Gracie Faltrain Gets it Right (Finally) (4 page)

I lie in bed and try not to think about the look on Martin's face when he dumped me. ‘Gracie, can I come in?' Mum's voice floats through the darkness.

‘I'm sleeping.'

‘We could sleep-talk, then.' The door lets in light from the hallway. Her face has the soft look it gets when she's worried. She wants things to be the way they were but they can't because we've been fighting all summer about soccer and school. There's a brick wall shaped like a ball in the middle of us and we have to yell over the top to be heard. You can't yell for months and then decide one day to walk around and have a conversation.

‘What happened with Martin this afternoon? You didn't come out for dinner.'

‘He came over to say hi, that's all.'

She doesn't believe me. She watches like I'm a toaster. If she waits long enough what happened today will pop. ‘Mum,
I'm fine. I need to get a good night's sleep before state trials tomorrow.'

She waits a little longer. I look at the door. ‘Well, I'll let you sleep. Remember the deal, Gracie. I'll drive you to trials and Dad will pick you up after.'

‘Can't I have a quick kick with the guys to see how they went?'

‘You can find out on Monday.'

I keep my voice low so I don't wake anyone. ‘You're getting bent out of shape over nothing. School soccer means training Monday and Wednesday nights and one game on Saturday. I can handle that.'

‘I'm getting bent out of shape, Gracie Faltrain, because when you add that to the state trial training it equals almost all of your time.'

‘Trials go for ninety minutes every Sunday and I only play one practice match through the year. That's it.'

‘That's it? Most of the weekend is gone. You need to pass Year 12.' Any minute now she'll spin some hard luck story about her daughter working in a supermarket. ‘You'll be lucky to get a job in a supermarket next year.'

Ouch. Score one for Mum. ‘Not everyone wants to go to uni,' I say. ‘You didn't.' Score one for Gracie Faltrain.

‘If working in a supermarket was your goal career and you worked towards it I'd make pompoms and cheer.'

‘
I have a goal
.' My voice rises. ‘But you never listen. I want to play in the World Cup and if I qualify for the state squad I have a shot at that. I need to play soccer every chance I get.'

‘You play soccer more than you breathe. I've told you the deal. Take it or leave it.'

Dad appears in the doorway, yawning in his pyjamas. ‘If you two are finished kissing each other goodnight, the neighbours five blocks down want to get a little sleep.'

‘We're finished kissing,' I say.

Mum closes the door. Loud and sharp. I hear her voice on the other side. ‘You don't back me up with her, Bill.'

‘I don't back you up because I don't agree with what you want me to back you up on . . .' I put the pillow over my head.

I hate arguing with Mum. I hate that Mum and Dad argue because of me. But if I have to fight to get what I want this year then I will. Not fight as in punch. Hello, been there, lost a boyfriend, almost lost a boob. I mean fight as in stand up for what I believe in: soccer.

Mum doesn't understand how hard it will be to qualify. Every Sunday, starting tomorrow, I train with forty of the best under-18 girl players in the state. Every Sunday for the next five months I have to be on top of my game because the selectors will be watching. They'll weed out the girls who aren't good enough so that by September only twenty players will be left. Those twenty players will form the state team.

Flemming, Singh, Francavilla and Corelli were picked to trial for the under-18 boys' state team last year. So were Dan and Truck. They'll go through the same selection process as me. It's those guys I'll be playing my practice match against. I know how tough they are and none of them will be doing me any favours. If I don't practise every chance I get, I can pucker up and kiss the state team goodbye.

Soccer is the only thing I'm good at. It's my dream. Mum
understood that once. When we were in Year 8 she and Dad took Jane and me hiking. We crawled up a mountain so steep we had to dig our hands into dirt to hold on. ‘It'll be worth it, Gracie,' Mum said.

She and Dad walked behind Jane and me the whole way, ready to catch us if we tumbled. ‘What did you do?' Jane asked on the way up, her voice struggling like her legs. ‘This has to be some kind of punishment.'

But it wasn't. We saw that when we got to the top. One minute we were in the middle of trees and dirt and rocks and the next we were in the middle of sky, stretching wide over the ocean. Jane let out a sound like a bird and it echoed all around. Mum and Dad joined in, sending their voices towards the tangle of the mountain.

I stood close to the edge and drank it in. ‘Okay, Mr and Mrs Faltrain,' Jane asked after a while. ‘Give me the bad news. How do we get down from here?'

