Kenzie Kickstarts a Team

by Kit Rosewater

  Tomoko and Jules came around the corner.

  “The rest of Team Derby!” Shelly said. The girls all tapped hands.

  “I don’t think that’ll stick,” Tomoko said. “All the basketball teams I know have real names.”

  Kenzie glanced at Shelly. Since they were the ones who formed the team, they should be the ones to come up with a name. Not Tomoko.

  “Let’s wait until we get a full team first,” Shelly said.

  Kenzie nodded.

  “Speaking of a full team,” Jules said, “any ideas on where we’re going to find our last member?”

  The girls all waited for someone else to come up with a plan.

  “Hey! Maybe we should brainstorm,” Shelly said.

  Jules grimaced. “I thought teachers came up with brainstorming as a torture device.”

  “No,” Shelly said. “Kenzie’s mom has us do it all the time, and it works! That’s how we got the idea to form a derby team in the first place. Come on, let’s go to the meeting spot.”

  Shelly turned for the bathroom. Kenzie paused a moment, then followed with the rest. Since when did the bathroom become the team meeting spot?

  The door closed behind Kenzie. Shelly, Tomoko, and Jules stood in a semicircle by the sink in the corner. A girl at the middle sink eyed them as she wrestled her hair into a bun.

  “Come on,” Shelly said, waving Kenzie over. “Only ten minutes until class starts.”

  Kenzie swung her backpack around and unzipped the main pocket. She reached deep in her pack, way past her notebooks, to the black hole where graded spelling tests and unfinished activity sheets liked to vanish. She fished out a crumpled ball of paper that turned out to be a parent permission slip she thought she lost three months ago. She smoothed it out and flipped it to the blank side. Jules handed over a pencil that was barely longer than Kenzie’s pinkie finger. Kenzie looked at Jules.

  “What?” Jules said. “I like my pencils extra sharp.”

  “OK,” Shelly said. “List time. We need to find someone who’s skated before. What are some ways we can get our last member?”

  “Ooh! I’ve got one,” Jules said. Everyone turned to her. “It starts like this: First, we prank-call the secretary and tell her to come see something going on at the playground. Then, while she’s gone, we sneak past her desk and break into the principal’s office. We take over that thing with the huge speakers. What’s it called?”

  “The intercom?” Kenzie asked.

  “Yeah,” Jules said, “the intercom. Then, when it’s time for morning announcements, we’ll tell the whole school about roller derby! I’ll bet we could get at least one skater to come to practice that way.”

  The others stared at Jules.

  “That’s your idea?” Tomoko said.

  Jules nodded.

  Intercom takeover, Kenzie wrote on the list.

  “I don’t even know where to start about how bad that plan is,” Tomoko said.

  “It’s a great plan!” Jules huffed. “If you think it’s so awful, you come up with something.”

  “What if we had a bake sale?” Shelly said. “And then we could use the money to pay someone.”

  “They should want to be on the team without being paid,” Kenzie said. She wondered if Shelly was thinking of Bree specifically.

  Even though Kenzie didn’t think they needed to raise money, she still wrote Bake sale down. That was one of the rules of brainstorming: No idea was too out there to go on the list.

  “We can’t really do a bake sale in one day anyway,” Tomoko said. “I don’t think complicated ideas are going to work.”

  “The whole point of brainstorming is to get lots of ideas,” Shelly said. “Then you can cross things off later.”

  “Yeah,” Jules said. “You still haven’t added anything.”

  Tomoko sighed. “OK,” she said. “There’s this thing in basketball right when the buzzer’s about to go off and the quarter is over. Whoever has the ball, even if they’re way on the other side of the court, has to throw it at their basket.”

  “And?” Shelly said.

  “It’s called a Hail Mary,” Tomoko explained. “And most of the time the ball doesn’t make it through the hoop. But once in a blue moon, the Hail Mary works and you get the shot. I think we need a lot of Hail Marys today.”

  Hail Mary, Kenzie wrote on the list.

  “So we’re throwing things at people?” Jules asked.

