Throw Like a Girl

by Sarah Henning

  “Dude, shut it. We’ll get them,” I say, cuffing his wrist. “Show, don’t tell.”

  Jake meets my eyes and does a Grey-style deadpan I didn’t know was in him. “You’re one to talk.”

  I just smile. “Learn from my mistakes. Jawing gets you nowhere.”

  By halftime, we’re tied 10–10, and Jake is still livid, stalking to the sideline for a word with Coach. So I’m not surprised when the first call out of the gate in the second half is yet another rushing play. Jake badly wants to break through this line like he’s mowed over everything else.

  We push into the huddle.

  “Orange Five, Tigers.”

  We throw our hands in the middle and break.

  At the snap, I turn and cover the ball just enough so that the defense thinks I’m running for it, but not so much that Jake can’t sprint past and snag it. With the ease of a pickpocket, he tucks the ball under his arm and hurtles through the tiniest crack in a wall of bodies.

  Jake breaks free on the other side and becomes a blur of orange, the white three and two on his jersey jumbling together under the lights as he speeds in the direction of the end zone, forty yards downfield.

  With two white-and-silver bodies in worthless pursuit, he flies into the end zone in a sweeping arc and spikes the ball so high it sails up and over the goalpost.

  All that frustration gone in a rush of satisfaction that comes with a breakthrough. And damn, if I don’t feel better, too. Relieved we’ve figured out how to score on the ground.

  The crowd feels it, too, becoming a stream of noise. There’s a chant rising above the general screams of people too excited to realize they should join in.

  “Tigers! Tigers! TIGERS!”

  Jake swoops back downfield, helmet off, soaking it up. Arms raised to the star-speckled sky, he insists the crowd go louder.

  It’s magnetic.

  The ground pulsates as I jog toward him—a rumble and roar rolling through Tiger Stadium. The rest of the offense is ahead of me, rushing in for fist bumps and high fives.

  So when Jake goes down, I think it’s under the weight of love.

  Until a scrap of white-and-silver wedges in my eye, Jake’s orange-clad body smothered into the ground, helmet rolling toward open field.

  And then all hell breaks loose. Helmets and fists flying—an all-out brawl at the end zone. The benches dump onto the field, bodies all running full speed at each other, screaming like boy banshees.

  FFS.

  Jets on, I get there the same time as Kelly, tearing into the fray, determined to pound some skulls to get to Jake. But no matter what’s happening between the two of them, she can’t go in there. Kelly was right that day she yelled at me outside the locker room—she can’t be on the football field. As much as I hate to admit it, she really is too important to the softball team to get hit. And she doesn’t have a helmet. Or pads. Or any protection at all.

  Shit.

  Automatically, I pin her arms to her sides and hug her to my chest pad.

  “The coaches have it, Kelly. The coaches have it,” I tell her, hauling her back over to the sidelines. Deaf to anything but the fight on the field, she lunges forward anyway, trying to pull me along. But I stay upright, hands drilled to her shoulders in focus, grimace set.

  “Think of the team,” I shout at her. “You join that mess, you could be out for the year. The team needs you to pitch. You get hurt, there go your team’s chances!”

  Logic settles in and she quits struggling so much, softening enough that I finally risk searching for Grey. I twist around to look at the bench—empty as Chick-fil-A on a Sunday. He’s in that freaking mosh pit.

  And though I know he said he was all right, that he was healed, that he was only keeping quiet for the scouts, I still squint into the crowd, searching for number sixteen. I mumble a silent prayer that he grabbed his helmet before rushing into this mess of bodies.

  It’s all a blend and a blur—scraps of clothing, slips of skin, noise and fury.

  Coach Lee’s voice lifts above the din, but, like Grey, it’s impossible to locate him in the fray. My legs itch to run in and find Grey, to grab his hand and pull him away. Keeping him safe seems like a much better use of my time than holding back my ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend. But still, I stay with Kelly, who’s thrashing less now, finally coming to her senses.

  Somewhere behind me, an engine revs—Coach Napolitano is driving the cart over. The one used to collect bodies from the field, zipping them to the locker room or, worse, the ambulance.

