Shutout (11 page)

“What are you worried about?”

“You. Conrad. Dominic. That's mostly it right now, though of course there's always financial stuff too.”

“Well,” I said, getting off the couch—the crappiness of the movie had suddenly made me exhausted—“you don't have to worry about me. I'm tough as an old boot, remember?”

“I know you are. I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you too, Daddy,” I said. I climbed the stairs to my room and got probably the best five hours of sleep I'd had in a week.

The rest of the month was weird, but not because I was grounded. It was weird because it was the first month in six years when Lena wasn't my best friend. She seemed to be best friends with Courtney now, and Duncan was always all over her, so I guess he was willing to wait until she got her phone back. Since this was the main reason she had been mad at me, you'd think she might've cut me some slack. But you'd be wrong about that. She wouldn't say hi to me or even acknowledge my existence in any way. Which really didn't make her any different from any of the other girls on varsity or actually about 99 percent of the CHS student body, but still. In spite of everything, I expected better from her.

The worst part was that for the first two weeks there was this gigantic Lena-shaped hole in my life. At least eight times a day something would happen that I thought I couldn't wait to tell her, or I'd find myself bored in class and I'd get as far as turning to a blank page in my notebook to write her a note
before I realized she wouldn't be reading any notes from me.

But then, as the days went by, the hole got smaller. It was definitely still there, but it shrank. I started to get used to having a life that didn't include Lena.

Kind of. In English class we started reading
Romeo and Juliet
, and we watched the movie and everybody got all gooey about how cool and romantic the whole thing was, and it seemed like Angus and I were the only ones in the whole class who weren't impressed. Also, I finally understood why Dad was pissed about being Friar Lawrence while everybody else got the studly fighting roles.

One day, after like the eighth girl had gone on about the beauty of tragic love, Angus finally spoke up. It was the first time he'd said anything in class outside of a small group, and everybody stared at him as he talked.

“You know,” he said, his voice kind of shaking with anger, which was weird, but okay, whatever, “the tragedy here is just that these two are idiots. Romeo doesn't have any idea what love is. He thought he was so in love with Rosaline until he sees some pretty girl at a party, and suddenly he neglects his best friend so he can be with a girl he talked to for five minutes. His selfishness and stupidity get Mercutio killed. Mercutio is literally willing to die for Romeo, and all Romeo can think about is some girl he just met. And then they kill themselves because they're too stupid and selfish to think about any of the people they're leaving behind.”

“Well,” Mr. Gordon said, “that's certainly a strong opinion. What does everybody else think?”

Everybody else obviously thought the kid was a freak, but
I was glad that for the first time somebody had put their finger on what bugged me about the play—that everybody feels bad for Romeo, when it's really a tragedy for his neglected best friend. I said, maybe a little too loud, “I agree.”

A couple of days later, I was walking toward the locker room when he came out of nowhere. “I wanted to say thanks,” he said.

I just looked at him. “Um. For what?”

“For havin' my back in English class. You know?
Romeo and Juliet
?”

I stopped myself short of giving a laugh of surprise that might have hurt his feelings. The kid was thanking me for two words I said in class days ago! “Oh. No problem. I mean, you were right.”

“Well, still, it was a nice thing you did. It was my brother,” he added.

“What was?”

“The dying young thing. He killed himself.”

“Oh my God. I'm so sorry. That's horrible.”

“I found him.”

“Oh God.” What do you say to that? Nothing else but what I already said. “That's awful.”

“Yeah. I thought I owed you an explanation. Since you told me about your mom. Anyway, I gotta go. I just wanted to thank you.”

“Any time,” I said. “I guess we're kind of in the same club.”

It took him a second to figure out what I meant. “Yeah,” he said. “Wish it was a better club.” And then he walked away.
I half expected this to mean he would start popping up in the hallways and talking about death with me, but he didn't. I saw him in class, and sometimes in the halls, but we'd just wave, and it never came up again.

