Silence, and we all stared at Conrad, who stared at the paper.
“Conrad?” Mom waited for a minute, and when he showed no signs of having heard her, she raised her voice. “Conrad!”
He looked up. “You don’t have to yell, Mom, God, I’m right here!”
“Obviously she did have to yell because you totally didn’t answer her the first three times she asked you,” I said.
Mom turned to me. “Amanda, don’t parent. That’s my job. Conrad, I just wanted to know if you have enough water for practice today.”
“Yeah, my water bottle’s in my room somewhere.”
Mom took a deep breath. “We have a bin for all your soccer stuff. If you just used it, then you’d always know where your water bottle was.”
“Got it, Mom, thanks,” Conrad said as he disappeared into the paper again. Mom looked like she wanted to yell at him, but instead she topped up her travel mug and turned to go.
“Okay, I’m gonna be late,” she said. “I love you all, have a great day, and remember that whatever happens, none of this is a referendum on your worth as people.”
Five minutes later, Lena and I were on our way to the high school fields. My stomach felt tight and sour. I hoped I wouldn’t puke. I was so nervous, which was stupid. I mean, most ninth graders get put on JV, no questions asked. I guess I thought if I made varsity, then when school started next week I would already be somebody.
Well, I would be somebody no matter what. I just thought it might be nice to be somebody besides the hugely tall ninth grade girl getting lost in the halls and feeling totally out of place. If I were on varsity, I’d be in with a lot of older girls, so I’d have a friendly face to ask if I had any questions, and when people talked about me, they would say how I must be a hell of a soccer player to make varsity as a ninth grader. Going into this new school with all these new people, I wanted to be somebody besides the Tallest Girl in the Class.
That’s what I was thinking about on the way to practice. Lena, of course, was thinking about Conrad, who rode past us on his bike with a friendly “Later, losers.” “I don’t know, I think maybe he might like me.”
“Why?”
“Well, did you see how long it took him to answer your mom? He was completely tuned out, but he answered me right away. Right? So, like, my voice is important to him or something. Right?”
“I think he was ignoring Mom just to be a dick, but okay,” I said.
“Maybe you could ask him,” she kind of half whispered.
“You want me to tell him you like him?”
“Oh my God no. That would be so embarrassing. I don’t know, I thought there might be a way . . .”
“You might not have noticed this, but we don’t really talk about who we like, or much of anything else with each other,” I said.
“Okay. Well, let me know if he does say anything.”
“Will do.”
We didn’t say much else on the way to practice—I guess we were both obsessing.
We got to practice right on time, and everybody else was already there. The boys’ soccer team was doing their usual thing where they stand around pretending to stretch while looking at the girls. But we were not doing what we usually do, which is pass and shoot and pretend not to notice the boys, especially that Duncan kid who’s in the tenth grade and is almost too gorgeous to be real. I swear to God the guy must be an android or, like, an alien from Planet Hot or something.
Instead of pretending to ignore the boys, all the girls actually were ignoring the boys, sitting on the ground staring at crusty Ms. Keezer, who was standing there looking stern and holding a clipboard. She glared at me and Lena as we sat down. I looked at Ms. Beasley, and she gave me a friendly smile.
Ms. Keezer looked at her watch. “It’s nine o’clock,” she yelled in her scratchy, raspy voice, “and we have a lot of work to do today, so we’re going to get this out of the way early. Ms. Beasley and I have made the decision about which girls are going to which squad. Listen carefully for your name as Ms. Beasley reads the JV list. Those of you on JV will be coached by Ms. Beasley, and you’ll be practicing with her today. I’ll be coaching varsity. Now, the school committee in their infinite wisdom forbids us from holding practice over Labor Day weekend, and our first games of the season are next Wednesday, which means we have only two practices between now and then. We need all of our practice time to try to get ready to compete by next week, so if you want to have a long, involved conversation about how our placement isn’t fair and we should reconsider, please put your complaint in writing, and I’ll make sure it gets filed appropriately.” She shook a big plastic garbage can as she said this, and all the senior girls who knew they were making varsity anyway laughed, and the rest of us felt sick. Or maybe that was just me.
