“He has it! He has the football! I can see it under his arm!” yells Liv.
Peyton claps a hand over her mouth and tackles her in the backseat, the two of them erupting in giggles. Melanie Jane and I exchange a glance that says “children.”
Liv whips out the camera again and begins narrating. “Chad MacAllistair has just entered Catcalls with the Football of ’76. Will he return? Will he stop to get a lap dance first? Will Liv’s undeniable craving for a Frosty keep her from finishing this video?”
It only takes her a couple of minutes to get bored and turn off the camera.
“My turn for questions!” She taps a finger to her face like she’s pondering one of life’s great mysteries. “I know! Let’s have the virgin talk. Who’s had sex before?”
“I’m waiting till I’m married,” says Melanie Jane primly. You can almost hear the judgment in every word.
Peyton fidgets in the backseat. “I had sex for the first time a few months ago.”
I glance at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes are on the floor. Liv wants to say something to her, I can tell, but she seems to change her mind.
“I’ve had sex with Trevor,” she says. “And only Trevor.”
She glares at the door of the strip club like she’s trying to laser beam Chad with her eyes from the outside.
I can’t answer this question. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I feel like someone tore away a piece of me without my permission. Does that mean I’m not a virgin? Maybe if I sit very quietly and don’t make any sudden movements—
“Ana didn’t answer! Spill! Spill!” Liv’s squeals from the backseat are gleeful. She has no idea what this question is doing to me.
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. What am I supposed to say? Maybe? I can’t say that because then I’d have to explain why I don’t know, and I can’t do that right now. I could just say no. Refuse to give any details. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. It’s just a one-syllable word, only two letters, but I can’t make myself say it.
“She’s a virgin too,” says Melanie Jane in a voice that says end of discussion.
“Um, okay, cool,” says Liv. And half a second later, “Oh! There he goes!”
All talk of virginity is forgotten. I mouth the word thanks at Melanie Jane.
Chad doesn’t have the football with him this time. We all know what that means, and we’re pinging with excitement as we watch him drive away. I make everyone wait ten extra minutes, during which I think Liv will spontaneously combust, before we exit the car. Peyton stares up at the building like it will eat her alive. Melanie Jane’s nose wrinkles like she can smell something the rest of us can’t.
I throw out an arm between them and the front door. “Hold up. This isn’t going to work. You.” I nod to Peyton. “You look terrified. They’re strippers, not vampires. And you.” I turn to Melanie Jane. “If you go in there with your face twisted up all judgey-like, they’re going to throw us out on our asses without helping us at all. Maybe Liv and I should go in by ourselves.”
“What? No way. We’re in this together. We all go.” Melanie Jane’s green eyes are hard, and I know from experience she won’t budge.
I sigh. “Fine. But try to smile or something—isn’t that what they teach you in pageants? And for heaven’s sake, let me do the talking.”
The girls adjust their faces, though to be honest, Peyton still looks pretty damn scared, and we enter the cement building with the painted-out windows. It’s so dark inside, we have to stop to let our eyes adjust. Clusters of chairs and tables and two stages with poles start to take shape through the dim lighting and haze of smoke. A few men in trucker hats watch a half-naked woman gyrate to Def Leppard. I begin to think the strategic lighting is a good idea. Not being able to see the years of carpet stains is a good thing. Not being able to see their faces is even better. There’s an all-day breakfast buffet. The bacon and eggs look and smell surprisingly good, and I’ve always been a big fan of brunch, but something about the combination of naked sweaty bodies and French toast seems unwise.
I squint across the room at the older woman wiping down the bar. I don’t mean old like playing bridge in the nursing home, but she’s definitely over forty. Which means she’s like 250 in stripper years. I think she’s who we’re here to see. I lead the way across the room. A man at the back takes apart our bodies with his eyes, and I wish I had on a parka. The woman eyes us as we stop in front of the bar.
“Are you here for an audition?” Her washrag never stops moving. “You don’t look old enough.”
“We’re not,” I say. “We’re actually here for something else.”
I take in the lines around her tired eyes, the leathery skin of her arms. It’s impossible to say how old she is. Whether time or sun damage or life or too many cigarettes has done this to her. I wonder if men were partly responsible. I wonder if that means she’ll help us.
“We’re looking for a football. We think a guy we go to school with just dropped one off.”
I feel like a complete and total fool until she says, “Maybe he did.”
“We’d—well, the thing is he—we were hoping—” I’m having trouble saying this in a way that sounds normal.
“We’d like you to give it to us,” blurts Liv.
The rag stops. “Why would I do that?”
Melanie Jane steps up to the bar. To her credit, any trace of judgment has vanished from her face. “Because the football team is a bunch of jerks.”
The girls fall all over each other, spouting off a list of injustices a mile long.
“They deserve to have to walk on that field naked at Homecoming. We just want a little revenge,” says Melanie Jane.
She seems very proud of herself. And the other girls were really very convincing. They wait, certain she’ll pull the football from under the bar at any second and hand it over.
“No,” she says.
They step backward in disbelief.
