The Things She Kept

by Rosalie Marie Whitton

  THE THINGS SHE KEPT

  Rosalie Marie Whitton

  CHAPTER ONE

  The snow is so thick that Riley’s sweatpants are wet up to the middle of her calves by the time she gets to the gym. She’s regretting leaving her room at all when she gets inside and digs in her coat pockets for her ID card, but when she realizes it’s not there she’s already at the check-in desk and panics thinking of a walk all the way back to her dorm in the snow for something she should never have forgotten in the first place.

  She starts to turn around, but the oddly familiar girl behind the desk looks up at her and smiles and holds out her hand for the card, and Riley panics some more, able to feel the blush crawl into her cheeks.

  “Sorry,” she manages to get out, “I left the card back in my dorm, I was just about to go get it.”

  The girl’s smile never falters. She drops her hand and says, “Don’t worry about it, just tell me your ID number and I’ll patch you through no problem,” and Riley stutters out the seven-digit code and is through the gates before she remembers to call a hurried “thank you” over her shoulder.

  ***

  Willa has nothing better to do than what she ends up doing after that.

  The number she was given rings through as Riley Carlyle, junior, twenty, soccer player. If Willa had been in college here they would have played together- Riley would have been a sophomore when she was a senior. And now in her third to last semester she’s spending her Friday night at the gym, alone, apparently, instead of out with her friends.

  Nights like this are slow. Riley’s interesting. Willa finds herself thinking about soccer, about college, about whether or not she made the best decision. Half a year into her masters, half a year into trading her cleats in for psych books and a new city, it’s difficult to convince herself she’s anything but a coward. Thinking about the sport has hurt since her last game, enough for her to have left her cleats in Cali, and it had never occurred to her to go watch a college game here, because that’s not why she’s here, but she could.

  The field is close. Right beyond the wall, close enough that if she could somehow walk through it she’d be there. The door opens. A pair of boys in basketball jackets bustles in, shouting things at each other, flushed red and smiling when they hand over their cards, which she swipes and offers back with a smile of her own.

  Once they’re gone, she exits out of Riley’s profile and goes back to her book, and forgets about the field.

  ***

  It makes her nervous to do it but she knows she’ll feel bad if she doesn’t, so on her way out, more relaxed now that she’s gotten some weights and a run in, Riley steers herself to the reception desk. The girl behind it is studying something, a thin highlighter dangling from her lips like one of those long, elegant cigarettes from the twenties, and for a moment she feels bad enough about being distracting to hesitate.

  “Hey.”

  The other girl jerks her head up so violently that Riley jumps, but she doesn’t get the blank stare she’s expecting. Instead there’s a smile, like the one from before, and the highlighter clattering before she finds herself reaching to stop it from rolling off the desk, and handing it back. They must have had a class together or something, because once again Riley is struck by how familiar she is.

  “Thanks,” the receptionist laughs, and Riley shakes her head.

  “No, sorry- I mean, thank you for getting me in. I know you’re not really supposed to do that.”

  That gets her a raised eyebrow in return, and when she realizes she’s screwed up she shuts down, stuffing her hands into her pockets.

  “You’re a student athlete, right? Soccer?”

  “I’m... yeah.”

  “So I’m sure nobody’s gonna mind.”

  “I didn’t mean-”

  “When’s your next game?”

  ***

  It comes out before she even realizes she’s going to ask, and Willa is just as surprised as Riley looks. For a second there’s no answer, just a stare.

  “Thursday. But our next home game is next Tuesday night.”

  “Cool,” Willa stammers, confused at the heat in her cheeks, “cool, cool.”

  “Yeah. Um, so, thank you.”

  “No problem. You have a nice night.”

  ***

  Three is the number of lines it takes for Courtney to draw the arrow on the back of Riley’s hand. It’s the number of colors on her jersey, too, and, most notably, it’s the number of games it’s been since Riley’s scored a goal. The gap seems insurmountable. It’s like she can’t remember how to score anymore, the more she thinks about it, the more she tries to remember the mechanics of it. There’s not a lot of thinking involved in scoring, just the before. She knows it. Still- Three. Three. It feels like forever.

  Colton is beatable. The first five minutes are a scramble to keep possession, but once they have it, the passes connect nearly every time. They’re one up early. But it’s not hers.

  She gets more and more frustrated throughout the first period, until she starts making little mistakes, starts making some passes that don’t connect and grinding her teeth whenever she sits the bench with the rest of her teammates. By the time the second starts her coach has already told her to take a breath, to stop being so hard on herself, to start that period like it’s the first. And she tries. But they’re up three and she wants one, and she can’t ignore that, no matter how hard she fights to.

  It’s 5-1. Two more. The next has to be hers.

  Has to be. The crunch of the soil under her cleats, the lights, the bench, the satisfying sounds of the field, all this could be gone for her by the end of next year if she doesn’t get her shit together enough for a recruitment, and she might be the leading scorer of the Gazelles, but if she doesn’t score today, leading college scorer will be out of reach. She needs it. She’s been told as much.

