Throwing Like a Girl (2 page)

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. And it’s purple and green.”

“Purple and green?”

“School colors.”

“Oh, my.”

On Monday morning, my first day, I throw up and have to change the new shirt I bought the day before. I tell my mom I decided to wear something else, and she gets mad because we took a long time at the mall to find my outfit. I can hardly talk the whole drive to school, and when we get there it’s jam-packed with cars going every which way. Mom’s trying not to act annoyed, but I can tell by her mouth all straight and tight that she is.

I can’t see one other person my age getting dropped off by a parent. Meanwhile, we have this hideous blue station wagon
that’s been the family car since before I was born, practically. Each of my sisters drove it in high school, and when Becky suddenly needed a car up at college, my parents gave her the Volvo, the good car. Don’t ask me why. She bugged out about it, as if they should’ve given her a new car or something. And now, like some bad dream, I’ll be stuck with the Blue Bomber, which I swore I’d never drive in public, even with my learner’s permit.

To make this moment worse, my mother actually leans over like she’s planning to kiss me good-bye, and I say, “Mom,” with a very firm look, so she backs off.

“Remember,” she tells me, putting on a brave face, “bloom where you’re planted.”

Luckily no one’s near enough to hear this.

I give her a weak smile, climb out of the car, and feel for the first time how out of place I am in Texas. Is it my imagination or is everyone staring at me? At my short brown, curly hair. My pale skin. My clunky, winter, midwestern shoes. My camouflage backpack, which was cool back home, now clearly stands out as some kind of fashion emergency. Most of the girls are wearing short skirts and color-coordinated sandals, with painted toenails and silver toe rings. They have highlights in their hair and complicated updos that look casual but may actually require another person to perfect. I can’t believe how underdressed I am.

For a split second, I want to whip back into the car, duck down, and tell my mom to put the pedal to the metal. But I don’t. I swallow the bubble in my throat and walk across the quad to the headmaster’s office like I’m supposed to. His nice secretary hands me a schedule and escorts me to my first class—geometry, which is actually one of my better subjects.

The teacher, Mr. Milauskas, seems fine, geeky in that math-teacher
way, but nice enough to smile when I sit down in the only open seat, smack dab in front of him, to start my new life.

The rest of the day goes along. I get introduced in every class; faces turn to stare, but that’s it. Nobody leans across the aisle to make friends with me. It’s March; they already have friends.

At dinner my father asks, “Did you make any new friends?”

I try not to roll my eyes. “Dad, it’s my first day.”

“Maybe you could join a club.”

“Great idea,” my mom chimes in.

Parents are so out of touch.

“It’s March.” I state the obvious, the same thing I’ve been telling myself over and over. “Everything’s already decided.”

“Everything?”

“It’s practically summer, Dad. No one does anything now.”

And
hello
, I’ve never in the history of my life been a club-joining type of person.

“What about a spring musical? Do they have something like that?” my mom says, as she passes me the salad.

There’s really no response necessary.

At my old school you just had one big four-story building. There was the principal’s office, gym and auditorium, smoking area in the teachers’ parking lot. Simple. The classrooms had numbers, not names, and bells rang when the period was over. The lockers lining the hallways defined you: freshmen on the fourth floor, seniors on the first, like that. You had a place in the order of things. You knew where you belonged.

But Spring Valley Day School makes me feel lost from myself. For starters, it’s a campus with lots of low, modern buildings, gathered in a skinny oval: library at the top, athletic fields at the bottom, with the football stadium across the street. (The stadium has a parking lot, a snack bar, bathrooms, and lights for night games. It looks like it belongs at a college or something.) In the middle of the oval, the grassy, tree-lined quad is dissected by sidewalks that connect the separate buildings: lower, middle, and upper schools; arts and sciences; cafeteria; gyms. But the campus is top-heavy with its spectacular library, which overlooks a sweeping front lawn. When prospective parents like mine approach the campus from the long driveway, they gasp at the superior academic possibilities exhibited not only in test scores, but in the architecture as well.

The upper school classrooms don’t have walls, just dividers, and you can hear French during Spanish and world history during geometry. The headmaster’s secretary explained to me that it’s a progressive way of educating, so I nodded my approval, even though it’s totally distracting. Also, forget about lockers defining the internal hierarchy. Here, in the “progressive” upper school, you get cubbies painted in primary colors, like when you were in kindergarten, with all your private things on display and your lunch right out there for everyone to smell.

And then there are the peacocks, which happen to be the school mascot. Apparently the property used to be part of a peacock farm and real-live peacocks still roam the campus. The students seem to ignore them because they’ve been there forever. After my first few days, I’m starting to feel like a peacock myself—there, but not noticed, not yet. Which in some ways is a good thing.

By Friday, I’ve got a routine going. I don’t ride the bus or car pool with my nonexistent friends. No, not the new girl. I still get driven by my mother, who has been instructed to wait in the drop-off lane by the lower school for “vehicle flow” purposes. At least this way the only people staring at me are less than four feet tall and I can completely ignore them. Who’s the peacock now?

