Rock Bottom Girl

by Score, Lucy

  “Fine,” I agreed. I could do this. It was only a couple hundred yards-ish. I was really bad at math. “I’ll run this one with you if you all promise to actually put some effort into the drills this afternoon.”

  Yesterday, they’d giggled and sashayed and played their way through every footwork drill I dug up online. Pretending it was a party instead of practice.

  “If you finish, we’ll participate,” Ruby negotiated.

  I would finish this sprint if I had to drag my ass across the line on my hands and knees. They wouldn’t break me. At least, not on Day 2.

  “Fine. Let’s do this.”

  8

  Marley

  It was hotter than hot. My sneaker was going to melt on the line under the morning August sun. At least that was one thing I hadn’t screwed up. I hadn’t saved the running portion of our practices for the afternoon when temperatures would push into the high 90s.

  “Remember, ladies. This is a sprint!” Yeah right. Most of them wouldn’t even be running by the time we got to the far penalty area.

  “Ready? Set? Go!” I shouted. I made an effort to explode off of the line to at least make a good show of it. I’d let off as soon as the slower team members started to fall off. There was a point in ball busters when you couldn’t physically worry about anyone else. You were too exhausted to care if you were even alive.

  There was a blur of legs, the thunder of feet muffled by grass as both junior varsity and varsity teams came off the line. I hid my grin as Ruby and one of the Sophies accelerated past everyone.

  Ha. Just you wait, girls. Just you wait.

  I touched the goal box line and ran back to the end line. Next was the penalty area line. Easy peasy. I felt a little rusty, but mostly okay. There had to be some muscle memory in this, right?

  Ugh. Center circle was next. I should have let them skip the circle and just go to half field. But I was only thinking those thoughts because I was starting to feel winded. Ruby powered past me, and I swear to God she was humming a catchy little tune.

  “This is a sprint, ladies! Push harder!” I yelled, channeling my old, beer-bellied coach.

  Reluctantly the pack picked it up a little bit.

  “Keep going,” I gasped as I jogged back to the end line.

  I was going to knock myself out with my boobs. These girls could not be harnessed by a simple yoga sports bra. No, they needed to be tamed, smushed, wrangled into submission.

  Oh my God. I could feel my heartbeat in my head. I couldn’t see, the sweat was stinging my eyes. I swiped at the never-ending river of it with the hem of my shirt. “There’s no rest here,” I gasped at the stragglers that were trying to catch their breath on the goal line. “Go!”

  My world narrowed to the sun, the heat, and the hard ground under my feet. I was plodding. It wasn’t even jogging. I wasn’t even sure if this qualified as walking. It wasn’t just hot. It was Satan’s sauna on this patch of crispy fried grass.

  I was vaguely aware of girls walking, their breath coming in sharp wheezes heard over the sound of the cicadas buzzing in the trees on the street. This had been a very stupid idea. I might die from this. I might kill one of them from this. I hoped it wasn’t one of the nice ones. I looked up, swiped the sweat out of my eyes, and saw Ruby slowing to a jog at the other end of the field.

  “Push harder!” I yelled.

  Out of breath, the words tore through my throat, trying to bring up bile with them. I gagged and slapped a hand over my mouth. Nope. Nope. Nope.

  “Suck it up,” I whispered to myself. I took a deep, shuddery breath and pushed on. My feet were made of lead. I pictured my dad at the end of the field holding a platter of snack cakes and a gallon of ice water.

  “Can we quit?” one of the freshmen on the team begged from somewhere out of my peripheral vision.

  “You do not quit. You cross this line on your hands and knees if you have to,” a voice snapped. Freaking Ruby. How did she still have oxygen to speak?

  I was no longer a coach. I was no longer human. As my foot touched the far end’s goal line, I realized that I would die out here on this humid, Pennsylvania kill zone. One hundred-ish yards separated me from my water bottle and that bottle of ibuprofen. Why did I agree to do this? Why would I put myself through this?

