Kate Christie (5 page)

“I think so. It’ll be good to see everyone again. La Jolla is really quiet in the summer.”

“You stayed in town this year?”

“I always stay.” She looked sideways, closing her eyes for Beautiful Game 35

a moment in the sunlight streaming in the window. Then she looked at me again. “When’s your first practice?”

The subject of summer break slipped away as we talked about preseason and regular season schedules. They played on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We played Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. They were hosting fall Big Eights this year, always a major event in the SDU sports world, the second weekend in October.

“You should come check it out,” Jess said. Her words were quick, her voice lighter now as we discussed our upcoming seasons. She loved tennis as much as I loved soccer, I could tell.

“I’ll bring some soccer players to cheer you guys on,” I promised. “Even if we have a Saturday game that weekend, we should be around on Sunday.”

“Don’t you love Sundays? Whenever I’m in season, Sundays are the best. You can sleep in, eat whatever you want whenever you want, and no practice.” She sighed, smiling slightly, already daydreaming about Sundays.

“I know what you mean.” We were both quiet for a minute.

Then I said, “Can I ask you something?”

Jess crossed her arms over the front of her T-shirt, still leaning against the windowsill. Her dreamy smile vanished.

“Sure.”

Relax
, I almost said. I longed to tell her she didn’t have to defend herself against me, that I just wanted to be her friend.

Instead, I grinned at her disarmingly, the charming smile I saved for straight girls who were convinced I was about to hit on them.

“I was just wondering, what nationality are your parents?

You don’t look like a Maxwell.”

“My father’s mother was Spanish,” she said. “And my mother’s family was Scandinavian. What about you? Wallace is what, Scottish? Irish?”

“Both. My dad’s father came over from Scotland when he was ten. But they lived in Ireland before that.”

I leaned back on my hands, trying to appear casual. She’d referred to her parents in the past tense. Were they no longer living? Was that why she stayed in La Jolla during the summers?

36 Kate Christie

Probably they were just acrimoniously divorced, I decided, like the parents of half the kids at SDU.

“What about your mother?” she asked.

“Northern European mutt. Some French, a little English, maybe some German and Italian. Basically every major country in World War II except the Soviets.”

This elicited a small smile. She still seemed tense, though.

When we were talking about sports, she was fine. But now that the conversation had drifted into the personal realm, she was responding carefully, rationing out details about her past.

Definitely a story there. I wished I knew what it was.

As if she could read my nosy thoughts, Jess looked at her watch and pushed away from the window. “I should probably get going. We have a team meeting before dinner.”

“Us too.”

“Do you need a ride? Or are you riding your bike down?” she asked, smiling a little. Teasing me.

“I have a car this year,” I bragged, waving at the Just Do It keychain on the dresser.

“Let me guess. A Saab? No, too conservative. Let’s see.” She looked me up and down, eyes narrowed consideringly. It was probably my imagination, but her eyes seemed to linger on my legs, freshly shaven and newly tanned from my week off. “You’d drive a Beamer, wouldn’t you? Or your father’s old Mercedes.”

I nudged the soccer box toward the desk with the tip of my sandal. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m one of those people who probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for soccer.”

She stared at me blankly. Did she not get it?

“I drive a Tercel,” I elaborated. “And my parents drive Mitsubishis. Sorry to disappoint you.” I picked at the tape on a box of books on the middle bookshelf, catching a glimpse of Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
packed in next to a
Fundamentals of Literacy
text.

“Oh.” Her voice wasn’t mocking now. “So you’re a regular person, too.”

I looked up, caught by the warmth in her eyes. “Exactly.”

We smiled at each other. She had probably felt like an outsider before, too, on this campus. That was the thing about sports. If Beautiful Game 37

you were a good athlete, your sport could level the playing field of social interaction to the point that no one else realized you didn’t truly belong.

Off in the distance I heard Holly rambling down the hall and humming a tune from our mutually favorite Indigo Girls CD,
Nomads Indians Saints
, which we had listened to a couple of times through on the way down this morning.

