White Lines on a Green Field
Catherynne M. Valente
White Lines on a Green Field by Catherynne M. Valente
For Seanan McGuire.
And Coyote.
Let me tell you about the year Coyote took the Devils to the State Championship.
Coyote walked tall down the halls of West Centerville High and where he walked lunch money, copies of last semester’s math tests, and unlit joints blossomed in his footsteps. When he ran laps out on the field our lockers would fill up with Snickers bars, condoms, and ecstasy tabs in all the colors of Skittles. He was our QB, and he looked like an invitation to the greatest rave of all time. I mean, yeah, he had black hair and copper skin and muscles like a commercial for the life you’re never going to have. But it was the way he looked at you, with those dark eyes that knew the answer to every question a teacher could ask, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, you know? Didn’t matter anyway. Coyote never did his homework, but boyfriend rocked a 4.2 all the same.
When tryouts rolled around that fall, Coyote went out for everything. Cross-country, baseball, even lacrosse. But I think football appealed to his friendly nature, his need to have a pack around him, bright-eyed boys with six-pack abs and a seven minute mile and a gift for him every day. They didn’t even know why, but they brought them all the same. Playing cards, skateboards, vinyl records (Coyote had no truck with mp3s). The defensive line even baked cookies for their boy. Chocolate chip peanut butter oatmeal walnut iced snickerdoodle, piling up on the bench like a king’s tribute. And oh, the girls brought flowers. Poor girls gave him dandelions and rich girls gave him roses and he kissed them all like they were each of them specifically the key to the fulfillment of all his dreams. Maybe they were. Coyote didn’t play favorites. He had enough for everyone.
By the time we went to State, all the cheerleaders were pregnant.
The Devils used to be a shitty team, no lie. Bottom of our division and even the coach was thinking he ought to get more serious about his geometry classes. Before Coyote transferred our booster club was the tight end’s Dad, Mr. Bollard, who painted his face Devil gold-and-red and wore big plastic light-up horns for every game. At Homecoming one year, the Devil’s Court had two princesses and a queen who were actually girls from the softball team filling in on a volunteer basis, because no one cared enough to vote. They all wore jeans and bet heavily on the East Centerville Knights, who won 34-3.
First game of his senior year, Coyote ran 82 yards for the first of 74 touchdowns that season. He passed and caught and ran like he was all eleven of them in one body. Nobody could catch him. Nobody even complained. He ran like he’d stolen that ball and the whole world was chasing him to get it back. Where’d he been all this time? The boys hoisted him up on their shoulders afterward, and Coyote just laughed and laughed. We all found our midterm papers under our pillows the next morning, finished and bibliographied, and damn if they weren’t the best essays we’d never written.
* * *
I’m not gonna lie. I lost my virginity to Coyote in the back of my blue pick-up out by the lake right before playoffs. He stroked my hair and kissed me like they kiss in the movies. Just the perfect kisses, no bonked noses, no knocking teeth. He tasted like stolen sunshine. Bunny, he whispered to me with his narrow hips working away, I will love you forever and ever. You’re the only one for me.
Liar, I whispered back, and when I came it was like the long flying fall of a roller coaster, right into his arms. Liar, liar, liar.
I think he liked that I knew the score, because after that Coyote made sure I was at all his games, even though I don’t care about sports. Nobody didn’t care about sports that year. Overnight the stands went from a ghost town to kids ride free day at the carnival. And when Coyote danced in the endzone he looked like everything you ever wanted. Every son, every boyfriend.
“Come on, Bunny,” he’d say. “I’ll score a touchdown for you.”
“You’ll score a touchdown either way.”
“I’ll point at you in the stands if you’re there. Everyone will know I love you.”
“Just make sure I’m sitting with Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley, too, so you don’t get in trouble.”
“That’s my Bunny, always looking out for me,” he’d laugh, and take me in his mouth like he’d die if he didn’t.
* * *
You could use birth control with Coyote. It wouldn’t matter much.
But he did point at me when he crossed that line, grinning and dancing and moving his hips like Elvis had just been copying his moves all along, and Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley got so excited they choked on their Cokes. They all knew about the others. I think they liked it that way—most of what mattered to Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley was Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley, and Coyote gave them permission to spend all their time together. Coyote gave us all permission, that was his thing. Cheat, fuck, drink, dance—just do it like you mean it!
