Outside the Lines

by Kate Christie

  Another highlight also included dining with strangers. Midway through their holiday, they caught a bus to Finsbury Park for a day of volunteering with Foodcycle, the non-profit community food program where Jamie had learned to cook. There they donned the hideous hairnets the cooking managers provided and got to work peeling potatoes and mincing garlic in the Community Center’s kitchen. Jamie was more skilled with a paring knife, but for once Emma didn’t mind being one-upped as they worked with the rest of the team to produce a free meal for local residents out of the odds and ends that supermarkets and restaurants would otherwise have thrown away.

  Once the meal was ready, they exited the kitchen only for Jamie to be swarmed by several community members who wanted to know where she’d been hiding herself. One ancient couple in particular, with matching bushy eyebrows and age spots on their heavily veined hands, clearly doted on her. Harold and Glenda invited them to dine at their table and proceeded to quiz Jamie about Champions League, her family, Oregon and the NWSL. In return she asked about their children and grandchildren, who they were only too happy to gush about. They seemed proud of her, and excited to meet Emma, too. She couldn’t help being touched by the community that Jamie had managed to build for herself during her years away from home.

  When they weren’t exploring the city, they practiced tai chi on the deck (Jamie was teaching her), ran their favorite drills on the backyard pitch, spotted each other in the weight room, and ran sprints up Parliament Hill on nearby Hampstead Heath. Emma was used to working out alone, but this, she thought one morning as she and Jamie dribbled around the flat’s backyard pitch practicing freestyle tricks—the pancake, the elastico, neck stalls, assorted flick-ups, and, of course, the rainbow, laughing each time the ball went awry—this she could get used to.

  And then, simultaneously too soon and not soon enough, it was Saturday, their next to last day in London, AKA Game Day.

  Since kick-off at the Emirates wasn’t until later, they spent the morning playing small-sided pick-up at the Heath with a group of Jamie’s teammates. For once it wasn’t rainy or windy, and as the day wore on the temperature climbed towards sixty—a record, according to Emma’s weather app.

  Around three they donned their club gear and got ready to leave the flat. Emma wore her United jersey, the one Jamie had sent her all those years ago, while Jamie donned assorted Arsenal Ladies FC gear.

  “You’re seriously going to wear that?” Jamie asked, watching her in the dresser mirror.

  “Are you kidding? It’s my lucky jersey. Not that my boys need luck today, seeing as we haven’t lost to you in the last fifteen matches.”

  “You also haven’t won on the road this season, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Maybe not, but our record is better than yours,” she bragged, securing her hair in a ponytail.

  Jamie only made a sound of disgust and turned away. She had to know her team was going to lose today. And if she didn’t, she really should.

  Emma dialed up a black cab on her phone, and ten minutes later they arrived at the Twelve Pins, the pub where they’d celebrated the win against the Swiss women’s side the previous week.

  “It’s a game day tradition,” Jamie said after Emma had paid the driver, “to pop into the pub for a pint.”

  “Nice alliteration.” Emma followed her into the sprawling green and white building on the corner of a busy thoroughfare. The first time they’d come here, she’d thought it odd to find a Subway shop, a money exchange, and a kebab restaurant all in spitting distance. Now she thought the variety nicely summed up the London she was beginning to feel like she knew. “What?” she added, feeling Jamie’s eyes on her.

  “I like alliteration too.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Plenty of people, I would assume.”

  She might be right.

  The closing doors shut out the sounds of bus engines and truck brakes, but that didn’t mean the pub’s interior was quiet. It was packed, and not just with random patrons, either. Most were men and boys with the odd woman, nearly all clad in Arsenal jerseys and scarves that offered a brief history lesson on the local club. Some decades had certainly been more tasteful than others.

  Jamie led her to the less jam-packed back room where they’d hung out the last time. “Max!” a chorus of voices rang out Cheers-style. At a nearby table, Emma recognized several of the players from Jamie’s team, all in Arsenal gear. As she and Jamie approached, Emma was glad she’d worn an old UNC sweatshirt over her United jersey. No matter how warm it got in here, she doubted she would be shedding that particular layer anytime soon.

