by Score, Lucy
“I can’t freaking believe I’m doing this.”
Talking it over with my parents hadn’t helped. Neither had sleeping on it. The only thing that made any difference at all was the fact that I literally had no other options. I could take this job—and the adequate money it offered—and stay in town until the holidays. Or I could wallow in depression in my childhood bedroom, most likely ruining my parents’ Airbnb ratings.
So here I was at 7:10 a.m., I noted, checking my phone. I had my freshly printed team roster and the dozen orange safety cones my parents had surprised me with. Wondering how the hell I’d ended up back in the place that I’d felt the most self-loathing and disappointment.
I’d worked some shitty jobs since graduation. There’d been the front desk admin for the concrete company with men in dirty flannel who called me “sweetheart” all day. Then the community magazine that had suffered from so much drama the publisher had called in an HR consulting company to lay down the law before firing fifty percent of the staff. And let’s not forget the time I decided that working retail management was what I was meant to do. One Black Friday, and I’d turned in my two weeks’ notice.
But none of those jobs compared to how much of a dumb, insecure, loser I’d felt at Culpepper Jr. Sr. High School. Maybe it was the hormones in the milk. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t live up to the example my older sister set. Or maybe—and this was an even worse theory—I just didn’t fit here…or anywhere. Whatever the reason, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was queasy.
I was glad I’d turned down my mom’s offer of breakfast that morning. Because those burnt eggs poured from a carton would have been working their way up my throat right about now.
* * *
They arrived in minivans and sedans. Some driven by harried-looking parents, others arriving in clumps of gangly teenagers with driver’s licenses. We eyed each other in suspicious silence over the row of orange cones I’d set up four times before I was happy with the relative distance between each one.
I stared at the sea of ponytails and bandanas and general sense of disdain and let them look their fill. Diversity-wise, things had changed a lot since I had been in school. My sister had been the only “brown kid” in her senior class. It was comforting to see box braids and darker skin, to hear a Caribbean accent and some muttered Spanish. Central Pennsylvania was finally catching up with the rest of the world.
Some of the girls giggled, hunching over to whisper confidences to each other. Others stood tall and unsmiling, waiting for whatever athletic wisdom I was about to unfurl on them. One or two others stood off to the side, and I could identify them as soul sisters.
God help us all.
“I’m Marley Cicero, your new coach,” I said. I wanted to play it cool, maybe dazzle them with some fancy footwork. But even in high school at the height of my soccer career, I’d lacked fancy anything. I’d been a midfielder. An endurance player who never scored a goal and rarely did anything but chase my marks up and down the field. It didn’t take a lot of skill to just be a body in the way.
A hand shot up in the back. “What do we call you?”
The Asian girl and her artfully messy bun screamed Pinterest Princess. She was tall and confident. I couldn’t begin to guess her or anyone’s age. These girls were all in that nebulous twelve to twenty-four age range that I couldn’t identify.
“Uh. Coach? Marley? I don’t know. What do you want to call me?”
Mistake number one.
“How about Loser Lesbo?” an unfairly pretty brunette suggested. “No offense,” she said to the girl with the buzzed short purple ’do on her right.
“Angela,” Mohawk sighed. “You can’t use it as an insult to one of us and not all of us.”
Angela Bitchface rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’m sorry for my insensitivity, Morgan.”
“Apology accepted.” Mohawk Morgan nodded graciously.
Okay, team peacemaker. Good to know.
A hand on the left side of the pack shot up. She was very tall, very lean, and her hair hung in dozens of pristine braids down to her bra strap. Her skin was dark and impossibly flawless for a teenager. She was dressed in name-brand gear with her cleats and knee socks already donned.
“Yes, um?”
“Ruby,” she told me. “What are your coaching qualifications?”
How about the fact that I’m physically present? No? Not an actual qualification? Hm.
“I played AYSO from second grade on up and then JV and varsity in high school,” I told her.
“Nothing in college?” She didn’t look particularly impressed.
“Some intramurals.” That was a lie. Two games my freshman year didn’t count as a college sports career. By college, I’d hated soccer and the drama that came with it.
Ruby’s expression told me she was thinking that I sucked. And with my ego in this fragile state, I was inclined to agree.
“Look, I’ve never coached a team before. So I’m going to be learning right alongside you.”
Mistake number two. The eyerolls were audible.
“There goes the season,” Ruby complained.
“That’s the spirit,” I said dryly.
Angela muttered something about “another shitty coach” under her breath and the broad-shouldered girl next to her seemed to take it personally and told her to shut the fuck up.
“Well, regardless of how you feel about me, I’m here, you’re here. Let’s get to work.”
“Why bother?” a tiny girl with unfortunately large front teeth grumbled, arms crossed over her flat chest.
“I should have played field hockey,” another voice muttered.
They were testing me, I realized. I was the substitute teacher that got hazed just to see if she was really willing to send someone to the principal’s office. And these girls were nothing compared to the self-righteous whiners, the over-inflated egos of middle management that I’d worked with since college.
