Kate Christie (2 page)

Zodiac was a gay bar in the city that held eighteen-and-up nights once a week for the college crowd.

My smile turned sheepish. “I would, but she has to go up to L.A. this weekend. She kind of has to break up with her boyfriend.”

“Another straight girl?” Jake shook his head. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to have a posse of dissed boyfriends after you by the time we graduate.”

I was a little leery of that possibility myself. But I couldn’t help it that somehow I always ended up with women on the verge of coming out. I had going what my best friend from soccer, Holly Bishop, called the twelve-year-old boy look: short dark hair, delicate features, freckles, and small breasts that were just substantial enough to assure you I was in fact a nearly twenty-year-old woman. Straight women were always telling me how cute I was. I just smiled and went along with it. I was young, in college and playing the sport I loved. Even I knew enough to appreciate these years while they lasted.

A couple of days later, I was walking toward the gym for track practice when a red Cabriolet pulled up alongside me on College Lane. A dark-haired woman in sunglasses and a black sweatshirt leaned out the driver side window. Jess Maxwell.

“Want a ride?” she asked.

“Sure.” I walked around the car and hopped in, resting my bag on my lap. “Thanks.”

“No problem. You are going to the gym, aren’t you?” she added, smoothly shifting gears.

“I am.”

Unlike the cars of most college kids I knew, you could see the floor in Jess’s. It even appeared to have been vacuumed recently.

Only the back was slightly cluttered, plastic containers of tennis balls sharing the seat with a sports duffel, two jacketed tennis racquets and a backpack.

Beautiful Game 13

“Where’s the bike I always see you on?” she asked.

“One of my suitemates snagged it this morning. I’m Cam, by the way.”

She smiled a little, eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. “I know. I’m Jess.”

“I know,” I echoed.

We drove across campus, past brick buildings and under palm trees, the sun warm on our shoulders and bare arms. Back at home in Oregon it was probably rainy and fifty degrees. Once again I thanked my lucky stars I’d landed at SDU.

On the floor at my feet was a textbook,
Art: Context and
Criticism
.

“Are you an art major?” I asked, surprised for some reason by the idea.

“Art History. What about you?”

“Education.”

My father was a teacher, as had been his mother before him and her mother before her. My older brother, an extreme sports junkie, couldn’t stand to be indoors for any significant length of time, so it looked like I would be the one to take up the family educator mantle. In my intended future career as a high school history teacher, I was hoping to land a position at a school that needed a girls’ soccer coach. But that future seemed a long way off yet.

Jess downshifted to turn into the athletic building parking lot. The gym was only three years old, an impressive modern structure with a glass-walled atrium that spanned three floors.

“You have practice?” I asked unnecessarily as Jess parked the car. Of course she had practice. Tennis was a two-season sport, but spring was the “real” season—the most competitive tournaments took place during the last two months of the school year.“Yep. You work out with the track team, don’t you?”

“Just to keep in shape for soccer.”

Only five months now until preseason, that twelve days of hellish double sessions that strained every leg muscle until it hurt even to sit on the toilet. I couldn’t wait.

She reached into the backseat to grab her bag and a racket, 14 Kate Christie

her arm brushing mine. This close, I could smell her shampoo, a delicate floral scent that somehow didn’t seem to match the image she projected.

“Can you lock?” she asked as we both slid out.

“Sure.” I did, slamming the door a little harder than I meant to, and thought I saw her wince behind her shades. We stood facing each other for a moment on opposite sides of the car.

“Thanks for the ride.”

“No problem.”

Still we lingered near her car. The sun was out, hardly unusual for Southern California, and a slight breeze rustled the trees at the edge of the lot.

“How’s tennis going?” I asked. I knew the team was doing well, mostly thanks to Jess. Everyone was saying she would get All-American this year for sure.

“Not bad. We’ve got Big Eights up in San Francisco this weekend. Shouldn’t be too tough.” She paused. “I heard you guys did pretty well this season.”

