Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (25 page)

Lena had a funny relationship with her face. She wanted it to be beautiful, and she also didn’t. She looked at it with the desire to find some overriding flaw that would kick her from one category (beautiful) into another (not). And she also looked at it with the fear that she’d succeed. Either way, she usually didn’t find it.

It was like what Tolstoy said in
Anna Karenina
about all happy families being alike. Lena felt that all pretty faces were all alike—straight, even, regular. It was the ugliness, the sadness that set them apart. Lena couldn’t find that much objective ugliness in hers. But the sadness was apparent.

As she began to draw the outer edge of her cheek, she realized she had the look of a person who was waiting. Not impatient, not tortured, not frustrated. Just waiting. What was she waiting for?

The eight-thousand-pound elephant in the middle of her room snorted in irritation. Kostos, of course. The one who was always there while she studiously avoided him.

She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn’t going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn’t going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.

Release me
, she begged, silently, of her elephant.

She needed to be free of him. She needed to get on with her life. Maybe even to fall in love again. She had a candidate in mind.

It was easy to wish to let go of the torture and the heartbreak and the missing Kostos. It seemed easy, at least. But there was a catch. To let go of the pain, she had to give up the other parts too: the feeling of being loved. The feeling of being wanted and even needed. The way Kostos looked at her and touched her. The way her name sounded when he said it. The number of times he’d written
I love you
at the end of his third to last letter. (Seventeen—once for each year of her life.) And yes, she did still read those letters. Time for a full confession: She did.

It wasn’t the suffering she willfully clung to. It was the precious stuff. But the precious stuff attached her, irrevocably, to the pain.

She waited for Kostos to come for her. She waited for him to release her. She lived quietly, passively, at the margins of other people’s bigger lives: her father’s, Kostos’s. She took up the space they left for her.

She couldn’t wait for Kostos anymore. That was the thing she learned from the face she saw in the mirror and on her paper. There was one person who could release Lena, and Lena was looking right at her.

Beezy,

Call me, would you? These are for you, and they are full strength, so wear them well. (And carefully! I had to say that, Bee. I’m worried about you.) I am here. I can be there in a flash. Call me.

Love,
Len

I just need your star for a day.
—Nick Drake

B
ridget didn’t see Eric until late Monday morning. She felt like the universe could have exploded and cooled and spat out a few new galaxies in the time that had passed.

He didn’t look at her and she didn’t look at him. Or she didn’t let him see her looking at him, anyway. He was an avoider, wasn’t he? She hated avoiders. She hated being one. How could a person transform from her hero to her destroyer in so short a time?

The intercamp tournament began Monday. Because it was tournament week, she and Eric got off lake duty. This was the time of the summer when everybody lived and breathed only soccer. Eric and Bridget stopped needing to see each other.

By Tuesday afternoon, Bridget’s team had already taken their first two games. Usually she drove her players hard, but she was fun. Now she drove them harder and she wasn’t fun. She was vicious.

Eric’s team had also won two of two games. As angry as she was, Bridget had to grant that Eric was probably the best of the coaches. He was patient and he was intuitive, and he already had three years of Division I soccer under his belt. Bridget was considered by the other staff to be talented but unpredictable and inexperienced. And she had a few real cases on her hands. Everybody agreed Eric’s was the team to beat. So Bridget determined to beat them.

Maybe it wasn’t the most mature way to deal with her anger. But she had a lot of dangerous energy, and it was better used in soccer than in, say, operating heavy machinery.

So she knew her team and Eric’s would meet in the final on Friday. She spent every moment until then working on her lineup and her strategy. She had a few really fine players: Karl Lundgren, Aiden Cross, Russell Chen. She knew exactly what to do with them. It was a player like Naughton who required some thought. She scouted Eric’s team. She scheduled surreptitious meetings of her own team by flashlight in the woods after dinner. She took them on early-morning runs. She had to hold herself back from setting a crushing pace.

Three or four times in those days that passed, Eric looked up at her and waved or tried to catch her eye. She kept her head down. She wasn’t going to hope anymore.