  “No,” Tomoko said. “We ask a bunch of kids about derby. Like, as many kids as possible. And we hope that one—a skater—says yes.”

  “I like it!” Shelly said. “Let’s go with that idea first. Talk to as many people as you can in class, over lunch, and at recess.”

  Kenzie shrugged. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

  The girls threw their hands into the circle between them.

  “Go, team!” Shelly said.

  They raised their hands in the air, then set off on Operation Hail Mary.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kenzie, Shelly, Tomoko, and Jules headed out to their separate classrooms.

  All morning Kenzie tried passing notes to the other girls in her class.

  Do you like roller skating?

  Circle one: Y/N

  But the only person who saw her note was the teacher, who it turned out wasn’t interested in roller derby either.

  During P.E. class, Kenzie ran through the field in the middle of a soccer game to ask the players if any of them skated, but before she could ask, the ball bounced hard into her shin and she limped back off the field.

  No one at lunch wanted to hear about the league, even when Kenzie offered to trade her cookie if they would let her sit and talk derby with them.

  “What did you do to it?” one girl asked suspiciously as Kenzie waved the cookie in her face.

  “Nothing!” Kenzie said. “Just eat it!”

  The girl turned back to her table. Kenzie sighed. None of her Hail Marys were working.

  She found Shelly and Jules at a corner lunch table.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  Shelly shook her head. “It’s really last minute,” she said. “Everyone seems to have plans this weekend.”

  “Heck, even I had plans with drama club,” Jules said.

  Kenzie and Shelly raised their eyebrows.

  “I’m not going,” Jules said defensively. “I’ll be at derby with you guys. All I’m saying is . . . I’m on the team and I had plans!”

  Shelly drummed her fingers on the table.

  “What do you think they’ll say if we only show up with four?” she asked.

  Kenzie shrugged. “I don’t think it will be good.”

  Tomoko sat at the table next to Kenzie. She buried her face in her arms.

  “Ugh,” she grumbled. “People don’t want to do anything fun.”

  Jules held up her juice box. “You said it.”

  Kenzie scanned over the cafeteria as the other girls ate. Why was it so hard to find another skater? It seemed a lot easier to add beginners to the team. They found Tomoko right away at the park, and Jules stood out of the crowd with her sword fight.

  Wait, Kenzie thought.

  “I have an idea for our fifth member,” she told the group.

  “Who is it?” Tomoko asked.

  “A skater?” Shelly asked hopefully.

  Kenzie smiled. “Meet me in front of school after class gets out,” she said. “And you’ll see.”

  She stole a look at Jules, but Jules was poking at the blob of food on her plate. That was OK. Jules could be surprised too.

  “Places, everyone!”

  Miss Moss clapped her hands from the front row of the auditorium.

  Kenzie held the door behind her so it would close without making a sound. She snuck into one of the back rows and waited as the lights dimmed down. Shoes scuffled across the stage. A spotlight rose in the center over the same kid who had broken up the sword fight in the lunchroom. He stood next to two other boys.
<
br />   “By my head, here come the Capulets.”

  “By my heel, I care not.”

  Another group of kids charged onto the stage. Near the back of the group was the girl with the long, shiny hair. She held a fake sword out. Kenzie’s eyes widened. She blinked and suddenly she could see the girl in the center of the derby rink, skating and sword fighting alongside Jules. Jules was a little rowdier, sure, but this girl was just as tough. She flourished her sword in the air and did a quick backspin on her skates.

  Kenzie could see it so clearly in her mind. This was the girl for their team.

  “Away!”

  The skates vanished in Kenzie’s head as the girl exited offstage. Kenzie slunk out of her seat and made her way to a section of curtain hidden in shadow. She pushed past the heavy velvet fabric.

  Going from the auditorium to backstage was like flipping a switch. Everything went from dark and hushed to bright and animated. Kids were doing makeup on each other, putting on and taking off coats and vests, and practicing lines from their scripts. Kenzie waded through the whispering clusters of kids until she found the girl sitting in the far back corner. Her knees were tucked carefully up to her chin. The fake sword lay beside her.

