by Amy Efaw
Darkness.
Devon opens her eyes slowly. She blinks away the rain. Above her teammates are crowding, anxious faces looking down at her. She catches a glimpse of Kait, standing off to the side with crossed arms, her lips pressed tight together. And Coach Mark, he’s kneeling at her side, his mouth moving, his words unintelligible.
Slowly, her surroundings take shape, make sense. She’s outside—gray sky, rain. Wet grass. Mud underneath. Cold. And her head—it throbs. She moves to swipe the rain from her face. A searing burn from her shoulder. She cries out.
“So,” Dom says when Devon has finished telling her story, “did they call an ambulance?”
“Uh—” Devon blinks, shakes the memory from her mind. “No.”
“Anyone take you to the emergency room?”
“No!” Devon stops, collects herself. “I mean, no. I didn’t want to go there, to the hospital. I . . . after a couple of minutes, I felt fine. Really. Coach Mark ended practice early, and then he drove me home.”
Dom nods. “Yeah, he told me that he was very worried about you. He wanted to make sure that you got home okay.”
Devon remembers sitting in his Tahoe, the passenger seat. Resting her aching head against the window, holding her left arm close to her body, not saying anything. Watching the rain splat the glass, then slowly slide down. The windshield wipers swishing across the glass the only sound.
“So, your mom took you to a doctor later.”
Devon shakes her head. “No . . . ”
Dom frowns down at her legal pad. “But Mr. Dougherty said that you missed school the next day, and when you came back the following day, you told him that you had gotten a concussion and a shoulder subluxation—you had explained to him that your shoulder had sort of rolled along the edge of your socket and snapped back in place again—and that the doctor had said you wouldn’t be able to practice for at least four to six weeks, mostly due to the concussion. And that you had to go to physical therapy three times a week for the next six weeks to strengthen the muscles around your shoulder’s rotator cup.” Dom raises her head, looks at Devon.
Devon shifts her eyes back down to her knees.
“So, you’re telling me now that you didn’t go to a doctor at all?”
Devon chews on her lip. Risks a glance up at Dom.
Dom is frowning. “Should I take that as a no? Because I wasn’t able to dig up the medical records documenting any of this.” She drums her fingers on the tabletop. “Did your mom know anything? About hitting your head and hurting your shoulder?”
“Well, when Coach Mark brought me home, my mom was still at work. I go to sleep way before she gets home most nights, and I went to sleep extra early that night because I wasn’t feeling very good. And then, well, my mom was asleep when I got up in the morning. So . . .”
“But—” Dom looks up at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts. “Okay, so you did stay home that next day? Like your coach said?”
“Yeah, because I wasn’t feeling that great. I was sore all over. My head was still hurting—I had this huge lump. I didn’t feel like sitting in school all day.”
“Okay. So when did you tell your mom?”
Devon picks up one of her rubber slides. Slips a hand into it. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I really didn’t want to deal with it. She’d just obsess over nothing. Plus, going to the doctor’s expensive! We don’t have money to just—”
“Excuse me, but smashing your head into a goalpost and getting your shoulder knocked out is nothing? I think if your mom hadn’t obsessed about it, I’d be concerned. And there are some things in this world worth spending money on, Devon. Okay? You didn’t even give your mom the chance to make that choice!” Dom sighs with frustration. “You robbed her of an opportunity to finally make a good decision for you!”
Dom’s comment stings. Devon slips her other hand into the second slide. Goalkeeping wearing these? Totally ridiculous.
The conference room is silent. Finally, Devon peeks up at Dom. She’s on that stool with her jaw clenched, her cheeks flushed. Devon quickly returns her eyes to the slides on her hands.
“Didn’t the school call your mom that day to report your absence?”
Devon shrugs. “My mom never asked me anything about it.”
“I see.” Dom’s voice is pinched. “So, that stuff you told your coach. You just”—she flicks her hands out—“made it up?”
“Um.” Devon clears her throat. “Not exactly.”