We had ten soccer games that month, usually with zero members of varsity cheering us on. We went 7 and 3, which was, as Beasley kept telling us, an awesome record that anybody could be proud of. (I allowed an average of 1.25 goals per game, not that anybody kept track of that.)

And I guess we would have felt better about our record if varsity hadn't gone 9–1 over the same stretch. They were a completely awesome soccer-playing machine. Geezer was still screaming at them all the time, and they never looked like they were having much fun, but they really could play. Lena was phenomenal, more than making up for Stephanie LoPresto's deficits in goal. She had two hat tricks in that month. I'm not going to lie—it was pretty impossible for me to cheer for her. It's not like I wanted anything bad to happen to her; it's just that every time I tried to yell some encouragement, it stuck in my throat. Luckily, everybody on my team was taking notes on the games so they could have a hope of starting in the next one, so whenever Lena did something spectacular, I wrote in my notebook so it would look like I was just a really intent student of the game instead of an ex–best friend with a chip on her shoulder.

I took a lot of notes.

In week three of my grounding, I went to the more forgiving of my jailers and asked if I might be allowed to grab a
slice of pizza with Shakina. Dad said he thought that would be okay, and then he and Mom had a little fight about how he obviously didn't understand what being grounded meant.

But that's how I got to meet Shakina for pizza. It was such a relief to actually be able to talk to somebody I wasn't related to outside of school, especially somebody who wasn't mad at me.

It was hard not to compare Shakina with Lena. Shakina and I didn't have any kind of history together, so I couldn't just say “Mouse in the closet!” and have her remember how that happened in fourth grade. But on the other hand, we seemed to have more in common now than Lena and I did. We both thought all the boys in our class were doofs, we didn't want to go to parties and get drunk, and we would have been happy to stay up late watching stupid movies instead of plotting ways to sneak out and do stuff that wasn't really that fun anyway. The only problem was that I couldn't talk to her about Lena, because she'd just say what she thought, which was that she couldn't have been such a great friend to begin with if she'd dropped me so quick. This pissed me off because Shakina didn't know anything about the years Lena and I had together. But I guess it mostly pissed me off because I was afraid she was right.

Yoga was getting better and better. My heels definitely hurt less after soccer than they had in years, and if I still felt a little goofy doing some of the poses, at least I didn't feel goofy because I couldn't do it right anymore. I watched Portia, and I tried to be like her—tall, limber, confident, and beautiful—when I was walking around, especially before and after class.

I must have been getting pretty good at it, because when I strode out of the bathroom at Demarco's with my breath
connecting my body and spirit or whatever exactly it was supposed to do, Shakina yelled out, “Portia! Namaste!”

Then I cracked up and went back to being myself, all knees and elbows instead of one gloriously harmonious body of interconnected parts. Still, it was nice to know I could make the attempt. As we ate our pizza, Shakina said, “It looks like varsity is going to states.”

“Yeah. It definitely looks that way. Well, good for them. I'm not sure it would be worth it playing for Geezer.”

“Right? She is too scary. Anyway, maybe she'll retire or die or something and then Beasley can coach us on varsity next year.”

“That would be awesome,” I said, and Shakina snorted. “Well, I mean, not the lady
dying
, of course.” She kept laughing, and I knew I was never going to talk my way out of the horrible thing I had unintentionally said, so I added, “I mean, her dying would be cool, but I wouldn't call it
awesome.
”

Shakina answered, “Not unless she took a soccer ball to the face and it broke her nose and drove it into her brain and she died that way.
That
would be awesome.”

“You have given this way, way too much thought,” I gasped out between laughs.

I guess it was pretty sick, the two of us cracking up about some old lady kicking the bucket and practically choking on our pizza, but it was the most fun I'd had in a long time.

In the car on the way home, I said to Mom, “You know, Shakina's family is new in town. I was thinking it might be nice to have them over for dinner. You know, to kind of welcome them to the neighborhood.”