  “Hey,” Kenzie said. She knelt in front of the girl. “I’m Kenzie. You were in the sword fight in the lunchroom, right?”

  The girl looked up from her script. “Yes,” she said timidly. “I’m Camila.”

  “You were great!” Kenzie said. She sat down in front of Camila and clasped her hands the way her dad did whenever he was about to launch into one of his stories.

  “So I know you’re in this play,” Kenzie said. “And you’re really good,” she added. “But I’m on this roller derby team and we need another member, and I was thinking that since you’re so good at fighting and stuff, you’d be perfect.”

  Camila tucked her hair behind one ear. “Well, I don’t like actual fighting.”

  “Right,” Kenzie said. She waved her hands. “Of course not. Just the play-fighting thing.”

  “What is roller derby?” Camila asked. “Is it like a play?”

  Kenzie paused. She remembered getting upset when Shelly had told Tomoko that derby was like basketball.

  “Sort of,” Kenzie said. “Derby’s a little like a play. There’s five of us and we put on these uniforms—which are a lot like costumes, actually. And people cheer while we skate around a track.”

  Camila leaned forward. “I like costumes,” she said. “But I don’t know how to skate.”

  “Oh,” Kenzie said, frowning. She had promised Shelly they would find a skater to finish the team. But now they only had one day to practice before the league began. And they needed a fifth person.

  “That’s OK,” Kenzie told Camila. “The others don’t really know either. We can practice tomorrow after school.”

  “Tomorrow?” Camila said. “That’s really soon. What if I don’t know how to skate by then either?”

  Kenzie smiled. “It takes a while to really learn skating,” she said. “Even I’m still learning. I fall all the time.”

  Kenzie was trying to help Camila get excited about derby, but she seemed to keep saying the wrong things.

  “You fall?” Camila asked. Her eyes grew wide.

  “But we wear pads and stuff, to not get hurt,” Kenzie said quickly. She needed to show Camila that derby wasn’t about getting beaten up; it was about being tough and having fun.

  Kenzie pointed to the sword next to Camila. “You know how you have to use this in the play?”

  Camila nodded. “For fight choreography,” she said. “That's when we plan out moves for a pretend fight.”

  “Perfect!” Kenzie said. “Roller derby’s a lot like fight choreography. We get to perform for crowds of people. And we train to make sure we don’t really hurt ourselves.”

  Camila gathered her script to her.

  “Is derby a . . . a sport?” she asked.

  Kenzie chewed her lip. She couldn’t just lie to Camila. That wouldn’t be fair.

  “Yes,” Kenzie said.

  Camila swallowed. “My dad really wants me to try sports. And my part in the play is really small.” She looked at her script again.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll do it.” She smiled to herself. “My dad will be so excited.”

  Kenzie gave a huge sigh of relief.

  “You’ll be great,” Kenzie said. “And everyone will be cheering for you, not just your dad. Meet me after school tomorrow, and we’ll get started. I can introduce you to the other girls. Well, you already know Jules.”

  Camila’s face fell. “Jules is on the team?”

  Kenzie nodded. “Yeah. She just joined.”

  “But . . . she doesn’t listen to Miss Moss’s fight choreography,” Camila said. “It’s really hard to have scenes with her.”

  “That’s OK,” Kenzie said. “Roller derby is different from performances. There’s not one thing to do, like in a play. Derby’s a sport, remember?”

  “Oh. Right,” Camila said uncertainly.

  Kenzie gave a thumbs-up.

  “See you after school tomorrow. Front steps!”

  “OK,” Camila said. She gave a thumbs-up back.

  Kenzie wore a huge grin as she walked past the prop tables and costume racks. She emerged into the hall and jogged to the front of the school. As Kenzie pushed the doors open, she felt like she was finally coming up for air. She had done it. She had finished the team.

  “I found her!” she cried. “I got our last member!”

  Shelly, Tomoko, and Jules turned from the steps.

  “Who is it?” Tomoko asked.

  “Camila,” Kenzie said.

  Jules’s eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead.

  “Camila from drama club?”

  “Yep,” Kenzie said. “We’re going to teach her how to skate tomorrow!”