She’d left the apartment that next morning before her mom got home from work. Walked the mile to the library, the main one downtown. A place to be until after her mom had slept and left for her cosmetology classes in the afternoon. She’d Googled around on a library computer, trying to figure out what had likely happened to her physically the previous afternoon. WebMD and some sports medicine sites, that’s where she’d gotten the diagnosis—moderate concussion and shoulder subluxation—and the recommended treatment plan. Devon remembers how relieved she’d felt when she’d made this discovery, and how she hurriedly scribbled everything down on a piece of scrap paper a librarian had given her. When she’d walked home, she took a circuitous route, wandering all the way down to Commencement Bay. She’d stood there a long time, staring out at the horizon. The water looked beautiful and new. The fog had finally burned off after so many gloomy days. The sun was out, shining brightly. The air warm. She’d wished she’d had sunglasses. The glare on the water hurt her eyes.
Not anything like the last time she’d observed that particular view, the time when she’d watched a sunset with Connor from his dad’s balcony.
“Why did you feel so relieved, Devon?”
Devon looks up at Dom. Had she actually told all of that to Dom? Yes, she must have.
“It seems to me that discovering that you might have sustained a concussion and had injured your shoulder pretty seriously, you’d definitely want to go see a doctor, just to check everything out. I’d think you’d be worried, not relieved.”
Devon softly taps her two sandaled hands together. With Dom, there’s always more questions. Questions, questions, questions. Never satisfied. Always digging for more.
“You want to know what I think, Devon? I think you were afraid to go to a doctor.” Dom’s tone is clipped. “I think all this crap about your mom freaking out and you not wanting to spend money is just that, crap.”
Devon stops tapping the sandals together. She feels her hands grow slick against the rubber. She tosses the sandals down, rubs her hands on the legs of her jumpsuit.
“I mean at this point”—Dom checks down at her legal pad—“around mid-January, you’d be”—she counts on her fingers—“about five months pregnant.” She turns back to Devon. Raises an eyebrow.
Devon looks away, shifts around. Her butt’s numb, sitting in one position for so long.
“So, if you had gone to a doctor, he or she would’ve undoubtedly discovered that you were pregnant. At five months, women start to show—”
“No!” The word flies out of Devon’s mouth. “No, I wasn’t thinking that at all!”
“You didn’t want a doctor seeing you. Be honest! You didn’t want to take the chance—”
“No, you’re wrong!”
Dom rolls her eyes. “Come on, Devon!”
“No! I mean it. I didn’t think I was pregnant. I mean, I don’t think that I thought I was. I . . . ” Devon is rubbing her thighs faster and faster now. “I know that you probably don’t believe me, but . . . it’s so confusing! All I know is that I was sort of happy that I didn’t have to practice for a while. That I was going to be able to take a break from it. From soccer, I mean.”
“Uh-huh. And why would you be happy about that? I thought soccer was your life, Devon.”
Devon glares at Dom. “Yeah? Well, how would you like to do something day after day for years and never get to take a break? Maybe I was getting sick of soccer! Ever think of that? I go to my varsity girls’ practic
es. I go to the boys’ practices. I go to my club practices. I play indoor soccer in the off-season. I do separate specialized goalkeeper training. I do camps and 3 v 3 tournaments all summer long. I was getting totally burned out. So . . . so, when I got hurt, I knew I had an excuse to stop for a while.”
“So, that’s it? You just needed a little vacation from soccer? Right before your team was going to travel out of state for a showcase tournament? Right before your club league season started? You’d just leave your team without their keeper?” Dom doesn’t look convinced. “Okay, fine. Then let’s go with that, shall we? Going to a doctor wouldn’t have changed anything. The doctor would’ve undoubtedly made a similar diagnosis, done some tests, taken some X-rays, maybe an MRI, and you would’ve gotten your little vacation. Four to six weeks off. Maybe even more. End of story.”
“Well, maybe they wouldn’t have found anything wrong with me.”
“Yeah.” Dom makes a snide laugh. “Maybe they would’ve found a lot wrong with you.”
