VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  I’d been expecting a kamikaze attack, so I was puzzled when Mrs. Jamison, our new English teacher, pulled me aside and made me read a page from a John Steinbeck novel. When I finished, she was frowning. “So you can read. In that case, what’s the meaning of this?”

  She handed me a story entitled “The Two Peerless Kitins Have an Adventur” by Angel Eastland.

  When I explained that a classmate must have substituted the story for my own creative writing assignment I pretended to be furious, but I later laughed myself sick reading it in the washroom. The story was full of sentences like “the pore little kitin cryed all nite and dint leave the hows” and “Johnny pulled the nice kitins tale and she dint like it so she skratched his eyes out.” No wonder Mrs. Jamison had thought I was illiterate!

  Wendy knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you all right, Angel? What did Mrs. Jamison say?”

  I jammed my fist in my mouth to keep from howling. “Here.” I opened the door and handed her the story, glum-faced. “Mrs. Jamison says she’s going to fail me. Could I get you to proofread this paper for me?” I asked as she started to read it, eyes glued to the story by virtue of its sheer awfulness. “I think my spelling needs a little work.”

  “A little?”

  My lips twitched, and we both started laughing so hard we had to clutch our sides.

  “It was Mike, of course,” I said when we’d calmed down. “You’ve got to help me get back at him for this—and don’t you dare tell him I laughed!”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I was reading the personals in the paper this morning. There was an ad from a lady wrestler seeking romance.” We walked out of the washroom planning the ad, but Mike scored the next coup in drama class.

  Ms. Velez had finally selected the Christmas play—some gothic suspense thing set in a creepy old mansion—and had scheduled tryouts for today.

  Much to my parents’ pride, I’d played the lead female role in school productions for the past four years. I’d played two wishy-washy simpering heroines, and the part of Laura Morgan, rich girl, in this play looked much the same. I’d decided to try out for the second lead, Laura’s spunky friend, Jessie.

  Somewhere in the back of my head was the thought that Mike was a shoo-in for the male lead, Giles Foster.

  Ms. Velez had her own ideas, however. After watching Maryanne’s and Carl’s uninspired performances she called Mike and me up on stage.

  I balked. “I don’t want to try out for Laura; I want to play Jessie.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. “Read Scene One.”

  Mike smiled down at me. “Come on, Angel. I promise I won’t bite.”

  That did it. I marched up on stage. But I refused to do Scene one, where Laura first arrived at a decrepit mansion and made a fool of herself in front of Giles. I flipped quickly through the script. Didn’t Laura have any scenes where she didn’t scream or cry or faint?

  I finally glimpsed a promising-looking one. “Page fifty-one,” I told Mike and launched into furious dialogue: “‘You’re just like all the others. All you’re interested in is my money!’”

  “‘That’s not true! Will you listen to me? I can explain.’”

  “‘Explain?’” I shriveled him with my contempt. “‘How can you explain? The facts are self-evident.’”

  “‘There are extenuating circumstances,’” Mike-Giles pleaded.

  “‘Your name isn’t Giles Foster, it’s Gary McFadden. You lied to me. How can you explain that?’” I demanded passionately, barely glancing at my lines, using Laura’s anger to yell at Mike.

  “‘Do you hate me?’” He asked the question through white lips, afraid of the answer.

  I threw it in his face, just as Laura, hurt and betrayed, would have done. “‘Yes! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’” She was hysterical. I skimmed quickly ahead to my next line—Oh, no!

  I looked up, horrified, and saw Mike swallow a grin before Giles-Gary said grimly, “‘Well, since your opinion of me can’t sink any lower, I might as well do this.’”

  I looked frantically at Ms. Velez, hoping she’d call a halt to the scene, but it was too late. Mike seized my shoulders and bent me backward in an old-movie-villain-style kiss. A real one, not a stage kiss.

  He was just as good at it as I remembered from the pool, damn him.

  The other students whistled and clapped until he released me. He bowed to them and then, for my ears only, said, “You needn’t have gone to so much trouble just to get kissed. You only had to ask.”

