We were at a stoplight and Bobby looked over at me. “Wow,” he said with an approving nod. “That’s real commitment.” I was waiting—or hoping—for him to add, “That extra work really shows,” or “I should have known—you’re my best player,” or to at least look longingly at me. He didn’t, and the light changed.
I’d finally settled on folding my hands in my lap when Bobby pulled to a stop in front of Happy Seeds, a health food store.
“Come on in,” he said as he hopped out of the car and waited at the curb for me. I had the thrilling idea that someone might see me with him. Is that Susan Klintock with Coach McMann? the person would think, and I’d have to fend off inquiries at school the next day.
I’d been in Happy Seeds once or twice with Mom, who every now and then would go in search of a new vitamin. The sharp mineral smell of the place hit you right away, like dusty pepper. Bobby grabbed a small basket and we made our way to the bread aisle. An older black man with gray hair and muscular arms greeted Bobby with a back slap. “Hey, Coach, what’s happening?”
“Hey, Earl. Picking up some supplies.” Bobby gestured to me. “This is Susan Klintock, one of my star players.”
“Star, huh? Coach doesn’t say that kind of thing lightly. Nice to meet you, Susan.” Earl wiped his hand on his apron and stuck it out for me to shake.
I shook his hand and he told me he was excited to see us play a game, then excused himself to get back to work as Bobby surveyed the breads. They were laid out on a table, and all of them were brown or coated in seeds. They looked like harder work to eat than running fifty suicides.
Another employee waved and smiled at Bobby, a woman about my height with pale skin that could have really been helped by a little lipstick under the grim lighting in here. I doubted the grim lighting was doing me any favors, either, and thought better of trying to catch my reflection.
“Hi, Bobby,” she said. He was Bobby to her and not Coach like he was to Earl. I bristled.
“Charlene, hi,” he said. Once again he gestured to me and made introductions, and this time I reached out first to shake Charlene’s hand, which felt limp in my grip. No way could she handle Bobby’s practices.
I followed Bobby toward a cluster of barrels filled with grains and seeds that you could scoop yourself. He pulled a bag off a roll and poured in a scoop of granola, holding it up to see how filled it was. Satisfied, he twisted the top and tied it into a knot.
“There’s a lot more seeds than I realized,” I said. Had I really made an observation about the many kinds of edible seeds? Was I possessed by George Tomczak?
“Don’t worry, I like a nice burger, too.” Bobby grinned. “All things in moderation, even seeds. I need to pick up wheat germ; then I’ll get you home so you can finish your homework and whatever else you need to get to.”
I thought of how, after riding next to him in his car, the first thing I’d be doing likely wouldn’t be homework. I flushed, as if my intention to masturbate had scrawled itself across my forehead.
Lucky for me, he’d already turned to the wheat germ.
“Got it,” he said, looking victorious, and we headed to the checkout. Earl rang him up, gave Bobby another back slap, and told me to listen to my coach.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Earl said.
I’ll bet, I thought.
Near the exit, Bobby paused at a bulletin board covered in flyers advertising babysitters for hire and bikes for sale. In the center was a flyer with the words “Personal Best Training” across the top, and beneath that, a photo of Bobby that must have been cut from a larger image. He had his leg up on a weight bench. Someone had drawn a large penis extending out from his shorts.
In haste, he tore it down, but not before I saw that almost none of the row of flaps where he’d printed his phone number had been torn from the bottom.
The sad look on his face as we walked to the car made me desperate to say something.
“I think having goals at the park has really helped out,” I said. “It’s cool you got them.”
Bobby faintly smiled. “You know, the school gave me an account for Powell Park Sporting Goods. For jerseys. I ordered them last week.”
“That’s good, right?” I said, so chipper I could hear the pity in my voice. “Like they’re excited about the team?”
