Forward

by Abby Wambach

  She is there, watching, on the day Mercy High School plays Massapequa for the state championship. More than playing for the U-18 team, more than earning a full ride to college, more, even, than identifying my sexuality, I see a state title as the pinnacle of my high school life. Winning will put my name up on a banner in the school auditorium, above my sister Beth’s. Winning will correct my faults and fill in my gaps. It will make my mother see past all the parts of me she wishes she could change, including the parts she doesn’t yet know.

  Before the game the entire team congregates in the locker room, listening to our coach conduct what she calls an “imagery drill.” We are to sit still and visualize how we’d like the game to unfold: picture the ball coming to you, and now you’re racing down the sideline, and now you’re crossing the ball up into the air, and now you’re heading it into the goal. When we finish we form a circle, hands clasping shoulders, scalps touching. Silently I acknowledge that my performance will determine the outcome; one mistake and the loss will be something I have to own alone.

  We play on field turf after a snowstorm, with a layer of slush still coating the ground. For the first sixty minutes the game progresses perfectly, as though I’d choreographed every move. I am playing better than I ever have, the ball kissing my forehead before it finds the net, and we are up 3–0 with twenty minutes left. Coach Boughton pulls me aside and tells me to play defense, and in my mind I think that’s crazy—playing not to lose instead of to win—but I do what my mother would want me to do, and obey.

  The minutes tick by: nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. Massapequa scores three goals in fast succession, and for the first time in my life the game slips away from me, operating on some plane I can’t reach. I see their winning shot with cruel clarity, soaring past me, past all of us, the scoreboard lighting up to confirm our defeat. My defeat.

  I sense myself growing smaller, my body curling inward, my elbows to my thighs, my head to my hands, my ponytail grazing the ground. I feel the sting of snow through my stockings, numbing the points of my knees. I am wailing, making a noise I have never heard, and it occurs to me that I have never before cried in public; I am terrified at the thought that my emotions might be recorded and judged. I don’t know how long I’m there before my teammates surround me, hoisting me up an inch at a time. My legs feel detached, moving without orders from my brain, and they take me to the fence, where I see my mother waiting, her body stretching out to meet me. She pulls me in close, her hands touching behind my back, and fits her mouth to my ear: I love you, Abby, she says. I love you.

  I relax against her, finally believing those words and feeling as though I’ve earned them. Seventeen years later, when I am retired and alone in my hotel room, the days slurring past without much direction or hope, it is one of the memories that sustains me.

  4

  TEAMMATE

  On the night before I leave for college, I sit with friends on my front steps until sunrise, sipping beer from Coke cans and finding shapes in the stars. I am eager to leave Pittsford, with its strict parameters and provincial expectations, with its ingrained expectations of who I am. For all of my eighteen years I’ve lived someone else’s version of me, and I need to create a new model—one I recognize when I look in the mirror, one whose skin lies smoothly on my bones.

  “Tomorrow a whole new life starts for me,” I whisper. “I don’t know when I’ll come home again.”

  It’s a prophetic thought: for the next eighteen years—the amount of time I’ve already been alive—I won’t be in one place for longer than a month. I remember the lyrics I quoted on my yearbook page, from the October Project song “Ariel”: The day is breaking now. It’s time to go away. I’m so afraid to leave, but more afraid to stay.

  I am ready to see what’s next.

  My mother has packed up nearly everything I own, leaving only my trophies behind, arranging each box in my new Jeep Wrangler with such tight precision that not an inch is wasted. My father struck a deal: if I got a full scholarship to college, he’d buy me the car of my choice. He angled for a BMW but I insisted on the Jeep, fearing judgments about arriving on campus in such an ostentatious car. He’s also offered to pay fifty dollars for every college goal I score, a significant raise from my high school rate of twenty-five dollars. They follow me on the nineteen-hour drive down to Gainesville, making sure we’re never separated by more than one car. I am exhausted from my late night, and a few hours into the drive I’m nodding off, swerving in and out of my lane. Insistent honking stirs me awake, and through my rearview mirror I see my mother waving her arms, flagging me to the side of the road. For the rest of the way we take turns, one of my parents driving my Jeep while I sprawl out on the passenger seat and close my eyes. My mother lowers the volume on the radio and shifts into fifth gear, working the stick with surprising ease. Wow, when did Mom learn how to drive a stick shift? I think, and I’m intrigued by the idea that she has secrets of her own.

