The girl yelled in defeat and toppled on top of Lily, blocking her view and knocking the wind out of her. Lily couldn’t see but heard the crowd start to roar.
It felt as if the ball took an hour to cross the goal line, but as Lily fought to catch her breath, she was finally rewarded with the unmistakably sweet beep of the referee’s whistle.
Blue Bombers, 2, Cheaters, 1.
Vee ran over and pulled Lily to her feet, and the two friends jumped and hugged as their teammates and families celebrated.
Man, she loved this game.
chapter 2
The James family sat in rapt attention as Lily recalled the Bombers victory once again. That is, everyone except her little brother, Billy, who was busy constructing a garbanzo bean catapult.
“How many times are you going to tell that stupid story anyway?” he said from across the table.
“Hush now, baby,” their mother, Toni, said, patting his hand, oblivious to the weapon aimed at her only daughter. Billy smiled sweetly at his mom, then turned and stuck his tongue out at Lily. Her mother absently stroked Billy’s fire-red hair as he pulled back the thick green rubber band, lacing it through the tines of his dinner fork.
“How did you manage not to get run over by that goalie, sweetie?” her mom asked.
“I slid the ball right under her arm and ducked out of the way,” Lily answered quickly, hoping to defuse the worry on her mother’s brow.
“You could have gotten kicked in the face!” her mother exclaimed. “You could have wound up with a serious concussion!”
“Oh, she’s fine, Toni,” Lily’s father piped in from the kitchen. “Don’t get started.”
Lily smiled gratefully at her dad and nodded quickly to her mom, hoping she would stay calm. Most of the time, her mother was the best. She loved soccer and had even played a little in high school. Lily thought her mom had the world’s coolest job, an entomologist (an insect specialist), and when she wasn’t working, she spent all her time being super-mom. She cooked, she played, she took her kids places and was overall a lot of fun.
There were only two small mom issues. First, being a bug scientist and one of the world’s foremost experts on butterflies meant that her mom traveled a lot. Sometimes it felt to Lily that her mom was gone more than she was home. She would get emergency calls when the American snout butterfly swarmed parts of Texas or when a colony of rare silver-studded blues re-established themselves in a barn in Costa Rica. Her full name was Dr. Antonia Evangelista-James, and she made nature documentaries. Her friends and family called her Toni, but to most everyone else she was Madame Butterfly. She had an interactive website and a butterfly blog and even got on TV once in a while.
The second problem was bigger than the first. Lily’s mom was bit neurotic, particularly when it came to her two kids. She seemed to over-worry about everything. Lily was convinced this was because she had to leave for weeks at a time, so when she was home, she would jam-pack her love and worrying into a few fretful days. She made everyday molehills into catastrophic mountains. A cold was certainly pneumonia, a slightly twisted ankle needed a full twenty-four-hour regimen of the RICE treatment (rest, ice, compression, elevation), and a piece of dirt in an eye was conjunctivitis or, worse, a rare infection brought back from the Amazon. Since her mom was actually trained to live in the jungle, she knew how to self-treat most medical problems and loved to demonstrate her skills on her two favorite victims, Lily and Billy. Lily sometimes enjoyed the extra attention, but most of the time it was safer to just keep Mom calm. She and Billy shared a healthy F.O.M. (fear of Mom). “Sniffle at your own risk,” her brother liked to say.
“I think I see a little bruise under your eye,” her mother whispered ominously now, getting up from her chair. “Let me take a closer look.”
“Oh yeah, definitely, Mom. It’s way swollen,” Billy piped up.
Dad, Lily’s hero, tried again. “Sweetie, she’s fine.”
“That goalie didn’t touch me,” Lily offered, even though that wasn’t completely true. As usual, neither of her parents was at the game, a fact of life Lily had learned to live with, or at least pretended to.
“That was the game-winning goal, wasn’t it, LJ?” her father asked. “Wish I could have seen it.”
“Yeah!” Lily answered, relieved to see her mother sit back down but still staring at her closely. “There were like three hundred camcorders there. I’ll ask Reese’s dad.”
