I took a lot of notes.
In week three of my grounding, I went to the more forgiving of my jailers and asked if I might be allowed to grab a slice of pizza with Shakina. Dad said he thought that would be okay, and then he and Mom had a little fight about how he obviously didn’t understand what being grounded meant.
But that’s how I got to meet Shakina for pizza. It was such a relief to actually be able to talk to somebody I wasn’t related to outside of school, especially somebody who wasn’t mad at me.
It was hard not to compare Shakina with Lena. Shakina and I didn’t have any kind of history together, so I couldn’t just say “Mouse in the closet!” and have her remember how that happened in fourth grade. But on the other hand, we seemed to have more in common now than Lena and I did. We both thought all the boys in our class were doofs, we didn’t want to go to parties and get drunk, and we would have been happy to stay up late watching stupid movies instead of plotting ways to sneak out and do stuff that wasn’t really that fun anyway. The only problem was that I couldn’t talk to her about Lena, because she’d just say what she thought, which was that she couldn’t have been such a great friend to begin with if she’d dropped me so quick. This pissed me off because Shakina didn’t know anything about the years Lena and I had together. But I guess it mostly pissed me off because I was afraid she was right.
Yoga was getting better and better. My heels definitely hurt less after soccer than they had in years, and if I still felt a little goofy doing some of the poses, at least I didn’t feel goofy because I couldn’t do it right anymore. I watched Portia, and I tried to be like her—tall, limber, confident, and beautiful—when I was walking around, especially before and after class.
I must have been getting pretty good at it, because when I strode out of the bathroom at Demarco’s with my breath connecting my body and spirit or whatever exactly it was supposed to do, Shakina yelled out, “Portia! Namaste!”
Then I cracked up and went back to being myself, all knees and elbows instead of one gloriously harmonious body of interconnected parts. Still, it was nice to know I could make the attempt. As we ate our pizza, Shakina said, “It looks like varsity is going to states.”
“Yeah. It definitely looks that way. Well, good for them. I’m not sure it would be worth it playing for Geezer.”
“Right? She is too scary. Anyway, maybe she’ll retire or die or something and then Beasley can coach us on varsity next year.”
“That would be awesome,” I said, and Shakina snorted. “Well, I mean, not the lady dying, of course.” She kept laughing, and I knew I was never going to talk my way out of the horrible thing I had unintentionally said, so I added, “I mean, her dying would be cool, but I wouldn’t call it awesome.”
Shakina answered, “Not unless she took a soccer ball to the face and it broke her nose and drove it into her brain and she died that way. That would be awesome.”
“You have given this way, way too much thought,” I gasped out between laughs.
I guess it was pretty sick, the two of us cracking up about some old lady kicking the bucket and practically choking on our pizza, but it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.
In the car on the way home, I said to Mom, “You know, Shakina’s family is new in town. I was thinking it might be nice to have them over for dinner. You know, to kind of welcome them to the neighborhood.”
Mom gave me that “you’re full of it” look. “You really have trouble with the concept of grounded, don’t you? I guess you get that from your father.”
“No! What? I mean, I wouldn’t be leaving the house, right? What is this, solitary confinement, where I’m not allowed to receive visitors?”
“No, Amanda, it’s a punishment.”
“Mom. I lost my best friend. Don’t you think that might be punishment enough?”
Mom didn’t say anything for a while, and I hoped I hadn’t overplayed my hand. I hoped she felt guilty about how Lena wasn’t talking to me, since it totally wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t called Rachel and squealed on us. On the other hand, I knew if she thought I was questioning whether she’d done the right thing, she would get stubborn and make sure I served every second of my sentence.
Finally she said, “Okay. If you give me their number, I’ll call and invite them. So you don’t have to go behind my back and ask your dad, which I know would be your next step.” I looked over at her and saw she was smiling, so I dared to make a joke.
“Mom! I’m shocked you would even suggest that!”
She snorted.
7
We had a game the following Friday, and Shakina’s family was coming over afterward. It happened to be the last night of my sentence anyway, so I guess Mom felt like she wasn’t letting me out of too much punishment.
And, in fact, I had forgotten that hanging around Mom when she’s preparing to have people over is a kind of punishment. She goes into freak-out mode and cleans frantically and yells at us for doing the stuff we always do, like not cleaning out our cereal bowls after breakfast. Dad always manages to disappear when this is going on. He volunteers to go buy napkins or whatever, leaving the rest of us to participate in the hurricane of cleaning. I guess this is probably because he’d get it worse than any of us if he stayed home, since he’s the biggest slob of all.
So Thursday night while Mom was whirling around the house, Dad found some errand that he suddenly had to do, and that weasel Conrad volunteered to help him, like Dad can’t carry napkins by himself. I got put on cobweb duty, which is really not that bad—I got to walk around with a dust mop and poke at all the corners—and Dominic was dusting.
“How come she gets to do the cobwebs?” Dominic whined. “I never get to do the cobwebs.”
“You’re not tall enough,” I told him, and he stuck his tongue out at me.