  A few days later, at 5 A.M., I show up at my first preseason practice wholly unprepared. Over the summer Coach Burleigh had sent a packet detailing how we should condition ourselves, but I refused to put down the Coke and beer and junk food, let alone go for a run. My teammates and I gather at one end of the field and wait for the shriek of the whistle. If I don’t pass this fitness test, I won’t be allowed to play. But I am used to abusing my body without repercussions; it has never failed to do what I tell it to do.

  And I’m off: eight hundred yards in three minutes, around the track. I’m running swiftly, surprisingly fast for a big girl, finding my rhythm. Two minutes to rest and I’m only vaguely out of breath. Next up: a back-and-forth suicide run—six, eighteen, and sixty yards—in thirty-four seconds. Halfway through and I can hear my mother’s voice: I told you to go for a run, Abby. I warned you this would happen. The sun grows hotter with each inch it ascends, battering my scalp. A veil of sweat clouds my eyes. During the forty-five-second rest I inhale air so greedily it scythes a path down my throat. Oh my god, I can’t do this, I think, and then I’m off again, running four hundred yards in 1:25, both painfully present in my body and feeling as though I’m floating above it, a hapless witness to my own voluntary torture. I gulp only three hoarse breaths during the forty-five-second rest, and I order my legs to run again. Another 6–18–60 suicide, and my body begins to revolt, remnants of my last meal inching their way up my throat.

  And then a dreadful realization: it is only half over.

  I don’t know how I can do it, I can’t do it, I am physically incapable of running another step or taking another breath or stooping to graze the ground with my fingers, and then my body does something it never has before—it seizes control and speaks to my brain: I am not going to stop, even if you think I’m finished. You have so much anger inside of you, layers and layers of rage, each a different flavor. Feeling like a failure, feeling like a freak, feeling abandoned and unloved and unlovable, feeling like an “athlete” is your only authentic identity, a sum total far greater than all of your parts. Take that anger and use it now to make me move.

  My mind submits to my body and my body responds in kind; for once there is accord between them. I am gaining speed, overriding every scream and aching bone, feeling possessed by a demon I freely invited inside. Another four hundred in 1:25, another 6–18–60 suicide, another eight hundred in 3:15. Through those last eight hundred yards I vomit and piss myself the entire way, but still my mind feeds its anger to my body and my body absorbs it all, using every last watt of energy until they both, at once, order me to stop. It’s finished. I did it.

  I think I might die. I have never felt so alive in my whole life. I hide under my towel, fearful that if I look up to watch the goalkeepers I might never be able to step on a field again—and I have to, in just a few hours, for more drills and a scrimmage. One of my new teammates, Heather Mitts, sits next to me. I lift the edge of my towel to peer up at her. She’s a junior, two years older, with shiny blond hair and legs up to her armpits, and I su
spect—correctly—that one day we’ll be together on the U.S. national team.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I confess.

  She smiles, a quick flash of blindingly white teeth, and says, “Yeah, you can.”

  It’s a dare as much as an order, and I believe I can comply—as long as my body and mind are speaking to each other.

  Our team has twelve seniors, all of whom have been here from the beginning, when the program first launched four years ago. They become my surrogate family, substitutes for the older siblings I’ve left back north, and I am equally desperate to please them. My pedigree—142 high school goals, one of the country’s top ten recruits, named the high school player of the year by numerous organizations—is irrelevant on my new field. Unlike at Mercy, this team doesn’t depend solely on me. Raw talent is no longer enough, and I need to prove I belong on this field.

