Training Ground

by Kate Christie

  Apparently Emma realized that, too.

  Slipping her arm through Meg’s, Jamie leaned into her sister’s side as they rambled on along the boardwalk, the sound of the ocean thrumming in her ears.

  #

  “I know it hurts, but what did you expect?” Dani asked.

  Emma gripped her hand tightly. “Do you think there’s any way to stop it?”

  “That’s not a question I can answer. Only she can.”

  The woman bending over Emma’s hip sat up and raised the magnifying lenses on her glasses. “We’ll be done soon. You’re doing fine. You should see some of the whiners I get in here. Grown men are the absolute worst.”

  Emma took a breath and peeked at the tattoo taking shape on her hip. It was actually really nice—clean, simple lines and small enough that no one would ever know it was there unless they saw her naked. Some of her regret faded. Maybe this wasn’t the stupidest thing she’d ever done. Probably, she already knew what that was. And like the tattoo, there was no erasing it now.

  “Ready to continue?” the tattoo artist asked.

  She nodded. “Go for it.”

  The woman winked at her and went back to work.

  “Have you heard from Jamie at all?” Dani asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you email her?”

  “Not yet. I don’t want to bug her at camp. She’ll be home Sunday.”

  Dani tapped her fingers against the chair she was sitting on. “Are you sure an email is the best way to handle this?”

  “No, but I doubt she’d answer her phone, and I don’t want to send her a thousand texts like her ex did.”

  She wasn’t sure Jamie would read an email either, but she couldn’t leave for North Carolina without reaching out somehow. Otherwise the next time they met—and she had a feeling they would meet again—it might be too difficult to get past what had happened.

  “Okay, but can I point out that this is what you did last time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You screwed up and then you blew her off. Do you really think she’s going to forgive that a second time?”

  Emma closed her eyes. “It doesn’t matter. I’m pretty sure she isn’t going to forgive me either way. I wouldn’t if I was her.”

  “Neither would I,” Dani admitted.

  “I really fucked up this time, didn’t I?”

  “Yep. But I still love you.”

  Emma was almost certain the same couldn’t be said for Jamie.

  The tattoo artist had lied. They were nowhere near to being done. The torture had to end eventually, though, and when it did, Emma found herself blinking back tears that had nothing to do with her damaged skin.

  “What do you think?” the woman asked as they all stared at the completed tattoo.

  “It’s perfect.”

  Dani nodded. “It really is.”

  “Can I see the necklace again?”

  Emma pulled the spiral sun out from under her T-shirt and waited while the woman briefly compared the pendant to the tattoo.

  “I think that’s it,” the tattoo artist said, nodding.

  They went over care instructions as Emma pulled her shorts up, and then Dani and Emma were leaving the cramped shop and walking back to Dani’s car.

  “Aren’t you glad I talked you out of the song idea?” Dani asked, nudging her shoulder as they strolled along Broadway.

  For half a second, Emma had kicked around getting a line from Pearl Jam’s “Wishlist”—the one about being the verb to trust and never letting someone down—tattooed at the base of her spine. Fortunately, Dani had convinced her that this was not the phrase she wanted to share with future significant others—or with her future children, for that matter.

  “I mean, is ‘Mommy is a lying liar’ really the aesthetic you’re going for?” Dani had intoned, eyebrows raised.

  Now Emma smiled sideways at her. “Glad doesn’t begin to cover it.”

  Her smile slipped at Dani’s next words: “Are you going to tell her about it?”

  She knew which “her” Dani meant. “I don’t think so. It’s not for her, you know. It’s for me. Besides, it’s more of a compass than a sun.”

  “Whatever you say, Princess.”

  Emma resisted the urge to smack her best friend. After all, they didn’t have much time left together before they both headed off to college. She couldn’t believe it was almost August already. Her post-high school life had seemed so far away for so long, and now it was suddenly, painfully close.

  Dani dropped her off at home and she wandered from room to room, looking for her mom or Ty. But no one was home as usual, not even the dog. It was as if her dad had been the sun they revolved around, and without his light and warmth to ground them, without his gravitational pull they were drifting away from each other. What a year. If someone had told her when it started that her father would be gone and she and Jamie would no longer be speaking, she wouldn’t have believed it. But here she was alone in the house on a beautiful summer day waiting for her new life to start without two of the people who had been so integral to the old one.

  By the time Sunday came, she had revised her letter to Jamie more times than her college application and senior honors essays, combined. After breakfast with her mom and brother, she went into the den and opened the text file to read through it again:

  Dear Jamie,

  I’m sitting here at my father’s desk writing this letter to you, and I can’t quite figure out how we got to this place. I know I’m responsible for what happened and that you probably hate me by now. You were my anchor when I was at my lowest, and I repaid you by using you to make myself feel better and then lying to you about what was really going on with me. But you know all of that. What I hope you also know is how much I care about you. You have been an amazing friend this past year, and I am changed because of you.