“The account was for twenty-five dollars,” he said, unlocking the door. I didn’t know how much jerseys cost, but I knew that there was no way he’d get nearly a dozen of them at Powell Park Sports for that amount. “But I know how uniforms make you feel like a team in a way not much else does. So I got them.” He tossed his now balled-up flyer into the back seat. “I’m hoping my personal training business picks up. Teacher pay . . .” He shrugged. “You know.”
I didn’t, but I could see Bobby carefully considering jerseys for us the same way he compared wheat germs. I wanted to think of the right words to say thank you. He’d spent his own money.
“Don’t say anything to the team yet,” he said, as I started to open my mouth. “I want it to be a surprise. But you asked me before, so I figure it can be our little secret.”
The words “our little secret” uttered as Bobby looked into my eyes were as exciting as if I’d put a scoop into one of the barrels of seeds and lifted out diamonds.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “I can’t wait to see them.”
“They weren’t my first pick of colors, but there’s always next year,” he started saying with excitement. “I hope they’ll be ready next week.”
I didn’t care about the jerseys. He’d spent his own money on us. He was making plans for the next year, for us.
He deserved a team that was worthy of him, and if he was going to call me his star player, I had to try to live up to the title.
Twelve
Joe picked me up on Saturday morning for our next practice at the park. His Nova had ripped brown seats that were taped in places and the glove box door was missing, but you could tell he took care of the car. One of those pine-scented trees dangled from the rearview mirror.
“Um, what is that?” I asked, pointing at the tape sticking out of the 8-track player. “You like the Doobie Brothers?” My dad liked the Doobie Brothers.
Joe grimaced. “It’s been stuck there since I bought the car from my uncle,” he said. “I thought you saw it last time and were too nice to say anything. So we can either listen to the radio or ‘Takin’ It to the Streets.’”
“Whatever’s good.”
He put on the rock station and a Boston song poured out. “Ugh. Someday, I’ll play you some real music.” He spun the radio dial, dissatisfied with everything.
“Here.” I pushed the button for the 8-track. “The Doobies would want it this way.”
Joe’s appreciative laugh made me laugh, and we listened to part of the song before he asked, “So how did practice go this week? Any goals?”
“Still no,” I said.
“Don’t be upset,” he said as he slowed for a stop sign. “It’ll happen.”
“Easy for you to say,” I told him.
“True.”
I made a gesture toward the radio. “So what’s your band like?”
“The Watergate Tapes? We’re sort of awful but we make it work for us,” he said. “Our drummer got a serious girlfriend, though, so we’ve barely been practicing.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking of Candace and George. “Do you think they’ll last?”
“I hope not. She’s super critical of everything Ben does. But you can’t explain why people like who they like.”
“So your girlfriend isn’t like that?” I said.
“Who?”
“The girl you were with at Sportmart?”
“Oh, that . . . didn’t really work out,” Joe said.
I wasn’t sure if I should ask about the break-up; I didn’t want to give him the idea that I might be interested or anything like that. But it didn’t matter, because we were pulling up at the park. Joe turned to me and said, “Has you
r coach shown you chops yet?”
I squinted at him.
“That’s a no,” he said. “Come on, we have work to do.” For someone who seemed so unserious, Joe was taking our practice really seriously. He jogged out to the field, looking happy to be there, then waved me over. “I think there’s a peewee football game here today, so we need to get going!”
Learning the chop was fun—it was a way to trick a defender by kicking the ball sideways from you to get around her.
But even though Joe declared me a natural at that, I hadn’t improved when it came to scoring on him. He was a walking, talking wall at the goal. He sort of loved how good he was, I could tell, from the way he flung himself in front of every one of my shots.
“Maybe I’m not meant to be a forward,” I said with a sigh after he easily fended off what I’d thought was a genius kick.
Joe shook his head and lobbed the ball over me to the center of the field, where I’d been starting from. “I think you have to use the power of attention,” he said.
“I’m paying attention!”