  No. No. No.

  It’s a precaution. It has to be. It can’t be that someone—Jake, anyone—can’t get up.

  Napolitano noses the cart’s bumper into the heart of the scuffle. The forced motion sends most of the Tetherman players packing to their bench. A few remain, white flecks in a sea of orange.

  Unmoving orange.

  Everyone has stopped. Eyes drawn forward and down. Napolitano disappears into the mass, hand up—signaling for help.

  My fingers slip off Kelly’s shoulders and I hop to the first metal bench, balancing on cleated tiptoes, reaching for something—anything. But the angle’s bad. I can’t see a single thing except helmets reflecting the glare of the stadium lights. My eyes shoot to the crowd—Dad and Danielle have identical emotions telegraphed across their faces: grim, grim, grim. Mom has her hand pressed to her mouth, eyes pinned to the field. A few rows down, I find Jake’s parents—Jerome and Angela—and Max. Oh, Max. Max has his head buried in his mother’s Northland hoodie, little seven-year-old shoulders quaking. Jerome and Angela are talking and then Jerome nods and starts to scoot out of the row. Headed down to the field.

  My stomach drops and my blood pressure rises, breathing near impossible. For all the weirdness of our postbreakup-current-teammate relationship, I would still call Jake a friend. And even if we hated each other’s guts, there’s no way on earth I’d ever wish him hurt. Ever.

  After a long moment, something stirs in the center and I recognize Jake’s buzzed head.

  There are hands on his shoulders. Three visors—Lee, Shanks, and Napolitano—surround him. I exhale as I realize that though they’re keeping him steady, not a single one is gripping him like he’s not moving under his own power. I can see Jake’s mouth moving. Blood streaming down from a cut over his left eye.

  When he gets to the cart, Jake takes a seat next to the medic and lifts his head until he’s looking me right in the eye. Even at this distance, I recognize the order.

  Win the game, O-Rod.

  Jake lifts both arms straight to the sky—touchdown!—and the crowd roars, knowing he’s okay.

  “Go get him,” I whisper to Kelly. She immediately starts running after the cart, but then hesitates for a moment, and it’s clear she’s looking for her brother. “I’ll check on Nick and let him know where you’ve gone,” I add.

  And then she’s sprinting again without a reply.

  I turn back to the fight, now broken up, the coaches and refs turning both sides back to the sidelines. I tell myself he has to be okay. They didn’t bring another cart. Another medic. No one is circled around someone unable to get up because they’ve suffered yet another brain bruise.

  And then, there is Grey—helmet on (thank God), gait strong, walking off next to Nick, who’s helmetless but appears fine. When he sees the look on my face, Grey breaks into a run, taking off his helmet when he gets to me.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, eyes searching.

  “Are you?” I ask Grey, and my voice is all weird and stilted. There’s so much in it I don’t say, and the fact that Nick doesn’t know about the concussion looms large in the front of my thoughts.

  He winks. “Rogers is gonna live and we’re ahead by a touchdown—I’m most definitely okay.”

  29

  GRADE ONE CONCUSSION, DELIVERED BY THE RIGHT hook of a Tetherman lineman immediately after the dude plowed Jake into the ground on a super-duper late hit. Not even close to Grey’s injury, but a prescription all
the same for butt-to-bench therapy.

  Jake’s out the rest of the game. Just like the delinquent who took him down, and it doesn’t seem fair that they have the same punishment. That’s not an eye for an eye, it’s a slap on the wrist for a brain bruise.

  My mind is a jumbled mess once we’re back and settled. Tetherman scored on the next drive, and so now we’re tied at 17–all. But with fewer than thirty seconds left, it’s our turn to end this and avoid overtime.

  The kickoff return was a great one—Chow getting us all the way down to the twenty. Coach Shanks signals for our first rushing play and Jake’s backup—a runny-eyed sophomore named Levi Towson—looks like he’s just been asked to scale the Taj Mahal.

  “Orange One.”

  There’s nothing different about my voice in the huddle. But there’s everything different about the reaction.

  All ten boys are silent.

  Towson just stares at me, glinting eyes begging me to take it back.