  Please believe me when I say that I truly regret how I handled everything. I don’t have any excuse, except to say that I am descended from multiple generations of Minnesotans, a people not known for our ability to process difficult emotional situations. Chop down a forest and tame a river, yes, but deal with our emotions? Oh, hell no. I’m only sorry I couldn’t figure myself out better before I hurt you.

  My offer to visit still stands, but I also understand if I’ve botched things beyond repair. Just please know I’m thinking about you. No matter what, I will always be grateful that I went for that first walk with you.

  Good luck with school and soccer. Our paths may be diverging now, but I still hope we might meet again someday down the road, and when we do, that we can be friends.

  Miss you. All my love, always,

  Emma

  She copied and pasted the text into an email, read it over one last time, and finally forced herself to send it. There. Now she had to wait to see if Jamie would respond.

  Too antsy to be by herself, she went back into the kitchen where her mom was cleaning up the breakfast mess. Wordlessly she picked up a dishrag and set to work on the detached bar while her mom washed the cast iron skillet she’d used for pancakes. Emma was wiping down the individual rungs of each bar stool when she felt her mother’s eyes on her.

  “What?”

  “Now I know something is wrong. Like mother like daughter.”

  Whenever her mom was upset about a dying patient or a bureaucratic administrator, their house became the cleanest place on Earth. She’d always said that scrubbing the bejesus out of things made her feel better, an impulse Emma had grown to understand better over the past few months. She may not be able to control her feelings—or even her own actions, apparently—but she sure as hell could control how clean the backsplash in her bathroom got.

  When Emma didn’t answer, her mother pressed. “Want to talk about it?”

  Emma balled the dishrag in her fist. “I don’t know.”

  “Might be more beneficial than destroying household cleaning items…”

  “Fine. But remember, you ask
ed.” She hopped up on one of the stools and rested her elbows on the bar. “It’s Jamie.”

  Her mom came and sat next to her. “I remember the last time you said that to me. I hope it’s not as serious this time?”

  “No.” She hesitated. Her mother had barely been home all summer, pulling double shift after double shift in a transparent attempt to literally work through her grief. She had lost weight, and her formerly fit figure now seemed gaunt. Emma wasn’t sure how or if she should tell her that. She couldn’t remember the last time they had talked about anything deeper than work, school, or soccer schedules.

  “I know I haven’t exactly been knocking the parent thing out of the park lately,” her mom said, drawing circles on the bar tiles with her pointer finger, “but I would really like to listen, if you feel like talking.”

  “You’ve been doing fine,” Emma assured her.

  “You don’t have to say that. We both know I’ve barely been getting by. I’m sorry your last summer at home had to be like this. I envisioned it going very differently. So did your dad.”

  “So did I,” she admitted.

  “What do you think? Do you want to throw your old mom a bone here?”

  “Again, pointing out that you asked for it.” And she launched into an abridged version of the past few months, starting with the kiss at the train station and ending with the email she’d sent out into cyberspace, uncertain if it would even be read let alone answered.

  When she finished, her mom steepled her hands and regarded her. “Did you really hurt your hamstring, or were you trying to avoid camp?”

  “It’s been nagging me, for sure. But I probably would have gone if the sixteens weren’t there.”

  “I wish I’d known that. I probably would have made you go.”

  “In the spirit of ‘you made your bed and now you have to lie in it’?”

  “Precisely. Although, I don’t know, maybe it’s better this way. If nothing else, you saved Jamie the pain of seeing you and Tori together. You do know why that would have hurt her, don’t you?”

  Emma bowed her head. “Of course.”

  “And you? How do you feel about her?”

  “The same way. But it can’t happen. Even before I messed everything up, it was an impossible situation.”

  “I’m going to ask you something and I want you to think about it. Is it possible you did all of this so that it would be easier to leave Jamie behind at the end of the summer?”

  Emma covered her face with one hand. “God, you sound like Dani.”

  “Dani knows about all of this?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Her mom blinked. “You’re serious about dating women, aren’t you? This isn’t about having a crush or trying something out.”

  “Yes, I’m serious. I thought you knew that.”

  Slowly her mom shook her head. “You told me, but I’m not sure I fully comprehended. I had crushes on girls when I was younger, too. I think most of us do. But you’re talking about something else entirely.”

  Crap. Emma bit her lip. Technically she was still a minor while Tori wasn’t. Would her mom cause problems with the federation? Could Tori get in actual trouble, as in legal trouble, for having sex with an underage teammate? Her mother hadn’t interfered when she told her she was planning to have sex with Drew her junior year. In fact, she’d taken her to Planned Parenthood herself and made sure she knew all of her options when it came to protection. But sex with a girl, apparently, was different.

  Her mom touched her arm. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m glad you told me. Genuinely. Actually, I’m thankful you felt you could after the way I’ve been missing in action lately.”

  “Oh,” Emma said, breathing a little easier. “Well, good.”

  “It’s apparent that you recognize your mistakes and you’re taking responsibility for your actions, so that’s a good sign. Now I guess you have to wait and see what Jamie wants to do.”

  “That’s why I suddenly felt the urge to clean,” she said, holding up the wrinkled dishrag.