  “Did you hear?” asked a dark-skinned woman whose name Emma thought was Marjorie but who everyone called The Major. “PSG next round.”

  Jamie nodded. “Yep. Paris in the spring. Can’t say I’ve ever been.”

  Her tone was glib, but Emma remembered how relieved she’d been when the draw earlier in the week showed them facing Paris-St. Germain, not Lyon. Still, if Arsenal managed to get past the strong Paris side—Jamie had confided this was doubtful—and Lyon managed to beat the Swiss team they’d drawn for the quarters, Jamie might yet travel to Lyon for Champions League semis.

  As Emma watched, Jamie changed the subject by asking the Major about her day job at an investment bank. That did the trick, and they discussed international economics until their teammates booed them good-naturedly and brought them back to Premier League and WSL fixtures.

  It really was like the bar in Cheers, Emma decided. Everyone appeared to know each other, including the wait staff. A woman named Judy, who Jamie said was the owner’s daughter, even pulled up a chair to chat.

  “Judy, this is Emma,” Jamie said.

  “Aye, I know who she is.” Judy eyed her shrewdly for a moment and then nodded decisively. “I’d been wondering why you didn’t come back to us. Now it seems I have my answer.”

  Emma watched delightedly as the back of Jamie’s neck reddened.

  “What? No. I mean, I moved home to play in the NWSL.”

  Judy’s eyebrows rose. “Right. ‘I still have a year left on my contract,’ you said. ‘I’ll be back,’ you said.”

  “I am back,” Jamie argued.

  “Sure you are, Max. But not alone, are ye? Not that I blame you,” she added, tipping her glass at Emma and winking.

  As kick-off approached, Jamie’s teammates remembered that she was a United fan and began to heckle her. Like before, Emma bought a round to quiet the discord. No doubt that was what they’d intended as they nudged each other and grinned appreciatively, magically restored to cheerful spirits.

  Jackasses, Emma thought, shaking her head at their antics. Since they knew her loyalties, she might as well take off her sweatshirt. The back room was getting hot. Or maybe it was the beer and the rowdy company warming her up.

  When Jamie handed her phone to Jeanie and asked her to snap a shot of them smiling over their shoulders, names visible on their jerseys, Emma didn’t think about US Soccer or her Twitter following. She didn’t think of WoSo fans or Tumblr teens until her phone blew up and she checked her notifications to find that Jamie had posted the photo of the two of them on her public Instagram account. Quickly Emma shut off her social media alerts, ignoring the ball of fear hardening in her stomach. She couldn’t believe Jamie had posted the photo without asking her first. Must be the lager shanty talking. Jamie was such a lightweight—one drink and she was already pink-cheeked and twinkle-eyed.

  Emma rubbed her forehead. It had been nice to be off the grid. She hadn’t heard much from Twitter in weeks, not since the end of CONCACAFs. Maybe her troll wouldn’t notice the photo. Either way, she told herself, it wasn’t worth ruining their day over. It was a great photo of them, and the Tumblr teens at least would be happy to see more evidence of Blakewell. Besides, she was about to see United play in person! In London! With Jamie! That was what mattered, not what may or may not set off an anonymous creep presumably thousands of miles away.

  The
television above the bar was tuned to a Premier League review show. An hour before game time, the announcers began discussing the upcoming match at the Emirates. When an image of Roelof Peeters in his United jersey flashed across the screen, the room immediately erupted into boos and whistles. This time the heckling was decidedly serious.

  “Damn,” Emma commented. “Bitter much?”

  Jamie snorted. “He moved to one of Arsenal’s biggest rivals. Of course Gooners are going to be pissed about his lack of loyalty.”

  “Peeters put Arsenal on his back for what, eight seasons? And what does he have to show for it? An FA cup title? His first year with us he won a league title. Roelof’s move to United was a clear case of career advancement, and you know it.”

