Summer in the City

by Elizabeth Chandler

  “Where’s your toolbox?” Andrew asked.

  “In my room.”

  As Andrew headed upstairs, Ted motioned to me. I sat next to him on the rug. “I know your mom writes romances,” Ted said in a low voice. “That’s cool. But I never thought to mention it to Andrew. He’s a poet and into writing a lot of profound stuff, if you know what I mean. When he and Rita meet outside, they look at each other as if they’re from different planets.”

  “They are,” I said.

  Ted nodded. “I like your mother. Maybe because you love sports and we’re the same age, but when I started listening to spring baseball, she and I sort of connected. She talks a lot about you, you know. I knew all about you before you came.”

  I blushed, ashamed of myself for not admitting my mother’s line of work when, apparently, she bragged about me.

  Hearing footsteps on the upstairs landing, Ted began pulling the heavy boards from the IKEA boxes.

  “God, I’m glad you’re organized,” Andrew said, as he set down the toolbox and dropped to his knees. “If you’re given a choice, Jamie, choose a science major for a roommate.”

  “But maybe she likes stepping around books and fighting her way through snowdrifts of papers,” Ted teased him.

  “Ted said you’re a poet,” I prompted.

  Andrew, who was pulling instructions from one of the boxes, paused to look at me. He hadn’t shaved for at least a day and his beard was rough. His blue eyes sparkled with mischief. “That’s right. I scribble images.”

  “I like to read what other people write,” I said, not wanting to be too pushy and ask directly to read his work.

  He smiled. “You’re a sweet girl.”

  What did that mean? Was it a pat on the head?

  “Want to hang out and help us put these together?” Ted asked me.

  I glanced toward the toolbox. I could handle a screwdriver and hammer, and I’d much rather spend the evening at Ted and Andrew’s house than my mother’s. But this was just the kind of togetherness that got me into being thought of as another “guy.”

  “Thanks, but I have some things of my own to take care of,” I lied. “Let me know when I can come back and admire.”

  Chapter 7

  “Ladies, I expect you to be on time,” Josh lectured us the next morning. “I expect you to be well-rested, and well-fed, Amanda—” she shoved the last bit of bagel in her mouth and licked the cream cheese off her fingers, “properly equipped, and on time.”

  Yes, Mother Superior, I thought. I must have muttered without realizing it, because several girls turned toward me.

  “Jamie, do you have something to say?”

  “No…” This time I definitely muttered and somebody giggled. Josh and I were off to another great start.

  “Okay, the three who just arrived, do your jog lap and stretches. Everyone else, line up for partner passing, ten strong hand, ten opposite hand, and so on till I tell you to stop.”

  Michelle and Brooke, who had strolled in late wearing short pajama bottoms (Michelle’s had sleeping kittens on it), began their lap with Amanda. Monalisa asked me to be her partner, which was nice of her given that, if I didn’t keep my focus, I tended to drive the ball into the ground with my girl’s stick.

  “Do anything interesting last night?” Mona asked, as we got into a rhythm of back and forth.

  “Played basketball in the alley, watched guys lug boxes into a house, and fell in love.”

  “Whoa!” Mona exclaimed.

  “Just kidding,” I said quickly, “about the last part, I mean.”

  “Well, maybe, you fell in like?” Mona suggested.

  My lousy pass skittered past her. “Maybe.”

  After fifteen minutes of the passing drill, Josh called us together and went over the basics of shooting. We were split into two groups, with a goalie assigned to each group, and lined up along the eight-meter fans for a “rapid-fire” drill, practicing high, mid, and low shots into the goal, each girl having her own ball, giving the goalies a workout. At nine forty we got our first break.

  “So tell me about him,” said Mona, as everyone gathered around to drop balls in the bag Josh was holding.

  “His name is Andrew. He’s great-looking,” I began, “and he’s taller than me.”

  Everybody’s eyes flicked to the top of my head, as if they had just pulled out imaginary yardsticks.

  “Six feet,” I said automatically, “I am six feet exactly.”