  Every hellish three-a-day, every scrimmage, every game is a chance to seize their attention. I score on a header in my very first game, a 3–0 victory. I credit my goals to teammates, insisting that without their skillful serves, I wouldn’t score at all. At a game in Connecticut, a male spectator begins harassing a teammate who also happens to be gay. “Hey, twenty-eight!” he yells to me, referencing my number. “Is number eight your girlfriend?” I deliberately kick the ball into the stands, a searing line drive that nearly collides with his head; he subsequently leaves her alone. I cheer everyone on as they run their suicides, sometimes literally pushing them across the finish line. I stay just fit enough to cross the line myself. Look at me, I think. See me. Notice me. Love me—if not for who I am, then for what I can do.

  What I want to do, what we all want to do, is find our way to the NCAA tournament, where we will inevitably meet the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, who’ve won the championship game fourteen out of the last sixteen years. Every time we play the Tar Heels they dominate the field, beating us four times over the three previous years. I have my own personal vendetta against North Carolina—in particular, its legendary coach: Anson Dorrance was the only one who refused to offer me a full scholarship (he offered a partial, a gesture that, in my teenage memory, was downgraded to the cost of a couple of textbooks). The Tar Heels are a dynasty, a fearsome Goliath that churns out stars for the national team with assembly-line efficiency, and I am determined to play a role in knocking them down.

  Early in our season it becomes clear that we have something; we are something, and we feel invincible in our cohesion. We beat teams the Gators had never beaten before: Southern Methodist University and Texas A&M and Vanderbilt, and as our first game against UNC approaches we see no reason for the streak to end. In October, in front of five thousand fans—including my parents, who attend every game—it does end, but barely. One of our seniors ties the game one-all in the eighty-sixth minute and forces extra time, during which the Tar Heels score. But this loss feels different, like it’s halfway to a win. It is our only loss of the season, and we’re hell-bent to meet the Tar Heels again.

  We do, two months later, in Greensboro, North Carolina, just fifty miles away from UNC’s home field. It’s our first time in the NCAA championship tournament, and just one game stands between us and the national title. We are ready, and within the first six minutes our captain scores on a free kick, soaring the ball over the head of the Tar Heel goalkeeper and lighting up our side of the board. The next eighty-four minutes are some of the ugliest soccer I’ve ever played, a ferocious stretch of hustle and vigilance and hurling myself at the ball, all 170 pounds of me tumbling forward and coming to rest on my face. Every minute stretches interminably, and toward the end, at the final TV timeout, Coach Burleigh summons us together for a huddle. We sling slick arms around each other’s necks and fidget, stabbing at the turf with our cleats.

  I look at my teammates, one by one, as if I’m back home in Pittsford at the dinner table, waiting for my chance to talk. This is the seniors’ time, their last shot, and I have been respectful of the team’s hierarchy, being ready when they need me and stepping back when they don’t. But no one is louder or more insistent than the youngest of seven, and I decide that they need me now, that some words are best said in my voice.

  Rearing my head back, I roar: “We are not fucking losing to these bitches!”

  When I lower my face I see everyone is looking at me. Coach Burleigh mentally discards whatever speech she’s prepared and says, “Okay then. Let’s go.”

  We run out, whooping and slapping palms, and when the final buzzer sounds my vulgar prophecy comes true: the score stays steady and we win. In that moment, buried beneath a pile of euphoric teammates, it’s so easy to trust that my voice will never fail me.

  5

  LESBIAN

  One night, at a house party, I debate how to tell my teammates that I’m gay. They suspect something, I’m sure of it; their whispers—not malicious, just curious—follow me into the locker room and to the bars after games. Once, after many rounds of beer, we start a drinking game: “Never have I ever.” Everyone takes a turn: “Never have I ever . . . shoplifted.” A few guilty parties take a swig. “Never have I ever . . . walked in on my parents having sex.” One girl cringes at the memory and chugs, eliciting sympathetic pats on the back. I’m next. Fuck it, I think. “Gay” is only one part of who you are, and you should be as vocal about that as you are about everything else.