Thursday night, she found the Traveling Pants bundled up inside a Jiffy bag in her mail cubby with a note from Lena. She was in business.

Friday morning she got up at five. She was too preoccupied to sleep. She put on her team’s blue jersey. She brushed her hair and wore it down. As an afterthought she applied mascara and a little blue eye shadow. The color matched her eyes, her Pants, her mood, and her jersey. Team spirit and all.

She went outside to consult her notebook in the streams of first sunlight that crept across the ground. She was still stuck on Naughton. Everybody deserved a chance. Everybody had something to give.

In a fit of inspiration, she went to his cabin and woke him up. “Get dressed and meet me at the south field,” she told him. He had a hopeful look about him, which she suspected related to something other than soccer. “
Naughty.
Nothing like that. I need to figure out what to do with you.” He knew he was an unconventional player. If he didn’t, he should have.

When he got out on the field she ordered him into the goal. In one way, Eric had been right. Naughty’s deficits made him a terrible choice for goalie. But on the other hand, there was something about him….

“Ready?” she called lining up with the ball fifteen or so yards out from the goal. She kicked one straight at him, hard but not very hard. He moved away from it and fumbled the ball with his hands, allowing it into the box. His big feet weren’t good and his hands were worse. She wondered why he’d stuck with soccer since first grade, as he’d proudly told her that he had.

“Let’s try another one.” He threw her the ball and she stopped it neatly with her foot. She tried several more straight shots on goal. He couldn’t just stand there and catch a ball coming right at him. He felt the need to move. He screwed it up almost every time.

She decided to try out her theory. She stood farther back and gave herself a little room to run. She kicked the ball hard, sent it sailing right into the top left corner of the goal. She watched in amazement and also satisfaction as his body took off in the direction of the ball. He leaped high, and with arms outstretched, he caught it. “Wow. Nice,” she called out.

Inside she was screaming, but she didn’t want to make a big deal.

She sent him several more hard, angled shots and he pulled each of them down. He couldn’t tend goal when it meant just standing there. He couldn’t be given any time to think, or his mind sabotaged him completely. But he could move. He had a remarkable, almost spooky sense for where the ball was going to be, and the faster it came, the farther away it was, the more impressive his ability.

On her final shots, she actually challenged herself to get one past him. Only her last and finest shot made it into the goal.

She went over to him and shook his hand. She smacked him hard on the back. “Naughty, you have something. I don’t know what it is, but it is something.”

“You look amazing,” Tibby said, sitting across from Christina at the small table in their kitchen. Christina bowed her head modestly. She peeked proudly at her baby. It would appear that she felt amazing too.

“I am lucky, is what it is,” Christina said, hiking the baby up a little in her arms. “But Tibby, listen.” Christina cast her eyes at the closed door. “I wanted it to be just the two of us”—she paused and glanced at the baby—“well, the three of us—for a few minutes, because I wanted to ask you something. It’s kind of serious, and you don’t need to say yes and you don’t even need to answer right away.”

“Okay.” Tibby couldn’t help feeling a little nervous. “You aren’t going to ask me to be your labor coach again, are you?”

Christina snorted so loud in her laughter that the baby startled. “No. I promise.”

Tibby laughed too.

“Not that you weren’t everything I needed,” Christina said more seriously. “You were.” Her eyes looked perilously shiny, and Tibby felt her own eyes getting like that too.

“I wanted to ask if you would be the baby’s godmother.”

Tibby’s eyes widened.

“I know it sounds heavy, but it doesn’t need to be. You played a special role in his life already. I want to acknowledge that. I’d love to think you would continue to share your life with him a little.”

Tibby didn’t need to think. “I’d love to.”

“Seriously?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Great.”

“Do I need to offer religious guidance?” Tibby asked with some trepidation.

Christina shook her head. “No, no. Teach him filmmaking. Or teach him about cars. Take him to movies I won’t let him see.”

Tibby nodded. She liked this idea. “God, wait till I tell my parents,” she said joyfully. “I’m a teenage single mother.”