I think the safety had that tattooed on his calf.
After we won four games in a row (after a decade of no love) things started to get really out of control. You couldn’t buy tickets. Mr. Bollard was in hog heaven—suddenly the boosters were every guy in town who was somebody, or used to be somebody, or who wanted to be somebody some impossible day in the future. We were gonna beat the Thunderbirds. They started saying it, right out in public. Six-time state champs, and no chance they wouldn’t be the team in our way this year like every year. But every year was behind us, and ahead was only our boy running like he’d got the whole of heaven at his back. Mr. Bollard got them new uniforms, new helmets, new goal posts—all the deepest red you ever saw. But nobody wore the light-up horns Mr. Bollard had rocked for years. They all wore little furry coyote ears, and who knows where they bought them, but they were everywhere one Friday, and every Friday after. When Coyote scored, everyone would howl like the moon had come out just for them. Some of the cheerleaders started wearing faux-fur tails, spinning them around by bumping and grinding on the sidelines, their corn-yellow skirts fluttering up to the heavens.
One time, after we stomped the Greenville Bulldogs 42-0, I saw Coyote under the stands, in that secret place the boards and steel poles and shadows and candy wrappers make. Mike Halloran (kicker, #14) and Justin Oster (wide receiver, #11) were down there too, helmets off, the filtered stadium lights turning their uniforms to pure gold. Coyote leaned against a pole, smoking a cigarette, shirt off—and what a thing that was to see.
“Come on, QB,” Justin whined. “I never hit a guy before. I got no beef here. And I never fucked Jessie, either, Mike, I was just mouthing off. She let me see her boob once in 9th grade and there wasn’t that much to see back then. I never had a drink except one time a beer and I never smoked ’cause my daddy got emphysema.” Coyote just grinned his friendly, hey-dude-no-worries grin.
“Never know unless you try,” he said, very reasonably. “It’ll make you feel good, I promise.”
“Fuck you, Oster” shot back Halloran. “I’m going first. You’re bigger, it’s not fair.”
Halloran got his punch in before he had to hear any more about what Justin Oster had never done and the two of them went at it, fists and blood and meat-slapping sounds and pretty soon they were down on the ground in the spilled-Coke and week-old-rain mud, pulling hair and biting and rolling around and after awhile it didn’t look that much like fighting anymore. I watched for awhile. Coyote looked up at me over their grappling and dragged on his smoke.
Just look at them go, little sister, I heard Coyote whisper, but his mouth didn’t move. His eyes flashed in the dark like a dog’s.
* * *
LaGrange almost ruined it all at
Homecoming. The LaGrange Cowboys, and wasn’t their QB a picture, all wholesome white-blonde square-jaw aw-shucks muscle with an arm so perfect you’d have thought someone had mounted a rifle sight on it. #9 Bobby Zhao, of the 300 bench and the Miss Butter Festival 19whatever mother, the seven-restaurant-chain owning father (Dumpling King of the Southland!) and the surprising talent for soulful bluegrass guitar. All the colleges lined up for that boy with carnations and chocolates. We hated him like hate was something we’d invented in lab that week and had been saving up for something special. Bobby Zhao and his bullshit hipster-crooner straw hat. Coyote didn’t pay him mind. Tell us what you’re gonna do to him, they’d pant, and he’d just spit onto the parking lot asphalt and say: I got a history with Cowboys. Where he’d spat the offensive line watched as weird crystals formed—the kind Jimmy Moser (safety, #17) ought to have recognized from his uncle’s trailer out off of Route 40, but you know me, I don’t say a word. They didn’t look at it too long. Instead they scratched their cheeks and performed their tribal ask-and-answer. We going down by the lake tonight? Yeah. Yeah.
“Let’s invite Bobby Zhao,” Coyote said suddenly. His eyes got big and loose and happy. His come-on look. His it’ll-be-great look.
“Um, why?” Jimmy frowned. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck that guy. He’s the enemy.”