  “I know nothing of the sort,” Jamie said stubbornly. “He was getting older, so he moved to a team that already had a star striker. Retiring to a team where you’ll be less challenged is a time-honored football tradition, and you know that.”

  Emma shook her head, certain that Jamie couldn’t believe what she was saying. Facts were facts, and emotion couldn’t change the clear fact that United was the better team, with or without Roelof Peeters.

  “You’re just angry because your boy jumped off your club’s sinking ship.”

  Jamie’s expression remained unaffected. “I’m not angry. You know the saying—don’t get mad, get even? Well, we stole Danny from you, didn’t we?”

  That was actually a sore spot. Welbeck was a rising star, and the new United manager’s recent decision to let him go to one of the club’s biggest rivals had not been well received by the team’s fan base. Still, she wasn’t about to admit as much to Jamie.

  “You’re welcome to him. It’s not like he’s done much for you.”

  “It’s been two months. Geez, Blake.”

  “Geez, Max.”

  They glared at each other, and then suddenly Jamie started laughing.

  “What?” Emma asked, peeved.

  “Are we really having our first fight over Arsenal and Man U?”

  One part of Emma’s brain prodded her to shout at Jamie that it was United, not Man U, for eff’s sake! Fortunately, the rational part won out. “It isn’t technically our first fight, is it? Wasn’t there that very slight disagreement we had that led to you not speaking to me for, what, five years?”

  “Oh, you mean that little quarrel over Tori Parker?” Jamie asked, and then added almost under her breath, “The whore.”

  It was Emma’s turn to laugh, mostly in surprise. “Um, okay.”

  Jamie winced and pushed her pint glass away. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called her that. This is why I don’t drink.”

  “Such a cheap date,” Emma said, but fondly. “You know I never felt even a tenth as much for her as I do for you, right?”

  Jamie glanced up from where she was practically wearing a hole in the table with her fidgeting fingertips. “You didn’t?”

  “No. Dani and my mom accused me of hooking up with her because I couldn’t be with you.”

  Jamie’s head tilted. “How did hooking up with her help?”

  “It didn’t,” Emma admitted. “In hindsight, it’s obvious that it could only make things worse. But we were kids then. And my father’s death—well, you know from personal experience that it made my decision-making less than stellar.”

  “You’re right, we were kids. That’s why I reacted the way I did. I wanted to be able to date other people, but as soon as I heard about you and Tori I was all, ‘You are dead to me.’ Talk about a double standard.”

  Emma smiled. “I’m glad your soccer gods waited until we grew up to bring us back together.”

  Jamie smiled back. “Me too. Somehow I suspect that was their plan all along.”

  She was adorable, and Emma wanted terribly to kiss her. Instead she segued from soccer gods into a safer topic: Manchester City’s spending spree to buy the league title two out of the last three years. To her credit, Jamie didn’t point out the hypocrisy of a United fan accusing another club of overspending.

  Emma’s anxiety over the Instagram photo slowly lessened as the tasty English beer continued to warm her from the inside out. By the time they left the pub en masse, singing Arsenal supporter songs (not her, obviously), Emma had nearly forgotten about the fan meltdown likely happening across the sea. It was comforting to be surrounded by a group of strong female athletes who would no doubt have her back should she need it. Jamie was family, which in their world made Emma family by extension. That was the way teams functioned, no matter what side of the Atlantic you happened to be on.

  At the Emirates, they parted ways with the rest of Jamie’s crew and entered a concourse that opened onto the lower tier of stands directly above the player tunnel. Emma held her breath as she and Jamie descended closer and closer to the brightly lit field, only remembering to breathe again as they stopped a handful of rows behind the home team bench. She couldn’t believe these seats. They were far enough off the edge of the pitch that they could easily see over the home bench while still being close enough to practically smell the players’ sweat. Or maybe it was the coaches who were sweating. A Premier League manager’s hot seat was comparable to that of a national team head coach.

  “So?” Jamie asked, looking rightfully pleased with herself as they settled in. “What do you think of the view?”