“Terrific idea!” her father said a little too loudly, giving Lily a conspiratorial wink. He turned to his wife. “So shouldn’t Pop Pop and Dina be here already? Hope their car didn’t die again.”
“Oh, you’re right, Liam,” Lily’s mom said, looking up at the clock. “They should be here by now. Let me go call.” Toni rushed to grab the kitchen phone. Lily relaxed and gave her dad a grateful smile. Worry transferred. Subject changed. Mission accomplished.
Pop Pop and Dina were Mom’s father and sister. They came to dinner every Sunday, rain or shine. It was a James family tradition and pretty much went the same way every week: Dad cooked something great, Billy looked for trouble, Pop Pop looked for food and Dina complained about having to take care of Pop Pop. Dina was Mom’s younger sister and not married. One night when she was supposed to be in bed, Lily overheard Dina saying she couldn’t meet anyone because she lived with an old man, but most of the family agreed Dina was still single because she was kind of rough around the edges. She was pretty okay looking, in Lily’s opinion, but had a bad habit of barreling over everyone and everything. She hardly ever said nice things like “sweetie,” “honey” or “pumpkin,” like Lily’s mom did, and you could hear her coming from three rooms away because she never walked: she stomped like she’d filled her boots with concrete blocks. Lily knew Aunt Dina was sweet on the inside, but somewhere along the way she seemed to have grown tough on the outside, like she had personality bark.
As if on cue, a pair of headlights pulled into the driveway.
“They’re here!” Lily yelled, pointing out the window as a small sticky missile smashed into her hair.
“Ouch!” she cried. She looked across the table to see her brother reloading.
“Is it your face?” her mother asked, rushing back into the dining room.
“No, it’s Billy, he’s shooting ceci beans again!”
“Billy, love, please don’t shoot your sister,” her mother said placidly, heading to open the front door. Imaginary wounds were always a crisis, but real projectiles were nothing. Billy was eight going on intolerable. If Lily said, “Don’t put your foot on my chair,” he would put his toe. If she told him not to come into her room, he’d reach an arm over the doorway claiming he wasn’t technically “in” her room at all. Lily ducked as her brother shot another bean across the table but laughed when this one bounced off her head and landed in the lamp fixture above the table. Sometimes Billy was pretty funny, actually.
With a thud the front door flew open and Dina came charging into the dining room, dropping her jacket on the floor and plopping a pair of dirty wet gloves on the table.
“Hey, squirt,” she said, sitting down with a clunk. “How ‘bout a little vino?”
“I’ll get it!” Billy said, jumping up from the table. Billy adored his unusual auntie.
“Sorry we’re late,” she said, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve. “Old man lost his dentures again and the darn car wouldn’t start. Such a piece of junk. I fixed it, though. So, Miss Beckham, how was the game yesterday?”
As Lily happily recalled the victory, Pop Pop shuffled in, grunting as he took his place at the end of the table.
“Hi, Pop Pop,” she offered.
“Brutta.”
That was the standard grandfather greeting. Lily knew that in Italian brutta meant “ugly,” which was really her grandfather’s way of saying she was pretty. It was an old Sicilian fear that if you talked too much about the beauty of a child, particularly a girl child, then the gods would come and take her away. So just
to be safe, every time he saw her, he would call her ugly. Lily wasn’t sure if she was pretty or not, but every time she was greeted by the word brutta, her shoulders involuntarily sagged just a little.
As usual, Pop Pop failed to notice the look on Lily’s face, seeing only his empty plate. He was the kind of old man who demanded to know what was for dinner before lunch was even over. He’d lived too long to wait for anything anymore.
“What? No food?” he asked gruffly, conveniently forgetting he was the one who was late.
And so another James family dinner was launched. Her dad had made something incredible as usual, which was no surprise since he was a chef who ran his own restaurant in town. He placed the food on the table just in time to stave off a meltdown from her grandfather. Tonight, it was chicken scaloppine, one of Lily’s favorites. Lightly floured chicken sautéed in a tangy lemon sauce with olives and capers over spaghetti. A rare silence fell over the table as everyone dug in.