“We made it to quarterfinals at nationals. And we hosted Big Eights earlier in the fall and ended up beating Southern State in the finals.”

“I know. I was at that game.”

“You were?”

I bit my lip, remembering how I’d nearly gotten red-carded in the finals. A tall forward I was marking had actually punched me when the referee wasn’t looking five minutes in, and the rest of the game had been a thinly veiled battle between us. Her, to mentally knock me off my game and score. Me, to stop her from scoring and take her down legally without getting called.

I succeeded, mostly. She never did score. But I got a yellow card midway through the second half for slide-tackling her from behind at the half line. I could tell the ref thought about red. A yellow card is a warning, while a red card gets you ejected and makes your team play down a man for the rest of the game. I’d gotten lucky that day.

Jess tilted her head slightly. “You kept picking on some girl on the other team. I thought she was going to have to be carried off on a stretcher.”

Beautiful Game 15

“She hit me first!” All at once, it seemed inordinately important that Jess Maxwell not think I’d instigated the fight.

My rule in soccer was simple: Never start anything, but finish everything. “Seriously. She kidney-punched me when the ref’s back was turned.
I
almost had to be carried off on a stretcher.”

“Uh-huh.” She raised her eyebrows again, and I realized she was just teasing me, pushing my buttons to get me riled up. If it had been someone other than Jess Maxwell, I would have sworn she was flirting.

“At least I never busted a racquet on the court after double faulting a game away,” I said slyly.

At one of the matches I’d attended the previous year, Jess had done just that despite the fact she was leading 6-2, 4-1.

She appeared to color slightly. “You saw that?”

“Your McEnroe impression? Uh-huh.”

“Guess we’re even, then.”

She took off her sunglasses and slipped them into her bag.

Then she smiled, and I noticed the coppery glint of her eyes again.

I checked my watch. “I should probably head up. Thanks again for the ride.”

“De nada. See you around, Cam.”

She turned away, and I did too a moment later, heading in the opposite direction. As I walked toward the track, I pondered the fact that her “de nada” had a Spanish lilt to it, which might have to do with her slightly darker coloring. Maybe she wasn’t as WASPy as the majority of the tennis players I had met in Southern California.

Curiouser and curiouser. Not only did Jess Maxwell know who I was, she seemed to want to get to know me better. I could dig it, I thought, only just stopping myself from skipping all the way to the stadium.

Whenever I think of spring semester sophomore year, I remember listening to Melissa Etheridge’s self-titled album on Friday nights with Holly, my best friend from soccer, shouting along with the songs while we drank Rolling Rock beer and got ready to go out to a party or check out the scene at Zodiac.

Holly and I had been inseparable since the first day of preseason freshman year. I wasn’t even sure why we’d latched on to each other at first. We were about the same height and build and we both had freckles, but there the similarities ended. I was dark-haired, fair-skinned and comfortable in faded jeans and hiking boots, while Holly was blonde, blue-eyed and nearly always dressed fashionably in the latest J Crew ensemble. She hailed from an L.A.

suburb, her family as different from mine as possible. Her father was a corporate lawyer, mother a stay-at-home mom despite the Beautiful Game 17

fact there weren’t any kids left at home, older brother president of a fraternity at UCLA. They were all blond and, far worse to my mind, card-carrying Republicans.

But Holly and I had been tight ever since that first day when we ran the timed two mile together and pushed each other to make it in under twelve and a half minutes and then walked off our cramps, barely speaking the entire time. She was the first person at SDU I told I was gay, and she was cool with it. She even said she thought she might be attracted to women herself. Now, a year and a half later, Holly had canceled her assorted catalog subscriptions, joined the SDU Democrats and was dating a woman for the first time, a junior who lived in her dorm and looked even straighter than she did.

