by Tara Wimble
THE LOVE BUG
Tara Wimble
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Chapter 1
FROM the second Bella steps onto the campus at Illinois it feels like its home. That probably has everything to do with the fact that it actually is. There are offers from other schools across the country, nothing crazy, it’s not like UNC is banging down her door but respectable top-tier schools want her to come play for them.
In the end though she stays in Urbana because that’s where her family is and she can’t think of a better way to spend her four years than to be able to play in front of the people that she loves.
The soccer isn’t half bad either.
She was slightly worried that in turning down these more notable programs in favor of staying close to home that the level of play would suffer. Through campus visits she’d been impressed with the coach and the program but it’s always a different story when you actually put on the shirt.
Instantly her fears are put to rest.
Soccer becomes her happy place and it has everything to do with how much this program makes her love to play the game.
And it shows when she makes the Big Ten All-Freshman team on her first year on campus and gets her first u-19 national team invite by the end of the season.
Bella becomes an automatic invite to the u-19 and then u-21 national team camps and by the time she’s a senior she’s standing up on stage at a fancy dinner being awarded the Big Ten Player of the Year award. Second in assists all time at Illinois, the stat she’s most proud of because it’s tenable proof that she’s a good teammate and that makes her the proudest out of anything.
This is her happy place, the whole thing.
Illinois, soccer, and her family.
But she wants more, no, she needs it. This can’t be the place where she stops, there’s no ceiling in the near future.
Only more, only moving upwards because she can’t see any trajectory that doesn’t lead to her eventually getting her full cap for the US national team.
The ultimate goal.
Every roster she makes puts her one step closer to that dream.
But she’ll always look back and remember, yeah, this is where it all started.
*
Bella’s been waiting to stand here for over a year. Finland is cold, the ground is solid and her teammates don’t understand her frustration with her uniform.
Danesha slaps at her hands when she untucks her jersey for the second time. “You look fine.”
Bella snorts but pulls it down again. The anthems are about to start and while the only cameras being shoved in their faces are from those recording the game for archive purposes, Bella wants to remember this final. The last time she’ll be counted as being able to play for the u-21 team. In all honesty, the final of the 2006 Nordic Cup is probably the best way to go.
Kiki smiles at her fidgeting, unlike Danesha, and pokes her in the back when they turn to the flag. The action makes her think of the number on her back more than her name. The number that hundreds of other girls have worn at all levels, the one she asked for and the one she hopes to wear for a long time to come. It’s about the number and the crest on the shirt more than the name. Because after her, there’s a long line of girls waiting, and she becomes part of the history.
She closes her eyes to sing. She can hear Rachel, their captain, belting it out over everyone and it makes her smile. It builds up the game for her. Germany won this competition, beating them out for it, last year. Everyone is determined not to have the same ending.
Still, everyone’s all smiles when they shake hands and exchange banners. Bella crouches for the team photo and then they're breaking their huddle to set up on the field, knowing this might be the last time they all play together for this particular team.
Rebecca Faustus brushes shoulders with her like she knows something before she jogs back to the defensive line, passing Allison on her way. It’s then that Bella knows that the German girls have no chance of breaking their defensive line.
Eleven minutes in the number eight on her back feels larger than life. She cuts through defenders down the left side, the Germans flail behind her and the goal gets bigger and bigger. Whatever she does, they’ll say it was a failed shot on the replay, but her cross rebounds and the glorious sight of Danesha Handy following through and tucking her shot into the right corner is enough to send her to her knees.
The first goal was the floodgate opening for three more. Bella spends every minute on the field running and trying to make every second of the last six months of training, practice games in England and camps worth it. She doesn’t score but she’s there as Angie, Tina and Michele all get on the board.
Their defense doesn’t break and that marks a shut-out for every match this tournament.
Bella reaches Danesha when the whistle blows and they fall to the ground in a mess of limbs. Exhausted but unbeaten. She’s sure that she’s got grass all over her face when she makes the rounds of teammates, high fives, hugs and dances before they’re all ushered together on the champion’s stage.
She gets a hand on the trophy and then everything’s a blur of flashing cameras and the weight of a medal around her neck.
Coach Kent grabs her at the end, pulling her shoulders like a proud parent, after the crowd has started to fill out. “There’s someone who wants to speak to you and Rebecca later.”
“Yeah?” Bella is still sweating though she’s been on the bench for the last half hour. The roar of standing on the stage and hoisting up the trophy hasn’t left her. There’s a buzz under her skin that always comes with winning but feels amplified because it’s different when it’s Germany.
Bill doesn’t give much away, though she can see how happy he is to have the winning team after last year’s defeat. “Conference call about playing in the WPS.” That stops Bella in her tracks. “Well done, kid.”
