“It’s okay,” I answered.
“No, it’s not. I’d be totally pissed if you did that to me. I won’t do that again,” she promised.
“Cool then.”
“Friends?”
“To the end,” I said, and extended a hand. She clasped it, and it was funny how that one moment seemed to turn my whole day around.
And then practice was awesome. Mostly. We did the usual drills, and we scrimmaged, and my team won 3–2, not that I was keeping track of the score in a scrimmage. One of the goals against me was this amazing lucky shot right up in the corner of the goal that no human goalie could have possibly stopped, so I didn’t feel too bad about that, but the other one I just guessed wrong and went the wrong way with my hands and watched as the ball sailed past my feet and into the goal.
“Nice job,” Ms. Beasley told me at the end of the scrimmage.
“I should have had that second goal,” I replied.
“Well, I think Kate accidentally deked you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the boys’ team was practicing over to the left, and somebody obviously has a crush, so she was distracted and you saw her eyes going that way and thought that’s the way the ball was going. Don’t watch the eyes. Watch the feet.” She clapped her hand on my shoulder, and I felt better. For a minute.
Then Beasley—somebody dropped the “Ms.” at the beginning of practice and she rolled her eyes and smiled, so after that it would have suddenly seemed really uncool to call her Ms. Beasley—called us together.
“Okay,” she announced. “Tomorrow is our first game, and I want you to do your best, but I don’t want anyone to freak out. I want to see you using what you’ve learned, but this is not the win-at-all-costs team. Don’t get me wrong—it’s more fun to win than it is to lose, but that’s the reason to win—because it’s more fun. Teams almost never go undefeated, and we are going to lose some games. Which is fine, because you probably learn more from your losses than your victories. We’re going to play everyone in the conference twice, so what I’d really like to see is you showing that you’ve learned something the second time we play a team. You’ll know which players are dirty, which ones you should double, stuff like that.
“In any case, you’ve been working really hard, and I’m sure we’re going to do well tomorrow.”
We started to get up, but then this red-haired senior with one jet-black streak in her hair and a CHILD SOLDIERS RUN AMOK shirt on walked over from the field hockey field, and Beasley said, “Hang on, girls. Two more things. One is, well, here’s Rosalind.”
Rosalind, the senior with red hair, smiled at us. “Hey, guys. I just want to let you know that my stepmom runs the Charlesborough Yoga Studio over in Curley Square, and she gives deep discounts to Charlesborough athletes. So if you tell them at the desk that you play CHS soccer, you’ll get any class for half price. It helps a ton with your flexibility, preventing injury, stuff like that. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime!”
She waved her stick at us and ran back to the field hockey field, and I totally wanted to be her. She was confident and pretty and nice and looked like she had never felt unsure of herself or uncomfortable in her own skin or any of the things I felt all the time.
“I know you guys are busy, but I was injured constantly until I started doing yoga my sophomore year in college,” Beasley told us.
“You played in college?” somebody asked.
“Yeah,” Beasley said.
“Were you any good, Beasley?”
“I don’t know . . . I guess so.”
“Like how good were you?”
“My senior year I was the eighth alternate for the national team,” Beasley practically whispered, her face bright red.
“So you were the twenty-ninth-best player in the United States?” I said, and then I was immediately embarrassed, but apparently not as embarrassed as Beasley was.
“I don’t know . . .” Beasley offered, and then everybody was talking at once. How cool was that? Our soccer coach was in the top thirty players in the whole country! There’s no way Geezer was ever that good at anything.
“Why’d you stop?” I asked, and the whole team fell silent.
“Well, Amanda, it’s a long story, but the short version is that, no matter what your shirt says, soccer isn’t life. It’s really fun and beautiful and cool, but there are other things in life that are fun and beautiful and cool, and if you want to play soccer at that level, you have to give up a lot of the other fun, beautiful, and cool things.”
I realized I was going to have to chew on that idea for a while. Since pretty much everything that was beautiful and fun and cool in my life came from playing soccer, it was hard to imagine anything else.
“But enough about me,” Beasley said. “Let’s talk about you. Now you know our games are always going to take place before the varsity games, against the same schools and on the same fields. So unless I get a specific written excuse from your parents saying that you have a medical appointment or a funeral to attend, I expect you to stick around and watch every varsity game.”
We all made a shocked, unhappy noise at this, and Beasley just raised her voice over us and kept talking. “There are two reasons for this. One is that it’s simply the right thing to do to support girls’ soccer. You guys know that compared to football or basketball games, our games are not going to draw big crowds. At some of the away games it is possible that you’ll be the only people there supporting varsity, and so you need to do it. Period.
“The second reason is that you can learn a lot from watching these games. You can really dissect what’s going on in the game when you’re not under the pressure of playing it, and that’s going to make you better players. Not to mention that you will all be varsity players sooner or later, and so you should see the kind of system that Coach Keezer runs. Also, you’ll be playing against some of the same girls next year and the year after, so if you’ve seen their games, you’ll have a leg up when you do get on varsity. I know none of you are actually going to do this, but it would be a great idea to keep a notebook on what you see.”