  So I repeat myself. “Orange One.” And give a descriptor. “Straight through the middle.”

  Blink, blink—Towson stares at me. Tate isn’t having it—that eye roll could probably be seen from Pluto. “Let’s just Orange Nine it up in here and finish this on first down. Kid’s not ready.”

  He isn’t. But that’s not the point. We respect our coach and our teammates.

  “Orange One.”

  “But—” Towson begins. I don’t let him finish.

  “Orange One.” Handclap. “Break.”

  That buzzing crowd comes in now, an entire wall of orange, on its feet, a wave of noise crashing over our movement toward the line. I settle in behind Topps. Towson is a yard behind me, shaking like the wimpiest leaf known to man.

  Dude, grow a pair.

  “ORANGE ONE. ORANGE ONE. HUT-HUT.”

  Topps shoots the ball into my hands and I rocket left, ready to pick up Towson before he jukes through a hole made by the offensive line and leading straight toward the end zone.

  Only Towson isn’t there.

  He’s gone the wrong way and gotten tangled up in the meaty palms of a defender on the right side.

  Shit.

  I tuck the ball against my body and jerk two steps until I’m lined up with the hole, narrowing by inches each second. I grit my teeth, twist my shoulders, and dive through, aiming for the white end zone paint just beyond a Tetherman lineman’s back foot.

  A body comes flying in crossways at my ankles, pushing my lower half into a spin and throwing off my balance. I brace for impact, the turf rushing up toward my face, my body now parallel to the white line of the end zone.

  Wait. The ball can’t just hit the ground. It’s got to hit before my knees.

  My knees—which are being driven straight toward the plastic grass by some hippo in Tetherman white and silver.

  Shit.

  I thrust the ball away from my chest and reach for the green beyond the white line. The ball’s point touches and I have a split second to smile before the freaking hippo crashes down, crushing my knees into the turf so hard I’m sure I tag China.

  The crowd roars, and somewhere in the storm there’s the shrill of a whistle. Through the corner of my eye I glimpse one of the refs, arms up.

  Oh, thank God.

  Touchdown.

  The hippo peels away, but not before grinding his shoulder into the outside of my top knee one final time before the refs run over to break it up. When I can stand, a pair of arms immediately hooks me under the shoulders and flings me around in a rough circle.

  “O-Rod!!!!” Topps’s cheeks are rosy with glee as he winds up for another revolution. Gentle giant that he is, he sets me down as if I’m landing on a flower petal, my other teammates approaching for high fives. It’s only as I’m walking away from them to the sidelines as special teams set up for a field goal that I feel it.

  Mixed in with elation and realization that I should’ve spiked the ball—because when else am I going to get to do that?—is a twinge in my left knee.

  It doesn’t hurt, not with the white-hot certainty of a true injury, but it doesn’t feel right either. There’s a hitch on the outside of the joint, like a violin string that’s skipped the bridge.

  “Rodinsky,” Coach Lee yells from down the line, “you’re a sorry excuse for a running back, but at least you managed not to get caught.”

  My heart rises. That almost feels like a compliment.

  I stick my head under the hand dryer for just long enough that my hair won’t paint wet streaks on my shirt before grabbing my bag and checking my phone.

  Addie: Have Nick. Meet you at Pat’s. We might be late.

  I text back: Don’t miss curfew, Adeline.

  Addie immediately answers: I don’t miss anything and you know it.

  I laugh. Kill, block, shot, catch—she’s right. She doesn’t miss.

  I step out of the locker room with a smile on my face.

  Like the past couple of weeks, Grey is there. Again, he’s pushed up against the building, smelling of boy soap, the curling pieces of his hair catching the dying stadium brights.

  But this time, he’s not alone.

  A girl in a dress is there, too, blond hair shimmering in the same light. She’s pressed into Grey, one palm flat against his chest, the other hand in his hair, sweeping the curls off his temples.

  I’m so stunned, I stand there for a second, the locker room door open, wedged against my backside.

  “Look—don’t.” Grey’s voice is insistent. I could just be imagining it, but it almost looks as if he’s trying to jerk his head away from her hands but not getting anywhere. “Stacey, don’t,” I hear him say.