Mom gave me that “you're full of it” look. “You really have trouble with the concept of grounded, don't you? I guess you get that from your father.”

“No! What? I mean, I wouldn't be leaving the house, right? What is this, solitary confinement, where I'm not allowed to receive visitors?”

“No, Amanda, it's a punishment.”

“Mom. I lost my best friend. Don't you think that might be punishment enough?”

Mom didn't say anything for a while, and I hoped I hadn't overplayed my hand. I hoped she felt guilty about how Lena wasn't talking to me, since it totally wouldn't have happened if she hadn't called Rachel and squealed on us. On the other hand, I knew if she thought I was questioning whether she'd done the right thing, she would get stubborn and make sure I served every second of my sentence.

Finally she said, “Okay. If you give me their number, I'll call and invite them. So you don't have to go behind my back and ask your dad, which I know would be your next step.” I looked over at her and saw she was smiling, so I dared to make a joke.

“Mom! I'm shocked you would even suggest that!”

She snorted.

We had a game the following Friday, and Shakina's family was coming over afterward. It happened to be the last night of my sentence anyway, so I guess Mom felt like she wasn't letting me out of too much punishment.

And, in fact, I had forgotten that hanging around Mom when she's preparing to have people over is a kind of punishment. She goes into freak-out mode and cleans frantically and yells at us for doing the stuff we always do, like not cleaning out our cereal bowls after breakfast. Dad always manages to disappear when this is going on. He volunteers to go buy napkins or whatever, leaving the rest of us to participate in the hurricane of cleaning. I guess this is probably because he'd get it worse than any of us if he stayed home, since he's the biggest slob of all.

So Thursday night while Mom was whirling around the house, Dad found some errand that he suddenly had to do,
and that weasel Conrad volunteered to help him, like Dad can't carry napkins by himself. I got put on cobweb duty, which is really not that bad—I got to walk around with a dust mop and poke at all the corners—and Dominic was dusting.

“How come
she
gets to do the cobwebs?” Dominic whined. “I
never
get to do the cobwebs.”

“You're not tall enough,” I told him, and he stuck his tongue out at me.

The phone rang, and Mom called out “I'll get it!” mostly to stop Dominic from answering it, since after nearly a month of groundation, I had gotten used to the fact that the phone was a forbidden object to me.

“Oh, hi, Rachel,” Mom said, and disappeared into the kitchen. The kitchen where, it occurred to me, there were probably a lot of cobwebs that needed removing. I poked my way into the kitchen, but Mom retreated into the dining room, and all I got to hear was “Mmmm.” I mean, what does “mmmm” mean? It could be anything.

As it turned out, the kitchen was relatively free of cobwebs, but the dining room, well, now that probably needed some attention. It really did—every corner had a cobweb, and there were a couple of strands of web running to the light over the table, so I removed those. When Mom went to the bathroom, I couldn't pretend I had any cobwebs to remove, at least not while she was in there.

So I gave the hallway pretty thorough attention but couldn't catch any of Mom's conversation filtering through the closed
bathroom door. Why is it that I can hear Dominic, who needs to eat some fiber, grunting every time he's in there even if I'm two rooms away, but I couldn't hear anything Mom was saying?

Finally I gave up, finished the cobwebs on the rest of the first floor, and then sat down to watch some TV.

Mom appeared about five minutes later and looked at me with my feet up. I could already hear the speech about how this is your friend coming over and you have to clean up your mess, blah blah, so I said, “Mom, look, the first floor is spotless!” Mom looked around trying to prove me wrong, and when she couldn't, she flopped down on the couch next to me.

“Well, thank God.” She sighed. “Now we just have to keep your father and brother out of here until tomorrow night.”

“Out of this room?”

“No. Out of the house. The minute they come in, they start spewing shoes and dirty tissues and change and empty drink bottles. Do you think I could call them and tell them to get a motel room tonight?”

“Yeah!”

“I don't think it would work. Just help me yell at them, will you?”