  “I could think of some other work around the house…”

  Emma smiled. “That’s okay. I should probably start packing for school. Only fourteen shopping days left.”

  “Good point.” She paused. “What do you think about making a dorm room list and running to Fred Meyer later?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Emma said, and hugged her.

  Cleaning, working, or shopping therapy—in her family, staying busy had always been the prescription for a broken heart.

  For the next couple of days, Emma checked her email almost hourly, trying to distract herself with packing her room and planning for college while the email she was hoping for remained elusive. Finally, on Wednesday night after dinner when Emma checked her email for the hundred and thirty-second time since Sunday, Jamie’s name leapt out at her from the sender column. She had replied. Jamie had written back.

  Emma pushed back from her father’s desk and paced around the den, nearly slamming her shin against the awkwardly situated printer table. She’d heard her dad yelp and curse in here a hundred times, but whenever her mom suggested moving the printer, he insisted he liked it where it was. Now Emma paused to push it closer to the wall, sending her dad a silent apology. She knew her mother would never move the table herself.

  Distraction exhausted, she went back to the desk chair and sat down, staring at the screen. Then she clicked on Jamie’s reply.

  Dear Emma,

  I don’t hate you. You are one of the closest friends I’ve ever had, but for whatever reason, you did what you did and neither of us can change it. I’ve been tempted to rethink the entire past year, but I know that you cared about me, and you were an incredible support at a time when I really needed it. I’ll always be grateful to you for that.

  The thing is, though, I can’t be your friend anymore. At least not right now. Do you remember how I asked you what you wanted and you said you didn’t know? And I said maybe it was time you figured it out? Well, you obviously made your choice. I get why you picked her. I really do. I probably would have done the same thing in your position. I only wish I had found out from you instead of from a girl I didn’t even know.

  You said you still have hope that we might end up as friends one day. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about that. I guess we’ll have to wait and see where we’re at if and when the soccer gods decide to bring us back together.

  In the meantime, I hope you know that I wish you all the best on your path.

  See you-

  Jamie

  Emma scrolled down, hoping for a postscript or an attachment, but that was it. She read through it again, inwardly protesting Jamie’s version of events. She hadn’t chosen Tori over her. It wasn’t like that at all. In reality Jamie wasn’t available and Tori was. The older girl was attractive and confident and she didn’t even know Emma’s father had died. They didn’t know each other well at all, which was why, as Dani had said, she made the perfect first girl. Meanwhile Jamie had shared herself with Emma and Emma had opened up to her in return in a way she could honestly say she had never experienced with another human being. In the way that mattered most, Jamie was the true first—no, the only girl.

  Not that she would ever get the chance to tell her that now. The email was entirely unambiguous in both voice and content. At least if Jamie had still been angry with her she would have had something to work with. But Jamie wasn’t mad, and she wasn’t willing to try to fix what Emma had broken. She didn’t even want to try to stay friends.

  “Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  She pictured Jamie at home with her adorable family in their adorable house in adorable Berkeley, and the urge to pick up the phone and call her like she had a hundred or more times in the year since they’d met nearly overwhelmed her. It would be so easy. Jamie wouldn’t really hang up on her, would she? Then she remembered how Jamie had told her that once she broke up with Amanda, her feelings for the other girl had
shut off as if they had never even existed. Besides, her email was clear. She didn’t want phone calls, texts, visits. She didn’t want contact with Emma of any kind, possibly not ever.

  In the living room, her mother glanced up from her book as Emma entered. “Any word?”

  Emma nodded and opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She stared at her mother, eyes blurring.

  “Oh, honey,” her mom said, and opened her arms.

  Emma fell onto the couch beside her, burying her face in her shoulder. She was too old to be doing this, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. Jamie had closed the door on their past, present, and possibly their future, too. She knew it was unrealistic, but at some level Emma had still hoped Jamie would care too much to walk away.

  When she eventually managed to say as much, her mom stroked her hair and sighed. “That’s probably why she is walking away, honey. You said yourself it’s an impossible situation. Even if she wanted to try, how could you rebuild your relationship when you’re going so far away?”

  “I know,” Emma said, tears rolling down her cheeks. She wasn’t only crying for Jamie. She was also crying for her dad and her mom and Ty, for Dani and the other people she was getting ready to leave behind all so that she could do what? Chase a ball across a field? How could a sport mean more to her than everyone she loved and who loved her?

  But being a soccer player wasn’t, for her, only about playing the game. On her dad’s desk was a framed quote from Roger G. Ingersoll that read, “Reason, observation and experience—the holy trinity of science—have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so.”

  The happiest moment in her life so far was still the day years earlier when she had sat beside her father in the hot Pasadena sun watching Mia Hamm, Brianna Scurry, and the rest of the 1999 World Cup champion team inspire a nation, possibly even the world. She had already known that soccer was her life’s passion. But on that day, she’d realized it could also be her path to one day making others as happy and inspired as she had felt watching that amazing group of women achieve everything they’d set out to do.