  To prove myself. A therapist would have a field day with my constant need to prove that I was at least adequate.

  The thought punched me in the sternum as I stared down the field. I’d screwed up or lost everything that had been important to me. On paper, I was a loser. But I didn’t feel that way in my heart. I had potential. If I could finish this. If I could put one foot in front of the other, I could do something with my life.

  I desperately needed this.

  The opposite end of the field wavered in my vision like a mirage. But I forced my feet to move. I was walking, then jogging, then something else. Flailing. Stumbling. Running.

  There were still a dozen girls struggling with me on the field. The rest were laying in the grass at the finish line. I wasn’t sure if they were dead or recovering. There was only one way to find out.

  Get there.

  “Come on,” I whispered to them, to me. “Come on.”

  Goosebumps rose on my skin, but I was too hot, too gutted, to pay attention.

  My stomach knotted as my breath clogged my throat. I was going to puke. In front of people. In front of teenagers genetically designed to exploit any weakness discovered in adults. But I was going to finish this run first.

  Half field. My foot touched the white line, and I swear I felt it zing up my body. Almost there. Almost there.

  I chanted to myself.

  Oh, God. The penalty area. Yes, baby cheeses! So close to the end of this stupid torture. To the end of the only challenge I’d risen to in months. Or years.

  I pushed, forcing my wobbly legs to chug faster. Crossing the line on a gasp, a wheeze, a dry heave. I collapsed onto my hands and knees.

  “Nice run, Coach,” one of the girls said weakly. I think it was sarcasm.

  But I was too busy vomiting to respond.

  “Well, shit,” someone sighed.

  Oh, God, no. I knew that voice. I knew the man behind that voice. He was the last person on the planet I needed to see me retching my guts out of my body through my throat. A worn shoe, one of those finger sneaker things, came into my line of sight. I gave one last heave before flopping over on my back.

  “Hi, Mr. Weston,” Ruby wheezed from somewhere very far away.

  “No, you don’t,” the voice said as things went blurry and gray. Something hit me in the face. Hardish.

  “Coach, what do we do?” a teenage boy squeaked.

  “Hey, dumbass. Do you know what heat stroke is?” the gravelly voice demanded of me. I felt another slap. A slap?

  Someone was slapping me in the face? How dare he!

  I struggled against the gray, the stars that were sparkling in front of my eyes. Defensively, I flailed my hands, catching myself in the face.

  “Guys, let’s drag everyone down to the locker room,” the voice ordered. “Take as many bodies as you can.”

  Suddenly I was airborne. Floating up, up, up. Then I was unceremoniously tossed over something hard and sweaty. I was upside-down. My ponytail hung straight down. Everything was still a blur, but was that an ass in my face? Wow. A really nice ass. Tight globes of muscle that bunched under shorts.

  Hallucination or not, that ass was connected to the finest pair of thighs I’d ever seen in my life. Some women were into the arm porn. Others into the chests or v-cuts. Me? I wanted a meaty thigh to sink my teeth into.

  “Did you just bite me?” the voice demanded.

  Shit.

  The grass under those weird shoes changed to sweltering pavement and then… Oh, God. No. The industrial tile floor of a high school hallway. It smelled like polish and antiseptic.

  I heard a thudding and wasn’t sure if it was just in my head.

  “Testosterone incoming. Get de
cent,” that voice boomed. A second later, I was facing concrete floor. The smell of cleaner and perfume tickled my nose.

  Someone yelped. A barefoot blur to my right shrieked.

  “Hi, Mr. Weston,” a girl purred.

  “Stay covered up, ladies. I’ve got a few gentlemen with some luggage coming through.”

  There was giggling. And then my body was floating through air up, over, down. I felt cool tile beneath me and at my back. There was the tell-tale screech of a twisting faucet. But before I could muster the energy to threaten my attacker, cold water pelted down on me.

  “You stay there,” the finger in my face ordered. And then those shoes were squishing away from me.

  I did as I was told because I had no other options. Besides, the water felt pretty damn good.