She catches Rebecca’s eye and realizes this is what she knew before. Under the darkening sky in Finland, Bella looks up and aims for the stars.
*
2007
The doctor tells her that the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been but she still waited too long to avoid the surgery she’s waking up for. Her parents couldn’t fly in but her saving grace is that they’re on her side in all of this and she’s not going to walk around with medical bills on her back for the foreseeable future.
She sits in the hospital bed, waiting to be checked out, for a good hour gently touching the bridge of her nose wondering how everything got so fucked up. This was meant to be her break after college. Getting picked by MagicJack to play alongside Rebecca and a ton of the full national team players. It was a dream come true. To play pro in a thriving women’s soccer league until the under-21 camp started in October. Have fun, make friends, and show her family that she didn’t need to think about playing abroad to make it.
Instead it’s only for hospitalization that she’s temporarily escaping the abuse of a coach who cares more about the bigger names and the bigger money they’re bringing in rather than her well being.
It feels like she’s been crying for days since Bill echoed his threats against her for standing up for herself and for teammates that dunked their heads back into the sand the minute things went sour.
She’s free to go once the paperwork checks out and she calls her mom to tell her that everything is alright. But she delays going home for as long as she can. She busses into town and ignores the way people a
re staring at her black eyes and taped up nose in the line for Taco Bell, because all she wants to do is watch TV and try to convince herself things could be worse.
Bella comes back from the hospital, her nose taped up and with a bag full of medication and another with food, to find a barrage of emails from teammates about seeing each other for the u-21 camp later this year and one single email from Bill.
She leaves her laptop open while she eats. Whatever it says, she doesn’t want it to turn everything she tastes to ash just yet. Not opening it though, while she chews and swallows slowly, makes everything settle heavier in her stomach. There’s no avoiding it though when she’s tidied everything away.
When she looks at the subject line Bella almost doesn’t even need to open it to know that she’s done. Bill’s titled it ‘re: charges’ and Bella is crying more from the pain than the news that she’s been fired in the end. Fired for standing up and saying what everyone wanted to say but didn’t have the guts to stand behind her against the tour de force of Bill and the bigger names.
Bella half closes her laptop and tries to feel something other than pain. All that seeps out is a hollowness that the words carved out of her.
It only really hits her later, when she’s wincing trying to wash her face of the small spots of blood she can see over the bruises that Bill said he would do this and he did. The looks of triumph when she called him out, like he was just waiting for this to happen the moment she broke her nose on the field, even after she did what she was told and didn’t seek out instant surgery. The control he had over her, her body and her teammates.
It was terrifying to not be able to breathe through her nose and to taste blood at the back of her mouth but watching everything fall into place in his expression was so much worse.
Bella stops dabbing the wet towel over her face when she thinks about it.
The threats he made against her career didn’t just stop at her club team.
Her stomach sinks as she tries not to sprint back to her computer and read through all her excited emails from teammates on the national team. She was wrong before, about things not getting any worse, because out of the twenty emails still unread from teammates and coaches and her parents, Bella doesn’t find an email from US-Soccer inviting her to join them in Jacksonville.
Things just got worse.
*
The e-mail never comes.
Not to the camp in Jacksonville and not to the next two camps that US-Soccer hosts for the underage squads and by the time early December hits Bella starts weighing her options.
It’s amazing how one person can change the entire course of a life and usually, according to Hollywood anyway, it’s for the better.
Bill Jameson had obviously never heard of a happy ending.
Not for her anyway and she starts mulling the possibility that this might be it. The end of her dream.
She does get one e-mail, a few days before Christmas from her college coach offering her an opportunity she would have absolutely ignored a couple of months ago.
Before Bill. Before everything.
It’s a graduate assistant position, contingent on the joking application she’d sent in to start her Master’s Degree in social work, but it would act as a full scholarship and her education would be entirely funded.
But she’d basically be a student coach on the soccer team and most of those girls she played with and they know her dream and if she comes crawling back to the campus then they’ll know that she failed.
Of course it’s not like she can explain that it’s all one big conspiracy so that’s what they’ll see her as. Just another has been, somebody who spoke of great heights but didn’t have the ability to actually reach them.
Bella doesn’t respond to the offer but something in the back of her mind stops her from deleting it outright, the little voice in the back of her head that tells her she needs a fallback plan and a solid one at that.
Her acceptance to the Master’s program comes a few days after Christmas but still she waits for what now seems like a miracle.
When nothing comes by the beginning of the New Year she realizes that it won’t ever. Not anymore.
And she’s about to age out and it’s either now or never and it looks like the clock has stopped on never for her.
She responds to the e-mail immediately accepting the position, resigned to the fact that this is going to be her life.
