Kate Christie (10 page)

“What, like twenty minutes ago?”

“At least I remembered. Tell your tennis babe I said hello.”

The line went dead.

I clicked back. “Jess?”

“Still here.”

“Sorry about that. Holly says hello.”

“She remembered to call?”

“Finally.” I settled into my bed again, reached out, and turned the lamp off. I wasn’t going to click over if my call waiting beeped again. My room was dark and cozy now, lit only by the glowing red numbers on my digital clock.

“You were saying something about the weekend,” she said.

“Is it a big game?”

“Not really.”

While we chatted, I closed my eyes and pictured her as I had seen her last in her low-slung Levi’s, white T-shirt and the inevitable cross trainers. I was beginning to think she didn’t own any regular shoes. Not that I had that many pairs of non-athletic shoes myself.

We talked about nothing for a long time. She told me what was on TV, which classes she had in the morning, what the score was in her last match. I told her what I’d had for dinner, which classes I had in the morning, what I was going to have for breakfast.

72 Kate Christie

Then she asked, “Are you still upset about the game?”

I thought about it. “Not as much. Holly always knows how to make me laugh.”

“Good quality in a friend.”

“Seriously.” I paused, hearing again the crack of bone splintering. I didn’t think I’d ever forget that sound. “I never question what I’m doing out there, you know? I’m a soccer player.

It’s who I am. But tonight I actually wondered if it’s worth it. I was sure she’d get out of the way. She just wanted to score so badly and I couldn’t let her. It seems almost silly now.”

Jess was quiet for a minute. “What did you decide? Is it worth it?” “It has to be,” I said. “At least for now. Without soccer, I probably wouldn’t be at SDU.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

In the dark, the sounds of other students audible through the thin dormitory walls, I knew she did.

A little while later, Jess said it was late, that she should go. I opened my eyes, surprised that the clock now read after midnight.

As I set the receiver on the hook, I imagined her turning off her television and heading to bed. She wasn’t far away, I knew, picturing her apartment from the street, light visible at the edge of the third-floor windows. For some reason, the image comforted me as I lay in bed alone listening to the faint thrum of my heart beating in time to the throbbing in my foot.

On Sunday morning, fall was in the air as much as it ever was in southern California, evident in cooler temperatures and a breeze off the ocean. I woke up at eight thirty and, still in bed, reached over and tugged on the window shade. It snapped up with a crack to reveal the perfect morning dawning in the courtyard. Yawning, I stretched my arms above my head, tightening all the muscles in my body and then releasing them.

For once, waking up on a Sunday morning, I wasn’t sore.

The day before at Dominguez Hills I had sat the bench in street clothes. Coach made us dress up for away games. For me, that meant khakis, collared shirt and Sambas. During the game, I sat as far from Coach Eliot as possible and listened to the talk on the bench. Coach had a habit of playing the same eleven starters throughout the entire game with very few 74 Kate Christie

substitutions, which left seven players on the bench watching game after game.

Turned out the younger kids I had never paid much attention to, the players I’d thought were quiet and retiring, were funny as hell. We were winning, and they kept the jokes and cracks flying, making fun of the referee and the other team and even our teammates. Each time Jamie Betz got the ball, a sophomore forward named Toni would begin a mock sportscaster’s voiceover, holding a water cup up to her mouth as a microphone, speaking just quietly enough that Coach Eliot, Jamie’s biggest fan, wouldn’t hear.

“And it’s SDU’s star forward, All-American Jamie Betz, with the ball. She fakes left, she fakes right, she fakes the defense right out of their sports bras. What do you think, Bert? Will it be another sparkling performance out of the SDU senior, All-American and Big Eight record holder? Or will she choke?”

A freshman whose last name was Whittaker and whose first name I thought might be Lisa leaned in with her own cup. “Well, John, it’s hard to say. My vote is, she chokes.”