Devon brings her thumb up to her mouth. Chews on it. “I . . . I didn’t feel like I was that good anymore.” Her voice is so soft, Devon isn’t sure she’s said anything at all. “I was playing really bad, Dom. I was feeling heavy and slow. My timing was totally off. And my jumping . . . toward the end of my high school season in November, I was having a hard time putting the balls over the crossbar. Those high balls would just roof me sometimes. Coach Mark was starting to notice it, too. He kept getting on me to play faster. He kept yelling at me.” The last sentence is a squeak. She takes a moment to pull herself together. “One time he screamed in front of everyone, ‘Get the lead out of your ass, Davenport! You are totally ineffective back there!’ He . . . he’d never said anything like that to me before. Ever.” Devon covers her face with both hands. “So, I . . . I wanted to take some time off and work out on my own in the afternoons, take a month or whatever and get in really great shape before the season started. Work hard on my core and run. Jump rope.” She drops her hand then, looks up at Dom. “I was going to come back before league started. That was my plan, Dom. I swear.”
“And, according to all that extensive research you did on your injuries, you determined that it was perfectly safe to work out.”
“The Web sites just said no contact sport activities. No heading the ball. Stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh. And, so, did you? Work out?”
Devon nods. “Yes. Every day. Even on the weekends. I was running about thirty miles a week. And I even did those shoulder-strengthening exercises that I found on the Internet.”
“Well, you never came back, did you?” Dom’s voice is quiet now. “The girls’ season for Washington state’s premier league started at the end of February, and you never came back to practice, Devon. So, you didn’t stick to your ‘plan’ after all.”
Devon shakes her head, whispers, “I wasn’t ready yet.”
“Wasn’t ready yet.” Dom studies Devon for a long time. Devon can see all sorts of thoughts going on behind Dom’s eyes. Dom’s expression is one of intense dissatisfaction and suspicion.
Finally, Dom stands up. She slowly walks to the wall on the other side of the room opposite Devon. Leans against it and crosses her arms. Stares at the floor for a long time.
“What about friends?” Dom says at last. She looks over at Devon. “You never mention them. Except that one girl here in Detention, that Karma . . .”
“She’s not my friend,” Devon says quickly.
Dom cocks her head. “So, do you have friends? Anyone you feel close to, anyone who you’d be able to trust with your secrets? Your worries?”
Devon looks down at her knees again. “Yeah. Of course. Everybody has friends.”
“No, I don’t think that’s always the case, Devon. Most people have lots of acquaintances, but acquaintances aren’t friends. There’s a difference.”
Devon shakes her head. “Whatever. I already talked to Dr. Bacon about this stuff yesterday. Why do we have to talk about it again?”
“Because I want clarification, Devon. I have a specific purpose for the questions I ask, and Dr. Bacon has her own reasons for the questions she asks.” Dom pauses. “Dr. Bacon has drawn the conclusion that you have two completely separate sets of kids who you interact with. You have a set of kids that you hang out with at school, and then you have your club soccer teammates. Is that correct?”
Not exactly. There’s one girl who straddles both worlds of school and club soccer—Kait. But Devon doesn’t want to go there with Dom right now, and she didn’t mention Kait to Dr. Bacon, either.
Devon nods. “Yeah, pretty much. I told her that on my club team, most of us go to different high schools, so during practice is pretty much the only time we see each other. Most of them have no clue what I’m like at school.”
“Are you a different sort of person at school than you are with your club team?”
Devon doesn’t know how to answer that question, so she just shrugs.
“Your coach told me that you are a leader on the field,” Dom says. “That your teammates really respect you and seem to like you a lot. So, what’s the situation like with the kids who don’t play soccer? The regular school kids. Do you have friends there, too?”
Devon draws her legs in closer, wraps her arms around them. She thinks about Dom’s question. Does she have friends? Her number is programmed into a lot of people’s cell phone contacts, so she gets plenty of texts, and she usually has kids to sit with at lunch. Some of them play on the varsity soccer team with her, and some don’t. But she’s never had anyone over to her apartment; Devon’s mom just isn’t around much and it would just be weird. And Devon doesn’t like to waste time at the mall or the movies after school or on weekends very often; she’s way too busy for that and doesn’t have the money for it anyway. This arrangement has always seemed to be enough for Devon. Mostly, the people at school are her “friends” simply because they are there.