I had dated a few different women since arriving at SDU—

Beth, an intellectual writer-to-be who lived one floor away my first semester on campus; Sarah, a beautiful redhead who lived off-campus and kept trying to get me stoned the previous spring; and Tina, a rower for whom sport came first. Most recently I’d hooked up with Elissa, the girl with the L.A. boyfriend, but she’d gotten way too serious way too fast for me. I was soon single again, and happy to be so.

Single or coupled, Holly and I reserved Friday nights for each other. Usually I would get dressed up in jeans and a collared shirt and swing by her dorm a couple of buildings away. There, we would blast Melissa and drink beer and get ready to head out. “Like the Way I Do” was our favorite song that year. As we ritually bellowed the verses, rewound, and bellowed the words again, I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. I was having a good time casually dating, but I had yet to fall in love with anyone in California. As my sophomore spring progressed, though, the feeling of something missing was overtaken by the sense of something about to happen. Maybe it was just the mood of springtime, of new life everywhere, but I felt as if I were on the verge of a kind of discovery.

In the weeks that followed that first car ride, I saw Jess Maxwell around campus only a couple of times in passing. By April, everyone at SDU seemed to have spring fever except me.

Summer for me meant returning to Oregon, going back to my 1 Kate Christie

job as a maintenance worker for Portland’s Parks Department, spending ten hours a day in my spiffy green uniform mowing lawns and trimming hedges. I didn’t mind the job really, and by living at home I could save enough money to support myself the coming school year. But sometimes I wished I didn’t have to work quite so hard, especially when my friends didn’t have to worry about their tuition payments.

My parents didn’t have a lot of extra money for school. My mom had stayed home when my brother and I were little and gone back to work the year I entered third grade. Her current position in development at the local university, along with my dad’s public school teaching career, didn’t exactly bring in big bucks. My older brother Nate, who was up in Alaska putting his obsession with the great outdoors to good use working for a Fairbanks outfitter, had gone to college for free at the school where our mom worked. Unlike him, I’d wanted to get out of Portland after high school. My soccer scholarship covered partial tuition but not room and board. That meant I could either hang in San Diego for the summers and take out extra loans, or go home to work. Kind of a no-brainer, I always thought.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to head back to Portland just yet.

The second week of April, I attended a home tennis match with Holly and Laura Grant, another soccer player. The three of us were always doing anything remotely athletic together. Laura, unlike Holly and myself, was totally straight and slightly clueless, even borderline homophobic at times. But the three of us had bonded over soccer as freshmen, a connection that seemed to transcend difference. Holly and I loved Laura, even if we wanted to strangle her sometimes. Whenever we all hung out together, there was an unspoken agreement that Laura wouldn’t talk about boys—much—and Holly and I wouldn’t talk about girls. Our conversations centered around our team, other sports teams, our coach, other coaches and soccer. Especially the inaugural Women’s World Cup we’d heard was slated to take place in China that summer.

The day of the tennis match, the three of us climbed into the stands during warm-up, picking seats near the court where Jess, the number one seed, would be playing. It was a Saturday Beautiful Game 1

morning, warm and sunny, only a slight breeze coming in through the hills. I could smell coconut suntan lotion in the air, a familiar scent at outdoor sporting events at SDU. I ran a hand through my still-damp hair. I’d gotten up around eleven. It was only a little before noon now.

“There’s Jess,” Laura said, adjusting her light brown hair beneath her baseball cap.

While Holly and I both sported soccer shorts and Sambas, Laura was wearing a tight white tank top and faded cut-off jeans shorts, bordering on the Daisy Duke variety. I’d noticed a couple of guys checking her out as we picked our seats, and thought again that if I didn’t know Laura, I’d probably have the hots for her myself. She was the consummate athlete, all muscle and energy. On the soccer field, whatever individual skills she lacked she made up for with determination. Laura liked to win.

“Didn’t you say you talked to Jess a couple of weeks ago?”

Holly asked me, raising a suggestive eyebrow that Laura missed.

I ignored the look. “Yeah. She’s pretty cool. Seems kind of shy, though.”