  Stacey.

  That Stacey?

  I stiffen and my butt loses its leverage as a doorstop and the heavy metal door slams shut behind me. Grey stumbles off the wall and out of the girl’s grasp.

  “Liv,” he says, eyes wide and hands out, defensive. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  For a moment, I believe him—he didn’t look like he was encouraging her or enjoying her touch. But Grey Worthington knows how to evade the grasp of a two-hundred-pound linebacker. Surely he could escape a scant one hundred pounds of teenage girl.

  Then the girl turns and it is her. She’s not at school in Arizona. Stacey’s here.

  Touching my boyfriend.

  The light’s not the best, but she’s definitely recovered from my right hook. Stacey’s face morphs into a little smirk. She’s had her brows filled in and her blond hair is less softball-practice-and–Sun In and more super-expensive balayage.

  Her palm is still on Grey’s chest. Grey realizes it the same moment I do and hastily moves away.

  Stacey laughs, her eyes shining as they loop from my face to Grey’s, reading the situation. “And is this what it looks like?”

  “Yeah. It is,” Grey says, and pointedly steps around Stacey and grabs for my hand, tugging me away toward the parking lot.

  But Stacey’s not done.

  “What is it with you and my sloppy seconds?” she calls after me. “First Jake and now Grey?”

  I stop dead in my tracks, pulling Grey to a halt.

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” she says. “Grey and I dated for the last two years. Who do you think held my hand on the ride to the hospital after you punched me?” I wince, and this hurts more than what Stacey did to my eye at that last softball game.

  Grey tugs at my hand. “Dated. Past tense. Come on, Liv, I’ll explain.”

  But my heels are planted on the concrete.

  “Oh, yeah, explain,” Stacey says. “Don’t forget the part where I dumped you and you were so upset you wrapped your car around a tree.”

  I shut my eyes.

  The wreck.

  I just totaled my car, busted my collarbone, and my hard-ass mom took away all my driving privileges and refused to buy me another car.

  “I wasn’t upset,” Grey snaps.

  She cuts him off with a single laugh. “You were three beers in—wh
ich is worse. Too drunk to drive, too emotional to Uber.”

  When I open my eyes, Grey’s face is pale and his hand has gone clammy around mine.

  He didn’t just want to hide his concussion from recruiters. He needed to hide the fact that he drove drunk, too—no college wants to touch a quarterback stupid enough to do that with a ten-foot pole.

  The concussion. The drunk driving. Two years with Stacey.

  What else is he hiding?

  And then—I see it. As clear as the perfect pitch coming my way, begging to be smashed.

  Recruiting me, befriending me, even the starry eyes and kisses no one saw.

  I’m not just his girlfriend—I’m a means to an end.

  Because what better way to push back against a broken heart than to date the girl who shattered Stacey’s nose?

  And the lies. The lies by omission over the course of our relationship are suddenly so dense, piling together and splitting apart until I’m blinded by the spread of them.

  Again, Grey tries to tug me away, to the privacy of Helena the Honda and then to celebratory pancakes with friends. But I’m frozen in place.

  I slip my hand free of Grey’s.

  Now Stacey’s the one moving, sweeping past us. She turns midstride, teeth flashing. They’re whiter than they were all those months ago, too. It’s like she got a makeover simply for this moment. “Rodinsky, I almost feel sorry for you. Not only is your whole relationship a revenge plot, but it’s a shitty one. Because guess what? I don’t actually care what Grey does with his time. Or who he does.”

  And that’s when I walk away. Because I don’t need to hear a single thing Grey has to say.

  30

  “LIV! HEY! LIV!” GREY IS ON MY TAIL AS I BURST OUT OF the shadow of the main building and into the parking lot.

  Oh, hell no.

  I pick up the pace until I’m literally sprinting toward where Helena’s parked next to an island.

  A crush of disappointment, shame, and anger constricts my lungs until I can’t breathe. It’s like I’m piled under a bunch of bodies yet again, nose to the turf. Still, I weave through the cars. Why the hell are there so many people still here?