  “How tall are you, Josh?” Brooke asked.

  “Five eleven.”

  Mona knew better than to ask anything more about “him” in front of the others.

  “And?” Michelle prompted, her eyes fixed on me.

  “And what?”

  “Well, it can’t be just his height that makes this guy so great, although I can see how that would be an issue for you.”

  Everyone was listening, including Josh.

  I gazed down on her dark roots—she stood maybe five-five. “I was talking to Mona, okay?”

  “I was just being interested,” she replied. Giving a grade-school toss of her ponytail, she walked away.

  Josh wore a poker face—coaching girls, he probably had seen this kind of thing before. Brooke followed Michelle, but the others, even the members of their Stonegate School clique, looked uncertain for a moment, as if they were hoping for more details. I guess all girls are interested in hearing about somebody else’s love life. The problem was, I didn’t have one. And I couldn’t believe Andrew would want to go out with me—and I really didn’t want Michelle to observe once again that she could see how this was “an issue” for me.

  Monalisa gave me a light push in the opposite direction. “Sorry,” she said, “I got you into that.”

  A heavyset girl named Amber, who played goalie and had just proven herself to be a human octopus with remarkable reflexes, followed us, as did three blonde ponytails and a braid. It would have been snobby not to include the others, so we dropped down on the grass and talked about summer stuff, vacations, part-time jobs, et cetera. Mona and the girl with the braid, Brittany, had jobs that I would like, working at camps for the summer. Mona was coaching several sessions at Stonegate, including basketball camp with middle-school girls.

  We came back to play three-v-three at each end of the field, three girls versus three plus a goalie, then moved on to four-v-four, playing just one end of the field, so that Josh could stop us in midaction and teach. He rotated us in and out of positions and expected us to be totally involved whether we were playing or watching. Being desperate to learn the sport and prove myself good at it, I was very attentive, but others received laserlike glances from him when they started fooling around. He didn’t seem to get that this was a summer camp.

  When I played, he yelled at me constantly, but I didn’t mind. “Watch your stick, Jamie, your stick. You’re going to lose the ball!” And just as he’d say that, I’d lose it, because I had held my stick too straight up, like a guy’s. My old stick had felt like an extension of my hand, the same way my baseball glove felt like a mere improvement on my palm and fingers. The girl’s stick felt like a tool that I couldn’t control without constantly thinking about it, an effort that distracted me from the game action.

  Then suddenly, the stick began to feel right, began to feel like mine. I raced after the ball as it flew past the goal, scooped it, fed Brittany from behind the goal—nice shot, blocked by Amber—Kate played the carom, passed it to me, I cradled, dodged, spun, faked out Michelle (oh, the joy!), and prepared to sidearm a shot past Brooke.

  Plunk. The ball fell out of my stick. Just like that, plunk.

  I was furious. I slammed my stick into the ground and had a wild four-year-old impulse to jump up and down on it, to break the stupid stick into a thousand pieces, which would have been tough, given it was metal. Then I came to my senses. I peeked around at the others, who were staring at me, and felt the color creeping into my cheeks. “Excuse me,” I said in a tiny voice.

&n
bsp; “It’s okay,” Josh replied. “It’s frustrating, especially when you’re used to succeeding.” His voice was surprisingly gentle.

  I caught the arched-eyebrow exchange between Michelle and Brooke, and ignored it. They were used to succeeding, too, and probably resented an amateur struggling to learn their game. I didn’t know if Amber caught their look. She lifted her mask and said encouragingly, “Try it again, Jamie. I want the fun of blocking your shot!”

  “Okay. I will!”

  We played on. I was good at defense, partly because my height gave me tremendous range with my stick. On offense, I settled for more conservative moves, concentrating on getting the ball to my teammates when they were in a good position to shoot. But then the opportunity came again. Mona had rotated into the scrimmage and slipped me the ball, knowing from either watching me play or perhaps instinct, that I would have taken the ball and run if I’d held a guy’s stick.

  “You go, girl!” Josh shouted at me, and I did.