  With ten seconds left she finds herself with an entire field between her and the goal she needs. Courtney looks at her, nods, half a second wasted to communicate the back and forth they’ve only tried in practice, and then they split the field. Riley passes, and the ball comes back to her, and back to Courtney, and somehow they avoid the frantic purple jerseys, and the ball is back with her, and the net is there, the goalie prepared-

  and the ball is in the back of the net. And she has no idea how she did it.

  But it’s there.

  ***

  Willa has missed cheering so loudly that it leaves her hoarse. She had assumed that being there, watching someone else play the sport she knows she still dreams about at night, would hurt- but it doesn’t. It’s like living vicariously through the team of girls she doesn’t know. She doesn’t have to know them, past knowing their positions and watching them pass to each other, watching them take shots, watching them play. They’re good. The Gazelles have always been good. They were rivals before, so she never got to appreciate how good they were, and even now it should make her bitter, probably, but it’s so good to see a game again that she doesn’t care.

  Watching Riley’s goal brings her right back. She leaves the field with a smile on her face she doesn’t recognize until she’s halfway across the parking lot.

  She knows that she’ll go again even before she turns the key, before the engine rolls over and she wonders if she should have stayed to say ‘hi’.

  ***

  The gym is the same as always, too bright and too sterile but still smells wrong in a familiar way. Familiar enough that she doesn’t take any notice of the other person in the room until she hears a soft huff of air and almost drops her duffel. Instead of looking right away, she finds the elliptical she wants and plugs in her headphones. She’s imagining that if she looks over at whoever�
�s a few feet away she’s going to look like some kind of creep, and she’s been creeped on enough while working out that she’d like to avoid that.

  She adjusts the settings and is well into her warm-up by the time she lets herself glance across the floor.

  The girl from the reception desk is lifting an obscene amount of weight with one arm. Her hair is back in a messy knot and her brows are furrowed in concentration and her form is perfect. She looks up and smiles and Riley somehow manages to trip on one of the elliptical foot holes. She laughs, Riley blushes, and it’s impossible to know whether the tripping or her blatant staring is more embarrassing.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. You,” the interval goes up and she’s forced to move a little faster, gripping the arms of the elliptical in sweaty hands, “surprised me.”

  “I mean, I go here. To school. So I’d be dumb to pay for another gym.”

  “Totally.”

  “I’m Willa, by the way.”

  “Riley.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Their conversation is strange, clipped on Riley’s part and awkwardly nice on Willa’s. It feels like they have some kind of history that Riley knows they don’t have, like the whole thing is loaded with subtext, but she can’t come up with any. She’s glad when the interval goes up again and she’s moving too quickly to entertain holding a conversation, and relieved when Willa moves to the stationary bike.

  This way she finds she can watch her companion without giving herself away. Willa has one earphone in and one out, like she’s ready to strike up another conversation at any moment, but she’s clearly focused. And clearly in shape. Riley’s been an athlete her entire life and is absolutely positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that Willa is the most athletic woman she’s ever seen in person; for the remaining minutes of her two-mile run she entertains herself by trying to guess what sport all that lithe muscle is for.

  They reach their cool downs at the same time, and Riley is confused and surprised by how aware she is of it, of how their paces match and of Willa’s carefully controlled breathing. She’s not focusing hard enough on her own breathing and finds herself more out of breath than she would be usually, so by the time Willa is finished and standing, she herself is still panting slightly- and this time keeping her eyes to herself. She figures she’d prefer to understand her curiosity before she lets it run wild. She’s still too aware of how sketchy she can seem. She’s been told- nicely- enough times.

  “I went to your games,” Willa says, and Riley is forced to look up from the console.

  “The last two home games?”

  Willa’s nodding, and walking over, and Riley stops moving and hopes she doesn’t smell too rank.

  “You’re badass. You know? Like, looking at you, you wouldn’t think, necessarily... but then you get on the field and it’s like, wow.”

  "Thank you," Riley replies, once again aware of the blush creeping into her cheeks, "I guess everyone has that thing that they're kinda good at."

  "You're not kinda good, you're on a totally different level. And I know my stuff, okay? I played in college."

  It all makes sense now. The body- not that Riley’s staring, or even looking really, but Willa has the optimal soccer body. And suddenly Riley recognizes her. In the split second that she tries to envision Willa in a soccer jersey, she recognizes her, like her hair pulled up into a high ponytail and her muscular thighs beneath the shorts was all it took to figure out why there was so much familiarity between them.

  They had been rivals once. Willa like Willa Carson, like the top scorer in their league through her junior and senior years, whose team had beaten them up until her senior year. Riley can remember that game, the championship and the win, but this doesn’t seem like the same girl. She’s conscious, suddenly, of the fact that her mouth has fallen open.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Willa takes her awe in stride and smiles with all her teeth. Riley stutter-steps off the elliptical to stand properly in front of Willa and immediately regrets it when she realizes for the first time how small she is in comparison. Willa had been sitting at the reception desk, had been sitting on the stationary bike, and the elliptical, until now, had given her a couple of extra inches- but Willa looms, and Riley fights not to shrink away, given that she feels like they’re already too close.

