The Football Girl

by Thatcher Heldring

  “Your girlfriend plays football,” Luke said. “Call her.”

  I had to stop and let what Luke had just said sink in. First, I had to start getting used to other people knowing. It was like I wasn’t just Caleb anymore. Not that I didn’t like it. I wondered what sounded better—Tessa and Caleb, or Caleb and Tessa. Second, Luke seemed surprisingly casual about the fact that she played football. Maybe that was a sign that it wasn’t such a huge deal after all. Inviting her to play just for fun could be a way to clear the air between us without sending a message that I thought she should come to camp or tryouts in the fall.

  “You cool with that?” I asked Dobie.

  “It’s just for today, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, totally,” I said.

  “Because, the other thing—her playing on the team—bad idea, dude.”

  “Oh, I know. I don’t think she really wants to do it,” I said with a gulp.

  After breakfast, Dobie and I walked to Boardman Park, where we’d made plans to meet everyone else, including Tessa. Charlie was driving Luke in his truck.

  “Man, I love summer,” I said as we made our way along the river trail. I watched two kayakers paddling in the light rapids. “Do you realize that a week ago at this time we were taking a math test?”

  I almost ate my phone when I got the text from Caleb. He wanted me to play football! Not that I needed his permission, but it was such a relief to know he was seeing things differently. I drank a smoothie and ran as fast as I could to the field. I had to escape the house before I got forced into licking envelopes.

  I had been so obsessed with not being able to play football that I had forgotten what it was actually like to hold one. When I ran, I lived for the zone—that point in a race when the rhythm comes automatically, my feet flying over roots, dirt, and rocks, while my eyes stay locked on the trees, the sky, or whatever sucker I’m about to pass. I felt all that when I ran a good route in football, but the cherry on top was the sensation of catching a perfectly thrown ball in stride and sprinting away from the defensive back I was about to burn for six. That was why I was like a kid on cake when the game started.

  There were just enough of us for a real game. It was Caleb, Dobie, Luke, Shane, and me in pinnies against Nick, Charlie, Roy, Fish, and Julian in shirts.

  We stood in a circle near the middle of the field. “All right, dorks,” Charlie said. “This is two-hand touch, two completions. No runs. Touchdown is the full seven.” He paused. “What else? Oh yeah, blitz count is ten Boise Idaho. And remember we’ve got a girl out here.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I can handle myself.”

  Charlie smiled and pointed at Luke. “I was talking about him.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Luke said, coming up a little short of threatening.

  “You should,” I told him. “It’s a compliment.”

  “Who starts?” Caleb asked.

  Charlie held up the football. “Losers walk,” he said.

  “We haven’t lost anything yet,” Caleb replied confidently.

  Charlie was just as confident as Caleb. “You will,” he replied.

  I could see where Caleb got it, like it was hand-me-down swagger.

  My team hustled to the other end of the field.

  Charlie raised his hand. “Ready?”

  I raised my hand. “Ready!”

  He let the football fly. I sidestepped to my right until I was under it. After a clean catch, I tucked the ball away and found a seam up the sideline. I shifted into a higher gear, trying to cover as much ground as I could before the defense closed in on me. I was fifteen yards up when I heard the two sweetest words a girl can hear when playing with all boys on the football field.

  “Get her!”

  I think it was Roy yelling at Julian. Whoever said it, it was like sprinkling turbo dust onto a video game player. I ran from the voice behind me, still clutching the football, until Charlie ended my kickoff return with a two-handed tag.

  “That was friggin’ spectacular,” Caleb said, holding up his hands.

  “Bam,” I replied, slapping his hands.

  “Bam,” he said.

  Dobie looked at us impatiently. “Hey, uh, you two want to keeping playing, or was that enough for one day?” We joined him and Luke in the huddle.

  I could have stayed in a huddle for hours. I loved it. There was always either too much energy or everyone was wiped out. Even if it was cold, a cloud of sweat and dust hung overhead. The QB talked first, and nobody ever questioned anything, even if the play made no sense, which I enjoyed, especially when the QB was me. And we all talked like we were about to invade a foreign country.

  Dobie drew up the first play on his finger. From what I could tell, I was supposed to run a slant route left to right across the field and he’d hit me in stride. Luke would try to lose Roy with a hitch, then run deep. Caleb was the checkdown option, hanging closer in case nobody got open.

  Dobie turned his hand over so it was palm down. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Let’s do it,” said Caleb.

  We stacked our hands, then broke the huddle.

  Julian lined up across from me. I didn’t know much about Julian except that he went to Caleb’s school. But one look told me everything. The attitude. The fitted long-sleeved undershirt. The bright red shoes. He was the star of his own highlight reel. He had probably burned half the guys in town in four sports. But I could see from the look on his face that he had no idea what to do with me.

  “You can’t win,” I said. “Play off me or jam me. I’ll take you deep either way.”

  “I don’t think so,” Julian said.

  “You don’t think so?” I repeated. “That’s all you got?”

  Julian shook his head. “Not gonna happen.”

  “Let’s talk about it in the end zone,” I said.

  Roy jogged by Julian. “Careful, dude. She’s got wheels.”