  “Wait a second.” Shelly grabbed Kenzie’s arm and took her aside. “I thought we decided to find a skater.”

  Kenzie held out her palms.

  “What was I supposed to do?” she said. “The league starts on Saturday! We need five players.”

  “But what about Bree?” Shelly asked.

  Kenzie glared at her. “Camila’s our fifth player.”

  Kenzie glanced at the others. Jules sucked on her teeth and shook her head. Tomoko looked questioningly at Shelly. The team was in dire need of a pep talk.

  “Look, we’re all coming to derby for different reasons,” Kenzie said. “But the important thing is that we’re all here. There are five of us now. And tomorrow afternoon, we’re going to practice as a team and kick butt!”

  Kenzie held her arm into the circle.

  “Der-by, der-by, der-by,” she chanted.

  Jules put her arm in next. Then Tomoko. Shelly sighed and placed her hand on top.

  “Derby!” the team said in unison.

  Kenzie smiled and nudged Shelly’s side. Maybe they didn’t quite have a dream team, but they did have a team, which meant they were headed for the track.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Ladies and gents, earlobes and ice cubes,” the announcer sang out. “Introducing Austin’s first junior roller derby league! Please welcome to the track our leading ladies, the Dynamic Duo: Kenzilla and Bomb Shell!”

  Kenzie and Shelly skated to the center of the rink. They held hands and twisted in circles, spinning faster and faster until they turned into a human cyclone, ready to take out their rivals on the track.

  “Woo!”

  The crowd went wild. They brought out their BOMB SHELL banners and waved their KENZILLA signs. Some of the little kids roared like they were Kenzilla monsters.

  “And here’s their superstar team: Tomoko, Jules, and Camila!”

  Kenzie and Shelly stopped spinning and gestured toward the entrance. Tomoko made a perfect backflip onto the rink and tossed her basketball toward the bleachers. Jules sliced the air with her sword. Camila blew kisses to her fans as she skated close behind the ot
hers.

  “They’re ready to take on the competition,” the announcer said. “As long as they pay attention. Hello? Anyone there? Kenzie, are you listening to me?”

  Shelly snapped her fingers in front of Kenzie’s face. Kenzie jolted upright.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Man,” Shelly said, “you really check out sometimes. I was asking if you knew Camila’s shoe size. For the skate rentals.”

  Kenzie shook her head. “Why would I know her shoe size?” she asked.

  “Well, you’re the one who got her for the team,” Shelly said. “You think she’s still coming?”

  Kenzie looked at the school doors over her shoulder. It felt like the bell had rung ages ago. Was Camila still coming?

  Tomoko rummaged through her backpack. Jules had plucked a blade of grass and was using it as a whistle.

  “Hey, Jules?” Kenzie asked.

  Ffftttt!

  Jules looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Was there rehearsal today? After school?”

  Jules shrugged. “I dropped out,” she said. “But I think so, yeah.”

  Kenzie buried her face in her hands. It seemed like the Hail Mary was a total bust.

  “Hey,” a soft voice said. Camila stood at the top of the steps.

  Kenzie and Shelly jumped up together.

  “Hi!” Kenzie said. “Ready for practice?”

  Camila smoothed her shirt.

  “Um. OK,” she said. “I mean, I’m ready to leave. But I still haven’t learned to skate.”

  Kenzie laughed. “That’s what we’re doing right now,” she said. “Don’t worry!”

  Jules ran up the steps and linked her arm through Camila’s.

  “We can do our sword fight on wheels!”

  Camila winced. Kenzie smiled encouragingly and came to Camila’s other side.

  “We’ll start with regular skating,” Kenzie said. She walked ahead with Camila and Jules, trying not to notice Shelly and Tomoko walking together behind her.

  The girls popped into the roller derby warehouse. A woman sat behind the front desk reading a comic book.

  “Is Wreck-the-Holls around?” Kenzie asked.

  The woman hitched her thumb over her shoulder.

  “Who’s Wreck-the-Holls?” Tomoko asked.

  “Ms. E.,” Shelly whispered. “Kenzie’s mom.”