Open Court

by Carol Clippinger

  My mom exhaled.

  “She likes the battle of it. The bloodier the better,” Trent informed him.

  Thomas cracked a smile. “I can see that. Quite impressive out there, young lady.”

  “Thanks.” I hate it when people call me things like “young lady.” It's condescending. But he was a former pro, so I decided to let it slide. Plus, Trent would've hollered at me if I said anything.

  I sucked down half of the water in my bottle and poured the rest on the top of my head. Cool water dribbled down my face and body, further soaking my sweat-sopped tennis dress. The four of them watched this and said nothing.

  Back on court, Skittish Helper Guy set up the ball machines. I strained to seize the words of Trent and Thomas Fountain as they walked toward the gate, talking about me in regard to tennis.

  “Haven't got much time. Wouldn't want her to miss her window,” Coach said.

  “Twelve would've been better, but at thirteen—”

  “She's barely thirteen,” Coach said.

  “Possesses the game, anyway. Layered with the right shots. How is she on strategy?”

  “Girl could be a general. Got the one intangible of tennis, the rhythm. Changes the pace ever so slightly to confuse her opponents.”

  Thomas nodded. Coach seemed satisfied as they stood near the gate. “Thanks a lot, Thomas. Sure appreciate it. If they could see her—”

  “No problem. She's a hoot. Got the attitude, that's half of it. That's what they like out there.”

  “We'll talk later, then,” Trent said. “You've got the home number?”

  “Yep.”

  Thump… thump … thump …

  A scheme to send me away was definitely in the plotting stages. It wasn't just my parents; Trent was in on it, too, involving former tennis pros, no less. My world was closing in. No one could be trusted. The Fourth of July was fast approaching—a third of the summer gone. Time was running out. I had to regain my champion status. I had to get my confidence back.

  … thump… thump… thump…

  Trent stood at the net. My parents were out of earshot. “Give me some control out there!” Coach screamed. “Get aggressive, charge at it. Focus on placement … show me some control. No bargaining now. Place the ball … dominate the point … go, go …”

  “Agg!”

  “Move, move, move! Braxton, wake up out there. What do you need, a nap? Dominate the ball… move, move, move!”

  … thump…

  “On the line, excellent.”

  … thump… thump… thump…

  My parents did the wave from the bleachers, standing up with arms overhead, then sitting back down. Again, this stole my focus. I hit a backhand lob into the net.

  “Nice try anyway, honey,” my dad said from across the court, not realizing it was his fault.

  “What the hell was that? Concentrate, Braxton,” Trent bellowed. “One hundred more backhands for that mistake.” He called to Skittish Helper Guy, “One hundred more.” Helper Guy nodded.

  … thump… thump… thump…

  “You can do this in your sleep, no reason to miss even one. I don't care if there's an elephant in the middle of the court, you hit that ball. Kill that ball!”

  Emotionless, I obeyed. Thump … thump … thump…

  “In the corner, excellent.”

  … thump… thump… thump…

  “On the line, good girl.”

  … thump… thump… thump…

  As I walked in the door, Michael turned and grunted. It was his way of getting my attention. “Two of your stupid little friends left messages for you/’ This kind of disrespect was the main reason my friends never hung out at my house. Brad blocked my way, pretending to be the hero of a martial arts film.

  “Move, Brad.”

  “Hi-yaaa!”

  “Quit.”

  He flung his foot an inch from my face. “Hi-yaaa!”

  “Stop it, Brad.”

  “I could do damage. Two hits and you'd be a dead woman.”

  Lately my brothers and their friends have ditched their usual football games in favor of tae kwon do. Instead of being tackled on my way up the stairs, I'm now the endless recipient of exotically named kicks to my body and aggressive blows to my throat. They never make actual bodily contact but act like I'm lucky they spare my life on a daily basis.

  “Let me by, Brad, you brat.”

  “Hi-yaaa!”

  “I'm telling!”

  “Crybaby,” he said, moving aside.

  I grabbed the messages. One from Eve: Do you want to spend the night? Call me hack if you do.

  And one from Polly: Maren is going out with her boyfriend tonight. Do you want to spend the night?