“No, no, I mean my attention. Say you’re coming up from the left,” he explained, as I dribbled the ball around a cone and toward him. “You’re going to want to aim for the opposite corner of the net, since I’d be looking at you and the ball.”
“Yeah, but that’s not going to work now,” I said. “I’m the only player out here—you’ll see me coming. It’s not like in a game, where you might get distracted.”
Joe puffed himself up, “Me? No freaking way. I’m always ready. Like, this one game, against St. Rita’s—”
And as he began to talk about how great he was, I lined up a shot and kicked, angling my body directly toward him. Joe, who normally saw shots coming from a mile away, looked stunned as the ball clipped by his ear and into the net.
“Fuck!” he said, at the same time I leaped into the air and screamed, “Hell yes!”
He was staring at the ball like it had betrayed him somehow.
“You knew I was going to make one someday,” I said, jogging up to him with my shoulders back. I picked up the ball with propriety and patted it like it was a loyal pet.
“You’re pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you?” he said, bending down to retie his cleat.
“You know it. Now I’ll be ready for my first game.”
Joe looked up, raised an eyebrow. “You got a game?”
“Not yet,” I told him. “But soon.”
The peewee football coaches had shown up, and they shot Joe and me dirty looks, like they’d caught us having sex on the field. I started to gather the cones Joe had set up for me to weave around during warm-ups.
“Till then, you want to keep practicing? With me?”
“Yeah, definitely,” I said as we carried the stuff to his car. Standing behind him, I waited for him to unlock the trunk. “I mean, if it’s okay with you?”
“Of course.” He chucked his gear into the car and took the cones I handed him. Light passed over his face, and his mouth pulled into the grin that meant he was about to say something flirtatious. “You didn’t really think you were done after one score, did you?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t made you cry yet.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said. He pointed at my T-shirt, Tonia’s old Styx one. “I just want to be alone when I cry over your tragic celebration of Styx.”
I would have flipped him off if I hadn’t been laughing.
My lessons with Joe began to pay off during the next couple of scrimmages. At one point on Tuesday, Marie confronted me as I dribbled toward the goal and I knocked the ball left with the outside of my foot—a chop—then took possession again. I drove toward the goal and took a kick, getting my shot by Dawn.
Bobby clapped from the sideline, and said, “Whatever you’re doing in your own time, keep doing it.”
Tina shot me a look. “What does he mean, what you’ve been doing in your own time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I’d mentioned my ride home with Bobby, but I hadn’t told her about the lessons with Joe yet. I felt bad for lying, but I’d been hesitant to tell her because talking about a boy with your friends—even if you said the guy was just a friend—meant they’d start pointing out signs he liked you.
But when Tina called Wednesday morning to offer me a ride to school (it was raining), I thought I’d use the ride to tell her about practicing with Joe. Then, Tonia called.
“Hey, Suze,” she said. “Mom around?”
“No, work. What are you doing up? Isn’t it, like, five a.m. there?”
“I just got home from a crazy party, but I needed to talk to Mom about the wedding thing.”
“You mean Dad’s wedding?”
“Yeah, how fucking weird, right?” Tonia said, impatient. She hadn’t talked to me in months; could she at least try to see what was going on in my life? “Can you tell them I can’t make it? There’s a maybe thing going on in Joshua Tree, and it’s too expensive to fly out there anyway.”
“I think Mom said she and Dad would pay for your ticket,” I told her. Dad would definitely want Tonia there, but I was more angry she was bailing on me. “Won’t there be other maybe things in Joshua Tree? Dad probably won’t get married again, again.”
“Ha, there are guys out here on their third wives; you never know.” Someone in the background called Tonia’s name. “Look, I have to go.”
“But—”
“You’re a big girl, Suze. You’ll be fine.” She hung up.
I was so worked up by the whole thing, I spent the rainy car ride bitching about my sister to Tina, who agreed that she was being selfish. After that, she reminded me how we’d caught Ms. Lopez hunched over a Harlequin romance the day before, when we’d had a test on Faulkner, and I knew she was trying to cheer me up. It was working, until we saw Candace getting out of George’s car wearing his letter jacket.