This is how it all turned out.
Chapter 2
2007
*
ON the last day of her first week as a graduate assistant she manages to wait until she gets to the library of all places, because she’s still staying with her parents a few more days until her housing comes through, before she breaks down into tears. She’s actually proud that she was able to wait that long to do it because she’d felt the urge ever since she’d left that locker room.
They’d always said that those that couldn’t do, taught. Well, Bella had preferred it when they were a metaphorical sort of abstract concept and not the voices of her former teammates.
It was by complete accident that she’d overheard them and there’s a large part of her that wishes she hadn’t gone back for that water bottle, it was a cheap free one that she got from a table on campus and she can’t, not that it’s important now, even remember what the table was hocking but it was full of her favorite flavor of Gatorade and really it’s the little things that make her days lately.
As it stood she never did get the bottle back.
Or her pride.
Because every single thing that they said confirmed what she’d been feeling since she accepted the position. She’s a failure. And everybody can tell.
Furthermore, she doesn’t even have the respect of the people who she gave everything for on the field not even a year ago. It would be unfair to say that every person in that locker room agreed with the girls spewing those hurtful words into the air where they probably never even thought she’d hear.
But the few players were more than enough to leave her curled up in the corner of a study room, enduring the judgmental looks of passing students and freaking out the library attendant enough with her tears that he didn’t even have the heart to kick her out even though the rules clearly state a minimum of three per room.
There’s a small part of her brain left over from when she thought there was something she could make of herself that wants her to say something to the girls. Stand up for herself and take ownership of her life decisions and the path it’s taken her on.
Of course, that would mean first accepting the path it’s taken her on and clearly, judging her actions, she is far from that path.
So she promises herself that no matter what she’ll look them in the eye tomorrow and keep her head higher than it deserves to be. A confrontation isn’t worth it because, let’s be honest, she’d probably just fuck that up too.
*
They’re playing the fourth exhibition match of their spring schedule, away against Notre Dame, and Bella is the one leading them through the warm up drills when it happens.
She’s caught off guard, in a way that not stepping on a field to play properly for months does to you, by a short range shot from one of the sophomores. She can’t remember her name but she never heard her voice in the locker room that day.
On the other hand, when the ball smashes into her nose, she’s sure that she would have preferred harsh words to the splitting pain that rushes through her face and her head as she falls to the floor.
The dull thud her head makes against the grass isn’t enough to block out the burst of laughter she hears from somewhere. It’s enough to make her hyperventilate out of panic. It definitely doesn’t feel like it did on the field with MagicJack. It hurts but Bella coughs and makes herself breathe through her nose. There’s no collapse this time.
Yet she lies there wishing it was broken or that the ground would just swallow her because on top of everything she’s putting up with, this further humili
ation shouldn’t be happening to her.
The sophomore rushes over and fusses with such a sincere apology that Bella has to wave her away. The last time she was taken down on a field like this, the only person that stood over her was the opposition’s keeper, and then Bill.
Coach Raymond is by her side when she sits up, along with the trainer who refuses to let her stand until she’s checked out.
Bella glares over his shoulder to the seniors who are still sniggering in her direction and she just feels so angry. This is another thing to add. Another fight that she’s losing. And it’s to girls with wonky ponytails.
“Bruised.” He declares. Coach Raymond sighs. “We’ll get you some tissue for the bleeding.”
Bella touches under her top lip and winces. “I’m bleeding?” Perfect.
They help her to the bench and Bella refuses to look out onto the field at their players as she’s given an icepack and mopped up by the staff. That’s when she makes a conscious decision, a bargain with herself almost, not to cry until she’s locked away somewhere once this is all over.
It’s more of an effort than she imagined it to be. She ices her nose throughout the game and has to stand shoulder to shoulder with more than half the girls she heard talking about her in the half-time huddle. They’re one up, which means they’re a little pumped and she should be happy, but her chest is tight and all she really wants to do is wait on the bus out of sight.
It’s a quick paced exhibition and Notre Dame comes back to equalize just as time runs out on them. It’s not the best result but this is all preparation for next year so no one is too downhearted when they all pile out of the locker rooms, showered and ready for the bus ride home. Bella is already sitting at the front, purposely engrossed in her phone to avoid the looks being thrown her way. Only the sophomore who blasted her in the face, Sammy, stops to ask if she’s okay and to apologise again. After that Bella plugs her headphones in and listens to music the entire way back.
It’s late when they reach campus again. Coach Raymond gives her a warm goodbye when Bella leaves the bus. A few of the younger girls tell her to look after herself, now that her nose looks worse for wear. When she’s gotten into the light of the nearest Taco Bell she pulls out her phone and assesses the damage.
