by Mike Lupica
The St. Patrick’s game had been at ten in the morning, so Jayson had plenty of time to head back to the soccer field at Belmont for Zoe’s championship game against Weston in the afternoon.
Jayson had lost a bet, and he intended to make good on it.
Bryan Campbell’s parents had driven them back to Belmont from the gym at St. Patrick’s. “She won’t even know whether you’re there or not,” Bryan said. “We could skip out and go to an early movie.”
“She’d know,” Jayson said.
“Well, I like Zoe, too,” Bryan said. “But I’m not watching a whole girls’ sports match. You’re on your own.”
Jayson just shrugged.
A promise was a promise. And to be honest, he was actually looking forward to seeing Zoe do her thing. Everybody at school had told him she was a total star.
“Well, you go have your soccer fun,” Bryan said. “I’m out of here.”
Jayson was actually happy that he was leaving. If he hung around, he might find out that Zoe had invited Jayson over to her house after the game. He didn’t want to have to listen to Bryan busting on him over that particular piece of information.
Jayson wasn’t going straight from the game to Zoe’s house, though. If Belmont won the championship, the girls on the team and their parents were going to a pizza party in town. Zoe had told Jayson he could join them, but he said he’d pass. Hanging with one girl was already enough pressure for Jayson, let alone a whole soccer team full of them. Instead, he’d asked Mrs. Lawton to drive him over to Zoe’s after the pizza party—if her team won.
“Isn’t that like planning the victory parade before you win the game?” he’d said to her on the phone the night before.
“I thought you were the one always talking about thinking one move ahead.”
“It doesn’t mean you should get ahead of yourself.”
“If we lose, we call off the party, no biggie,” she’d said, before adding, “But we’re not losing.”
He wasn’t nearly as worried about her losing as he was about her hearing about his past, his life before he’d come to live with the Lawtons and gone to Belmont Country Day.
He kept coming back to the same thing: The better he got to know Zoe, the better the chance she was going to find out who he really was.
Jayson sat by himself in the bleachers. He looked around at the other people there to watch the game. Lots of moms and dads, their phones or tablets always ready to snap a picture or record the action. There weren’t many kids from school, he noticed. A group of girls he’d seen hanging around with Zoe who weren’t on the team. Eric Kelly, who Jayson knew was the star of the boys’ soccer team, was on the sideline, dribbling a soccer ball, practicing some moves against an imaginary goalkeeper. And one other boy, who seemed to be taking notes. Jayson figured he wrote for the school paper or something.
It turned out to be a great game. Even though there wasn’t much scoring, the defenses outplaying the offenses, it was obvious that Zoe was the best player on the field.
Neither Zoe nor any of the other scorers on her team could put the ball in the net early on. But what he realized now after watching the game this closely was that soccer would be fast and fun to watch even without goals being scored. Zoe was a midfielder—a center middie, she said—and she wore number 10 because that was the star number for center middies in soccer. She was constantly on the attack, setting things up, kind of like Jayson did on the court for the Bobcats. Looking at things from the perspective of a point guard, he loved the way the girls moved the ball, passed it around, and spread the field.
But with five minutes left, it was the two goalkeepers who’d been the big stars in the championship game. Zoe had hit the crossbar once in the first half, a couple of minutes into the game. With about ten minutes left, she’d blasted a huge shot at the Weston keeper that had just missed the far post. The game stayed zero–zero.
Or nil–nil, as they called it in soccer.
Then there were three minutes left. Jayson knew, because Zoe had explained it to him the night before on the phone, that because it was a championship game, they’d play a ten-minute overtime if the game was still tied at the end of regulation. And if it was still tied after that, they’d go to one of those World Cup–style penalty-kick shootouts to decide who would win it all.
With just under three minutes left, Zoe made a great pass to her friend Lizzie, and Lizzie ended up with what looked like a mile of open net, but she slipped at the last minute and didn’t get enough leg behind the kick. The Weston keeper dove, got a hand on the ball, and knocked it away.
Weston’s girls tried to push the ball down the field, but then Zoe did what she’d been doing a lot of during this game: turned defense into offense in the middle of the field.
Turned the game into the “Zoe Show.” Now she was the one pushing the ball, flying up the middle of the field.
They’re giving her too much space, Jayson thought, knowing space mattered as much in soccer as it did in basketball.
One Weston backer, then another, came up on her, but Zoe dusted them both off, making it look as if the girls on defense had suddenly forgotten just how fast she really was. Dribbling it with her foot the way Jayson could dribble a basketball on the fast break.
Another backer came from her right and briefly got in front of her, but Zoe pushed the ball through the girl’s legs, and kept on moving forward like nothing had gotten in her way.
Now it was just her and the goalkeeper. Jayson knew the girl had to make a decision on the fly herself: whether to come out the way Zoe had that day when Jayson was trying to score on her, or choose to sit back, like the last defender on a fast break, and wait for Zoe to make her move.