  “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you.”

  “I would hope I look pretty different in street clothes,” Willa laughs, pushing the loose hairs out of her face but not retying the bun that threatens to burst out of its tie any second.

  “I thought you would have been playing in the big leagues or something by now. Like, drafted immediately.”

  “I opted out of the draft,” Willa says, like it’s easy, like it doesn’t mean anything at all.

  Riley’s mouth is open again. She wishes she had Courtney with her to reach over and shut it.

  “I know that sounds weird to you. Considering the fact that you’ll probably be first in the draft after you graduate, if you stay where you are now….has to be weird to you that I’m getting a masters in sport psychology instead of still being on the field.”

  “I think it’s great,” Riley blurts, and Willa smiles again, though she doesn’t look as if she believes that, not entirely.

  “I wish I had some kind of option like that, like something to fall back on, if-”

  “If you suddenly start to suck? Please, come on.”

  Willa’s joking, still smiling as she speaks, rocking up on her toes a little like she might reach out and punch Riley in the arm, right out of a buddy flick. Riley’s incapable of not taking the idea seriously, because the question has very rarely been a question of skill. It’s something more real to her.

  “Yeah, or if I got hurt. I mean, I’m still an undecided major. So if I don’t end up on the field I’ll end up in a cubicle answering emails all day.”

  She’s never said that out loud before. Not to Courtney, not to Quentin, not to her parents, not to herself. And she can tell from Willa’s expression that’s obvious, so she retreats a little, breaking eye contact and retying her ponytail with shaking fingers. She smoothes down her t-shirt, her shorts, and searches for the sweatpants she’d worn over them.

  “Alright,” Willa says, honey in her voice like she’s trying to soothe a wild animal, “but you’re going to end up on the field. If you want it, it’s going to be there for you. Players like you don’t just disappear.”

  “You did.”

  The second it’s out of Riley’s mouth she regrets it. She expects anger or something, but all that happens is that Willa laughs again.

  “Touché,” she says, completely unfazed. She’s looming again, just a little before she scratches the back of her neck and asks, “Are you hungry?”

  -***

  They spend the first twenty minutes in the just-off-campus diner ignoring the elephant in the booth. Willa can feel it in the way Riley avoids direct eye contact, even though they’re not avoiding talking about the sport. It’s awkward that the game hasn’t come up yet, but it’s more awkward to think about bringing it up.

  Because it still hurts.

  The aftermath of that game had been brutal enough that Willa can still vividly remember it. She can remember the goal that ended it and losing her balance and falling to the ground. Letting it hurt, and noticing that she was crying. They had come for her in droves, the underclassmen, to pick her up. They had done the best they could. And in public she hadn’t cried for long, but nobody on the field had known that would be her last game and her last chance, nobody knew beforehand why it was so important for them to win, for her, to her.

  But that’s a past life now. Today Willa’s a student in a different city and if she avoids talking about it that night is never going to get better for her.

  Riley beats her to it, tapping the bottom of the ketchup bottle and keeping her eyes very carefully on her grilled cheese.

  “I’m sorry that was your last game.”


  Willa’s chest aches, starts to hollow out like her heart is sucking everything in and leaving her empty. She starts to wish that she had ordered a beer.

  “It was a good game.”

  Riley picks at the crust of her sandwich like she’s going to peel it off, and Willa takes a bite her burrito big enough to shut herself up for a while.

  “It was a good competition,” Riley cedes, finally, “but it was a terrible game.”

  That hits so hard and square that Willa stops chewing. Riley’s so focused on her own food that she doesn’t notice, but Willa has to take a second to think about it before she can swallow. It had been a terrible game. Nobody had ever said that afterwards, everyone was so set on calling it a good game, a great game, even, especially for her, or for them, or for the other team, for the other players. The truth was that it had been awful, and she’d always thought that she was in the wrong for feeling that way, and here’s this girl she’s only barely just met pulling the rug out from under her and then reaching to help her up off the ground.

  It’s dizzying. And the burrito is disappointing.

  “Did you opt out of the draft after it?”

  “No. Before. But I didn’t tell anyone beforehand. I didn’t want them to feel any more pressure than they were already feeling.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  It’s a weird observation. Willa lets it sit and decides she’s not going to give up on her burrito. They eat in silence for a while, for long enough that the burrito is two-thirds gone and still lukewarm and mushy before Willa finds it in herself to speak again.

  “Second place isn’t so bad. I was proud of them. I still am- after that match that season, you know, so many of them got national team call-ups...life goes on.”

  She decides to give up on the burrito and watches Riley peel the last of the crust off of what’s left of her grilled cheese before popping it into her mouth. It’s a funny thing to do, since the whole thing is toast, but Willa doesn’t say anything about it.

  “Life goes on,” Riley repeats, but she says it like she’s trying to convince herself.