Settle the Score (2 page)

“So then Addison went to the party as Taylor's brother's date, and Taylor flipped out,” Jessi told me as we walked to the cafeteria the next day at school.

I gasped. “No way! What did Taylor do?”

“She smashed a piece of birthday cake into Addison's face!” Jessi sounded shocked, but then she started cracking up. “And then Addison's dog started licking it off.”

I shook my head. Thankfully, these weren't people we actually knew. They were the stars of
The Real Teenagers of Beverly Hills
. I had missed last week's episode, and Jessi was filling me in.

“I wonder if Zoe's seen it yet,” I said. Out of all of my friends, Zoe was definitely the most into fashion. She tuned in mostly to see what the girls were wearing, but like us, she couldn't help getting sucked into the silly drama.

“We'll ask her at lunch,” Jessi said as we turned toward the double doors leading into the cafeteria.

Zoe was standing there, waiting for us.

“Hey, guys,” she said with her usual shy smile. “So, um, I just wanted to let you know that today I'm going to sit with Grace and Anjali.”

Grace and Anjali were Kicks too, but in the winter league they were on the Gators with Zoe.

“Gonna talk strategy for Saturday's game, huh?” Jessi teased her.

Zoe's eyes darted nervously around the hallway, not making eye contact with either of us. “Um, maybe a little bit,” she said softly. “So, see you later?”

Before we could answer her, she turned and jogged off into the cafeteria.

Jessi looked at me and shrugged. “Pregame jitters?”

I shrugged back. Zoe had been acting a little odd. “I guess.”

As we walked into the cafeteria, Emma waved at us from the table she was sitting at that was filled with members of the Tree Huggers, Kentville Middle School's environmental club.

We waved back and kept walking, looking for a table in the crowded cafeteria. Then we heard Frida's voice booming out from another table. “And then I told him he was blocking my light!” she said as her drama club friends laughed loudly.

Most days Jessi, Emma, Frida, Zoe, and I all sat together at lunch, but sometimes we split up. Today was one of those days.

“Devin!” I heard a voice yell my name. I looked up and spotted Steven at a corner table, waving me over. He was sitting with Cody.

“Hey,” I said as I slipped off my backpack and sat next to Steven. Jessi sat across from me. I pulled my lunch out of my backpack. Jessi was doing the same.

“So, how's the pizza today?” I asked. Both of the boys had cafeteria trays in front of them with half-eaten slices.

“Just like my mamma makes,” Cody said in a really corny, fake Italian accent. Steven and I cracked up, but I noticed Jessi was frowning, lost in thought.

“Jessi, what's up?” I asked, worried. She loved Cody's silly jokes, so for her not to have a reaction was weird.

She let out a sigh. “Should we be strategizing too? Zoe is, and so are Grace and Anjali. The game is in two days. I want to win!”

“Are you playing the Gators on Saturday?” Steven asked.

I nodded. “Yes, and if we beat the Gators, we'll be guaranteed a spot in the semifinals. If we lose, we still get another chance. But why leave things to chance? We need to win!”

“You'll win,” Steven said confidently. He always complimented me on my soccer skills. Now it was my turn to feel my cheeks blush.

“But what if you don't?” Cody asked. Jessi shot him an angry look. He held his hands up in the air. “Aren't the Gators good too? It could be anyone's game.”

Cody was right. The Gators
were
good. “Yeah, our record is pretty solid, but we had a loss to the Gazelles early on. If we lose against the Gators, the only other chance we'll have to make the semifinals will be our last regular season game against the Giraffes,” I explained.

“Zoe is talking strategy right now, and her coach called an extra practice,” Jessi said. She sounded stressed. “Demolition Darby needs to kick it into high gear!”

Jessi had nicknamed Coach Darby, the Griffons coach, Demolition Darby. Coach had a strict, no-nonsense approach to coaching. At first that had been hard for me to get used to. But I had been learning a lot from her about how to be more assertive on the field.

My thoughts drifted back to Zoe. She had definitely been acting weird around me and Jessi, and it was probably because she really wanted to beat us! And because we were friends, she felt uncomfortable about it. I wanted to win as much as Zoe did. But one of us was going to have to lose.

I sighed. “This is too strange, wanting to totally destroy your good friend's team!”

Cody shrugged. “That's soccer. It's a small world, at least around here. You get to know most of the players. We're playing against some of our Kangaroos on Sunday too.”

“And after we slaughter them, we'll be moving to the semifinals!” Steven joked. He didn't look worried at all to be playing against his friends, and neither did Cody.

Jessi nodded. “I guess all we can do is focus on playing our best at Saturday's game. That's what the Gators are going to do. We can't worry about anything else. This is soccer, and it's how the game goes.”

“Yeah, you're right,” I agreed. I felt better as I began to eat my sandwich, grilled chicken with avocado that my mom had made for me.

Just then Hailey, a new student at Kentville Middle School, stopped by our table. Jessi glanced over at me. I knew what she was thinking. When Hailey had first come to school, Steven had spent a lot of time showing her around. Time he normally would have spent with me. It had gotten pretty awkward, and I had even wondered if Steven and I were no longer friends. But once I'd worked up the courage to talk to him about it, everything had gotten straightened out. And now I was starting to get to know Hailey for myself. She was really nice.