“Holly, however, is not,” I added. “Not regular, I mean, and definitely not normal.”

“Did I hear my name, perchance?” Holly glided into the room grinning, and I realized all over again what a cute girl she was with her curly blonde hair pulled away from her face in a style similar to Jess’s, her light blue eyes and the tiny freckles that dotted her nose and cheeks year-round. She was hard to resist when she was in a good mood.

“Perchance,” I said. “And maybe it was just those voices again. I thought you said you took your meds.”

“Shut up, Cam.” She slugged me happily in the shoulder.

“I should go,” Jess said again, heading toward the door. She stopped near the short, squat dresser just inside the door and examined the framed picture lying on top. I hadn’t decided where to put it yet, the Wallace clan photo taken right before Nate headed up to Alaska the previous summer. “Is this your family?”

“Yeah.” Nate was already working on his Grizzly Adams beard, as my dad called it, but it was actually a pretty good picture of me. I was tanned and smiling and dressed in my favorite khaki shorts and a dark gray T-shirt. Gray was my favorite color. Matched my eyes, Cara, my high school girlfriend, used to say.

Holly looked over Jess’s shoulder. “Doesn’t Cam look like a preppy boy in that picture?”

“Shut up, Holly,” I said, and punched her. Hard.

But Jess didn’t seem weirded out by the comment. She just said, “I don’t think she looks like a boy at all. See you guys later.

Good luck with preseason.”

“You too. See you,” I added, following her to the door and watching until she disappeared into the stairwell at the end of 3 Kate Christie

the hall. Then I turned back to Holly. “What were you trying to do, out me or something?”

Holly sat down on the edge of my bed, wiggling her bare toes in front of her. “You mean the preppy boy comment?”

“Duh. As far as I know, Jess is straight. No need to scare her off.” I sat down next to her, then lay back and gazed up at the white ceiling. Not that I wanted to hide who I was, either. I just wanted to deal with the issue my own way in my own time.

“Come on, Cam.” Holly stared at me. “You wore a Silence Equals Death T-shirt to the spring sports banquet freshman year, remember? Do you honestly think Jess Maxwell doesn’t know?”

I had forgotten about that banquet. That was the night Jess had received the Rookie of the Year award. I remembered she had walked up to the podium all cool and sophisticated in a black sundress and a black jacket, her hair swept up in a twist. I’d looked at her up there, beautiful and talented and smiling slightly as the athletic director presented her with the engraved plaque, and for just that moment, I’d wished I could be Jess Maxwell.

“Good point,” I admitted. Even without my choice of apparel, everyone in the SDU sports world gossiped about everyone else.

I’d known Jake Kim and Brad Peterson, my buddies from the swim team, were gay long before I met them. “I don’t know what it is about her, Holl. There’s something, I don’t know, deeper going on with her. Don’t you think?”

Still leaning on her side, Holly reached over and patted my head. “What I think is that you’re into her. Not that I blame you.

She’s totally hot.”

“That’s not it. I mean, she is hot. But it’s not like I want to sleep with her. I just want to get to know her better.”

Holly sat up, looking around. “Wait, where’s your calendar?

We have to mark down this day of infamy, this twenty-eighth day of August 1991 when Camille Wallace claimed that she did not want to get an attractive woman into bed.”

Laughing, I grabbed a pillow and whacked her on the head.

“Shut up, jackass.” It was impossible to stay serious around her when she was in one of her moods.

She grabbed the other pillow and struck back. Eventually Beautiful Game 3

we collapsed on our backs holding the pillows to our stomachs.

“We should chill,” she said, looking at her watch. “In another, what, forty-five minutes we’ll be running the two mile.

For time.”

I groaned. “Don’t remind me! So how’s your girlfriend, anyway? What’d you guys do, have phone sex or something?”