My face must have registered my disgust, because Tina said, “I know he’s a doofus, but she seems happy.”
“We should get out of the rain,” I said, and we ran through the doors of the school with our backpacks over our heads. As we shook ourselves off and turned down the hall to my locker, we saw some of the team gathered in the hallway.
“Coach wants us to meet in his classroom,” Dana said before either of us could even say good morning.
“What for?” I asked.
“Probably to tell us practice is canceled,” Dawn said. “Sucks.”
She was right. I was genuinely disappointed, and not just because it meant no Bobby. After talking to Tonia and seeing Candace with Garbage Breath George, I really would have liked to be on the field kicking something rather than going home to sulk after school.
“He said he has a special announcement, too,” Dana said, loading her voice with extra officiousness.
I looked at Tina. I’d let the jerseys secret drop to her after describing all the details of my ride home with Bobby, wanting her to be impressed with his generosity.
“Well, let’s find out what he wants,” Tina said.
When we got to room 133, Bobby was standing behind his desk in a button-down shirt and tan slacks. I must have given him a strange look, because he glanced down and said to the room, “I can’t wear shorts to teach algebra. At least, not anymore.”
“I wonder why,” Tina whispered to me. We took seats at the desks as Bobby stood up, hefting a large box onto his desk.
“I’m sorry, we’ll have to cancel practice today—the field is just too muddy,” Bobby said. “But I’m hoping I can brighten the day anyway.”
“The shorts would have helped with that,” Joanie muttered behind me.
Bobby patted the box and cleared his throat. “You’ve been playing like a real team,” he said. “And it’s time you looked like one.”
He reached into the box and pulled out shirts with “Powell Park” written across the chests in powder blue. The powder blue color was nice, if the words hadn’t been printed across a shirt that
was the same yellow that the armpits of white T-shirts turn after you sweat in them a lot. But Bobby held one up proudly and tossed it toward us.
No one reached out to catch it, but it half landed on the edge of Franchesa Rotini’s desk. She pulled it toward her and politely said, “Thank you.”
“I hope you like them,” Bobby said, as he passed out the rest.
The word “hope” was weighted with an apology. He reminded me of Fred Farris, a boy with a skin condition who’d been my square dancing partner in PE last year. “I’m not contagious,” Fred had said about the warts on his hands, which had prompted me to hold his hands tighter, so he wouldn’t feel bad.
“There are a few different sizes in there, and some extras, in case anyone forgets hers on game day,” he continued. “You can trade each other for the ones you want.”
“They’re definitely attention-getting,” Tina said, using her genius way of phrasing things to bring a smile to Bobby’s face.
“We love them,” I added, clutching my number 15 and trying to compensate for the team’s bland thank-yous.
“Well, good,” he said, standing in what I’d come to think of as his coach pose: hands on hips and his feet planted shoulder-width apart. In shorts, coach pose made every one of his muscles, every angle and slope of his body, available for careful study. But it still worked even in long pants. “You’re going to need them . . .” He paused dramatically as he looked from player to player. “Because I also got us a game.”
A cheer went up from everyone at once. We jumped from the desk chairs, shrieking like we’d already won the game we’d just found out about. The team’s collective excitement surprised me, almost as much as my own did.
“We’re official,” Tina said, waving her jersey over me and Dawn Murphy, who actually was smiling, too.
“Who do we play?” Marie asked.
“Is it a school around here?” Arlene chimed in.
“It’s another high school girls’ team, the Wauwatosa Warriors. They’re just outside of Milwaukee,” Bobby said. “The only problem is, we have to play early morning, so I think it’ll be an overnight.”
“Yes!” Marie Quinn said. “Freedom!” Her somehow-not-rained-on blond hair swished as she grabbed Joanie’s and Arlene’s hands and spun them around.
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