The girl decided to hang back, arms out to the side, knees bent, bouncing a little on her toes. A perfect defensive posture for any sport.
And Zoe did make the first move, pushing the ball to her right, side-stepping that direction, even though Jayson saw from where he was watching that the motion cut down her angle considerably, giving herself less net to shoot at.
The goalie moved with her, just slightly.
As soon as she did, Zoe was ready; she came almost to a dead stop, acting as if she had all day, even though she had to feel the Weston defense coming from behind her. She made this cool stutter-step move as the goalie dove to her left, defending a shot that seemed as though it was coming off Zoe’s right foot.
Now Zoe was the one thinking one move ahead.
The ball was on her left foot instead, and now the net was wide open. She buried the ball in the corner of the goal. Game over.
One–nil, Belmont.
19
JAYSON KEPT HIS DISTANCE FROM Zoe after the trophy presentation. This was her moment.
She was the one who found him after all the pictures had been taken, asking him again to come with her to the pizza party.
“Pass,” he said.
She grinned. “Suit yourself.”
“Nice play at the end there,” he said.
She did her little stutter step and said, “You like that move?”
“You have to teach it to me sometime.”
She said she’d see him at her house around four thirty. Her older brother, a senior in high school, was going to be there, too. Her parents were going shopping at the mall after the party.
She ran off to be with her teammates, joining in on all the selfie fun going on at midfield.
Later on, Mrs. Lawton dropped him off at Zoe’s house. It turned out to be just a couple of miles from where the Lawtons lived—it was still the way he thought about it; their house, not his—in what looked to be an even nicer neighborhood, with even larger houses. There was a security guard in a little house at the gate who had to buzz them in after Mrs. Lawton gave her name.
When they pulled into the driveway, Mrs. Lawton said, “This neighbor
hood makes me feel as if I’m still on the wrong side of the tracks.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Will you be staying for dinner?” she said.
He shrugged. “Zoe just said to come over and hang out.”
“Do you want me to call her mom?”
“No!” he said, almost before the last word was out of her mouth.
“Sorry,” Mrs. Lawton said.
Jayson didn’t want to go anywhere near the conversation about Zoe’s mom that had ended with Mrs. Lawton’s horse in pieces. He still thought about that night often, and always with regret.
He got out of the car. “I’ll call you, okay?”
She pulled out of the driveway and he watched her car disappear. He didn’t see any other people outside on the street. Even so, as he walked to Zoe’s front door, he felt like the whole neighborhood was watching him from inside their big houses, thinking the same thing that he was—that he didn’t belong here.
Zoe’s brother answered the door. As he did, Jayson could see Zoe running down a long stairway behind him, saying, “I said I’ve got it!”
“Chill,” her brother said. He turned to look at Jayson. “Jayson, right? I’m Chris.”
He was tall, with long brown hair. Zoe had said he was a shooting guard on the Belmont varsity team.
“Heard you can play a little,” Chris said.
“I guess.”
“I guess,” Zoe said. “My brother was just on his way back to his room to play more video games.”
Chris grinned. “Nah, I’m good. I could hang with you guys if you want.”
“And I could read all your text messages to your girlfriend the next time you leave your phone lying around if you want,” Zoe said.
Chris grinned again. “She’s all yours, Jayson.” He patted Zoe’s head on his way toward the stairs. She wheeled around and tried to give him a soccer-style kick, but missed.
Zoe was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and the kind of canvas sneakers that didn’t have laces.
“Sorry about that, my brother can be a little overprotective sometimes,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
They were standing in the front hall, as if neither one of them knew what to do now that Jayson was actually at Zoe’s house.
Finally, Zoe said, “You want to shoot hoops?”
“Do you?” he said.
“I showed you how to play soccer,” she said. “Now you can teach me how to be a basketball player.”
“That seems like a fair trade.”
“Follow me,” she said, and they went outside through the back of the house, across a lawn even longer and wider than the Lawtons’, to an even better outdoor basketball court.
Full court. More lights around it. It even had small bleachers with about five rows of seats surrounding it.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jayson said.
“My dopey brother and his friends have the best pickup games in town here in the summer,” she said. “He always makes sure they have eleven guys.”
“Why eleven?”
“So there’s always a guy sitting out to work the scoreboard.”
Scoreboard.
It turned out Zoe wasn’t bad at basketball, no shocker there. After a few minutes of watching her shoot and dribble and move around, Jayson asked why she didn’t play on the team at Belmont.
“During basketball season I ride horses,” she said.
“You ride horses?”
“Jump them, too,” she said. “You should come watch me sometime.”
“I play H-O-R-S-E,” Jayson said. “That’s good enough for me.”