In celebration of Lily’s goal, her dad brought out a giant tartufo for dessert, a beautiful dark mound of ice cream with nuts and fruit in the center, covered in chocolate. Lily looked around the table at her family and felt happy inside.
Her dad was smiling, her mom was home and had stopped looking worried and Lily had scored the game winner. She thought it was one of the best dinners they ever had, except of course when the garbanzo bean in the lamp started smoking and set off the fire alarm and Billy got sent to his room. Actually, Lily sort of enjoyed that part too.
chapter 3
A curious thing happened to Lily that Monday at Brookville Junior High. A few curious things, actually. For starters, lots of kids she didn’t really know or who usually pretended not to know her were suddenly offering high fives.
“Way to go, LJ!” she heard at least three times, once in the hallway and twice in the middle of a heated dodgeball game. Next, instead of the football team scores, the principal, Ms. Sawyer, congratulated the team on their victory and even mentioned Lily’s game-winning goal during assembly and over the loudspeaker. Then, to top it off, Tabitha Gordon passed Lily a note during social studies asking if she wanted to come over after practice. Tabitha Gordon was by far the most popular girl in the seventh grade. She played left fullback on the Blue Bombers, if you considered flouncing and falling as playing. Tabitha was slim and pretty in a Hannah Montana kind of way and was by far the richest kid in Brookville.
Lily James wasn’t popular, and her family was most definitely not rich. Her mom and dad worked constantly and were always fretting about money. Recently, when Lily complained she didn’t have an iPhone, or any cell phone, for that matter, her mother sat her down and told her they just couldn’t afford the things that other kids in her wealthy town could. She’d explained to Lily, more than once over the years, that she and Lily’s father had decided as a couple to follow their passions, butterflies and food, even if it meant always having to scrimp and save.
“Do what you love, and you will always feel complete,” her mother advised. “With or without an iPhone.”
Lily felt most complete when she was playing soccer and figured her mom might actually know a little something about life. But when Lily wasn’t on the field, she just felt average. She was the third-tallest girl in her class, which gave her about three inches on most of the boys, who hadn’t caught up on the whole growing thing just yet. Her hair was a mix of dark blond and strawberry, and she liked to keep it long. She usually wore a ponytail down her back or two braids, and during games one braid would occasionally whip around and smack her in the face. She liked to envision them as a distraction to her opponents. She had a gaggle of freckles on her nose which she kept track of in her bathroom mirror—sixteen at last count—but Lily thought her best feature by far was her eyes. They were a mix of green, blue and a slight yellowish-brown in the center. Technically, they were hazel. Her father called them “calico kitty eyes” and claimed to know how she was feeling by which color was dominant. Green when she was happy. Dark and stormy like a cyclone when she was mad.
Her mom said she was a fabulous mix of her dad’s Irish and her mom’s Italian blood. A perfect mutt. Lily wasn’t sure she liked canine comparisons of any kind but figured since it was Mom talking there was likely a compliment in there somewhere.
When it came to the whole popularity business, Lily calculated she fell smack in the middle of the cool range. She wasn’t unpopular or a total dork, like poor picked-on Milo van Leerden. Rumor had it he tried to read every Wikipedia entry and by the letter K had fried his eyes so badly he could no longer focus on anything that wasn’t twelve inches from his face. When the mean seventh graders weren’t ignoring him, they were stealing his glasses and tormenting him by holding up signs that read Loser, which, of course, he couldn’t see. Lily was neither loser nor tormentor. But she certainly was not among the top-tier kids, like Tabitha Gordon, who suddenly wanted to be her friend.
Lily was thinking about this exciting new development as she weaved her way down Hill Post Road toward the center of town. Hefting her backpack—the thing must have weighed forty-seven pounds—she thought, yes, something certainly was different today. Sure, she’d played a good game that weekend, but it never dawned on her that scoring the winning goal would result in so much attention. That had never happened before. She was one of the popular kids today—no doubt about it—and Lily had to admit she liked it.
A lot.