  Julian backed away from the line. “No problem,” he replied.

  I will say this. If there was any girl who could play high school football, it was Tessa. She was fast, ran good routes, and could catch. But there was one more thing about her that nobody else knew: she was lethal with head games. She had Julian completely out of his game. He was so afraid of Tessa beating him deep that he just assumed she was running a straight fly route. Dude never considered she was going to break inside on a slant.

  And she nailed it.

  Once Julian bit on the go route, it was game over. Tessa went zero to sixty up the left sideline, with Julian on the outside. Suddenly she hit the brakes and broke to her right. Julian got his feet crossed up trying to stay with her. He stumbled just as Tessa caught the ball in stride and turned upfield.

  That wasn’t football. That was artwork.

  Dobie, Luke, Shane, and I watched Tessa cross the line into the end zone. “I don’t think plays like a girl means what we think it does,” Dobie said.

  “Depends on the girl, I guess,” Luke replied.

  “After that, maybe we should change it to plays like a Julian,” I said, just loud enough for Julian to hear.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I got beat by a girl. You all happy?”

  “Dude, you didn’t get beat by a girl,” Roy said. “You just got beat.” Roy walked up to Tessa. “I don’t care what locker room you use,” he added. “That was slick.”

  The game lasted almost two hours.

  In the end, my team lost by a touchdown. Tessa had gotten the best of Julian, but she couldn’t stop him either. He was flat-out faster than she was. On offense, she could make up for that by running good routes, but on defense, Julian’s speed was a problem for her.

  “You’re lucky it wasn’t tackle,” Charlie said to my team.

  “I wish it was,” Dobie said. Big mistake.

  Charlie smiled. He tossed Dobie the football. “You want to play some tackle?”

  Dobie nodded. “Bring it.”

  Without warning, Charlie barreled into Dobie, hit
ting him square in the chest and knocking him six feet back onto his butt.

  We all cheered. Dobie sat up slowly. “That was awesome.”

  “Do me!” Roy yelled.

  Charlie plowed into Roy, flattening him.

  Roy rolled onto his side, clutching his ribs. “Feels great.”

  One by one we all took turns getting tackled by Charlie. Before long the field looked like the set of a kung-fu movie. There was only one person who Charlie hadn’t tackled.

  “My turn,” Tessa said, standing about ten feet from Charlie.

  Charlie shook his head. “Not today,” he replied. I knew from the tone of his voice that he wasn’t going to change his mind.

  Tessa waved her hand at the guys. “You tackled everyone else.”

  “That’s different,” Charlie explained.

  “Because I’m a girl?”

  “No, because I’m a guy.”

  After the game, Caleb and I went to town for frozen yogurt.

  “Why wouldn’t your brother tackle me?” I asked him. We were sitting on stools at a counter by the window facing the street.

  Caleb dug his pink plastic spoon into a bowl of blackberry yogurt. “What did he say?”

  “Seriously, Caleb? You were right there.”

  “I forgot.”

  “He said because I’m a guy. I want to know what he meant.”

  “I guess it’s like this: If Charlie tackles me and I get hurt, we all laugh and he tells me to rub some dirt on it. I mean, even if he broke one of my ribs, he’d be right behind me in the hospital telling me to walk it off. But if the same thing happens and it’s you, nobody’s laughing.”

  “I can take it,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Caleb said carefully. “But Charlie can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Handle it.”

  “Handle what? I don’t get it.”

  “Charlie works at a gym with a bunch of meatheads. He couldn’t handle being the guy who hurt a girl. And that goes for most of us. No matter how it happens. It’s nothing against you or any other girl. It’s just the way we are. Some of us, anyway.”

  “Stop it,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s the truth,” Caleb said. “Sorry if you don’t like it.”

  “Let me get this straight. First everyone says I can’t play football because I might get hurt. Now I can’t play football because if I get hurt, it would make you guys feel bad? That’s pathetic and you need to get over it.”

  “I can’t just get over it, Tessa. It’s, like, how I’m programmed. Guys I know don’t hit girls. They don’t tackle girls. They just don’t. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you. You can come to football camp. And if you try out for the football team, you might be better than a lot of the guys out there. But don’t be surprised if nobody touches you.”

  “Because you’re all chickens.”

  “Can you blame us?”

  Yes, I could blame them! What a stupid, stupid, stupid question. I was fighting against injustice, discrimination, and dumb rules enforced in the name of tradition. They were making a choice to be afraid of nothing and acting like the whole situation was just as bad for them as it was for me. Why couldn’t they say what they were really feeling? That they were afraid of getting outplayed by a girl?

  After a couple of minutes of silence where we both just swirled our spoons around in our empty frozen yogurt bowls, I finally asked Caleb a question. “Would it make you feel better if I told you there were zero other girls in Pilchuck who wanted to play football?”

  Caleb just looked at me.

  “I’m it, dude,” I said. “There’s nobody else behind me. The girls are not going to take over your football team. We’re going to keep playing all the other sports and going to piano lessons and babysitting after school. So maybe you can just quit being so paranoid and relax long enough to give me some respect.”