  I dodged Michelle and ripped the shot into the net.

  “Goal!” cried Mona.

  Amber grinned at me. “I let you have that one.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, grinning back.

  “Nice one, Jamie,” Josh said. I basked in the restrained but—from him—meaningful praise. I could still hear his enthusiastic “You go, girl!” ringing in my ears.

  He pulled me out then. I knew the coaching strategy: Let the player end her day on a positive note.

  A few minutes later, Michelle and Brooke joined me on the sideline.

  “Looks like the coach has a favorite,” Michelle remarked to Brooke, loud enough for everyone along the sideline to hear. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the others lean toward her, listening. I kept my eyes on Mona, trying to learn from her, mentally holding the stick like she did and studying her footwork.

  “I bet he wouldn’t mind giving Jamie a little extra time when we’re finished today,” Michelle went on.

  “Some one-v-one, some personal instruction on technique,” Brooke replied.

  They’re just having fun with me, I thought. Let it pass.

  Then Kelly, the redhead, said, “Last year, Jamie, several of us tried seducing Josh.”

  “Why?”

  The sideline broke out in laughter, which was quieted by a glance from Josh. “Ladies, stay with the game. You’re here to learn.”

  “Why?” the girl next to Kelly repeated after me. “Are you blind, Jamie? On a scale of one to ten, he’s a twelve.”

  “He is an inch shorter than her,” Michelle pointed out sweetly.

  “Still, I would think she’d like the challenge,” Brooke said, doing that annoying thing of talking about someone rather than to them, then scooting closer to me on the grass. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “He’s not my kind of challenge,” I told her.

  “Oh, guys like Josh are easy,” said a girl named Melanie. From various conversations, I had gathered that she was transferring to Stonegate and had been working hard to get accepted into Michelle’s group. She had the required blonde ponytail, but her most noticeable feature was an astounding set of boobs. Given this attribute, most guys probably were easy for her—at least, getting them to look at her would be easy.

  “Guys like Josh—” she gave a knowing shrug—“they look tough, cool, like they could have anyone and they’re really not interested in you. But when they fall in love, they go straight off the deep end. I could bring Josh to his knees.”

  “I bet,” I muttered. You would think that I had learned earlier not to mutter.

  “Take her on,” Michelle urged.

  “Do it!” Brooke said. “How much do you want to bet?”

  “I was talking to myself,” I explained quickly, but they already knew that.

  Melanie glanced from princess number one to princess number two of the clique that she so badly wanted admittance to. She turned to me. “Backing out?”

  “We have only three days left,” I pointed out. “You’d have to work awfully fast.”

  She smiled at me. “I always do.”

  “Of course, we should set the rules and conditions with that in mind,” Michelle said.

  “Maybe if you can just get him to ask you out,” Brooke suggested.

  “Good luck on that,” Kelly responded. “Knowing how Josh acted last summer, I think Melanie should win if she asks, and he agrees to go out with her.”

  “That sounds fair,” Melanie said.

  “But what if he’s only being polite?” I argued.

  “Not Josh,” said Kelly, as if she knew from experience.

  “Twenty dollars,” Melanie proposed.

  “Twenty bucks?!” I exclaimed.

  “What I want to know,” Michelle said, “is whether Jamie can try to interfere. Can she try to get him to go out with her first?”

  “No,” I replied firmly.

  “Great idea!” Brooke said.

  “Nooooo.”

  “Okay, ten dollars,” Melanie proposed, “just because I feel like I’m taking candy from a baby.”

  Who was the baby, Josh or me, I wondered.

  A shrill whistle split our ears.

  “Ladies,” Josh hollered—he had been trying to get our attention—“are you going to join us for the wrap-up, or shall we carry on into the afternoon?”

  We scrambled to our feet and joined the players on the field to hear an evaluation of our progress and Josh’s plan for tomorrow. Then we did the traditional “raise your stick and give a shout.”

  Little did Josh know that a second game plan was being drawn up.