Ms. Beasley started reading names. It was alphabetical order, so it didn’t take her long to get to Amanda Conant. (Yeah, I’ve heard the “Conant the Barbarian” joke a few times. Funny stuff.) Lena reached over and squeezed my hand as we waited for her name. Well, making varsity as a ninth grader was a stupid dream anyway, and at least we’d have the nice young coach instead of the scary old one.
Ms. Beasley read a bunch of other names, finishing up with Shakina Williams. Then she said, “Okay, if you heard your name, come with me. If you didn’t, you’ll stay here with Ms. Keezer, and congratulations.” She took her clipboard and a bunch of girls got up immediately to follow her, and I sat there still squeezing the hand of Lena Zaleski, whose name hadn’t been called.
“Maybe my name was on the second page or something,” Lena said. “This has to be a mistake. Let’s go ask her.” We dropped hands and stood up, and Ms. Keezer barked, “Zaleski! Sit!” and Lena—fast, beautiful, and a normal female height—sat back down with this “I’m sorry” look on her face while I walked toward Ms. Beasley and the Loser Squad and tried really hard not to cry.
3
My dad is a hopeless cornball, which I guess is why I tend to talk more to my mom about personal stuff. But sometimes I wonder if my dad is some sort of evil genius, because a lot of times he says some dumb thing that’s so corny it makes me want to curl up under the table and disappear, but then later on I’ll hear him saying it in my brain and it kind of makes sense to me.
One of his favorite things is to talk about how tough I am because my mom died. I mean, like I even remember that. I was two. But anyway, whenever something feels hard for me and I’m doing a bad job of hiding it, he’ll say something like this, usually with his voice breaking: “Amanda, you are the strongest person I know. You’ve been through stuff most kids can only imagine, and you’ll get through this too. Compared to what’s already happened in your life, this is a walk in the park, and I know you can do it. You’re tough as an old boot.”
Like any fourteen-year-old girl wants to be compared to a battered piece of leather. Though maybe that comparison gets more appropriate as you get older, because Ms. Keezer actually does look kind of like an old boot.
Anyway, as I was standing in the goal trying not to hear the happy practice going on at the other end of the field, as I was trying really hard to just focus on the ball and not think about how humiliated and sad and jealous I felt, how Lena was already prettier and more girlish than me, and now she was a better soccer player too, I heard my dad’s voice in my mind.
“You are the strongest person I know,” he said, and I punched away a ball like it was Ms. Keezer’s gross dried-up head.
“You’re tough as an old boot,” he said as I leaped across the goal and grabbed a ball I guessed wrong on and got to anyway.
I managed to get through the rest of practice this way, and I managed not to cry, even at the end when, as we were all packing up and Ms. Beasley was handing out the no-substance-abuse pledge forms for us to sign, she came up to me and whispered, “I’m really lucky to have the best goalkeeper on my team.”
That was nice, but obviously not true, because the best goalkeeper gets to be on varsity, along with the b
est forward. Ms. Keezer was keeping her team, the good, non-loser team, late, and the best goalkeeper was practicing over there while I walked home. And, oh yeah, all the boys were lingering over by the varsity girls, totally ignoring those of us who didn’t make the cut.
I saw Mrs. Zaleski in the parking lot. I practically lived at Lena’s house when she wasn’t practically living at mine, and even though Mrs. Zaleski is not as warm as my mom and never randomly tells us she loves us and she’s proud of us when we’re over there, she’s still probably the adult outside of my own family that I know the best. So when she smiled and waved at me, I knew I should go over there and say hi to her, especially since they were leaving for the weekend right after practice, but I couldn’t do it. Because what could she possibly say to make it better? And I could just about hold it together if I didn’t talk about it, but if I did have to say something, I knew I would start crying.