We sat in grumpy silence for a minute, probably thinking about how we’d have even less time to do homework on game days now. Finally, Shakina Williams, who was a pretty good forward, said, “So does that mean that varsity will be supporting us at all our games?”
“Well,” Beasley stammered, “since we can only get the half buses, we have to travel separately, and the schedule—”
“So basically no, is what you’re saying.”
“Well, some of them will be there sometimes. I guess that’s the best I can offer you.”
“But,” Fiona Goldberg objected, “isn’t it simply the right thing to do?”
Beasley looked up to the sky like she thought it might tell her whether she should say something bad about Geezer. I held my breath, hoping that one of those moments where teachers dish on each other was coming.
“Girls,” she said, “if you wait for everyone else to do the right thing before you do the right thing, then you’ll never do what’s right. You have to do what’s right even if other people aren’t. Maybe even especially if other people aren’t.”
Nobody spoke for a minute until Shakina yelled out, “Beasley’s droppin’ the wisdom!” That broke the tension. Everybody laughed, and Beasley said, “Okay, get outta here. And get a good night’s sleep tonight!”
Soccer Season
1
I did not get a good night’s sleep that night. It was a weird feeling: I was lying in bed with my eyes closed and everything, but it felt like I had forgotten how to fall asleep. Sometimes my heels hurt at night after I’ve been running really hard, which I can usually ignore enough to fall asleep, but not when my mind is in overdrive. The longer I lay there, the more my heels seemed to hurt, and the more times I looked at the clock, the more stressed I got about not being asleep, and the more hyper and awake I became.
I felt really angry and alone
. I was sure pretty much everybody else in the house was asleep (because Mom and Dad go right to sleep as soon as they go into their room and shut the door, and they always have, no matter what the evidence named Dominic suggests). When I got up and looked out my window at the dark street with those sickly yellow puddles of light from the streetlights, it seemed like everybody else in the world was asleep too.
I decided to go watch some TV for a while. Maybe that would clear my head. I shuffled downstairs and found the TV already on. Dad was sitting on the couch, and he looked surprised when he saw me.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “Welcome to the club.”
“Dad, you’re so random. What are you talking about?”
“Let me guess: you were lying there in bed with thoughts racing through your mind, and you felt like you forgot how to fall asleep. Like there was some switch in your brain that turned it all off, and you just forgot where it was.”
I hadn’t thought of the part about the switch, but it was actually a pretty good description of what I’d been feeling. “Yeah.”
“Well, I’m sorry. Bad genes. Insomnia, I’m afraid, runs in the family. Which is why I’m sitting here watching Satan’s Cheerleaders at one a.m.”
“Is it any good?”
“It’s way worse than any movie with that name should be. It’s got Yvonne De Carlo, and you know, I always had a crush on her when she was Lily Munster—”
“Dad, TMI.”
“Well, anyway, check her out.”
I looked at the TV. “You had a crush on the old lady?”
“When she was . . . forget it.”
We sat in silence watching the crappy movie for a few minutes. I could tell Dad was dying to say something, so finally I barked “What?” at him.
“I want to give you some advice, and I know it’s going to be hard to take, but I just want you to listen.”
“Okay.”
“Sometimes you won’t be able to sleep. And that sucks, but the only thing you can do to make it suck less is to just accept it. There are worse things in the world than being tired, and that’s the worst that can happen. The more you stress about why this shouldn’t be happening, the worse it’ll be.”
“But I have a game tomorrow.”
“And you’ll be so high on adrenaline that you’ll probably play great and then come home and collapse. And the good thing is, if you’re tired tomorrow, it will mellow you out a little bit and keep you from stressing all day.”
“I hope so,” I said, and turned my attention back to the movie. It must have been really crappy, because the next thing I knew, Lena and Courtney from varsity were laughing and punching me really hard in the stomach.
“What the hell!” I yelled. I opened my eyes and found myself on the couch with Dominic, clad in his SpongeBob pajamas, jumping up and plopping his butt onto my stomach.
I was awake in an instant. “You little monster! I’m gonna wake you up tomorrow pouncing on your guts. You freak! What is wrong with you?”
Dominic, manipulative little monster that he is, turned on the waterworks at this and went crying to Mom and Dad’s room.
“Amanda!” Mom called down.
“What?” I called back up.
“I need to speak to you.”
I trudged up the stairs thinking about how I was going to go into Dominic’s room after he fell asleep tonight and pounce on his guts and hopefully make him spew all over the place.
I got up to Mom and Dad’s room, where the scene didn’t look good. There was Dominic, red-faced and crying, snuggled into the crook of Dad’s arm while Mom looked at me.
“Well?” she asked.
“I couldn’t sleep last night and got up and fell asleep on the couch, and the next thing I knew, some freak in SpongeBob pajamas was bouncing up and down on my stomach.”
“Amanda. That’s it for the name-calling. You dehumanize people when you call them names.”
“Yeah, well, they have to be human in the first place for that to work,” I said, and Mom gave me the Look of Death and I shut up.