  My face burned.

  Ms. Velez was entranced. “You’ve got the parts.”

  “No! I haven’t tried out for Jessie yet,” I said quickly.

  Ms. Velez looked uncertain.

  Unexpected support came from Mike. “Oh, let her try Jessie. Angel can play any role she wants.”

  I tried out for Jessie and had them rolling in the aisles with her countiy-girl naïveté. Ms. Velez looked thoughtful when I finished. “You’ll do.”

  Maryanne got the part of Laura. “Thanks,” she said to me afterward. “I really wanted to play opposite Mike.”

  But I hadn’t done it for her.

  Dad was thrilled when I got home and told him about playing Jessie. “Did I ever tell you I used to do some acting back in college?”

  “Only about twelve hundred times.” I grinned.

  “Smart aleck.” He grinned back, and it was like old times for a moment.

  Mom popped her head in to call us for supper, and the smile leaked away from his face. I remembered the way she used to join in our teasing, and my heart hurt. I didn’t understand what was happening.

  I thought again about enlisting Mike’s help to break up Mom and Mr. Vallant. But we were enemies….

  And then it all began to make a terrible kind of sense.

  Preoccupied, I washed down my tender T-bone steak with a large glass of milk. I was still thinking furiously, considering angles, when the doorbell rang. I hurried to get it. I had some crazy idea it might be Mr. Vallant, and I wanted to head him off. Instead I opened the door to Coach Hrudey.

  “Good evening, Angel. May I come in? I’d like to talk to you and your parents.”

  Mystified, I led him into the living room.

  He introduced himself and shook hands with Dad. “I’m Angels new gym teacher and badminton coach. As you probably already know, she’s exceptionally good.”

  Mom and Dad managed to disguise their surprise. They knew I liked sports, and they had gone to a lot of my track meets and games over the years, but I’d never mentioned badminton to them in particular. I’d gone to a Volleyball camp that summer.

  “She and her partner, Mike Valiant”—Mom flinched guiltily—“are the best team I’ve ever coached, and I don’t say that lightly.” Coach certainly looked dead serious, but then, I’d never seen him joke around. “Angel is very, very good. I feel that she and Mike have the potential to be Olympic champions.”

  He startled even me with that announcement. Mom and Dad looked flabbergasted—and uneasy.

  “I know, I know.” Coach held up a hand as if they had protested. “Badminton is scheduled to be only a demonstration sport at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, but it will be a medal sport by 1992, when Mike and Angel are in their prime.”

  Dad’s expression clearly said he would never even have thought of that aspect.

  Coach kept right on rolling, ruddy face sincere, outlining his qualifications as a coach. He’d competed himself, and he had coached two pairs to Nationals. “With your cooperation, I’d like to start training Angel seriously.” He took it totally for granted that I would jump at the chance.

  Mom and Dad exchanged glances, the old teamwork still functioning, and Mom spoke for both of them. “I’m afraid you’ve taken us by surprise, Mr. Hrudey. Angel has always been interested in sports, of course, but the kind of training you’re talking about requires a lot of dedication. Angel is in grade eleven, and to be frank, her marks are not that great. I think
it would be better for her to concentrate on her studies.”

  Coach nodded but didn’t deviate from his track, like a train bearing down. “You’ve been very open with me. Now let me be equally honest with you. A year of school can always be made up; an opportunity like this comes along only once in a lifetime. An athlete has only so many years in peak condition, and Angel is already seventeen. She’s three years behind the rest of the field already. I believe she has the talent to make up for her late start, but she must start training now.”

  He made a passionate plea for them not to cost me this opportunity and leave me with a lifetime of regrets.

  Mom and Dad were still a bit doubtful but swayed by his arguments. They looked at each other.

  “Perhaps …”

  “On a trial basis.”

  Then together: “What do you think, Angel?”

  “Is this something you really want to do?” Dad asked urgently.