The phone rang, and Mom called out “I’ll get it!” mostly to stop Dominic from answering it, since after nearly a month of groundation, I had gotten used to the fact that the phone was a forbidden object to me.
“Oh, hi, Rachel,” Mom said, and disappeared into the kitchen. The kitchen where, it occurred to me, there were probably a lot of cobwebs that needed removing. I poked my way into the kitchen, but Mom retreated into the dining room, and all I got to hear was “Mmmm.” I mean, what does “mmmm” mean? It could be anything.
As it turned out, the kitchen was relatively free of cobwebs, but the dining room, well, now that probably needed some attention. It really did—every corner had a cobweb, and there were a couple of strands of web running to the light over the table, so I removed those. When Mom went to the bathroom, I couldn’t pretend I had any cobwebs to remove, at least not while she was in there.
So I gave the hallway pretty thorough attention but couldn’t catch any of Mom’s conversation filtering through the closed bathroom door. Why is it that I can hear Dominic, who needs to eat some fiber, grunting every time he’s in there even if I’m two rooms away, but I couldn’t hear anything Mom was saying?
Finally I gave up, finished the cobwebs on the rest of the first floor, and then sat down to watch some TV.
Mom appeared about five minutes later and looked at me with my feet up. I could already hear the speech about how this is your friend coming over and you have to clean up your mess, blah blah, so I said, “Mom, look, the first floor is spotless!” Mom looked around trying to prove me wrong, and when she couldn’t, she flopped down on the couch next to me.
“Well, thank God.” She sighed. “Now we just have to keep your father and brother out of here until tomorrow night.”
“Out of this room?”
“No. Out of the house. The minute they come in, they start spewing shoes and dirty tissues and change and empty drink bottles. Do you think I could call them and tell them to get a motel room tonight?”
“Yeah!”
“I don’t think it would work. Just help me yell at them, will you?”
“If I have to,” I said, smiling. “So, uh,
how was your conversation with Rachel?”
“You mean you didn’t manage to overhear the whole thing? It couldn’t have been for lack of trying.”
“Oh my God! I was clearing out cobwebs like you asked me to!”
She gave me this “who do you think you’re kidding” grin, and then said, “Well, it was awkward. I’m a little frustrated with Rachel right now, to be honest.”
“Why?” It was comforting to know that somebody besides me was frustrated with the Zaleski family.
“She called to ask if we wanted to get together tomorrow to celebrate the end of your grounding, and I had to tell her that you and Lena aren’t really speaking right now.”
“She didn’t know that? Isn’t that kind of weird?”
Mom looked slightly embarrassed. “I think so. But apparently Lena’s been able to use her phone and computer for the last two weeks, and Rachel assumed it was you she was talking to all that time.”
I exploded. “Two weeks! Two weeks she’s had her phone back! The whole thing was her idea! That is so totally unfair!”
Mom gritted her teeth. “Well, Rachel and I discussed what we thought an appropriate punishment was at the time, but apparently she had a change of heart.”
Could life get any more unfair? Lena got me in trouble and I ended up suffering more than she did. I hardly knew what to say.
“So Rachel wanted to know if you had any ideas about who Lena might have been communicating with for the last two weeks.”
“Yeah, I’ve got some ideas, and so would she if she talked to her daughter once in a while.”
Mom smiled. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I told her. Lena’s grades are slipping, and Rachel’s really worried.”
I rolled my eyes. Like I cared about Mrs. Zaleski’s worries. I still couldn’t believe Lena had been off grounding for two weeks.
“Listen,” Mom said. “I know this is a really hard time, but let’s just focus on the fact that we’re having your new friend over tomorrow. There are a lot of good things happening too.”
Well, I was glad that Shakina and her family were coming over, but losing Lena still hurt.
The next day after school, I was thinking so much about getting to practice to talk to Shakina that I forgot about trying to avoid Lena. So I walked into the locker room and there she was, right in front of me. She acted like I wasn’t even there, and for some reason it made me furious.
“Are you ever going to get sick of pretending I don’t exist?”
She opened her locker and pretended I didn’t exist.
“I mean, you got ungrounded two weeks ago and I’m still grounded! How long are you going to hold this against me?”
Lena pulled on her uniform shirt. I really wanted to punch her just so she would have to admit I existed.
“Six years, Lena. Six years. I can’t believe six years means less to you than a very stupid boy. You know what, on second thought, just keep pretending I don’t exist, because I don’t know you at all. I guess I never did.”
She closed her locker slowly and walked out to practice with varsity and not watch our game. I threw my uniform on and slammed my locker door. I don’t know how long I had been slamming my clothes and locker around before I realized Shakina was standing there.
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad I’m not trying to shoot on you today.”
This got a smile out of me, and I greeted my yoga buddy with “Namaste. I’m a being of pure light, breath, and energy.”
“Yeah. I can tell. You wanna talk about it?”
“You know, I’m bored with the whole thing and it’s happening to me. Tell me something that’s happening with you.”
Shakina talked about how her brother was annoying and how he got away with everything and she was supposed to take it because she was older, and she was ready to kill him. “He’s so embarrassing. I’m sorry we have to bring him tonight. Mom said she wouldn’t leave him locked up in his cage.”