So I just waved and kept walking.
4
It’s only a couple of blocks from the field to our house, but of course something happened on the way home too, because it was that kind of day. I was walking with my ball under my arm, and some loser on a bike came by and punched it. The ball rolled into the street right when somebody was driving by in their big stupid SUV they probably had to expand their garage for, and they squashed the ball flat.
We have lots of balls at home, so it’s not like it was some irreplaceable family heirloom or something, but I just didn’t have it in me to be tough about anything anymore, so I sat down on the sidewalk and started to cry.
At this point the idiot loser on the bike who had played the hilarious prank on me came wheeling back, I guess to rub my nose in how hilarious his prank was.
Oh, did I mention that the idiot loser was my stepbrother, Conrad?
So there I was crying on the sidewalk, and Conrad came over on his bike. I ignored him.
“Hey,” he said.
I didn’t raise my head or any part of my body other than my middle finger.
“It’s just a ball, Amanda, God,” he said. I knew this was the part where I yelled at him and we had a big fight, but I didn’t have the energy to do anything but cry. I guess this must have caught him off-guard because he didn’t say anything for a while.
Then, finally, he said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to wreck it or anything.”
Now I did look up at him, because his stupidity was offensive to me. “Well, what did you think was going to happen? I mean, did you think about the fact that we’re right next to a street with cars on it, and that rolling balls can actually get squished by two-ton machines?”
He didn’t say anything for a second. Then he practically whispered, “Um. I didn’t really think about that, no. I just thought it would be funny.”
“Well, it’s hilarious. Almost as funny as me getting cut from varsity.”
“Oh. I’m sorry about that. But you know they really don’t ever put ninth graders on varsity. I mean, for somebody to be on varsity in the ninth grade, they’d have to be like Mia Hamm or somebody, but for normal humans—”
“Lena made it.”
His reaction to this news was enough to make me take the “step” away, at least for a minute.
“What?” he yelled. “That is total bullshit! I can’t believe that! She’s good, but she’s not better than you. That is so stupid! God, Geezer must have had her brains fried by the sun.”
This was enough to get a laugh out of me. “Geezer?”
Conrad looked at me like I was from outer space. “Oh my God, you’ve never heard that? Everybody calls her that.”
“Not at soccer practice they don’t.”
“Yeah, well, in the real world, they do. She’s all old and crinkly, and her name rhymes . . . it’s a pretty obvious joke.” He held out his hand to me and helped me up. Then he got off his bike and walked with me the rest of the way home, fuming about Geezer’s idiocy the whole way.
“You know what it is, right? It’s freakin’ Stephanie LoPresto. She’s a senior, so they have to put her on varsity, but she’s a sieve in the goal. They would have totally made states with you in the goal. They’ll be lucky to win the conference with her back there. They might as well just pull the goalie altogether and put another forward in.”
Of course I would never tell him this, but it was really nice to have Conrad on my side for a change. It seemed like we’d been fighting more or less nonstop since I was ten, and it felt good to get a break from that on a day when I totally couldn’t deal with it. It should have been comforting to know I hadn’t made the team because of some senior girl, but it wasn’t. Because if I wasn’t afflicted with Sever’s disease, then I would be able to run and I could play another position and maybe be a backup goalie. It was so unfair.
We got home and Conrad went over to the bulkhead to park his bike in the basement and I headed in the front door. I wanted to run up to my room and cry, but Dad and Dominic were home playing Mario Party. I looked in the living room and rolled my eyes. Because, okay, you expect to see your annoying eight-year-old brother there in front of the TV frantically pounding on the controller, but when your forty-three-year-old father is doing the same thing, it’s just embarrassing.
It’s also embarrassing when your dad pumps his fist at your eight-year-old brother and goes, in this weird accent, “Waluigi the winner!”