  What did I think? Olympic gold sounded like a pipe dream to me, and I was suspicious. What were the chances of finding two world-class athletes in a small town, population 1,600? And a coach to boot? It could all be part of some game plan, but Mom and Dad’s nervous uneasiness made me decide to take a chance.

  “Have you talked to Mike yet?” I asked Coach Hrudey.

  “He said yes.”

  Mike wasn’t any keener on partnering me than I was him. I wondered if he had agreed for the same reason that I was going to agree.

  Escape.

  All the traveling involved in competition would provide opportunities for escape, opportunities that Chinchaga lacked. I’d tried driving out of Chinchaga once, but had barely gone a mile when broken glass on the highway made all four tires go flat. And the glimpse of the next curve in the river that I’d gotten from the bridge had shown a series of nets closing off a water route.

  CHAPTER 4

  I FOUND MIKE SITTING on my doorstep at six the next morning. Since he was wearing running shoes and shorts it wasn’t hard to guess Coach had sent him to be my running partner.

  I didn’t even pause. I ran right past him.

  It was late September, and drifts of soggy yellow leaves clogged the gutters. It had rained the night before, and there was a raw wind, but the exercise kept Mike and me warm.

  It also kept us from talking, which was both a blessing and a curse. I didn’t feel the sting of Mike’s tongue, but the silence was too companionable, too comfortable. I felt compelled to break it.

  “First one to the river wins!”

  I veered off the smooth sidewalk and into the park, Mike at my heels. We raced breathlessly over hills and obstacles, scrambling across sandpits, jumping over teeter-totters.

  The run was wild and reckless. Coach wouldn’t have approved. We could have broken an ankle.

  Panting, Mike bent forward once we’d stopped. “God, Angel, don’t you ever do anything easy?”

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  We ran just as hard on the court, clocking up another mile in short stops and starts in every forty-five-minute match. We played badminton for hours. Drilling, practicing the perfect serve, working on our backhands, learning how to recover from killer smashes and drives, all the while yelling insults at each other: “I’ve seen cows more graceful than you,” “Wimp shot,” and “Why don’t you just gift-wrap the point for me?”

  At first Coach tried to stop our heckling, but he gave up when he realized the competition between us could drive us further than any hope of a medal.

  We both bought better rackets, and Coach started us using proper birdies with goose feathers and cork buttons. They flew better, but Mike and I sometimes went through two a session and the little suckers weren’t cheap.

  We didn’t just do drills. We played each other, but more often, because we were supposed to be a team, Coach had us play another mixed doubles pair. “KyIe and Amy are the next best.”

  I disagreed. “Kyle’s good, but if you want someone to wear us into the ground, pick Carl. He has stamina.”

  “Him?” Coach was incredulous, echoing the same prejudice Wendy’s parents had.

  “Yes, him.” Mike’s face turned cold. “Carl happens to be a friend of mine.”

  Coach backed off, but it wasn’t until he saw us play Carl and Wendy that he agreed. Carl had all the power, and Wendy all the strategy. “You’re right. Practice with them.”

  Typically, it didn’t seem to occur to him that Carl and Wendy might have something better to do.

  “We never get to go out anymore,” Wendy complained.

  “Sorry.” I felt bad. Wendy needed a friend more than anyone I knew—except maybe me. We made plans to go to the movies the next cheap Tuesday to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator.

  Mike came along. Sometime, when I hadn’t been looking, he’d done a despicable thing: he’d become best friends with Carl.

  For Wendy and Carl’s sake we kept our sniping to a minimum, though Wendy still said, “Shall I check for knife wounds?” twice.

  I had to reassure Maryanne three times the next day that Mike and I hadn’t been on a date. “He’s all yours, really.”

  “You’re probably closer to him than a girlfriend would be anyway,” Maryanne said enviously.

  It was true. Off the court we still played tricks on each other, but on … It frightened me how very good we were together. How we could almost read each other’s thoughts, how our motions flowed together like poetry.

  And every time we stepped off the court it became harder and harder to stop being a unit, to become cool and distant and safe.