  Chapter 8

  “Do you have time for lunch?” Mona asked me.

  “Sure.” Stonegate had a dining hall rather than a cafeteria, and it was stocked like a gourmet delicatessen.

  “I can’t believe how fast you’re progressing,” Mona said, as we walked toward the building, she swinging her stick, me cradling an imaginary ball. “Even Josh was impressed.”

  I grimaced at the mention of him. How could I have gotten entangled in such a stupid bet?

  Mona misinterpreted my expression. “Why don’t you like Josh?”

  “What do you mean? I like him. I respect him. He knows his stuff.”

  She stopped and studied me, her dark, curly-lashed eyes probing my face. I was beginning to feel really uneasy about the bet and looked away.

  “I guess I have a soft spot for him,” Mona said, as we continued walking. “He was raised by his grandmother, like me. And if you think parents who are twenty-five years older than you are tough, try parents who are fifty.”

  “What happened to his mom and dad?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Josh is a private person, and personal info has to be dragged out of him. But I know he and his grandmother don’t have much money. They live in an old house in Waverly and he drives an ancient Toyota. He came to Stonegate in middle school on one of those scholarships for bright underprivileged kids. By the time he finished here, he not only had aced all his subjects, but learned lacrosse and got a scholarship to Hopkins. The other kids here, including myself, have our way paid by our families. Everything Josh has, he’s earned.”

  I was silent until we put in our lunch orders. Maybe that’s why he acted as if our little summer camp was an Olympic training ground. “He doesn’t take opportunities for granted,” I said.

  “He doesn’t take anything for granted.”

  We took our sandwiches out to a picnic bench next to the dining hall.

  “Tell me about your family,” Mona said. “I know your Dad’s a coach, but you’re with your mom now, right? Because you’re going to Maryland in the fall?”

  “Not exactly.” I told her about Dad and Christine, then Mom and Victor. She had finished her lunch and I hadn’t started mine.

  “Girlfriend, that is so cool,” Mona said, “having a mother who’s a romance writer!”

  “Cool, Mona, is having a grandmother who is a history professor. I bet your grandmother does
n’t leave Post-its around with juicy plot ideas and hot images, the kind you don’t want to read when other people are there.”

  She laughed out loud. “No, our Post-its say things like ‘Drop off dry cleaning,’ and ‘Dept. Meeting, Thurs @ 4.’ But the world needs both profs and steamy writers,” she added philosophically. “At least, I need both.”

  “I guess I do, too,” I admitted.

  “So, let’s go ogle some guys.” She glanced at her watch. “Their lacrosse camp starts in ten minutes. They play in the heat of the day and start stripping in no time.”

  But guys wear equipment.”

  “I mean on the sidelines, hon,” she said, slipping into Bawlmerese, “which is where we’ll be.”

  Mona and I watched the guys’ camp for an hour and a half, analyzing everything from great shoulders and tight buns to effective footwork. “Ah,” Mona said, stretching back on the grass, then rolling on her side, so she could continue to observe. “This is how spectator sports are meant to be experienced.”

  She saw my eyes drifting to the field behind us, where Josh worked with JV-level players, guys too young for us. “I know,” she said, “he’s good with us, but he’s better with them. I don’t know why he’s so uptight this year, except of course, that we’re close to his age, and several of the girls tried to come on to him last year.”

  I felt the color creeping into my face.

  “It was embarrassing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mona sat up. “You were thinking of doing that?” she asked, misinterpreting my guilty blush.

  “No, no.”

  “It’s okay, just wait till after camp,” she advised.

  “But I’m not,” I insisted.

  An hour later, as I let myself into the house, I decided to call off the bet and pay off Melanie, even pay her the twenty bucks if I had to.

  I found my mother typing on her laptop, sitting close to the air conditioner in the room behind the living room, dressed in a stretchy pink tank top with a tiny border of lace, pink shorts, and jeweled sandals. I was pretty sure Mona’s grandmother didn’t wear that kind of outfit. Post-its were stuck at odd angles on the wall next to her.