Caring what other people thought was new to Lily. For most of her life, she’d felt more than content in her little world, but recently, she was starting to see things differently. She was beginning to want all the things she never noticed she didn’t have: cell phones, RipStiks and, despite what her mother said, iPhones too. The change wasn’t going over too well at home: asking for pricey loot in the James house was inevitably met with frosty stares that would give polar bears shivers.
She spied her dad’s red restaurant awning at the end of the block and picked up the pace a bit. She loved the white cursive lettering that spelled out Katerina’s in long flowing letters and rolling the r in the name like a purring kitten, the way Vee taught her. Maybe the bag was only thirty-five pounds today. Popular goal scorers like her shouldn’t have any trouble carrying a bag with only thirty-five pounds.
Lily trundled quickly into Katerina’s, past the bar and the front dining area to the back office, adjacent to the kitchen. She cast off her heavy bag with a thud and heard a commotion coming from inside. Her dad and Tomás were at it again.
“You don’t need to put lemon slices,” Tomás said loudly, but with his thick accent and machine-gun delivery it came out more like, “Ju dan need topud leymon slighcess.”
“Sí, Tomás, that way they know there’s lemon in the sauce,” her father argued, his voice louder in any regular conversation with Tomás than even his maddest moment at home. Food just got him fired up.
“Too fanzy.”
“No, it’s not too fancy,” Liam said.
“Como quieras,” Tomás answered with disgust, dumping the lemon into the saute pan and walking away. “Iz jor cho.”
Lily realized they were trying out recipes for tonight’s dinner special. Spotting Lily, Tomás came over and gave her a big hug. “Hola, muchacha. Tu padre . . .” he said, then, trying to think of the word, knocked on his own head with his knuckles.
“Hardheaded?” Lily guessed, and Tomás laughed. “Sí! By de way, nice goal. Muy linda.”
“Gracias,” Lily answered, feeling instantly safe inside the warm kitchen. Tomás had been at the game over the weekend, but Lily’s dad had had to work as usual. Tomás was Vee’s father and her own dad’s right-hand man. The two men argued like enemies but loved each other like brothers. Tomás ran the kitchen, took care of ordering all the food and sometimes cooked when her dad wasn’t at the restaurant, which wasn’t often. Saturday lunches and dinners were super-busy. When Lily complained once that her dad was the only father to miss all the games, he’d tried to explain that weekends alone m
ade up about 30 percent of the business Katerina’s did all week.
Most afternoons, when her mom was working, Lily came to the restaurant and did her homework in the little office or kicked the ball around in the back parking lot with Vee. They’d been best friends for as long as Lily could remember, playing while their fathers worked in the kitchen. This was the place she’d really learned to love soccer. She and Vee would practice their skills or play pickup with any willing waiter or busboy. After-school afternoons were a never-ending USA-Mexico mini World Cup where the makeshift goals might have been garbage cans, but the passes were magic.
Vee and Tomás lived in the next town over, so she went to a different school, but after much begging, Liam had cleared it so Vee could play on the town’s travel team with Lily.
“Where’s Vee?” Lily asked Tomás now.
“Afuera, mi amor, where else?” he said, pointing to the rear door.
Lily sighed as Tomás and Liam resumed their bickering, this time about pepper flakes.
“LJ, you need to get all your homework done before practice,” her father called after her. “Be back in ten minutes.”
“Okay,” Lily answered with a smile, grabbing her ball and running out the door to the back steps. Her father gave her ten minutes every day but always let her have an hour.
Lily spied her friend. “How many?”
“Twenty-eight!” Vee answered. “A new record!”
“Awesome!” Lily said, joining Vee on the concrete below. “Let me try.”
The two girls juggled in silence, with only whispered counting as each tried to keep the soccer ball up in the air, using their thighs, feet, shoulders and heads. Occasionally, one or the other would shout out a number.
“Twenty-one!” from Vee.
“Twenty-nine!” Lily counted. “We’re getting closer. I heard that Landon Donovan can do like a thousand. Let’s try for fifty by the end of the week.”
Breakaway Page 2