In P. E., my last class of the day, it’s just me and a few other girls who never change clothes because they’ve got some medical excuse for not having to sweat off their makeup. One girl has an inner-ear imbalance and hands the coach a note. Another has her period. The others, I’ve no idea what their excuses are. But since they’re off the hook, and the athletes at Spring Valley are exempt from P. E., I’m left with a group of boys who are in no way connected to sports or teams. And do not fit any mental image I have
of boys in Texas.

They’re just like boys I knew in Chicago, funny and self-conscious, smart and socially challenged, like me. We’re supposed to be in week four of something called lifetime sports—things like golf and archery and tennis—but the teacher, Coach Dixon, has us playing basketball, instead. We pound up and down the court, exhausting ourselves, while Dixon calls out corrections and the girls in the bleachers look at their nails or chitchat. It makes it easier for me to participate.

Dixon blows her whistle and we break. She walks up to me. “Hey, Chicago,” she says. “Where’d you learn to shoot hoops?”

I’m panting. “Uh, nowhere?”

Everyone stares at me, even the girls in the bleachers.

Coach sets up a jump ball. “You play on any team?”

I must’ve blushed because everyone’s still looking at me, and also this is about the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone since I’ve been here.

“No.” I shake my head. “I didn’t play sports at my school.” In a gym full of nonathletes, this makes me proud.

She tosses the ball up, and we resume play, throwing the ball back and forth, working our way downcourt, taking shots. “How come?” Dixon pushes.

“Too competitive,” I huff.

She blows her whistle and doesn’t say anything more.

“Watch out,” one of the guys says. “She’s recruiting you for the basketball team.”

“Yeah, and they’re not competitive at all,” another one adds.

“I’m standing right here. I have ears,” Dixon says.

It’s still well before three, but like every day this week, she lets us go early. We all help put the basketballs back into the hopper.

Dixon says to me, “You’re a good athlete, Ella. You should look into the sports program here.”

My insides sing.

As I approach the locker-room door, another coach comes out. “Hey, Dix,” she says, looking up from a clipboard.

“Addie. I want you to meet a new student, Ella Kessler. Ella, this is Coach Lauer.”

We shake hands.

Dixon says, “When are your softball tryouts?”

“Monday. Why?” The coach looks right at me. “Do you play?”

Before I can answer, Dixon says, “Ella just moved here from Chicago. She’s a natural athlete.”

“I’m new here, too,” she says. “To Spring Valley. I started a month ago.” She smiles. “So, if you’re interested, Ella, why don’t you come by the field on Monday. Three thirty. Two days of try-outs, and the team’ll be posted by Wednesday. Easy as that.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, because she makes it sound so simple.

I change clothes in the locker room and then stand with all the second and third graders waiting for my mom to pick me up. I have no friends. No place to go this weekend. The wind is so warm and dry here, like September back home. I close my eyes to imagine Chicago right now, where it’s still winter in the worst way—streets heavy with slush, the wind biting at your cheeks, your nose running, and your eyes tearing. Everyone rushes down sidewalks or stands on El platforms waiting for trains, just gazing out into the world, trying to think of anything besides the cold. I always loved winter, even when it lasted six months in Chicago.

And then some kid pokes me out of my daydream and says, “Hey, I think your ride’s here.”

I’m so sure.

My mother asks me the same questions every day. How’d you do? How were your teachers? Are the classes too hard? Do you have a lot of homework? It makes it easy not to talk about anything important. I just answer the questions and glance in her direction every few seconds. I don’t tell her about the softball thing, and how would she even know to ask?

But then, out of nowhere she says, “What else is going on? There’s something, isn’t there?”

We’re at a stoplight. She’s staring me down. It freaks me out.

“What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. You have a look.”

“A look?” I snort as I say this.

“Okay, you don’t have to tell me. That’s fine.”

And so I keep it wrapped tight in the palm of my hand all weekend. I fix up my new room, which has a border of daisies with little flecks of yellow. Kind of babyish, but not so bad. I hook up my computer so I can start I Ming Christine, Amy, and Jen and tell them how wrong they were about their predictions for me. I unpack my things and get completely organized with my classes. I spend half of a beautiful Saturday doing my homework and the other half arranging clothes in my very own closet.
The house is so big I get my own bedroom, and, best of all, it’s connected to my own tiny bathroom, where I can line up my lotions and shampoos on the shelf beside the tub and not have to share anything with my sisters.

Finally, on Sunday I get out and do something. My mom and I go to the library together, and while she’s getting a card and looking through new fiction, I sneak to the nonfiction area and page through a book on softball.

In general, I understand the game. My dad and I watch the Cubs all summer. I know about three outs and balls and strikes. I know where each position is, and I know that a mitt is also called a glove. I haven’t played since I was a kid, but I’m pretty sure I can catch and hit. Throwing might be a problem. So I find a chapter on mechanics, like catching a fly ball, fielding a grounder, swinging the bat, and pitching. Unfortunately, the section on throwing only talks about things like where to throw when you get the ball in the outfield and there’s a runner on first, for example. I guess they just assume you know how to throw the ball already.

My mom rounds the corner. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you.” She cranes her neck to see the book I’m studying. “Find something?”

I need to make a quick decision. If I shove the book back on the shelf she probably won’t ask about it again and I won’t have to explain that I’m trying out for a sports team. But then I won’t have the book to take home with me. If I tell her I’m checking it out, she’ll see it, and I’ll have to tell her everything. And she’ll be so excited.