“The Ranburne team’s been coming here for years. I ain’t gonna risk all that business to help y’all out, even if that boy that just came in here is a snotty little pissant.”
The other girls are fading into the background. Muttering thanks and turning around and giving up.
I lean across the bar, lowering my voice to where it’s almost a whisper. “Ma’am, what’s your name?”
Surprise flickers on her face. “Destiny.”
“Destiny, that boy did something to me last year. Something you can’t erase.” I swallow down the tears building in the back of my throat. “And he didn’t give me a choice. Do you know what it’s like to have someone use you up and then discard you like a tissue?”
Her weathered eyes soften. She knows.
“Please.” I’m begging, and I don’t care. “I need this.”
She watches me for a moment before letting out the longest, saddest sigh I’ve ever heard. I swear I can read her whole life in that sigh the way fortune-tellers read palms. “Tell you what.” She reaches under the bar and pulls out not a football but a sheet of paper. “I’ve been paid to give the football to whoever finishes that list, so if you can finish it before they do, you can have it.”
I stare at the paper in front of me. The Ranburne Panther Scavenger Hunt. The other girls crowd around me now.
“We do everything on the list . . . and you’ll give it to us? You’ll give us the football?” asks Liv.
“If you beat the boys,” she says. She goes back to wiping down the bar like it makes no difference to her either way.
“Oh, don’t worry. We’ll beat them.” I clench the list tight in my fingers, and there is fire in my eyes.
She smiles for the first time since we entered the club. “I think you just might.”
RANBURNE PANTHER SCAVENGER HUNT
In Ranburne:
1. Fill a condom up with water. Draw a face on it. Put it on Principal Corso’s doormat, and ding-dong ditch. (One person)
2. The egg-on-a-string trick. Hang an egg from a pow
er line by a string and watch a car run into it. (Everyone)
3. Paint the David Bowie statue at Old Lady Howard’s corn maze. (Everyone)
4. Chair race through Walmart. (Everyone)
5. Get a picture of the team with the Ranburne Panther. (Everyone)
6. Go to the Dawsonville football field. Find that stupid rock they touch before their games. Pee on it. (Everyone)
In Nashville:
7. Visit the illustrious Delta Tau Beta fraternity at Vanderbilt. Have a beer with Panther alum TJ McNeil and take a picture of the legendary scar he got during a game-winning play against Dawsonville. (One person)
8. Go to LP Field and reenact the “Music City Miracle.” (Everyone)
9. Go to Centennial Park and jump into the pond behind the Parthenon. (Everyone)
10. Go to The Jackrabbit Saloon. Walk to the very middle of the dance floor and attempt to do the worm. (One person)
11. Go up to a girl who is totally out of your league, get down on your knees, and ask her to marry you. (One person)
12. Go up to a fat girl and tell her “You’re so beautiful . . . for a fat chick.” Bonus points if she throws her drink on you. (One person)
13. Hug a biker. Bonus points if he has a mullet. (One person)
14. Get a girl to give you her thong. (One person)
DARES REMAINING: 0
2:25 A.M.
ANA
Melanie Jane is frantic. “Ana, slow down! You’re going to get us killed!”
I ignore her. “We can’t let them beat us! We’re so close!”
I feel like I’ve downed about eight cafezinhos. Are the guys right behind us? Are they already there? We spent too much damn time splashing around in that water. And stuck in Nashville nightlife traffic. Now that we’re back on the highway, I fly. I don’t bother finding a real parking space when we reach Catcalls. I don’t bother checking for football players. Let the other girls worry about that. I race to the bar to meet Destiny, weaving in between dirty old men because things have really picked up since we were here earlier. Destiny is still there, but now she’s serving up drinks rapid fire.
“Did we beat them?” I’m panting and clutching the bar like a life raft. “Did we?”
She finishes the complicated drink she’s pouring with excruciating slowness. The lines of her face tell me nothing. That can’t be a good sign. She sets the bottle down, and only then do I see the hint of a smile. “You might have.”
“Woo!” I yell, causing every person in the club to stare at me. Oops. If there are any football players in here, I am screwed.
Melanie Jane elbows me. “Way to be discreet.”
I feel the blood drain out of my face. “Are there—?”
“Nope,” says Liv. “We already checked.”
Whew. I have a moment of relief, and then we are falling all over ourselves trying to show her the camera and list all at once.
“Whoa,” she hisses, her voice sharp. “Not here.” She gestures for us to follow her to a back room. Not the one where the strippers get ready. This one is more like a large closet filled with boxes of alcohol. “I don’t want anyone in there telling Ranburne I gave away their football. I’ll give it to you here, and you’ll sneak out the back. If you’ve done everything on that list.”
We show her our pictures and video, and she checks them off. I think she’s impressed with some of our changes. When she gets to the video of us in the pond, she nods.
“Everything seems to be here.” She pulls an old paper sack from behind a box of Jack Daniel’s. “I’d say you earned this.”
She drops the bag in my lap. “I gotta get back to the bar. Make sure to go out that way.” She points to the glowing, red exit sign.