  I grabbed Polly's message. Polly's. Not Eve's. It took no thought. Chose Polly over Eve. Snap. Like that. Surprised myself, but did it anyway. Eve would never know.

  I dialed her number. “Hey, Polly. Yes, I'll be there.”

  Polly instructed me to walk in without knocking, but I knocked anyway. As I stood on the steps a twinge of confusion stabbed me. I considered myself a loyal person. But I was here, not at Eve's. And I didn't feel half as much guilt about it as I thought I should.

  Polly's mom's boyfriend, a tall blond, sporting an unbuttoned shirt, greeted me. He was in his late twenties, I guessed. Since when do moms have cute boyfriends?

  “I'm Pete Graham, who are you?” I followed his exposed skin upward until I reached his aqua eyes. My brothers spent their summers shirtless; somehow this was different. He snapped his fingers at me, indicating I should hand him my sleeping bag, pronto.

  “I'm Holloway. Call me Hall.”

  “Well, that's a name, I suppose.”

  He was sort of a jerk. Leaning down, he grabbed my bag and stepped on a chew toy left on the floor by Sugar, the Cassinis’ Labrador. As the chew toy slid violently across the floor, so did Pete, landing hard on the Mexican tile. I waited for a four-letter expletive to fly from his mouth. He didn't curse, but he wanted to.

  “You just missed them,” he said, picking himself up. “They're getting a pizza. I'll put this in Polly's room,” he said, finally wrestling the sleeping bag into submission.

  While he proceeded down the hallway I forged into the living room to wait. Because we all hung out at Eve's so much, this was the first time I'd been inside Polly's house. It was clean, modest. A makeshift office was set up in an alcove near the sofas. I scanned the small desk, my eyes dropping to the paper shredder beside it. It just so happened that I'd stored my confiscated tennis academy catalogs in the bottom of a bag, the very same bag that was now slung over my shoulder, which held my toothbrush and oversized sleep T-shirt.

  Quickly I dropped the bag, opened it, and scraped tennis academy brochures and catalogs from its insides. I clicked on the machine. Green buttons lit the surface. Whirling, the contraption made horrific choking noises as I fed handfuls of pages into its violent jaws. Faster, come on… One, two, three down; twelve to go. They could never be traced back to me now. Come on, dumb shredder, faster…

  Pete Graham entered the room carrying Diet Cokes, eyes fixed on the tower of catalogs. I sat frozen, a brochure dangling over the shredder, waiting to be yelled at, or sent to reform school, or something. His face had erased its guile. It was clear he wasn't a parent.

  “Need a Coke?” he asked. “All they have is diet.”

  I hesitated. “Urn, sure.”

  I'd assumed our brief conversation would be the extent of his tolerance for me, but here he was again, with beverages, no less. His attitude had changed: his indifference morphed into politeness.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Urn, nothing … shredding some things.”

  “What are they, catalogs?”

  “Something like that.”

  He was amused. “Something like what, catalogs?”

  Something like none of his business, but he wasn't taking the hint. “Yeah, catalogs, kind of.”

  “Why?”

&n
bsp; “Um … because.”

  “Well, don't let me stop you.”

  I shoved more in, panicked. Pete sat on one of the large sofas. He didn't try to read the pages. I wondered why the sudden courtesy.

  The shredder coughed mournfully, a second from exploding. Shut up, I thought, shut up, only a few more, a few more…

  “Hall?”

  I turned innocently. “Yes?”

  “I think you're supposed to take out the staples before you shred it, otherwise you get that noise.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  I ripped out the staples on my last booklet, for Lang-ley Academy in California, and let the machine suck it down and shred it until it was unrecognizable.

  Refreshed, I sat opposite Pete. We popped open our cans simultaneously. I wasn't sure why he waited with me. Maybe he thought he had to entertain me, or keep watch in case I put my feet on the furniture, or something. I didn't mind. He was cute. It was like a fifty-dollar bill falling out of a birthday card from the grandma who usually sends a five.