They shot around. Jayson showed her how to put more spin on her shots. After a while, he suggested that they play one-on-one and make another bet.
“Nope,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not letting you sucker me the way I suckered you. I’m smarter than that.”
He let that one go, grinning. “How about if we play without a bet, and I can only shoot left-handed?”
“Deal.”
She started off with the ball, and Jayson figured he would go easy on her. He gave her an open layup on the first play to put her up by one.
On the next play, Jayson dribbled, trying to get fancy and show off, crossing from left to right, then paused when Zoe pointed somewhere far off and said, “What is that over there?”
Jayson wheeled around to take a look in the direction that she was pointing . . . and in that split second, Zoe swiped the ball out of his grasp, drove to the hoop, and laid it in once more.
“So you’re gonna play it like that, huh?” he said.
He ended up beating her, even though she made a surprisingly good game of it. When they finished, they went and sat down in the first row of the bleachers. The sun had gone down and the air was cooler, which felt good to him after Zoe had made him work up a sweat.
“You guys were great today,” he said.
“We had to be,” she said. “In the end all I kept thinking about was how I would have felt watching the other team holding up that trophy at the end.”
“I hate to lose, too.”
“I can tell,” she said.
“Well, I wasn’t trying all that hard just now,” he teased.
“Hard enough.”
Then they sat there in silence. Not the kind of forced silence he’d get when he was with Ms. Moretti, or even with Mrs. Lawton on the ride over here. Just something that felt natural. Like they were sharing the silence together, which made it okay.
He liked that about her. She wasn’t always trying to get him to talk. Or share. Or get inside his head. Usually he had enough trouble figuring out what was going on inside there himself, without trying to explain it to another person.
But he spoke first.
“It still feels strange being here,” he said.
It just came out of him, like a door had suddenly opened.
“Here meaning my house?” she said. “On this court?”
“Here meaning everything,” Jayson said. “Your big house, basketball court. Even living with the Lawtons and going to Belmont. I just never imagined I’d end up in a place like this.”
Zoe said, “The way I look at it, Jayson, where you are is where you’re supposed to be.”
He wanted to ask her why she wanted him to be here, at this house, on this court. If she liked him for who he really was, or some person she imagined him to be. But he didn’t. He knew that if he opened that door, if he started that conversation, he’d have to ask her how much she knew about him.
“It’s only been a couple of weeks,” she said. “Nobody’s saying you ought to feel like you’ve been at Belmont forever.”
She turned now and smiled at him. “But how the heck did you get here?”
There it was. The question he’d been dreading.
“Well . . . what have you heard?”
“What everybody has pretty much heard,” she said. “Your mom passed away. You ended up on your own. Then you came to live with the Lawtons.”
He forced a smile. “That’s pretty much it.”
Zoe punched him in the arm. “No it is not!” she said. “I mean, what was it like, living on your own? Weren’t you scared?”
“Sometimes. I guess. You get used to it.”
She was staring at him. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“Even though you brought it up?”
“Well,” Zoe said, “there is that.”
“Did you invite me over just to find out stuff about me?”
He was sorry as soon as he said it. But then, he was getting used to feeling that way about things he said lately. He saw the same look on Zoe’s face now that he
did sometimes on Mrs. Lawton’s when he’d said something to hurt her feelings.
“No,” she said in a quiet voice. “I invited you over because I like hanging out with you.”
“Okay,” he said. Then he added, “I like hanging with you too, by the way.”
There was another silence, not as long as the one before. Then Zoe said, “What would have happened to you if you hadn’t ended up with the Lawtons?”
“I probably would have ended up at some kind of group home,” he said. “Like a small orphanage. That’s what Ms. Moretti, my caseworker, told me.”
“Is she nice, this Ms. Moretti?”
“Really nice,” he said, surprised at how fast that came out of him.
“She’s the one who found you?”
“Pretty much.”
It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth, either. Maybe someday he’d tell her the whole story. Or she’d find out on her own. She just wasn’t going to get it from him, not today.
“It was hard living on my own, but I got by,” he said.
That much was the truth.
“What about you?” Jayson said, deciding it was time to change the subject. “It’s not like I know a whole lot about you.”
“Me?” she said. “Oh, there’s not much to know. I’m basically supposed to play the part of Miss Perfect.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” he said.
“Oh, it could be worse,” she said. “It’s just how my folks, especially my mom, look at me. Perfect student, daughter, sister, rider, soccer player. Like that.”
“That was never a problem for me,” Jayson said. “Nobody’s ever looked at me that way.”
“You’re lucky, then,” she said. “One of the reasons I like hanging out with you is that you don’t expect me to be Miss Perfect, so I don’t have to worry about letting you down.”
“Same,” he said.
Zoe stood up. “Let’s go get a snack.”
“A snack would be great,” he said, happy for an excuse to end the serious talk, at least for now.