  I hoist a can of Bud Light in the air and say, “Never have I ever . . . kissed a girl!” Within seconds I drain the beer and, as an exclamation point, crush the can in my hand.

  “I knew it!” they say, laughing, and move on to the next. I’m happy they accept me but I know I cheated the revelation, declaring my sexuality without actually saying the word.

  I still have my long blond ponytail, a vestige of traditional femininity I can’t yet bring myself to shed, and guys hit on me regularly. Early sophomore year, at an athletes’ party, one approaches me, pressing a beer into my hand. He’s imposing, six-two and about two hundred pounds, and he tells me his name is Are—spelled like the verb, but pronounced like the letters: R.E. For the next three hours, until every keg is kicked, we drink and talk and eventually conclude, with mutual delight, that we are the loudest, most obnoxious people in the room, and I think nothing of it when he accompanies me back to my dorm.

  We tumble onto the bed, our huge bodies filling the mattress, and lie chastely side by side. He twists his face toward mine. I recognize that look and realize I should clarify my position before he gets the wrong idea.

  “I need to tell you something,” I say. “This isn’t going where you seem to think it’s going. I like girls.”

  “That’s cool,” he replies, and from then on we are inseparable.

  I decide Are is me, exactly, in a slightly bigger body. He is my wingman as I negotiate my first “out” adult relationships. At a party early my sophomore year, I spot a girl with long dark hair and lithe, sleek limbs standing quietly in the corner. Her name is Nikki and she’s a nationally ranked tennis player. She knows all too well the pressure of being forced to perform, the feeling of hating the very thing that brings you love. We connect over our mutual determination to have a life outside of our sport, to be more than who we are on the court and the field. She is three years older than I, inching closer to deciding what she wants to do with her life, and before long I’m hoping, with terrifying intensity, that those plans will always include me.

  Our relationship reminds me that I need to tend to my life outside of soccer, and Are is a willing accomplice. When I’m not with Nikki or on the field, he and I are sitting in my dorm room playing video games and smoking pot and dipping Kodiak chewing tobacco, a nasty habit that develops into a lifelong vice. He is as competitive as I am and always up for a drinking contest. At Balls, our favorite campus bar, we shotgun one beer after another, punching a hole into the bottom of the can and swallowing its contents within seconds. The next day, on the field, I talk my body into performing and it complies with herculean resil
ience. During one game, I defy my hangover to execute what I still consider the best goal of my career, diving facedown and curling my legs in the air, scorpion style, kicking the ball in with my heels.

  I rationalize that I am not hurting my game, but rather helping it. My astrological sign is Gemini, and I have true twin personalities, always at odds with each other. On my right shoulder perches responsible, dedicated Intense Abby, serious about honing her technique and maintaining her fitness, always cognizant of her growing role as a leader on the team. On the left, whispering loud enough to fill both ears, is bad, rebellious Chill Abby, who argues, with skillful conviction, that if she lets soccer supplant every aspect of her being, she will not be able to play at all.

  Despite Chill Abby’s triumphs, my game remains intact and the honors accumulate: two-time SEC Player of the Year, two-time SEC Tournament Most Valuable Player, first-team All-American three years in a row. I’m on my way to setting a school record for goals, assists, game-winning goals, and hat tricks, and the national team coaches are taking notice. During spring of my junior year I’m selected to attend camp in California for the U.S. Under-21 team. There we scrimmage against teams from America’s first women’s professional league, the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA). At the end of camp I’m summoned to confer with Jerry Smith, the U-21 coach and the husband of Brandi Chastain, one of the stars of the 1999 World Cup–winning women’s team.