Coyote flipped up the collar of his leather jacket and picked a stray maple leaf the color of anger out of Jimmy’s hair. He did it tenderly. You’re my boy and I’ll pick you clean, I’ll lick you clean, I’ll keep everything red off of your perfect head, his fingers said. But what his mouth said was:
“Son, what you don’t know about enemies could just about feed the team til their dying day.” And when Coyote called you Son you knew to be ashamed. “Only babies think enemies are for beating. Can’t beat ‘em, not ever. Not the ones that come out of nowhere in the 4th quarter to take what’s yours and hold your face in the mud til you drown, not the ones you always knew you’d have to face because that’s what you were made for. Not the lizard guarding the Sun, not the man who won’t let you teach him how to plant corn. Enemies are for grabbing by the ears and fucking them til they’re so sticky-knotted bound to you they call their wives by your name. Enemies are for absorbing, Jimmy. Best thing you can do to an enemy is pull up a chair to his fire, eat his dinner, rut in his bed and go to his job in the morning, and do it all so much better he just gives it up to you—but fuck him, you never wanted it anyway. You just wanted to mess around in his house for a little while. Scare his kids. Leave a little something behind to let the next guy know you’re never far away. That’s how you do him. Or else—” Coyote pulled Cindy Gerard (bottom of the pyramid and arms like birch trunks) close and took the raspberry pop out of her hand, sipping on it long and sweet, all that pink slipping into him. “Or else you just make him love you til he cries. Either way.”
Jimmy fidgeted. He looked at Oster and Halloran, who still had bruises, fading on their cheekbones like blue flowers. After awhile he laughed horsily and said: “Whaddaya think the point spread’ll be?”
Coyote just punched him in the arm, convivial like, and kissed Cindy Gerard and I could smell the raspberry of their kiss from across the circle of boys. The September wind brought their kiss to all of us like a bag of promises. And just like that, Bobby Zhao showed up at the lake that night, driving his freshly waxed Cowboy silver-and-black double-cab truck with the lights on top like a couple of frog’s eyes. He took off that stupid straw hat and started hauling a keg out of the cream leather passenger seat—and once they saw that big silver moon riding shotgun with the Dumpling Prince of the Southland, Henry Dillard (linebacker, #33) and Josh Vick (linebacker, #34) hurried over to help him with it and Bobby Zhao was welcome. Offering accepted. Just lay it up here on the altar and we’ll cut open that shiny belly and drink what she’s got for us. And what she had was golden and sweet and just as foamy as the sea.
Coyote laid back with me in the bed of my much shittier pick-up, some wool blanket with a horse-and-cactus print on it under us and another one with a wolf-and-moon design over us, so he could slip his hands under my bra in that secret, warm space that gets born under some hippie mom’s awful rugs when no one else can see you. Everyone was hollering over the beer and I could hear Sarah Jane laughing in that way that says: just keep pouring and maybe I’ll show you something worth seeing.
“Come on, Bunny Rabbit,” Coyote whispered, “it’s nothing we haven’t done before.” And it was a dumb thing to say, a boy thing, but when Coyote said it I felt it humming in my bones, everything we’d done before, over and over, and I couldn’t even remember a world before Coyote, only the one he made of us, down by the lake, under the wolf and the moon, his hands on my breasts like they were the saving of him. I knew him like nobody else—and they’ll all say that now, Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley and Cindy Gerard and Justin Oster and Jimmy Moser, but I knew him. Knew the shape of him. After all, it’s nothing we hadn’t done before.
“It’s different every time,” I said in the truck-dark. “Or there’s no point. You gotta ask me nice every time. You gotta make me think I’m special. You gotta put on your ears and your tail and make the rain come for me or I’ll run off with some Thunderbird QB and leave you eating my dust.”
“I’m asking nice. Oh, my Bunny, my rabbit-girl with the fastest feet, just slow you down and let me do what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
“I want to dance on this town til it breaks. I want to burrow in it until it belongs to me. I want high school to last forever. I want to eat everything, and fuck everything, and snort everything, and win everything. I want my Bunny Rabbit on my lap while I drive down the world with my headlights off.”