I remembered my soccer coach in high school yelling until the veins on his neck and forehead looked like they were going to pop.
“Enough chatting. We’re going to kick things off with a mile run. Four laps around the field. Anyone finishes over eleven minutes, and we all do it again.”
That shut them up. For four seconds.
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly. Everyone line up.”
“Aren’t you running with us?” Smartass Angela demanded.
“Shut up, Angela,” Ruby snapped back at her.
“Bite me, Ruby.” Angela’s expression was one of loathing. Great. Two varsity players who hated each other. Awesome.
“I’m the coach,” I said as if that explained anything at all. Hell no, I wasn’t running a mile. I was still sore from vaulting my parents’ azaleas. “Three, two, one…go!” Damn. I wished I had a whistle.
I considered it a small victory when they all left the starting line with only a few side-eyes and grumbled “asshole” comments.
Unfortunately, they were faster than I thought they were, or they were cheaters. But what did I care? I was just a temporary babysitter. Ruby crossed the finish line with a gazelle-like stride in six minutes and forty seconds. The next thirty seconds brought four more girls across the finish line.
Dammit. I could have used more time to myself to figure out what we were going to do next.
Ruby gave me an “is that all you’ve got” look, and I mentally added in another set of sprints. Take that, mean teenagers!
My attention was stolen from my sullen team by a line of short-shorted runners moving at a fast clip up the street that flanked the field. The boys were shirtless and sported zero percent body fat. My team stopped to admire them in hushed silence. They breathed as one. They weren’t separate bodies with different goals. They were united by breath and pace.
“That’s the cross-country team,” the girl on my left told me. She had glasses and a Nike headband. Her wild, curly hair was tamed in a tail.
There was
a lone figure at the rear. He was older, more muscular. Tattooed. Sexy AF, in my humble, depressed opinion.
Wait a minute. I recognized that face even under the stubble.
“Holy. Shit,” I breathed.
“And that is Mr. Weston,” Ruby announced.
“Mr. Weston? As in Jake Weston?” My voice creaked into screeching territory.
“Yep,” Nice Lesbian Morgan chimed in. “Why? Do you know him? He’s like seriously the best teacher in the school.”
“I…” What was I supposed to say? I’d kissed him under the bleachers at a boys soccer game, and then he’d ruined my senior year.
“I think I graduated with him,” I said lamely.
5
Marley
Exhausted already, sweatier than I should be willing to be in public, I dragged my ass into Smitty’s, Culpepper’s version of a pub. My t-shirt clung to me in wet, uncomfortable ways. I hadn’t even done anything. I’d watched thirty-two girls run a mile and some sprints.
I was beyond relieved when I noted the very small lunchtime crowd in the bar. I wasn’t prepared to pretend to ignore the whispers. “Showing her face around here…” “Ruined Homecoming…” “A disgrace to the entire town…”
No, that could wait. Besides, it was only a matter of time before I did something even more outrageous than ruining Homecoming my senior year.
“You must be Marley.” A grizzly bear of a man rose from a high top in the center of the bar. He had a lumberjack beard and a man bun. “I’m Floyd.”
He offered me one of his meaty paws, and I accepted. “Thanks for meeting me, Floyd,” I said, collapsing onto the stool across from him.
Floyd signaled to the bartender.
“My pleasure. I was hoping to scope you out before you started so I could figure out if I was going to spend the semester working with a weirdo.”
The bartender dropped a menu in front of me. “Drink?” he asked.
I steeled myself and looked up. Balding, some extra-long nose hair, knuckle tattoos. Whew. Complete stranger. Awesome. “Uh, yeah. A water and…what’s that?” I asked, pointing at the beer in front of Floyd.
“Lager,” Floyd answered.
“One of those, too.”
“You got it. Good to see you back, Marley,” the bartender said.
“Uh. Thanks. It’s good to be back,” I trailed off, not having a name to put with the stranger.
“His name’s Roger,” Floyd whispered conspiratorially.
“Roger? Do I know Roger?” I asked. High school was so far back in my rear-view mirror, most of those years were a blur of early mornings and unfortunate acne.
“Rumor has it you graduated a year behind him and hung out with his sister, Faith. He claims he could have dated you if he wanted to.”
“Roger and Faith Malpezzi? Holy shit!” Faith and I had been friends from elementary school on up through our senior year. Her brother had been a blurry, vague presence farting and scratching himself on the outskirts of our sleepovers.
“Time is not kind to all of us,” he remarked.
“Wait, I’m not supposed to know you, am I?” I asked. Holy hell.
“Nah. I’m from the Gettysburg area. Landed this gig out of college.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Whole town’s buzzing about you being back.”
I bet they were.
Roger returned with my water and beer. I thanked him by name as if I’d come up with it myself, and he offered a smile that was missing a canine tooth. I skipped the hydration and dove straight into the alcohol. So what if I had a second practice today?
“Is that so?” I finally asked, coming up for air.