  I wondered what he thought about female athletes and the sport of tennis. I wondered if he knew tennis academies existed and that terribly misguided parents, such as my own, considered exiling their own children to live at them a grand idea.

  “You're dating Polly's mom?” I stupidly asked. I have the bad habit of asking questions I know the answer to. I didn't know what else to say.

  “Yep,” he said. “Maren is an interesting woman.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh.”

  My mom says I've got to be careful of adults. Some of them, men especially, pretend to be nice but are actually perverts. My mom says in addition to acquiring good judgment about people and listening to my gut, I should tell her immediately if some guy, even Trent, does something that makes me uneasy. I thought maybe I shouldn't be here talking to this guy who was possibly a pervert or something. Except my gut told me Pete Graham was an OK guy so far.

  Pete gauged my face for a moment, and then the mystery of his sudden respect was solved. “Holloway? Hall? You're the tennis girl, right?”

  He must have realized it after he'd taken my sleeping bag. Otherwise he'd never have offered me a drink. He was neither a pervert nor polite—he was a sports fan. When adults discover I'm a tennis player, they become nice to me. Lately, for some reason, it makes me sad.

  We were friends suddenly. “I'm talking to the famous tennis girl?” he continued. “Should I curtsy?”

  “No. Only women curtsy. You could bow, though.”

  “So, tell me about this. How does one become a tennis star? Polly says you play at the national level?”

  “I'm OK, I guess.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “Hard? Urn, certain girls are difficult to beat. The older you get, the tougher the competition.”

  “Does it get boring, practicing?”

  His questions were misplaced. No one asked me questions like “Hard?” or “Boring?” In fact, no one talked to me about tennis; they talked about me in regard to tennis. Tennis was the dragon that needed to be slain; I was the sucker with the sword.

  “It's just a game.”

  Pete Graham scoffed. He leaned forward, as if trying to discern if I was a fraud. “A game? What if someone's really kicking your butt? What then?”

  “That's different. It's war. I'm a nation by myself and the person on the other side of the net is a nation, too. One nation will be brought to their knees, without mercy.”

  “War?” he said.

  “In tennis there's no second place, no ties. There are no halftimes. Coaches aren't allowed on court. Nobody's going to give you a pep talk. You're all alone. And if you aren't the winner, you're the loser. Battle to the death,” I added for effect. It was true. It was so true in my own tennis that, again, I was briefly sad.

  If you aren't the winner, you're the loser

  My answer didn't make Pete sad. It seemed to delight the heck out of him. He was like all spectators. They want suffering, agony, and distress in their athletes’ victories. It's more exciting watching someone suffer to win than win effortlessly. If huge quantities of blood and possibly even some guts or bits of broken bones are involved, then it's really a quality match.

  Sugar howled and ran to the door. The Cassinis were home. Polly bounced into the living room carrying a pizza. Her little brother, Teddy, dug out a piece and disappeared. Polly quickly introduced me to her mom, and before I knew it Maren and Pete Graham slipped out on their date, leaving us.

  Polly's table manners were impeccable. Meticulously cutting small pieces, she chewed each mouthful a hundred times before swallowing.

  “Come on, let's finish eating in my room,” she said.

  Her bedroom furniture looked like it was purchased from random garage sales—a green desk, a pine headboard, a white chest of drawers. I sat at her desk, careful not to disturb her piles of math textbooks and test papers.

  Her eyes, deadened at the sight of them, seemingly mortified by the chunk of her life she devoted to them. “Geometry,” Polly said flatly. “I'll move them.” In one wide swoop of her hand, she flung the books to the floor: pages crumpled, pages tore.

  “The bindings will break,” I said, picking up a book.

  “Leave it,” Polly said.

  “Yeah, but the bindings—”

  “I don't care.”

  Polly gathered a red feather boa from her closet and slung it around her neck, transforming herself into a chorus line dancer. She applied a heavy coating of orange lip gloss, smacking her lips together to blend it. Now she was a gangster's girlfriend from the Roaring Twenties and a chorus line dancer. “Want to help me bury something?” she said.

  “It's not a body, is it?” I asked.

  She squealed. “No, don't be silly. Come along,” she urged. She grabbed a small cookie tin from her floor and led us out.