“No, we just talked.” She flopped over on her side. “But guess what? She’s coming over tonight. She has to be at work tomorrow morning at eight thirty and we have breakfast at eight, so it works out perfectly. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Sure, if you like booty calls.” No wonder she was so excited.

She was going to get laid tonight. Which reminded me. “You know what? I’ve been meaning to tell you this. I think I’m going to be celibate this year.”

She burst out laughing. “Yeah, right. As if! You flirt with every woman you meet.”

I moved up on the futon and leaned against the wall. “I’m serious—at least during the season. I’m going to concentrate on soccer and classes and nothing else. Next year is my student teaching internship, and I won’t have as much time to think about soccer.”

“You are serious,” she said, gazing at me. “You think you can make All-American?”

“Maybe. Either way, I want to give it everything I have right now. And I haven’t met anyone really, you know, special or anything yet. I hate that word, special.”

“Me, too. Makes me think of short buses. No offense to your dad’s students, of course. But I think you can make it. All-American, I mean. If anyone on defense gets it, it’ll be you.”

“Thanks, man.” I was glad she was a striker—that meant we never had to compete for playing time.

She slapped my leg. “You’re welcome. Now let’s get going.

I want to get to the gym early and check out the freshmen recruits.”

We jumped off the bed and got going.

More than one opponent compared our playing fields to a golf course. Short grass, evenly spread over a flat, machine-leveled surface, flushed daily with water by an automated sprinkler and drainage system, mowed horizontally like World Cup fields every three days in the cool evening hours so that the freshly shorn grass wouldn’t burn in daylight sun. A hillside provided ample spectator space and sheltered the field from the strongest breezes. There were even enough fields for separate men’s and women’s practice and game fields, a fact that never ceased to amaze me after my high school experience—the girls’

team had played league games on the J.V. football team’s practice field my freshman year in Portland.

Stepping onto the field each August was always the most incredible experience—grass springy beneath my cleats, familiar Beautiful Game 41

friendly (mostly) faces all around, sunlight warm on my bare arms and legs, new Adidas soccer ball at my feet—regulation size 5, FIFA approved, SDU logo embossed on multiple pentagons amidst the clean white leather hexagons. As the California breeze brushed my face and my teammates’ chatter washed over me, I would rest one foot on top of the ball and think how lucky I was to be back for another season.

Preseason was a lifetime all its own. After the initial excitement came the hard work, when we pushed our bodies to do things they barely remembered, taught our muscles and minds to work in unison all over again. Ball at our feet, sweat soaking our hair and stinging our eyes, Coach yelling at us to,

“Think, athletes! Play smart!” Anyone who hadn’t followed the workout schedule he sent out mid-summer to all prospective and returning players knew even before that first practice they’d be hurting. And in August, the anticipation of pain was almost as sharp as the pain itself.

In the space of two hours that Sunday afternoon, the last weekend of summer, during timed runs, overlap drills, shooting practice, passing drills, each player invited to attend SDU’s tryouts experienced frustration, satisfaction, self-loathing, egotism, exhaustion. And that was only the first day—we still had six and a half more days of preseason, which meant thirteen more practice sessions to run our butts off and push our bodies to their limits before Scrimmage Day.

Scrimmage Day fell on the Sunday before classes began.

While the non-athletes at SDU were moving trunks into dorm rooms and unpacking, listening to CDs, sharing cigarettes and beers with the friends they hadn’t seen in three months, we were playing three one-hour scrimmages, all before two in the afternoon, to determine who would stay on the team and who would go back to being a normal SDU student destined to look the other way anytime they ran into one of the rest of us on campus. By the time we left the locker room at the end of Scrimmage Day, Coach had posted the official team list on the Intercollegiate Bulletin Board. I never knew if he told the players he cut in person or left them to discover their names missing from the list. As a scholarship recruit, I had never had 42 Kate Christie

to worry about being cut. I hoped he told them in person. Holly always said that was the Oregonian in me talking. Probably she was right.