  I knew I was in trouble when I started defending Mike to outsiders.

  To pinpoint our weaknesses, Coach had made several videotapes of us playing, and he’d finally caught on to our little game. “Look at this!” He replayed several shots. “At first I thought it was just a bad habit on your part, Mike, but then I looked at all the tapes, and you’re doing it on purpose—setting Angel up to lose a point!” Coach’s face went red, but before he could get too far into his rant I spoke up.

  “I asked Mike to set me up for hard shots. I’ll never improve if I only get easy ones. If you’ll play a little more of the tape, you’ll see I do the same for him.”

  He played the tape, harrumphed, and told us not to do it all the time—it would be a bad habit to fall into during competition. “Zones are only a week away, and I want you to be prepared.”

  Coach was obsessed with Zones, which would be our first tournament and would decide which badminton teams in our region went on to Provincials. He’d drilled into us that we had to win.

  I was confident that Mike and I could win—if we were allowed to leave Chinchaga, at all.

  The first attempt to stop us happened on Monday. I showed up for practice and found Mike smashing birdies against the wall.

  “Temper, temper,” I said.

  Mike didn’t respond to my taunt. “They’re not going to let me go to the badminton tournament.” His voice was stark.

  The words turned a key inside me. Escape. “Why not?”

  “My parents say”—smash—“that tournaments are expensive”—smash—“and they can’t afford it.” Smash. Mike looked up, sweat running down his face. “Looks as though you’re short a partner.”

  “Not a chance,” I said, and went to find Coach. It didn’t take much to fire him up, and within fifteen minutes the three of us were at Mike’s house, talking to Mrs. Valiant.

  Coach gave his “lifetime of regrets” spiel again, harping on the Olympics. He pointed out that Mike’s absence would punish the entire badminton team and offered to pay for Mike’s hotel room and meals out of his own pocket.

  Mrs. Valiant was unprepared for the offer and stalled. “We really couldn’t impose on you like that.”

  “It isn’t an imposition. I donate money to sports scholarships every year because I believe that athletes with drive and talent deserve a chance to compete,” Coach said earnestly.

  She had more objections, but Co
ach shot them all down, and she finally relented, more to make Coach go away than because she felt bad about standing in the way of her son’s success.

  The incident pleased me in an odd way because it proved that the badminton tournament wasn’t part of the game plan; that Coach had come up with it on his own.

  Afterward, Mike and I stood on the sidewalk and grinned at each other.

  “Getting Coach to talk to her was brilliant.” Mike slung his arm around my shoulders. “I don’t know about you, but I feel like sinking my teeth into a juicy hamburger and to hell with Coach’s dry chicken diet. You want to come along?”

  The invitation was casual, a buddy thing, not a date, but it still froze me because I was so very close to saying yes. “No. I’ve got to get home.”

  My offhand tone didn’t fool Mike. He dropped his arm, his gaze intense. “What do you have against me, anyway? Can’t you see what a good team we’d make? What a good team we do make?”

  I lashed out at him. “Of course I do! That’s the whole point, dummy. We make too good a team. We’re too much alike”

  He hadn’t known.

  Realization dilated his pupils, and he took a step back. Violet eyes met violet eyes for an electric second, before I fled as if pursued by a pack of werewolves.

  CHAPTER 5

  I DODGED MIKE the next morning by going for my run an hour earlier, but there was no avoiding him at school. He brushed by me in the hall, eyes searing my face like lasers, and slipped a piece of paper into my jacket pocket.

  The note burned a hole in my coat lining all through math class. I didn’t want to open it. It couldn’t help; it could only tempt me.

  I finally gave in during social studies, while Wendy’s father was lecturing us on the Renaissance. I opened the note inside my desk, careful to appear as if I was merely fumbling with my pencil case.

  “We have to talk.”

  I tore it in half, put it in my mouth, and chewed it into spitballs. I had to shoot two at Wendy to get her attention. She looked irritated, then amused.

  I passed a note across the row to her as if we were third graders. “I declare today Shock the Teacher Day.”