searched for the right word; when Coach Ringer searched for the right word, his jaw came jutting out like he was going take a swing at somebody—“thing,” he went on, finding the word. “Remember one thing and one thing only, and this is it, so listen up. That means everybody. The thing to remember is this. Listen up. We’re gonna make them play the way we want them to play.” That was it? Oh, no—was he going to say it twice? For a moment, Ingrid thought maybe not. But then, raising his voice this time and spacing out the words: “We’re gonna make them play the way we want them to play. Got it?”

  The girls all nodded, ponytails sticking out sideways in the wind. Ingrid said, “I vote they play with their shoelaces tied together.”

  A pause, followed by muffled laughter. Coach Ringer turned red. “Twenty-two,” he said, calling her by her number, “on the bench.”

  Ingrid sat on the bench, steaming. She felt Dad’s eyes on her from the stands across the field.

  Coach Ringer concluded his pep talk the way he always did. “Anything you wanna add, Coach Trimble?” In the kind of tone that invited a no.

  Coach Trimble had been assisting with the As for two years now, and many parents couldn’t wait for Coach Ringer to retire to Florida. She said what she always said: “Play hard and play to win.”

  It sounded like one of those meaningless sports clichés. But at that moment, sitting angrily on the bench at soccer field number one up the road from the hospital, the wind blowing and the temperature falling, winter just around the corner, Ingrid realized she’d never actually heard it except from Coach Trimble, so it couldn’t be a cliché. She glanced up, met Coach Trimble’s gaze. Coach Trimble didn’t have friendly eyes. Not that they were unfriendly, either, just impossible to see behind, at least for Ingrid. And all of a sudden, Ingrid got what Coach Trimble was trying to tell her: Playing hard wasn’t the same as playing to win. Playing to win was something else entirely, a whole new way of seeing the game. A revelation: Ingrid’s mind started buzzing.

  “Ingrid,” said Coach Trimble.

  “Yes?” said Ingrid.

  “Earrings.”

  Ingrid felt her earlobes: her little gold studs, still in place. She’d been playing soccer since the age of four, knew that for safety reasons no jewelry was allowed on the field, knew the ref would boot you out of the game if you were wearing any, and for the first time in all those years had screwed it up. Why now? Ingrid unfastened the earrings, spotted Dad in the stands. He was watching her, arms folded across his chest. Ingrid gave the earrings to Coach Trimble for safekeeping.

  Her punishment lasted for five minutes, which was how long it took for them to go down one zero.

  “Head in the game, twenty-two?” said Coach Ringer, hands behind his back, unlit cigarette twitching between his fingers.

  Ingrid nodded.

  “Get in there.”

  Ingrid got in there. And then, despite the sleepless night and too-tight cleats and forgetting about the earrings, Ingrid ran out there and played the best soccer game of her life, by far. Everything was different somehow. The field was smaller, for one thing. And the ball, which had always had plans of its own, almost as though it were a member of a third team, was suddenly, if not a friend, at least predictable. Even the big red-haired sweeper, with her booming kicks and aggressive elbows, was starting to be predictable. Take that spin move of hers: The game wasn’t ten minutes old before Ingrid saw it coming and, instead of following her, took two simple steps the other way, stole the ball, and went in on the goalie all alone. Lower left corner—GOAAAAAAAAL! Ingrid always heard that Hispanic announcer in her head when she scored a goal, which was not often. But she scored another one before the half—GOAAAAAAAAL!—and assisted on a second. And in the second half, a third—GOAAAAAAAAL!—using that left-footed jitterbug fake to perfection. Hat trick. Echo Falls parents must have been cheering on the sidelines, but Ingrid didn’t hear, didn’t even sense Dad’s presence, another first. She was locked in.

  Ingrid stayed locked in until almost the end of the game. With a minute or two left, score Echo Falls 5, Glastonbury 2, the red-haired girl came dribbling up out of the corner and Ingrid moved in on her. It happened to be the corner of the field closest to the road, and right behind the red-haired girl, Ingrid couldn’t help but see a taxi driving up. And behind the taxi: a police car. They slowed down. The taxi driver’s window slid open, and I
ngrid saw his unshaven face, toothpick dangling from his lips: Murad, with the complicated last name. He pointed at something. The field in general? Her in particular? Were they going to stop and get out? No. They seemed to be speeding up, seemed to be—

  Ingrid opened her eyes. Coach Ringer, Assistant Coach Trimble, and the ref were crouched in a circle around her.

  “Ingrid?” said Coach Trimble. “Are you all right?”

  “What happened?” Ingrid said.

  “You got hit by the ball,” Coach Trimble said.

  “Right in the coconut,” said Coach Ringer.

  Ingrid had no memory of it. She shifted her head—that hurt—and saw all the players kneeling, proper procedure when a player was down; the red-haired girl knelt close by, looking worried. Dad stood on the sidelines, ready to charge out and embarrass her at any moment.

  “I’m fine,” Ingrid said.

  Coach Ringer held up three fingers. “How many?”

  “Three fingers and a ring with big yellow jewels.” She sat up. That hurt too, but not bad. What did she remember? Taxicab and police car. She looked around, maybe a bit wildly: gone.

  “Easy now,” said the ref.

  Red veins crisscrossed the whites of the ref’s eyes, as though she hadn’t slept well either. One of those sparks went off in Ingrid’s mind, a spark of inspiration, half memories fusing with probability. But this moment of inspiration was different from all the others because there was no excitement to go along with it.

  She had left her red Pumas at Cracked-Up Katie’s.

  six

  An IM from Powerup77 (Stacy): heard u were gr8 today

  Gridster22 (Ingrid): uh thanks

  Powerup77: whassup?

  Gridster22: nada

  Powerup77: nada—that another name for joey?

  Gridster22: huh?

  Powerup77: heard he called u

  NYgrrrl979 (Mia): hi—moi is here—joey strade called the i-girl?

  Gridster22: for godsake

  Powerup77: yup he did

  NYgrrrl979: he’s cute

  Powerup77: joey?