  There was a ruckus coming from outside the showers.

  I heard him triaging my team. “You, shower. You, cold, wet towel.”

  “Carpenter, you and Kerstetter bring the water cooler down.”

  “On it, Coach.”

  One by one, my girls were helped into the shower fully clothed.

  It was one of those gross old-fashioned shower rooms so everyone could make uncomfortable eye contact while they tried to wash the sweat out of their genitalia and pray that the popular girls wouldn’t notice them.

  Angela was propped against the wall in front of me. I raised my hand in a half-assed wave, and she started to giggle. It set me off, and one after another, we all ended up in hysterics.

  “I’m so glad you ladies find heat stroke hilarious.”

  My vision had cleared enough that I got my first good look at Jake Weston looming in the doorway, shirtless and still sweaty. My God, that body had only gotten more delicious with age.

  “Let’s go, Coach,” he said, dragging me to my feet.

  9

  Jake

  Bedraggled Marley Cicero propped her elbows on her knees in front of me.

  “What were you thinking?” I demanded, beyond annoyed. Hell, I was moving into seriously pissed off. “It’s ninety-four fucking degrees and a thousand percent humidity, and you decide it’s a great day for ball busters?”

  “Ovary exploders,” she muttered.

  “Ha. Hilarious,” I snapped. The anger made me antsy. I snatched a hand towel from the neatly folded stack on the shelf and stomped out of her office. In the locker room, I took inventory. My cross-country runners were fanning and rehydrating the girls soccer team.

  My fastest runner, Ricky, was staring into the wide brown eyes of Ruby as he held a wet towel to the back of her neck. That looked like trouble to me.

  “Everyone all right out here?” I asked, holding the towel under the sink faucet.

  “Everyone’s back on their feet, Coach,” Ricky reported, jumping back from the girl. He was tall and fast as fuck. Also one of the nicest kids on the planet. And the very pretty Ruby was looking like she might eat him up for dinner.

  Good luck, kid.

  “Great. Everyone take five and then meet me out front on the steps.”

  I grabbed a cup of water from the cooler my guys dragged down.

  “Us, too?” Morgan E. clarified.

  “Soccer team, too.” I headed back into the office. It had a creepy glass window that looked out on the lockers. There was a big, industrial gray metal desk, a bookshelf with several tomes on physical fitness from the 1980s, and one green-around-the-gills coach. “Here.” I dropped the towel on the back of her neck, moving Marley’s not-so-perky ponytail out of the way.

  “Thanks,” she rasped. She took the cup of water I offered and downed it too fast.

  “You’re gonna puke again,” I predicted.

  “So thirsty. The girls okay?”

  “They’re fine. You’re real freaking lucky. What the hell were you thinking? First of all, it’s too fucking hot to run sprints. The body’s main priority is to keep itself cool. Pushing everyone like that in Pennsylvania August doesn’t build endurance or speed. It makes kids sick.”

  “I noticed,” she said, rubbing a hand over what was probably a big-ass headache.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I muttered under my breath. I dug through the dinosaur desk drawers until I came up with a bottle of expired aspirin. “Here.”

  When she fumbled the bottle, I took it back, shook out a couple of caplets. She took them, downed them dry.

  “I repeat. What the hell were you thinking? These girls went through enough last year. Now you’re trying to kill them on the field?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Grumbling to myself, I refilled her cup and brought it back. “Better?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded.

  “You’re a real hot mess, you know that?”

  She looked up at me for the first time, and I remembered those eyes. The kind of light, warm brown that made me think of brownies and bourbon.

  I even remembered what they looked like one second after I’d kissed the hell out of her all those years ago.

  Yeah, I remember you.

  “I am well aware,” she said, snapping me out of my trip down memory lane.

  “Good. Now, let’s go.”

  “You’re really bossy. You know that?” She made it to her feet, and I had to give her credit for not immediately collapsing back into the chair.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Am I fired?” she croaked.

  “How the hell should I know? Come on.”