Except Kait. She was always more than just “there.” The years of sleepovers at Kait’s house—the prank calls and movie watching and music listening and whispering in the dark. But, well, Kait wasn’t really speaking to Devon much anymore.
“I’m just not a big talker, I guess,” Devon says at last. She raises her eyes to Dom. “I really don’t like to talk about myself very much. So, when I’m around people at school, I sort of just sit there and listen. It’s not that I’m shy or unpopular or anything. It’s just that if I have something to say, I say it. Otherwise, I’m sort of just there. And I’m totally fine with that.”
“But it’s different when you’re out there, playing soccer?”
“Yeah, because I definitely have things to say then. About the game and what’s happening on the field. From the goal, I can see the entire field.”
“Okay,” Dom says. “So, did you talk to anyone about Connor? About your relationship or how you felt about him? To a teammate or someone at school? Anyone at all?”
Devon shakes her head no.
But over the summer, Devon remembers, Kait had grown suspicious. “You’re acting very strange, Dev,” she’d teased in her silly singsong. Like always, they were coming off the field together, their afternoon practice finished. “You’re being really secretive. You look like you are glowing.” She’d grabbed Devon’s cell then, right out of her backpack, ignoring the sweaty shin guards and gloves that smelled like roadkill. She clicked through Devon’s call log. “So, what’s this three-oh-three number? Hmm? Wow—it’s in here a lot recently. Way more than my number even!” She looked over at Devon and grinned. “Could this possibly be a love interest? Could Devon the Untouchable have finally met her prince?”
Devon grabbed Kait’s bag, then, and snatched her car keys. And they chased around the field, laughing and squirting each other with their water bottles until Coach Mark yelled, “That’s it, Tweedledee and Tweedledum! Next practice, get here fifteen minutes early ’cause you’re doing suicides. You two obviously have way too much energy!”
And Kait had yelled back, “So, which of us is Tweedle Dumb?’”
Devon closes her eyes. No, she didn’t even tell Kait about Connor.
“But your mom knew about him?” Dom says. “Right?”
“Nope.”
“Your mom had no knowledge of your romantic involvement, having sex—”
“No way! I’d never, not in a million years, tell her that! I don’t talk to my mom about anything.”
Devon stares back down at the floor again. She’s so tired suddenly. So done with talking. Can’t Dom see this?
“All right, let’s push on to something else.” Dom kicks at the floor with the toe of her cycling shoe, thinking. “The question I’m going to ask you now is one I’ve asked you before, but in a different way. The difference is subtle, but important. Before, we’ve discussed the fact that you were afraid that you might be pregnant because you’d had sex that one time with Connor. The context of that discussion revolved around your behavior during your September appointment with the doctor at the clinic, with Dr. Katial—how you reacted to his questions, your not returning the urine sample to his office, wearing the sanitary napkin in your underwear, et cetera. This question has to do with later circumstances, as time moved forward in your story. Did you ever notice anything specifically about your body that may have led you to believe that you were, in fact, pregnant? You’ve told me that you felt heavy and slow at soccer practice, that you noticed you weren’t jumping as well. And that you were starting to wear baggier clothes because they felt more comfortable. Did you, at any time, suspect that you were pregnant, Devon?”
Devon thinks about Dom’s question. Did she suspect? Did she?
Running up Carr Street, what game did she always play? She’d stand on the corner of 30th and Carr after running the three miles to get down there, staring up at the monster hill before her, as long and steep as any in San Fransisco. She’d check her watch. If she could make it up those six blocks from hell—from 30th Street to Yakima—in under two and a half minutes, then there wasn’t anything “wrong” with her. If she failed to make her self-imposed time . . . But it was just a stupid game; she knew that nothing was “wrong” with her. It was just a way to motivate herself to bust her butt, to give herself a goal with consequences. And two and a half minutes was not a generous window of time. But she made it every time, sometimes with only seconds to spare. Her lungs would burn and her heart pound, and she’d bend over at the waist, feeling like she might puke when she was finished. Her stomach tight and throbbing.