‘She's asking the wrong question, isn't she?' Mum whispered. I knew what she meant. You don't ask how long it takes to get down from a place like that. You ask how long you can stay. I know qualifying for the state will be hard. Climbing higher will be even harder. I'm going to make it, though; with or without Mum walking behind me.

Forty girls try out. Twenty girls get through.
Gracie Faltrain

I wake up with one thing on my mind this morning: state soccer. I might have lost Martin, but I still have my dream of qualifying for the squad. When you're losing, the most important thing is to focus on the next win.

Mum and I don't talk on the drive to the trials. We said it all last night. She parks and says, ‘So, your dad will be here at 10.30.' I nod. ‘Good luck, Gracie.' I nod again, and shut the car door. Those words don't mean anything if she doesn't actually want me to have the luck. She's handing me a cheque that she hopes will bounce. If I don't make the state squad it will make more room for school.

I walk to the field and leave our fight behind. I can't be distracted. The competition is too fierce. Ten girls are warming up already. The only one I know is Kally Gordon. Every time I see her I feel unsettled.

I expected Kally to come in loud on the first day of
school, bragging about what a great soccer player she is and how she'd been picked to trial for the state team. I expected to hate her like I hate Annabelle. Okay, maybe I've watched too many science fiction movies but I figured we were genetically destined to be enemies.

But she came in quiet. She nodded to me in the corridor and said, ‘Dan told me you're the one to watch on the field.'

Kally upset the natural order of my world. She's related to Annabelle Orion and she was nice to me.

The only explanation I can come up with is that she's not actually related to Annabelle by blood. Either that or she and her cousin are orchestrating a highly organised plan to take me down on the soccer field.

It was Kally who fell on the soccer field in the end. After the first week she came down to the oval, looking to get in on a game. She wasn't even trying and she showed up every guy on the field. That put her in a vulnerable spot. People don't like it when they lose. The boys were waiting for her to stuff up and Susan opened her big mouth and gave them exactly what they wanted to hear.

She told everyone that Kally was planning on being the second girl in the school soccer team. She threw around some direct quotes: ‘Kally says she can wipe the field with Gracie. Kally says she can beat those guys blindfolded.'

I knew they were lies. Anyone who can play as good as Kally and holds back isn't the sort of person to brag. I don't think Susan meant to hurt Kally. I think she meant to hurt me, but it backfired.

Everyone came to see her try out. They lined the fence. They sat in the shade. Kally's eyes flicked from the crowd
to the school team and back again. I knew what she was thinking. These guys are tough. These guys are huge. And these guys mean me harm.

She played better than I did the first time I went up against boys. For a minute I thought she'd make it. She took the ball and used her body to block Francavilla. She moved like she was underwater, gliding towards the goal.

At least she glided until the guys snagged her. It takes you by surprise, a rough game. You're swimming fine till the rip takes you under. Flemming ran past with his elbows up. Legal but tough. The game got faster. They knocked Kally down again and again. She stood up until the chanting started. I saw it melting into her skin like the sharpest knife: ‘Loser, loser, loser.' It was only three, maybe four voices at most, but their voices carried.

Get up, I thought. Get up and show them what you can do. If I helped her, the guys would know. Kally had to do it on her own for it to count. Annabelle walked onto the field and held out her hand. She looked at the guys who were still chanting, and they stopped. And I was glad.

‘Happy are you, Gracie?' Annabelle asked the next day. ‘You could have helped her if you weren't such a jealous –'

‘Shove your feminist crap in your handbag, Orion.' Flemming cut her off. ‘Faltrain didn't owe your cousin a thing. We played by the rules – even Coach agreed.'

We did play by the rules. But somehow those rules seemed less black and white when I gave my side of the story to Dan. ‘I told Kally she couldn't expect any help from you,' he said. ‘Relax. The people she wants to kill are the guys who were chanting from the side.'

‘I couldn't help her. She's a girl. She had to do it alone or it wouldn't have meant anything.'

‘Hey, I'm not having a go. You're brutal out there, that's all I'm saying.'

‘I'm only brutal when I need to be. I wasn't brutal at the school tryouts.'

He held his hands higher. ‘I really didn't mean to upset you.'

I look over at Kally warming up. Maybe it's my imagination, but she looks different from how she did on the first day of school. Like she's moved out of her sunny spot into the shade. I don't like it that Dan thinks I had something to do with that. I am a person you can count on. I'm always out there fighting for my team. I didn't back Kally up, sure, but I don't know her. I don't have to back her up. If she'd been a boy no one would have expected me to help. I did more than I had to. I didn't knock her down.