“Hi!” she said cheerfully. Hailey had curly brown hair and a big smile. “So,” she said, looking to me and Jessi. “I know the winter league is winding down. Tryouts are right around the corner for the spring Kicks soccer season. Do you have any pointers? I really want to make the team.”

Jessi laughed. “Don't worry. All you have to do is show up. Coach Flores is a total sweetie. She doesn't say no to anyone who really wants to play.”

I nodded in agreement. Our Kicks coach was the total opposite of our Griffons coach.

“She wants to give everyone a chance,” I told Hailey. “But if you want, I'd be happy to kick the ball around with you before tryouts. We can go over some of the drills that Coach Flores likes to run.”

Hailey nodded. “That would be great, Devin. Thanks! I really want to be one of the Kicks.”

“We'd really like to have you on the Kicks too,” I said to Hailey, and I meant it. She seemed superfriendly and really excited to play soccer.

Steven looked up at the clock. “Oh man! Emmet's giving us another quiz today, right? I meant to study during lunch.”

“I studied last night,” I told him. After the earthquake, I had failed one of Mr. Emmet's World Civ quizzes, and I was not going to let that happen again! “We've got ten minutes left. I can help you.”

“Thanks, Devin,” Steven said, giving me the sweetest smile, and my heart did a little flip-flop. For the next ten minutes I didn't think about soccer at all, just ancient trade routes and how when the sun hit Steven's eyes, it looked like they were flecked with gold. Those ten minutes went really fast!

“Faster! Faster! You'll never be champions at this pace!”

I furiously dribbled the ball down the field, zigzagging between the cones set up for practice. Even though I had my hair pulled back into a ponytail, sweat was starting to pour down my forehead and run into my eyes. I hated when that happened!

A few hours before, I had worried that Coach Darby wasn't making us work hard enough. But boy, was I wrong. She was in full Demolition Darby mode. We'd been drilling at a breakneck pace for almost an hour now.

“Everybody drop where you are and give me twenty!” she called out, and we all fell to our knees as quickly as we could. My arms strained from the sixty push-ups we had already done today, but I gritted my teeth and did twenty more. I could hear a couple of the girls groaning, but I kept quiet. If Coach Darby even suspected you were weak, she would keep you on the bench. I had been benched by Darby before, and I was done with that. I wanted to play.

“Eight laps around the track!” Darby barked, and some of the groans got louder. This was the hardest she'd ever pushed us.

I jogged to the track, and one of my teammates, Katie, accidentally bumped into me from behind.

“Sorry!” she said, and she was smiling. “Darby's on fire today, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling back.

“She's burning up,” said Mirabelle, jogging up behind me. “But so are we!”

She held up her hand, and we high-fived. Then the other girls started high-fiving one another as they jogged. Darby was being supertough, but nobody was giving in.

I couldn't believe it. When I'd first joined the Griffons, we'd had no team spirit. Everybody had been really competitive—it had been every player for herself. That was why we had lost our first game. Then Jessi and I had started doing some team building exercises, and once Coach Darby had seen that we played better as a result, she'd let us keep doing them.

It had kind of felt like a miracle. After all, we were on a team with Mirabelle, who was a member of the Pinewood team, the Kicks' biggest rival. We'd had some issues with Mirabelle before, but now she was someone I could call a friend. Not a close friend, but a friend.

But things weren't perfect. There was one teammate who didn't want anything to do with team building, or even being nice: Jamie of the Riverdale Rams. During the Kicks' regular season she had actually tried to sabotage the Kicks so that we would lose! Jessi and I had been pretty upset when we'd ended up on a winter league team with Jamie. Even though we had put the sabotage behind us, it was hard to be on a team with someone who had no team spirit and hogged the ball whenever she could.

Even as we jogged around the track, Jamie didn't participate in the spontaneous high-fiving. She kept her eyes straight ahead. Her blond hair bounced in a ponytail against her neck as she ran, barely breaking a sweat.

There must be ice running through her veins,
I thought, which felt a little mean, but it was a pretty honest description of Jamie. I had even tried being nice to her, but she hadn't warmed up to me at all.

By the time I finished the eighth lap, my legs were starting to feel like jelly. It was a relief when Coach Darby blew her whistle.

“Gather round!” she called out.

All eighteen Griffons jogged up to Coach Darby. The last rays of the afternoon sun cast an orange glow on her spiky blond hair.

“I want to see everyone here at noon on Saturday,” she said. “One second late, and you'll be sitting on the bench. Got it?”

We all nodded.

“Get plenty of sleep the night before. No texting your friends all night, or whatever it is you do that makes you all look so tired in the morning. We need to win this game on Saturday. We
can
win this game on Saturday. But the Gators are undefeated. We've got to give them all we've got. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Coach!” we all shouted.

“Good,” she said. “See you Saturday!”

Then everyone started milling around. Some girls were stretching, while others collapsed onto the grass.

“Hey, everybody, I was thinking we could go out for pizza on Saturday after the game,” I said. “Win or lose.”

“Who says we're going to lose?” Jessi asked.

“You know what I mean,” I said. “We haven't gone out as a team in a while. I just thought it might be nice.”

“It's a good idea, but does it have to be pizza, again?” Kristin asked.

“Yeah, but it's our tradition!” Zarine pointed out.