“Now, Dominic, you didn’t tell us the part about jumping on Amanda’s stomach while she was asleep. How do you think that made her feel?”
I rolled my eyes and walked away before Mom could extract an insincere apology from the little twerp and before I’d be called on to give an insincere apology of my own.
But then, forty-five minutes later, as I was running out the door, Dominic came up to me without Mom shoving him in my direction and, looking at the floor, he mumbled, “I’m sorry I jumped on your stomach.”
And now I saw that he was a goofy kid and not some demon from hell sent to make my miserable life more miserable, so I just kind of tousled his hair and said, “I’m sorry I called you a freak.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“All right then, buddy,” I said. “You gonna come to my game today?”
“Yeah!” he yelled, his face bright. I have to say this: the kid was my number one fan.
“I’ll see you then,” I said. I called goodbye to everybody else but Conrad, who was still in the shower because he was obviously planning on being late, and left for school.
On my walk, I couldn’t help thinking that if yesterday sucked and it didn’t start with somebody slamming sixty pounds into my stomach, how horrible was today going to be?
As it turned out, less horrible than I feared. Maybe it was because, like Dad said, I was tired and felt kind of dazed all day. So classes came and went and I didn’t even really notice. At lunch, Lena didn’t have time for me again, but at least this time she kept turning back to me and going, “What do you think, Amanda?” Which was still not enough to get Duncan to pull his eyes away from her, but that was okay because I was too tired at that point to charm him with my sparkling wit anyway.
Maybe this was my big opportunity to get in with this group, but I was too tired to make interesting conversation.
And, anyway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get in with this group. At least not as Lena’s sidekick, which was all I would ever be to them. I didn’t want to be popular with a bunch of kids I didn’t even know. What I wanted was for things to be like they used to be, where it was Lena and me together against the world. Even with her remembering I existed, it still wasn’t like it used to be. I wanted them all to go away, even the cute boys, so I could have my best friend back.
2
Our game was at home, and so Lena, who knew I was completely exhausted, went over to the store across the street after school and bought me an energy drink. I didn’t know how drinking a barrel of sugar and caffeine would affect my sleep tonight, and I didn’t really care. I had a game to play.
Lena sat with Dominic and Dad. Mom had apologized for not being able to get off work early enough, which was fine. It’s weird, because of course both my parents are corny and embarrassing, especially Dad, but I always appreciate a parental representative in the stands at my games.
Lena was the only member of the varsity who showed up to watch our game. “I see your friend’s the only one doing the right thing,” Shakina observed before the game started.
“Yeah.”
“Well, what do you say we put on a show for her? Maybe she’ll tell the rest of them to come next time.”
I answered “Yeah!” maybe a little too loudly, because Shakina looked kind of embarrassed and everybody on the field looked at me. “Uh, too much caffeine, I guess.”
In the first half, we did put on a show. The other team only got three shots on goal, and I stopped all of them easily, even the one that was perfectly placed right in the corner of the goal. We were up 2–0 at the end of the first half, and I felt great.
And then, in the second half, our offense collapsed, or else their offense woke up, but in any case, pretty much the whole half was played on our side of the field, and the shots just kept coming. My caffeine buzz from the gross orange drink was starting to wear off in a major way, and I felt a little sluggish. Even so, I managed to make four sav
es, including one penalty shot after Marcia got called for a totally unintentional handball in the box.
So any game where you stop a penalty shot is a good one, right? Well, it would have been except that I let in two goals in between my four saves, and I guess I lost a step or something by the end of the game, because we lost when the other team got this incredibly cheap goal on a weak shot that came limping out of a crowd of players in front of the goal. I should have seen it sooner, and even seeing it late, I should have been able to get to it. And might have if I’d been more awake.
When the game ended, I sat in the goal with my head in my hands. I couldn’t sleep at least partly because I was nervous about soccer, and the lack of sleep that came from being nervous about soccer had made me suck at soccer. It was like stuff just kept piling on.
I had really wanted to prove that a mistake had been made, that I belonged on varsity. Not that I thought they’d move me up, but I wanted Geezer to see how good I was and know that she’d screwed up. Instead, all I’d done was confirm her belief that I wasn’t ready for varsity.
Well, the good news was that Geezer hadn’t watched our game anyway. “Amanda,” Beasley commanded, “get up and congratulate the other team.”
This was always the worst part about losing—like it wasn’t bad enough to get beaten, you had to go up to the people who’d made you look stupid and thank them for it.
I could tell from the look on Beasley’s face that I’d hear a speech about how I’d be cooling my aching heels on the bench if I couldn’t conduct myself like a good sport, so I got up, got in line, and slapped the hand of every girl on the other team, muttering, “Good game,” even to the girl whose penalty shot I’d stopped, who greeted me with a friendly “You suck.”
Still stinking of sweat and failure, we dutifully trooped into the bleachers with Beasley to cheer on varsity. I didn’t want to look like too much of a brownnoser, but I had actually brought a notebook and a pen in my soccer bag. I looked around to see if anybody else was taking notes. They weren’t, so the notebook and pen stayed in my bag.
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