Then they would look out on the field, follow the play, and finish, “And you’re absolutely right, Bert. She choked. But we can rest easy. Teammate Sara Alexander, All Region midfielder and team assist leader—all to Betz, I might add—doesn’t seem to realize there are nine other teammates out there! Betz should get the ball back for yet another attempt any moment now.”

“And speak of the devil,” Whittaker would chime in, “there she goes!”

The first time they did this, about ten minutes into the game, I pulled my baseball cap low over my eyes and slouched in my seat. What did they say about me? Probably called me SDU’s vicious center back who liked to literally bulldoze the other team’s offense.

Anna, the freshman backup keeper, was sitting next to me.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They think you’re cool because you don’t kiss Jamie’s ass.”

Good to know.

Watching the game from the bench, I felt tension and pressure easing from my shoulders. It was just a game, after all, Beautiful Game 75

and no one at our level was infallible. Even Mel, who had been all-conference for two years, let in an easy goal every once in a while. Jamie only converted one out of every ten shots. But when you were on defense and you messed up, the other team scored.

If you were on offense and you made a mistake, the other team just got the ball back.

As the game progressed, I laughed at the bench players’ jokes and cheered with them when we scored, which we did four times that day. And I enjoyed myself. I remembered why I loved the game as I watched our team outplay their team, the sound of the whistle and the slap of leather on leather echoing across the wide field, mid-afternoon sunlight warming the air.

Coach put the second-string in with fifteen minutes left.

They all made sarcastic comments about being excited as they shed their warm-ups, but I could tell they wanted to play. They loved soccer as much as the starters did. Otherwise, they wouldn’t ride the bench every game and still show up on time to every practice and put in the same amount of work the rest of us did.

Personally, I couldn’t imagine it. I might be low-key in the rest of my life, but not on the soccer field. I had played on only one team where the coach hadn’t started me, a spring select team in the high school off-season. The coach, a college guy named Tom, had never coached girls before. I was sixteen years old, burnt out from playing soccer ten months a year for ten years.

My timing was lousy, my clears worse, and Tom benched me.

One night after practice in the middle of the season, I stayed late intending to ask him how I could improve my game and regain my starting position. To our mutual chagrin, I burst into tears and demanded to know why I wasn’t playing, why I was sitting the bench, why he thought I wasn’t good enough. He reassured me as best he could, promising that I would see more playing time in the near future. Then we both practically ran to our cars. From that day on, I started and played the majority of every game at midfielder, where I couldn’t do much harm. My level of play was still lousy, but Tom didn’t bench me again.

At the end of the season my mother suggested I take a break from soccer. I resisted, so she packed me off to my aunt’s ranch in Colorado for six weeks, timing the trip so that I would miss 76 Kate Christie

tryouts and half the summer travel team season. At the time I hated her. Now I knew she’d been right. The next time I took the field, that August just before high school preseason, I was back. My skills and my timing and, most importantly, my love of the game were all stronger than before. Plus I had met a girl in Colorado who worked with my aunt’s horses, and fallen in love for the first time. Not a bad summer, really, even if the girl in question had ditched me for someone else shortly after I went home to Oregon.

Now, once again, I was taking a well-needed break from soccer, from the pressure and stress of the whole thing. Today, Sunday, I intended to relax and have fun hanging out with Jess Maxwell. I wasn’t going to think about soccer at all.

Which almost happened.

At eleven fifteen I pulled up in front of Jess’s house. Birds were singing and I could hear children screaming in play somewhere nearby as I walked up the driveway. The side door was open slightly, so I pushed it open and walked up the stairs, careful not to put pressure on my heel. The bruise was healing, but it still hurt to put all my weight on it. At the top of the stairs, I knocked on Jess’s door.

She opened it immediately. Like me, she was wearing a Tshirt and cut-offs, her hair trapped in its usual ponytail.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. “What’s up?”

“Not much. You ready to hit the park?”

“Definitely. Let me grab my bag.”

Down on the street, we strapped our bikes to her bike rack.

No need to take two cars, we’d agreed. I snagged my backpack from my car and slid into her front seat. Sunglasses masking our eyes, we drove off.