‘Okay, everyone, gather round,' the trials coach says. ‘I'm Adelaide James. This is Josephine Bryan, my co-coach. Before we start I'll explain the state selection process so everyone's clear. Only twenty of you will make it to the state team. Over the next five months we'll assess your skill and attitude. Every player here is good, so every move you make counts. I want you to know that now because once you're off, there are no second chances.'

I look around at my competition. I've never played against girls. I've never played with strangers. In my school team I know who I am and what I can do. Here I'm just one of forty.

‘We'll train every Sunday for an hour and a half,' Adelaide says. ‘After next week we'll cut people. If you're off the squad we'll send you a letter. There's one practice match against the boys' under-18 trials team on the twenty-second of July. By that time only the absolute best will be left. That match will help us make the last difficult cuts. The final squad will be announced on September the second.'

‘We'll start with drills and end with two games,' Josephine says, and gives us a number from one to four. ‘All the ones are together, all the twos, and so on.' I find my group. I'm with Kally. She looks more nervous than me, tapping her hands against her legs.

I figure the way to win is to read the competition. During the drills I check to see how people pass, what foot they favour, what their strengths and weaknesses are. I map their style. By the time the game starts I have an idea how to play against them.

I can't rely on being the fastest player. I can't rely on predicting that the opposition will go straight down the line, slamming everything in their way. I need to play smarter if I'm going to make it.

I find the beat after ten minutes. I forget the world I live in every day. This is the world, now. I set the rules. It's not an easy game. Every player is good. Every pass I make has to be right. I do what Flemming told me. I keep my eye on the striker. I pass to them. They send the ball to goal.

Kally's playing badly in the midfield. She's trying too hard, whacking the ball without looking, stealing it by force and not skill. Pull back, I think. Settle in and glide. It's easier
said than done, though. Losing your confidence makes you kick back harder than before. Hard kicking's not always accurate. Every time Kally misses she tries more and every time she tries more she misses again. The girls on our team are annoyed. The girls on the other team love it.

It feels like I'm watching an animal thrash in a trap. I have this urge to set her loose. ‘Kally,' I call. It's an easy pass but she misses. The coaches' eyes are on me. I can't afford to kick to a player who's not on their game.

We tie with the other team. We could have won if it wasn't for Kally. She knows it, too; I can tell by the slump of her shoulders.

Dan's wrong. Sure, there's a part of me that's brutal; I wouldn't have made it through last year if there wasn't. But there's another part of me too, the part that knows what it's like to stuff up. I feel sorry for Kally. And judging from the looks on the other girls' faces, I'm the only one who does.

‘You're quiet, baby,' Dad says on the way home. ‘How did it go?'

‘Okay. I played my best.'

‘You haven't mentioned how it went with Martin yesterday. Do you want to talk about it?'

I don't mean to tell Dad. But we're driving slowly down those streets where Martin and I ran yesterday, and it falls out of me. ‘We're not even friends anymore.'

‘That must hurt.'

‘You're going to tell me it gets better, right?'

‘With a bit of time it does. And with a bit of time Martin might forgive you. His mum left a huge hole. He's only starting to work out what meeting her again means.'

I know what it means for me, I think as the day moves past the window and disappears behind us. I close my eyes for the last part of the trip so I don't have to see the oval.

All afternoon and night I try to do homework. I stare at my books until dinner and stare at them again after. I make a list of the things that need to be handed in tomorrow. It's too big. It's easier to watch TV. I don't have one in my room so the film in my head runs on loop.

I think about Kally and the look on her face when she missed the pass. I think about Martin. I think about Dan saying I'm someone who can't be counted on. The past, present and future tangle in my brain.

I come out for a drink around midnight and Dad's on the couch watching TV. We got Foxtel last year and now he's addicted to the Discovery Channel. ‘What's on tonight?' I ask, sitting next to him.

‘Shark fin fishers,' he says. We watch fishermen hack off fins and dump bodies back in the ocean. ‘Why do they do that?' I ask as the sharks struggle away in the cold water.

‘Shark fin is a delicacy.'

‘But why throw them back, why not take the whole shark?'

‘You can only catch so many kilos per day. There are strict rules to keep the industry fair. Although, I think if you asked the shark they'd have a problem with those rules.' Last year or the year before, I might have said, ‘Dad, it's a tough world and there's a reason only the strong survive.' Tonight I nod, though. I feel sick like he does as I watch the casualties on screen mount up.

Sleep doesn't come easy. I close my eyes and the loop starts again. Only this time there are pictures of finless sharks in it too. And in my dreams they all have Kally's face.