“All the boys can disappear and be annoying together, and hopefully we’ll have a good time.”
We won our game 4–2, which of course was a disappointing score to me, but I was happy because Shakina scored two of our four goals. I made two great saves near the end of the game to preserve the lead, and a weird thing happened—I heard an extra voice cheering me on. My parents and Dominic were in the stands sitting with Shakina’s mom and a kid I assumed was her brother, and there were a few other parents in the stands, but somebody yelled out “Great save!” who didn’t seem to be any of the usual suspects. And yes, attendance at our games is so pathetic that it’s not just possible but actually quite easy to pick out the voice of every single person cheering for us.
I looked down to the end of the stands, and there, sitting by himself, was Angus. I didn’t really know what to make of that, so I basically forgot about it. Or I tried to forget about it, but once we got into the locker room the rest of the girls wouldn’t really let me.
“Hey, Amanda, who’s your boyfriend?” Marcia asked.
“What are you talking about?” I said, even though I knew exactly what she was talking about.
“I mean, I didn’t hear him cheering for anybody else,” she said.
“Yeah, well, who knows. I mean, the kid is in my English class, and that’s about it. So I have no idea.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. After a few more jokes about my cheering section from the other members of the team, the subject was dropped, and then when we went into the stands to cheer on varsity and take notes, he was gone. Varsity won their game and officially clinched their berth in the state tournament with two weeks left in the season. Lena was smiling and hugging Courtney and running around the field, and I had a lot of notes to take while everybody else was cheering.
I did not look at Stephanie, their goalie who allowed 2.43 goals per game to my 1.75, not that anybody kept track of such things, as she ran around celebrating.
I wondered for a minute: if I’d made varsity, would Lena have forgiven me by now? It’s pretty hard to pretend somebody doesn’t exist when you have to play on the same team. Or would we even have gotten into trouble in the first place? If I hadn’t been so afraid of losing my connection to her, would I have said no to the whole stupid party thing? Or if I hadn’t been so jealous of her, would I have felt like I had to tell Mom about it?
I guess you can drive yourself crazy thinking about what might have been, or how things might be different, but the fact is that you have to live in the real world where stuff can’t un-happen. I wasn’t on varsity, and Lena could never un-call me a bitch, and as much as I wanted to live in a world where she was still my best friend, that wasn’t the world I was in.
I was pretty down about varsity making states because I am petty like that, so I had totally forgotten about Angus being in the stands for our game until Dad, on the car ride home, had to be corny and embarrassing and say, “So, Amanda, looks like you have a fan club.”
Mom hit him on the arm.
“Dad, I barely know that kid. He’s in my English class.”
“Well, he certainly seemed to appreciate your play today,” Dad said with this cheesy grin.
“Yeah, well, maybe his mom was late picking him up or something. I don’t know.”
“Really? Because, speaking as a man, I have to say that I never attended a girls’ sporting event unless there was somebody on the team I had a special interest in cheering for.”
Ugh, Dad was such a cheeseball. “Dad, I told you, I hardly know the kid, and, anyway, I’m like five inches taller than him! How completely ridiculous would that be?”
Dad suddenly lost his grin and got interested in the road, and I realized I’d just described his relationship with the woman who gave birth to me.
“Mom?” I asked, hoping for a lifeline from the woman who had hit her husband in my defense just a couple of minutes ago.
Mom turned around and looked at me. “Amanda, you dug this hole. You’re gonna have to dig yourself out.”
&nb
sp; “Dad, you know what I mean. It’s like I’m enough of a freak already, and—”
“I’ll just say this and let it drop,” Dad interrupted. “The average height of a man in this country is five nine. If you never look below that line, you are, by definition, going to miss out on half of the quality guys.”
“Yeah, well, all other considerations aside, Dad, the kid’s kind of weird and I do not like him like that.”
“That’s fine.”
“I know it is! It’s fine and it’s none of your business. End of discussion!”
“I’m just—” Dad started, but thankfully Mom hit him again, and it really was the end of the discussion.
8
Dinner with the Williams family was great. Dad’s special errand to avoid cleaning and Mom’s wrath turned out to have been across town to the Asian market, and he made this four-course Asian meal that even I had to admit was delicious. The Williamses seemed to like it too: Shakina asked for seconds of the drunken noodles, which you don’t do if you’re just being polite.
And everybody seemed to get along really well. Both Dad and Mr. Williams love horror movies, so they spent the whole meal geeking out about which movies they’d seen, and their wives kept having to remind them that the dinner table wasn’t really the greatest place to talk about severed heads.
Mom and Mrs. Williams talked about craft projects, and Shakina’s brother, Jerry, worshipped Conrad as a god. As soon as dinner was over, all three boys went off to play video games and, like, fart and punch each other, or whatever dorky stuff boys do when they’re together.
Shakina and I went up to my room and talked about how we couldn’t find clothes that fit us. Whereas I could probably get away with an ace bandage, Shakina needed special sports bras that didn’t even work all that well, and she apparently had trouble with tops like I had with pants.
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