He looked up at me after video game trash-talking his son and didn’t look the least bit ashamed. “Hey, sweetie!” he said. “How was practice?”
I was going to give him the standard “Fine,” and head upstairs for a good sulk (which, for once, was not going to include calling Lena, because she couldn’t understand what I was feeling), but unfortunately, Conrad came up from the basement at that point. He was holding a box of latex gloves in his hand, and he kind of shook them at Dad and said, “She didn’t make varsity. And Lena did! Can you believe this crap?”
Dad looked over at Conrad and asked, “Why are you holding a box of gloves?”
Conrad looked at his hand like he’d forgotten they were even there. “Oh. I don’t know. I guess I must have picked them up in the basement.”
“Cool!” Dominic shouted. “Let’s fill ’em up with milk and make udders to drink out of.”
“Awesome!” Conrad said, and he and Dominic went running to the kitchen.
All Dad said to them was “Make sure they’re the powder-free kind, guys.” I really wished Mom was home at that point. When it’s just me in the house with three boys, I start wondering if it’s them or me who’s completely insane, and when Mom’s here, I can be confident in the knowledge that it’s them.
Dad looked at me with his concerned face. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said. “I know how much that hurts.”
“Dad, you never played soccer in your life.”
“Yeah, but I had . . . did I ever tell you the story of Romeo and Juliet senior year?”
“You mean about how the screen fell down and the whole school accidentally saw that girl’s butt you had a crush on?”
“It was her whole self I had a crush on, not just her butt, but no, that’s not the story.”
Every single thing that ever happens, Dad has a story. I knew I was going to have to hear it eventually, so I figured I might as well get it over with. “Okay, what was it?”
“Well, you know Uncle Jake was in that play too?”
“Yeah?” Jake’s not really Dad’s brother, but he’s always been Uncle Jake to me.
“He was my best friend then as he is now, and we were both seniors, so, you know, we had a reasonable expectation that we’d get big parts. And we did. Jake was Romeo and I was Friar Lawrence.” He had this look on his face like he’d said something important.
“So?”
“So? So my best friend gets to play the tragic romantic hero, and I get to play the old buffoon! How do you think that feels? He got more dates than me anyway, and here’s our director, a respected adult—well, after hearing about all the—”
> I rolled my eyes. “Dad? The point?”
“Right. So here’s this respected adult who hands down this decision that says, essentially, you, Jake, are an attractive young man, and you, Dan, are so far from attractive that you can play an old celibate buffoon. I know it probably sounds stupid, but it hurt. A lot. There are other parts in that play for young men—Mercutio is a great part and he also gets to die tragically, Tybalt is this hotheaded brawler, and he gets to die too, but no, I had to be the cowardly old fool. The kid who played Mercutio was a freshman.”
I looked at Dad’s face—he looked mad. “You know, Dad, the fact that you’re still upset about this like twenty-five years later really isn’t much comfort right now. I’m just gonna go to my room.”
“Wait, wait! This story has an interesting postscript!” This is how Dad’s stories always go. I really wish he’d try telling an interesting story with no postscript instead of a boring story with an interesting postscript, but he doesn’t seem to have it in him.
“Go ahead.” I sighed.
“So Jake is getting crazy phone numbers after every performance. From all the girls at our school, plus all these girls we’ve never even seen before. College girls. How many high school boys do you think get phone numbers from college girls? I’ll tell you—it never happens. This was the only time in the history of the world it has ever happened. And there’s me, just standing there, hoping maybe Jake will tell some of these girls he needs to double so I’ll at least get a pity date out of the deal. Did I mention that I performed in a padded robe to make me look fat on top of everything else?”
“You didn’t mention that.”
“Yeah, well, I might as well have had a sign on that said NEVER DATE ME. Anyway, only one girl congratulated me on my performance. This really cute, shy girl from the basketball team came up to me blushing and said, ‘You did a really good job.’ And that, of course, was your mom.”
Shutout Page 2