He laughed. “Small towns, man. So what’s your story? I’ve heard that you got divorced and are running from your ex. That you got fired from a big important job for sexually harassing an underling. And that you’ve decided to come home to find a husband and plant roots even though your eggs probably aren’t viable anymore.”
“Glad to know things haven’t changed that much around here,” I groused. “It’s none of the above, by the way. I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. Culpepper is a pit stop.” I was claiming responsibility for the ending of my relationship with Javier though it had been a mutual decision—that he mentioned first—to go our own ways. That happened twelve hours before my job went down the shitter.
“Well, happy to have you even if it’s just for the semester. Otterbach was nice and all, but it’ll be fun working with the talk of the town for a couple of months.”
I wondered if it would be acceptable to order a second beer, then decided against it. My every move was probably being dissected and catalogued.
Roger came back for our orders, and I made an effort at friendly small talk asking about his sister. He muttered something about nieces and nephews and then wandered away again.
“So what’s it like being a gym teacher?” I asked Floyd.
He swiped his beer mustache away with the back of his hand. “Best damn job in teaching. None of that testing bullshit, no homework to grade, papers to read. Just hang out with the smelly little hormones and try to keep them from killing each other during gym class.”
Huh. That didn’t sound too hard.
“Okay. What exactly does the job entail?”
We talked shop about fall fitness, what to do with the pregnant students, how grading worked.
“Then there’s the less physically gifted,” Floyd waxed. “Every class has its annoying athletes. Everything is a piece of cake to them. Nothing challenges them. Then there’s the ones who stand in the corner of the volleyball court and pray the ball doesn’t come near them. I like to think of my job as finding the balance between knocking the piss out of the smartass athletes and giving the wobbly ones a little bit of confidence in their physical abilities.”
“That’s very Zen of you. So are there any teachers I should watch out for? Any students?”
“Definitely watch out for Amie Jo Hostetter. And the Hostetter twins. Those idiots are God’s gift to sports, but they are dumber than a pack of glue sticks. Amie Jo has a tendency to go mama bear on any teacher that tries to actually make them do any real work. She keeps an eagle eye on things at school and won’t hesitate to report anything she doesn’t like to the administration.” He shuddered.
Twins. Of course they were twins. I doubted that Amie Jo would settle for anything less.
“Wait a minute. She’s a teacher?”
“Home Economics and Life Skills.”
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“I shit you not,” he promised. “Is this because she stole your high school boyfriend out from under you?”
Floyd was remarkably well-versed in ancient gossip.
“Is that what she’s saying?” I asked wearily. How in the holy hell was I supposed to survive an entire semester in the same building as that banshee?
“She may have brought it up once or seventeen times.”
“I only accepted the job yesterday.”
He shrugged. “Word travels fast.”
“She didn’t steal Travis away from me. I broke up with him, and then she ensnared him.”
“Interesting. Very interesting.” Floyd stroked his beard.
“It’s not that interesting,” I countered. I needed to find a strategy that would let me fade into the background as a coach and a teacher. The sooner, the better. I didn’t want to be thrust into the small-town spotlight. I was going to do my time, collect my meager paycheck, and then move on. Maybe I’d finally find the job, the cause, the meaning I’d been looking for.
“I’m sure you’re up on all the Hostetter news,” Floyd said expectantly.
“Actually no.” When I’d left for college, I’d given my mother a list of people whose names I never wanted to hear again. Travis, Amie Jo, and Jake Weston’s names were at the top. And while she’d talked my ears off about everyone else in town, she’d honored my request. “I just realized yesterday
that they live next door to my parents.”
“Did you meet Manolo?”
“Who’s Manolo? Their butler?” I asked wearily.
“The swan.”
“Yes. I did see something that looked like a swan in their front yard.” I didn’t add that I’d then proceeded to flop over my parents’ azaleas and crash land.
“So, Travis took over the Cadillac dealership from his father. Apparently it’s very lucrative,” Floyd said, leaning in as if he were imparting secrets. “They bought that lot and tore down a perfectly good two-story to build their mini castle just so the twins wouldn’t have to wait at the bus stop anymore because—get this—the elements were ruining the boys’ hairdos.”
“That seems…extravagant.”
“Well, when you spend $200 per twin every month at the barber shop, I guess you’d look at it as an investment.”
I wasn’t big on gossip. I’d been the target of it enough my senior year that I didn’t partake as a matter of principle. Besides, what business of mine was it if someone was screwing their boss or taking long lunches so they could run home and spy on their third-shift husband to see if he was having an affair? However, this piqued my interest.
“$200 per twin?”
The air conditioning vent above me blew a steady stream of arctic air onto my sweaty skin, and I started to feel the chill.
Floyd nodded. “Every month. Rumor has it Amie Jo is pushing to give them both Escalades for their birthday next year. They both drive pimped-out Jeeps that they got when they turned sixteen. Milton is on his second one since he drove the first one into Dunkleburger’s pond.”
Swans, Escalades, hair.
I shook my head.
“It’ll be very interesting to see how you two get along at school.” He grinned.
“You seem like a guy who knows a lot about a lot of people,” I noted.