  I led the way out of the locker room and toward the glass doors. This was the main entrance for the gym. The girls’ locker room was on one side of the gym and the guys’ on the opposite. I pushed the door open and surveyed my ragtag bunch of students. “Who wants Italian ice?”

  A cheer rose up, and I felt like a damn hometown hero. It was little moments like this that made the hard work and frustrations of teaching and coaching worthwhile.

  Marley trudged out of the door behind me sucking on a water bottle.

  “Let’s go, troops.” I hooked an arm through hers to keep her on her feet. We made a pitstop at my SUV for my own water bottle, phone, and wallet.

  I fired off a text to Mariah.

  Me: Got a small army coming. Ready the electrolytes and pickle juice.

  She responded immediately.

  Mariah: God I love the smell of preseason.

  “Where are we going?” Marley asked.

  “To rehydrate.”

  “Will there be beer?”

  The desperation in her voice made me laugh. “Not on the clock, Coach.”

  We trooped down the hill that the high school sat on, staying on the treelined sidewalk to soak up the shade. Mariah’s Italian Ice Shack was a glorified shed she plopped in the backyard of her row home across the street from the high school. She’d held down some administrative job at a local hospital before being downsized a few years ago. With her fancy severance package, she opened up the shack and supplemented her income with work-from-home gigs. She kept students and faculty cool in the summer with crazy flavored slushies and warm in the winter with the best hot chocolate in the county.

  When we turned down the alley, I could see the rows of paper cups already lined up. The bright green of the pickle juice ices against the red, blue, and orange of the sports drink ones. Mariah knew how to do preseason right.

  “One of each,” I told the kids as they descended like sweaty, pimply locusts.

  Snagging two of each, I directed Marley to one of the picnic tables Mariah had positioned under the big oak trees that crowded her tiny backyard.

  “Here.”

  She sniffed at the cup. “What is this?”

  “Pickle juice.”

  “No way.” I expected her to wrinkle her nose in disgust, but her pink tongue darted out and sank into the green ice. My reaction was instantaneous. It wasn’t like I’d handed her a banana and told her to go to town. I was still royally pissed at her total lack of regard for the well-being of her team. But I was also turned on.

  Huh. Interes
ting.

  She was less pale now. The summer heat was bringing a pink flush back to her cheeks. She had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. They spread out more on her cheekbones. Those brown eyes were warier now, less dazed.

  “Wards off muscle cramps,” I said, gesturing at the sinus-infection-colored ice. “And this one’s got electrolytes.”

  “Mmm, come to mama,” she murmured, scooping the orange-sports-drink-flavored ice into her mouth.

  All around us, high school athletes snickered and chatted. I noticed there was a definite divide right down the middle of her team. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the leader of Team A was Ruby, and Team B belonged to Sophie Stoltzfus. And then there was godawful Lisabeth Hooper who worked her demon magic on both sides. I worked my ass off to keep the drama out of my team. A slightly easier feat with the mix of the sexes. I didn’t envy Marley with the brewing disaster she had on her hands.

  “What’s going on with King and Stoltzfus?” I asked.

  Marley looked up, brow furrowed. “Who?”

  “Ruby making eyes at Ricky and Sophie with the hair.” I waved my hand around the back of my head to call attention to Sophie S.’s twisted braid bun thing.

  Marley looked in their direction and took another spoonful of slushie. “Hell if I know.”

  “Look. It’s your second day on the job. I’d cut you some slack, but you coulda put your entire team in urgent care making them run like that today—”

  “Your team was running,” she interrupted.

  “Yeah, but my team is used to this. And in deference to the weather, we took it slow and stuck to the shady route with water breaks,” I said pointedly. “What are you trying to prove?”

  “Apparently that I’m nothing but a hot mess,” she huffed.

  “No need to get snippy. I’m just being honest with you. Don’t push ’em so hard when it’s this miserable outside. You’ll get more out of them when they’re comfortable. And from here, it looks like you need to focus more on the team thing than the training.”