  In her backyard, while Sugar sniffed around the lawn, Polly sat in the grass near a dead aspen tree and the fence, digging up the dry earth with a kitchen spoon. Her red boa flowed onto the grass.

  “So, what's in the can?” I asked.

  “Open it and see,” she said.

  “It's not a dead hamster or something, is it?” I asked. I'd once given a deceased pet hamster a shoe-box funeral in my backyard. But I was eight then.

  Polly flicked out small spoonfuls of dirt, deepening the hole. Pausing, she flipped her boa out of her way, keeping its feathers from the dusty earth. Something about her face caught me—the girl did not look human. I pulled back like I'd touched fire.

  Polly looked up suddenly. Her orange lips popped off her face. “It's not a hamster,” she said. “Open it and look.”

  The lid came off with a ting sound. Inside was a balled-up red ribbon. Polly grabbed it from me and shook it so it unfolded. It read SECOND PLACE.

  “I won second place at the math competition today. Out of fifty kids. We compete every so often, to shake things up,” she said, rolling her eyes. She stuffed the silky ribbon back in the cookie tin and shut the lid. Looking at me, she dropped it to its scary resting place. “Bye-bye,” she said to it, waving, laughing.

  She scooped dirt over it with her bare hands. Giggling. She was a kite, flying free.

  Discovering Polly this summer couldn't have been a fluke. Janie had sent Polly here, somehow, to comfort me and tell me I'd be all right. Polly wasn't human— Polly was my angel I mentally replaced that boa with a set of celestial wings. Yes, my angel. I didn't have to worry myself over Janie, at least not right here with Polly in the yard. Polly had risen above her talent for math. Floated right above it, with her wings. She hated it, but it hadn't broken her. And maybe, just maybe, Janie wasn't broken, either. I let myself think this. I needed to think Janie was OK.

  At one o'clock in the morning Polly decided she was hungry. We creaked into the kitchen. Words echoed from the dimly lit living room.

  “Polly, are you guys still up?” called Maren. “Bring in the rest of that pizza, will you?”

  “A
nd water,” Pete said. “Please.”

  Polly grabbed bottled water. I carried the pizza.

  Pete's head was propped awkwardly against a sofa pillow. Maren's blouse was on the floor, her bra on the coffee table. I sort of stood there at a loss. Surely she knew she was naked, didn't she? How could she not?

  Maren took the pizza. “Did Polly tell you about her ribbon?”

  I assumed only hookers or drug dealers were corrupt enough to be naked in front of people and not care. Apparently I was wrong. I had the strong urge to laugh. To bust up laughing. I clenched my jaw tight. Surely this was a joke, right? No one was laughing. No wonder Pete thought she was interesting. Interesting, naked—same difference.

  “Yeah, she did,” I said, remembering the ribbon's untimely death in the Cassinis’ backyard. “That's great,” I added, pretending I wasn't surrounded by a bunch of freaks.

  “Next time she's going to get a blue ribbon, aren't you, Polly?”

  “Gonna try,” Polly said.

  “Don't leave it up to fate, Polly. If you'd studied a little longer, you would've easily won first place.”

  Polly shrugged.

  “You're smarter than any of those kids,” her mother lectured, voice rising. “Besides, this camp is expensive. You need to show a little more initiative.”

  This naked woman was yelling at angelic Polly right in front of me. No one was laughing. My jaw was clamped so tight I was forgetting to breathe. My mom wouldn't have mentioned a stupid ribbon; my mom didn't even know how to keep score in tennis. My mom wore clothes.

  Polly changed the subject. “Where'd you guys go?”

  Great, more conversation.

  Maren spat out the details of the James Bond flick they'd seen. “The line was clear out to the parking lot, and we had to wait an hour for tickets …”

  Meanwhile, Pete was falling asleep sitting up. Eyes closed, his head nodded. He'd catch himself only to dip down again. Finally, he shook off the sleep like a wet dog. Disgusted, he grabbed Maren's shirt from the floor and tossed it at her as she continued to talk about 007.

  “It itches,” she said, like he was stupid.