“I don’t want to be tricked,” I said, but he was already inside me and I was glad. Fucking him felt like running in a long field, with no end in sight. “Not into a baby, not into a boyfriend, not into anything.”
“Don’t worry,” he panted. “You always get yours. Just like me, always like me.”
I felt us together, speeding up towards something, running faster, and he brushed my hair out of my face and it wasn’t hair but long black ears, as soft as memory, and then it was hair again, tangled and damp with our sweat, and I bit him as our stride broke. I whispered: “And Coyote gets his.”
“Why not? It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”
When I got up off of the horse blanket, marigold blossoms spilled out of me like Coyote’s seed.
* * *
Later that night I fished a smoke out of my glove box and sat on top of the dented salt-rusted cab of my truck. Coyote stood down by the lakeshore, aways off from the crowd, where the water came up in little foamy splashes and the willow trees whipped around like they were looking for someone to hold on to. Bobby Zhao was down there, too, his hands in his jean pockets, hip jutting out like a pouty lip, his hat on again and his face all in shadow. They were talking but I couldn’t hear over everyone else hooting and laughing like a pack of owls. The moon came out as big as a beer keg; it made Coyote’s face look lean and angelic, so young and victorious and humble enough to make you think the choice was yours all along. He took Bobby Zhao’s hand and they just stood there in the light, their fingers moving together. The wind blew off that straw hat like it didn’t like the thing much either, and Bobby let it lie. He was looking at Coyote, his hair all blue in the night, and Coyote kissed him as hard as hurting, and Bobby kissed him back like he’d been waiting for it since he was born. Coyote got his hands under his shirt and oh, Coyote is good at that, getting under, getting around, and the boys smiled whenever their lips parted.
I watched. I’m always watching. Who doesn’t like to watch? It feels like being God, seeing everything happen far away, and you could stop it if you wanted, but then you couldn’t watch anymore.
A storm started rumbling up across the meadows, spattering their kisses with autumn rain.
* * *
Sudden
ly everyone cared about who was going to make the Devil’s Court this year. Even me. The mall was cleared out of formal sparkle-and-slit dresses by August, and somehow they just couldn’t get any more in, like we were an island mysteriously sundered from the land of sequins and sweetheart necklines. Most of us were just going to have to go with one of our mom’s prom dresses, though you can be damn sure we’d be ripping off that poofy shoulder chiffon and taking up the hems as far as we could. Jenny Kilroy (drama club, Young Businesswomen’s Association) had done all the costumes for The Music Man in junior year, and for $50 she’d take that cherry cupcake dress and turn it into an apocalyptic punkslut wedding gown, but girlfriend worked slow. Whoever took the Homecoming crown had about a 60/40 chance of being up there in something they’d worn to their grandmother’s funeral.
The smart money was on Sarah Jane for the win. She was already pregnant by then, and Jessica too, but I don’t think even they knew it yet. Bellies still flat as a plains state, cotton candy lipstick as perfect as a Rembrandt. Nobody got morning sickness, nobody’s feet swelled. Sarah shone in the center of her ring of girls like a pink diamond in a nouveaux riche ring. 4.0, equestrian club, head cheerleader, softball pitcher, jazz choir lead soprano, played Juliet in both freshman and senior years, even joined the chess club. She didn’t care about chess, but it looked good on her applications and she turned out to be terrifyingly good at it—first place at the spring speed chess invitational in Freemont, even seven months along. You couldn’t even hate Sarah. You could see her whole perfect life rolling on ahead of her like a yellow brick road but you knew she’d include you, if you wanted. If you stuck around this town like she meant to, and let her rule it like she aimed to.
Jessica and Ashley flanked her down every hall and every parade—a girl like Sarah just naturally grows girls like Jessica and Ashley to be her adjutants, her bridesmaids, the baby’s breath to make her rose look redder. All three of them knew the score and all three of them made sure nothing would ever change, like Macbeth’s witches, if they wore daisy-print coats and their mothers’ Chanel and tearproof mascara and only foretold their own love, continuing forever and the world moving aside to let it pass. So that was the obvious lineup—Queen Sarah and her Viziers. Of course there were three slots, so I figured Jenny Kilroy would slide in on account of her charitable work to keep us all in the shimmer.
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