Christina’s laughter came out in a snort again, but the baby didn’t notice this time.

Carmen appeared at the door. She was wearing a tangerine sundress and her skin was tanned and glossy.

“So what did she say?” Carmen demanded.

Christina beamed. “She said yes.”

“Congratulations to all three of you,” Carmen said.

“Thanks. And where are you going, Miss Gorgeous?” Tibby asked.

“She’s going out with Win.” Christina looked as happy as if it had been her own date. “Have you met him yet?”

Tibby shook her head. “I can’t wait to. So what’s he like?” she asked.

Carmen pointed to her pink, wrinkly little spud of a brother. “Well, he’s no Ryan Breckman….”

The championship game was a long, fierce defensive grind. By late in the second half, both teams were exhausted. It was soccer’s version of the rope-a-dope. Bridget put her best and brightest on defense. She did virtually nothing on offense. Even Naughty got some playing time at center forward. She kept Mikey Rosen in the goal. He was balanced and competent. On regular and even on good shots, he didn’t mess up. And anyway, her defense was so strong and so psyched up, she didn’t think his job would be all-important.

The thing was, she wasn’t coaching her team for the win. Not yet. That made her strategy simpler. She was going for a tie of the 0–0 variety. Her team did not grasp exactly why this was so, but they trusted her.

“Defense,” she said to her subs. “Defense,” she said to every player every time she opened her mouth. “Defense!” she screamed at the top of her lungs when any ball passed centerfield. She was single-minded.
“Non passerat,”
she muttered to them. Sometimes it was easier to concentrate fully and completely on one clear objective.

She paced her sideline and Eric paced his. He saw what she was doing, but he couldn’t figure out why. She liked him confused. He needed to change his strategy to fit hers, and it put his team a little off their game, just as she had hoped it would.

The final whistle passed the verdict she’d hoped for: tied at zero. Now they just had to gut it out through the overtime, to prevent the Golden Goal.

The entire camp had gathered on the sidelines by this point. They were screaming for blood. It was frustrating to watch this long without a single goal. Without even a particularly thrilling attempt on goal.

She pulled her team close around her. All eyes stayed locked on hers. As a coach, this was just what she wanted: to feel totally attached and in sync with each of her players. Her intensity was catching. She didn’t need to make a big speech. She just held their eyes. “Zero,” she said in a whisper. “Can you do it?”

They shouted and yelled and spilled back onto the field.

Amid all the yelling and bullying from the fans, her team stayed the course throughout the extra time. No heroics. They played hard, gritty defense. They made their coach proud.

Another whistle signaled the end of the game and the beginning of the shootout to determine the winner.

The ref tossed the coin and Bridget’s team won the first kick. This was just how she wanted it to go. She nodded to Russell Chen. He wasn’t as great an all-around player as Lundgren, but he was a sublime kicker, and having held back all game, he was ready to explode.

Her heart pounded as Eric’s goalie took his position and the other team members clustered in the center circle. The refs took their positions and Russell set up at the penalty mark. She watched the ballet of guesswork between kicker and goalie, and then Chen made his shot. Bridget’s heart soared as the ball fired straight into the top of the goal. Eric’s goalie guessed wrong. He didn’t get a finger on it.

Her entire team and roughly half the fans erupted in cheers. Telepathically she warned them not to lose focus yet, and being in sync as they were, they seemed to receive the message.

Now Eric’s team got their turn.

There was no question whom he’d choose to kick. Jerome Lewis was probably the best player in the camp. He walked out to the penalty mark.

Bridget’s team watched her breathlessly. They knew she had something up her sleeve. She poked Naughton in the shoulder. “Go get ’em,” she said.

He looked surprised, like he didn’t think she actually meant it.

“Go!” she yelled.

He went. Slowly. Everybody was whispering and chattering as they watched his slow march to the goal. Even the refs looked back at her as if to say, “Are you sure this is what you mean?” She waited until Naughton was in position before she nodded to the ref.