  “It’s okay,” Emma said, her voice offhand. Then she added, laughing, “Oh my god, it’s fantastic! How did you get these seats?”

  “I told you, I called in a favor. Besides, dropping your name goes a long way in the football world, Ms. Blakeley.”

  Emma doubted her status as a USWNT starter had much traction in one of the top male leagues in the world, but she supposed it was possible that some people involved in the Premier League were more progressive than others.

  “By the way,” Jamie added, leaning closer, “you might want to keep your sweatshirt on here.”

  “Oh, I see how it is. Don’t want to be seen with a United fan, do you?”

  “No, that’s not it. It’s just, the supporters can get out of hand, depending on the how the game is going… Well, I guess you’ll see, anyway.”

  The early evening was still unseasonably warm, but not warm enough that she felt compelled to strip down to her jersey. Emma figured she should take Jamie’s advice and assess the crowd’s mood before attracting the enmity of nearby fans. In a world full of soccer fanatics, English hooligans had a particularly brutish reputation.

  It didn’t take long for Emma to be glad she’d listened to Jamie. She had thought Roelof Peeters getting booed at the pub was poor sportsmanship; she’d even believed that playing in front of certain CONCACAF home crowds had taught her about the hostility a group of fans could level at the members of a rival team. But nothing had prepared her for the real-life experience of a top tier Premier League crowd. It was one thing to see matches on television, to watch the roiling mass of mostly male, mostly drunk fans chanting and singing on a flat screen. It was an entirely different matter to be surrounded by those same drunk men in person.

  Some of the verses the crowd shouted were sentimental and encouraging, while others were frankly appalling—like the “She said no, Roelof” and “Roelof you’re a c*#t” melodies sung with gusto when Peeters emerged from the players’ tunnel to take the field.

  “Are they saying…?” she asked Jamie as the teams lined up for their pre-match photo.

  Jamie’s face was grim. “Yep. They learned those songs from United fans after he was accused of rape one of his first seasons.”

  Emma remembered the accusations. Peeters had been thrown in jail for a couple of weeks after a woman he met in a club accused him of raping her in a hotel room not far from the flat he shared with his wife. He insisted the sex was consensual, and many months later the court dismissed the case based on lack of evidence. It turned out the not guilty verdict was accurate—Peeters’s accuser eventually admitted she had made the story up. For publicity.
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  “They don’t tell you on TV what they’re singing, do they?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Jamie agreed. “They don’t.”

  Emma wasn’t sure she enjoyed the game. “Enjoy” felt like the wrong word. The match was entertaining, yes, the atmosphere electric. The soccer itself was top notch, skilled and fast with plenty of dramatic moments. But she kept contrasting the feeling of being in the stands here with her experiences at the Olympics or the World Cup, or even a Seattle Sounders game. The atmosphere in each of those cases had been powerful, the large crowds knowledgeable and impassioned, but everything had felt much more positive and sports-focused. At women’s games in particular, the crowds tended to consist of more women and children than men, and the male fans in attendance carried handmade posters decorated with slogans like, “I wish I could play like a girl!” Here, as a woman, she couldn’t help being intimidated by the testosterone-laden air of violence simmering beneath the surface.

  The fact that she was intimidated infuriated her, and by the time the game ended she barely cared that United had won. She mostly wanted to escape this environment where she didn’t feel safe—and where she couldn’t help thinking that Jamie might as well be wearing a bulls-eye on her jacket.

  But: “Not yet,” Jamie said, remaining in her seat as the people around them began to file out, muttering and grumbling about the result. The score had ended 1-2, with one of United’s goals coming on an own goal by an Arsenal defender.

  “What do you mean, not yet?”

  “I mean,” Jamie said, her voice low, “that if we leave now, we could get hurt.”

  “Because I’m a United supporter?”

  “No, because most of these men are drunk and out for a fight. And you and I both, to be honest, make easy targets.”

  It wasn’t anything Emma hadn’t thought herself, but hearing Jamie matter-of-factly confirm the vulnerability she’d hoped she was imagining still chilled her.