  “Wow, she really let you have it, huh?” Charlie asked as he rolled the hot dogs on the grill and then took a sip of his soda.

  “Don’t laugh,” I said. “It’s your fault.”

  “How is it my fault?”

  “You wouldn’t tackle her.”

  “Oh, come on,” Charlie replied. “You and I both know what that was about.”

  “Is it because you’re afraid of what people would say if you tackled a girl?”

  “Pretty much. Caleb, I’m a twenty-year-old guy. I’m six two. I weigh two hundred and twenty-five pounds. I work at a gym. If I laid a hand on that girl, I’d probably go to jail. You want to come visit me in jail?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up about it. Look, if she wants to play football, fine. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to like it.”

  “I know.”

  “Is she still your girlfriend?”

  “Beats me. I mean, we do stuff together.”

  Charlie raised one eyebrow. “What kind of stuff?”

  “Like go out for frozen yogurt.”

  “Do you want her to be your girlfriend?”

  “I like her.”

  “But?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “It’s okay right now, but I guess I’m kind of afraid of this turning into a thing when I get to high school and it’s like, There goes the guy going out with the football girl. I don’t want to be known as the guy going out with the football girl. The guy going out with Tessa Dooley or the guy going out with the mayor’s daughter, I can handle that. Not the football girl. What would you do?”

  “I think she’s got a choice to make. It’s either you or football. I know that sounds harsh, but listen to the voice in your head and tell me I’m wrong.”

  I knew Charlie was right. I did want Tessa to make a choice. I just didn’t want her to choose football. I liked her. I liked that she liked me. I wanted people in high school to look at us and say, Oh, there go Caleb and Tessa. Or Tessa and Caleb. I didn’t really care whose name came first. And I could never say this to her, but when I pictured us in the future, she wasn’t sitting next to me on the bench with a mouth guard covering her teeth. She was sitting in the stands cheering for me.

  Was that so terrible?

  —

  Charlie and I were eating our hot dogs on the back porch when Mom and Dad came home from the shop. I could see them through the window. Dad moved stiffly to the kitchen table and sat down. Mom set a glass of water on the table, along with two pills.

  “You should take a day off,” Mom said.

  Dad grunted. “It’s summer, Janet. You know we’re stacked. I can’t walk away from the business.”

  “If you don’t take it easy, you’re not going to be walking away from anything. Why don’t you bring someone on part-time to help? We can afford it.”

  Charlie looked over at me. “Here we go,” he said quietly.

  I thought about making a noise so Mom and Dad would know we could hear them, but I froze. I braced myself for Dad’s answer to Mom’s idea about hiring someone to help them.

  “I shouldn’t have to hire anyone,” he said. “This is a family business. The problem is, not everyone in the family seems to get that.”

  “Give him space, Tom,” Mom said. “He’s finding his way.”

  “Well, I don’t think he should be doing it in this house. He knows what the deal is. If he wants to lift weights for a living, he can pay his own rent.” The next thing we saw was Mom following Dad out of the kitchen.

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked Charlie.

  Charlie chucked his empty soda can toward the recycling bin. “He gave me a choice. I can work at the shop or move out. I have to decide by the end of July.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “That’s not fair. You have a job.”

  “Not the right job,” Charlie replied.

  “Why can’t you work both places?”

  “Because it’s not just work, Caleb. I’m applying to a program.”

  “What kind of program?”

  “Physical therapy. W
ell, first I have to take a bunch of classes before I officially start the program. But if I get in, I’m going to do it.”

  “Here?”

  Charlie shook his head silently. “Spokane.”

  “Spokane? That’s on the other side of the state. Why would you go there?”

  “That’s where the program is.”

  “So find another one.”

  “Caleb, come on.”

  “No, find another one. This is crap. You can’t just leave.”

  “Dude, I’m too old to be living at home. Dad’s right about that. Look around. Do any of your other friends have deadbeat brothers in their twenties hanging around the house?” Charlie smiled. “It’s kind of pathetic.”

  “It’s not pathetic,” I said, standing up. “What’s pathetic is that you think you’re too good to work at the aluminum siding company. But you know what, don’t worry about it. Luke and I got it. You go to Spokane and do whatever you want. We’ll be fine without you.”

  “I know you will,” Charlie said tiredly.

  I left the back porch, heading for the woods behind the house, but not before hurling two more words at Charlie. “You suck.”

  THURSDAY, JUNE 16

  After the worst frozen yogurt date in the history of human civilization, it was pretty obvious that I needed someone to talk to. I needed my friends.

  My hands trembled as I texted Marina and Lexie.

  Can we hang out? pls. I miss you.

  “They’re going to make me suffer,” I said to the phone.

  It buzzed right away. I yelped.

  run?

  def. now?

  yes.

  Half an hour later, Marina, Lexie, and I were tearing up the trails above Boardman Park. At first, I pretended I was having a hard time keeping up with them. By the second mile, it was no joke. They were smoking me. I wasn’t out of shape. I was out of practice. In cross-country, the faster runner didn’t always win. There was more to it. Footwork, pacing, passing. I stumbled more than I usually did. On the final downhill stretch, I bit it big-time, and ended up with a raspberry on my thigh.