“No crutch?” Jess asked.

“I only used it one day. My foot’s a lot better.”

“That’s good. You barely look like you’re limping. How was the game?”

We talked about our Saturday matchups and listened to the Beautiful Game 77

Some Kind of Wonderful
soundtrack as we headed down I-5 south to the city. The album was one of my favorites, I had confessed to Jess when I saw it in her glove compartment.

“Me, too,” she’d said. “Put it in.”

We drove down the freeway, singing along with The Furniture (
You must be out of your brilliant mind
). It was Sunday, our day of rest. I munched on the bagel with cream cheese I’d picked up on my way over, and offered Jess a sip of sports drink.

But she had her own beverage, a bottle of iced tea. This was the life, I decided as we sped along the packed freeway.

The San Diego skyline appeared around a curve that passed between two hills. The airport lay at the western edge of town on a mass of land that bordered the bay. Huge jets, gliding beside the handful of skyscrapers that made up the San Diego skyline, hung momentarily suspended over the bay before touching down. They crossed over the city every ten or fifteen minutes.

Slightly disconcerting, I always thought.

We took the Balboa Park exit north of downtown and parked on Sixth Avenue, just up the hill from the park entrance. To the north lay University Avenue and the queer-friendly district, chock full of progressive bars and bookstores and theatres that occasionally showed queer films. In the off-season, I made it into the city a couple of times a month. San Diego couldn’t compare to San Francisco or L.A., but with the local LGBT community, made up of mostly college students, ex-hippies and recent post-college adults, the city had a friendly feel despite the conservative bent to the broader community.

On Sixth, we lifted the bikes down from the rack, tightened the straps on our backpacks and pedaled into the park. Paved paths led under trees and along the edge of a wooded cliff that dropped onto the highway far below. Mounted on our matching Treks, we circled the zoo, then stopped near the San Diego Lawn Bowling Association field where a group of elderly women, all dressed in white, were in the middle of a game. I explained the rules to Jess, who had never witnessed anything like it. We watched for a few minutes and then rode on. A little while later, Jess waved at an open green near Cabrillo Bridge.

“You want to lay out for a while?”

7 Kate Christie

I nodded. “Sure.”

We dropped our bikes on the grass and spread out an old sheet Jess had brought along. Warm from the sun and exertion, I pulled my sweatshirt off and made it into a pillow. Kicking my running shoes off, I lay down on the sheet and watched Jess take her own sweatshirt off. Her shirt crawled up, momentarily revealing her back and a purple sports bra. I tried not to stare too obviously at her impressive tennis player muscles. She was ripped.

I pushed my short sleeves up, tucking the extra cloth under the strap of my own sports bra. Time to get rid of that farmer’s tan. My legs were the worst—shin guards kept the front of both legs completely covered and left the back exposed, except where the strap circled the calf just below the knee. You could always tell a soccer player by her tan lines.

We lay on the sheet talking idly as the early autumn sun tracked across the sky. Jess kept sitting up to watch dogs and their owners playing on the green. A couple of times a dog came over to visit. Then I would sit up too and watch Jess play with the animal, scratching its head and rubbing its tummy and talking to it in a low, sweet voice. Eventually the owner would whistle and the dog would take off, with one last kiss for Jess and barely a sneeze in my direction. “You’re a real animal person,” I said at one point as a boxer she had been visiting with scampered off across the green.

“I love dogs,” she said, smiling as the boxer nearly tripped over the tennis ball its owner had thrown. “Sidney and Claire have a chocolate Lab named Duncan. I take him running every day in the summer, early in the morning before anyone else is up. They said I could have a dog upstairs, but I don’t have time.

Once I graduate, maybe then.” She glanced over at me. “What about you? Do you like animals?”

“I do, but my mom is allergic to anything with fur. My brother and I always wanted a dog, but it wasn’t meant to be.” I shrugged and lay back down.

“Too bad.” Jess plucked a strand of grass to chew on and watched me. “Wasn’t meant to be—does that mean you believe in fate?”