I open the bag with trembling fingers. It doesn’t look like much—just a dirty old football. But when I think of the weeks of planning, and everything we did tonight . . . When I think of what it will mean to the Panther football players . . . The girls crowd in from all sides, laying their hands on the football as I hoist it over my head. Maybe it could be more.
We have done it. We have beaten the football team. We head to my house for our celebratory sleepover, stopping at Waffle House on the way because victory celebrations aren’t complete without carbs. Then we camp out on the floor of my bedroom. I’m trying to laugh and chatter with the other girls, but it’s hard. I thought this would feel different. Better. Instead, I feel like not a whole lot has changed. I tell the girls I’m going to get some water, but instead go to my backyard and curl up in our hammock.
It isn’t long before Melanie Jane finds me. “Can I sit with you?” she asks.
“Sure.”
I scoot around so I’m sitting sideways in the hammock instead of longways. She crawls in beside me, nearly flipping us in the process. After a few tense seconds, during which I think we might sustain head injuries, we’re able to dangle our legs over the side and stare up at the stars.
“You don’t seem very happy,” she finally says.
I sigh. “It isn’t enough to make them walk onto the field at Homecoming naked or have the shame of losing the game ball of ’76.”
“Well, damn, what do you want to do, light it on fire during halftime?”
I picture Melanie Jane blowtorching the football on the fifty-yard line as generations of Panthers look on in horror. I can’t help but smile. It doesn’t last though.
“No, I mean, it isn’t enough to punish just this set of guys. Yeah, it’ll suck for them and pay them back for what they’ve done to us, but it won’t change anything. What about the next set of guys? And their next set of victims? How do we change that?” I try to figure out the words for how I’m feeling. “I don’t know what I was expecting. It’s like getting revenge on Chad doesn’t mean as much since I never got any answers.”
She turns to look at me, and the hammock shifts dangerously. “What are you talking about?”
Telling ruins everything. “Nothing.”
“I don’t think I believe you.” Melanie Jane has these eyes that cut right to the truth. I feel like they’re giving me an autopsy right now. I also feel like, this time, letting her see my insides might be okay.
I start at the beginning and tell her everything that happened. I don’t leave anything out. To her credit, she doesn’t cry or hug me or do any other kind of sappy thing that people do when they feel sorry for you. She doesn’t interrupt me either. Not until I get to the part where everything went dark.
“So, I don’t even know if I’m a virgin.” I scratch a scab off my arm. “I guess he had sex with me because that’s what everyone says.”
“He didn’t,” says Melanie Jane.
I clench my teeth. “Yeah. That’s what the school counselor said too. She didn’t want me to ruin his chances at a scholarship.”
“No, I mean, I was there.”
If I was a different kind of person, there would be a swell of hope in my chest right now. I remember she took me home, after, but I thought—“What did you see?”
“I saw”—she can’t even say it—“what you told me about. But he still had on all his clothes, and his pants were zipped and everything. I freaked out. And he ran away.”
“I’m still a virgin?” The hope is real this time but fragile. It’s not like being a virgin is the most important thing. It’s not like I have these grand plans about it like Melanie Jane. But it’s my body to decide what to do with and when. And I thought that choice had been taken away. “He didn’t—”
“He would have,” she says, squeezing the threads of the hammock like they’re to blame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know enough to understand that you didn’t want to be there. I didn’t start to figure that out until later.” She looks so defeated. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She doesn’t mean it as an accusation, but that’s how I take it. “Right. Like you would have listened.”
“I know. I was a total bitch to you. But if I knew—I mean, if you had told me—it would have made all the diff
erence.”
I think about what I’ve learned tonight. “Yeah. It would have.”
Neither of us says anything for a while. Her hand reaches out to hold mine. But in a fierce way. Like our locked fingers have taken a stand against the entire world.
“What if we could do something?” she says to the sky. “To change things.”
“Like what?”
“I might have some ideas.”
11
Monday, September 28
PEYTON
“Did you hear what happened?”
“Somebody stole the Football of ’76.”
“Do they know who did it?”
“I don’t think so. The football team’s crapping their pants right now.”
Excited whispers follow me around school on Monday. They don’t know they’re about me. But they are. It’s more than the usual flurry over a good piece of gossip though. The air is laced with revolution. The football team may be idolized by our town, but that’s the problem with being gods. It makes everyone else a mortal.
It’s all anyone is talking about when I get to geometry. Coach Mayes can’t make us calm down, but a school announcement during the first five minutes of class shuts everybody up. Coach Fuller’s face appears on the television.
“As I’m sure most of you have heard, the game ball of ’76 was stolen this weekend. We here at Ranburne know this is more than just a football. It’s Panther tradition, an important piece of history. We are asking that anyone with any knowledge of the theft come to my office or Principal Corso’s office. We need to get that football back before Friday’s Homecoming game. It can be left at the office—we won’t ask questions. It is our hope that those involved will understand the seriousness of what they’ve done and that we will be able to put an end to this tragedy.”
Tragedy? Really? I think that’s going a bit far. You wouldn’t know it looking at the football players though. By their somber faces, you’d think our town had been the victims of a terrorist attack.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Weston hides his face in his hands.
The Revenge Playbook Page 22