Lucy’s “Perfect” Summer (12 page)

“How’s Marmalade doing with his reading?” Dad asked Lucy Sunday afternoon as she was headed out the back door to practice her dribbling. Dad had gotten her a new ball after the storm — with Mr. Auggy’s help — and she wanted to try it out.

She leaned on the screen and tucked it under her arm. “He’s not doing that well.”

“I’m surprised. I thought he’d be a prime candidate for sitting on your lap.”

“Um, I haven’t exactly been making that much of a lap for him to sit in.”

Dad’s eyebrows went up. “And that would be because . . . ?”

Because every time she sat down to read, all she could think about was all the stuff on her list that she couldn’t do anything about. When she read the list to Marmalade, Lucy got dentist’s-office prickly and ended up pacing around the room, or sending signals to J.J.

“I have a lot on my mind,” she said to Dad.

He took a sip from his lemonade and made a sour face, although Lucy knew Inez put plenty of sugar in her recipe.

“Funny how getting lost in a book can take a person’s mind off of problems,” he said. “I miss that.”

Lucy wanted to swallow her soccer ball. She usually tried pretty hard not to make Dad sad about his blindness, but sometimes she plowed right in and did it anyway. Standing up straighter, she made her voice go cheerful. “You know what?” she said. “Maybe I’ll go in and try it.”

“That’s my champ,” Dad said.

It wasn’t going to work, she was sure of that as she picked up a sleepy Marmalade and skimmed to her room on the yellow rug. But if it didn’t, she wasn’t going to get to play soccer anyway.

She plopped the kitty on her bed and flopped down beside him.

“That’s called
flopping
,” Rianna had said to her. Lucy grunted. It was one thing to do it on your mattress and another to use it to cheat in soccer.

Lucy sat up. Could there possibly be something about cheating in that book Mr. Auggy gave her? Where did she put it anyway?

She flipped her head upside-down to peer under the bed and found Lolli curled up on it. She yowled indignantly as Lucy pried the thing out.

“You can come up and be read to, too,” Lucy told her.

Another protest. It was obviously too much, having to share the bedroom with Marmalade.

Lucy sat cross-legged against her pillows and didn’t have to do much coaxing to get Marmalade to join her. Finding anything to do with cheating in the book was a lot harder. There was nothing in the table of contents, and a flip-through didn’t pop out anything. She was about to give up when she caught the words FOUL PLAY in bold letters with a frowny face next to them.

“This could be it, Marmie,” she said.

She was rewarded with a yawn. Lucy frowned at the page until she was sure she knew the words.

“ ‘There are a whole bunch of actions that will cause a referee to blow her whistle,’ ” Lucy read out loud. “ ‘Charging, hitting, holding, kicking, pushing, tripping.’ ” She pulled in her chin. “Good grief, this sounds like Worldwide Wrestling, not soccer!” And there was more. “ ‘Dangerous play. Interfering with the goalkeeper. Un-gentle-man-ly conduct.’ ” Lucy had an image of butlers hitting each other with trays, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what it meant. In parentheses, it said, “(bad behavior).”

The last word on the list was a hard one. “ ‘Ob-struc-tion.’ What does
that
mean, Marmie?”

Lolli answered from under the bed, but it didn’t help. Lucy scanned the page and saw the word again in a box in the corner. “Okay, here we go. ‘This call means that you’ve placed your body between your op-po-nent’ — that’s a player on the other team, like Lolli’s your opponent, Marmie — ‘between your opponent and the ball without going after the ball yourself.’ ”

Lucy closed her eyes to picture it. Well, yeah, she could see doing that to try to keep a girl on the other team from saving the ball if it was going out of bounds.

She went back to the book. “ ‘It’s not allowed. You can only throw your body in front of another player if you are actually going after the ball.’ ”

That made sense. Nobody was going to get away with that or any of the other stuff, so why did Rianna and the girls J.J. heard talking even try it?

Of course, Rianna had pulled it on Coach Neely and it had worked.

“That doesn’t count,” Lucy said to the orange pile in her lap. “Coach Neely doesn’t know what’s going on half the time. She’s either sending a text message or crushing on Seth, whatever that means. I don’t care whether Mr. Auggy thinks she’s good — she’s like a grownup Mora coaching soccer.”

“She won’t get away with it in a real game anyway,” little Kayla had told Lucy.

But how could she be sure? Kids from big city teams obviously did it.

Lucy searched the page again and jiggled Marmalade awake. “Okay, listen to this: ‘There are times when a referee might not call an obvious foul. If a team is about to score, for instance, it wouldn’t be fair to stop play and set up a free kick just because the other team fouled.’ ” Lucy sat up straighter. “Get
this! ‘
It might en-cour-age’ — okay, yeah, encourage — ‘It might encourage some players to behave badly and try to foul whenever the other team gets close to the goal.’ ”

Some players. They might as well have put Rianna’s name right in there.

“I just want to go to soccer camp and bounce a ball off of Rianna’s head,” Lucy said to Marmalade . . . and Lollipop, who hopped onto the corner of the bed as if she didn’t want to miss this show.

“That’s some pretty lively reading going on in there,” Dad said from the hallway.

“We’re doing great, Dad,” Lucy said.

She closed the book and sank onto the pillows again. It was there in writing: nobody got away with ruining the beautiful game. She couldn’t wait to tell J.J.

Lucy flew through the house and out the front door, neck already craning toward J.J.’s. Her steps slowed when she saw a white, important-looking car in front of his house.

Nobody ever came to visit the Clucks, except Mr. Auggy and Winnie the State Lady. That wasn’t Mr. A’s Jeep over there, and it sure looked like something a Child Protective Services person would drive. Lucy sank onto her front step and held out a hand absently to Mudge who joined her, muttering under his cat-breath.

“J.J. didn’t say anything about her coming over today,” Lucy said to him. “He would’ve told me.”

Or she just would have known. He always got sullen and grumpy when he had to deal with Winnie, even though she was always telling him she was on his side. Even though she’d told J.J. he didn’t have to have visits with his father anymore if he didn’t want to, J.J. still kept her in the same category as the sheriff and the Easter Bunny: people who weren’t to be believed.

But as Lucy fiddled with the hair poking out of Mudge’s ears and studied the car, she realized the letters on the side weren’t CPS. They were TCPO. She squinted to read what was underneath. Tularosa County Probation Officer.

Probation? Wasn’t that kind of like being grounded? Gabe said his dad put him on that when his grades started to slip. Lucy pulled her hand from Mudge’s ear. Was J.J. on probation?

Lucy’s heart began to pound as if she were the one it had happened to. She was about to go in and grill Dad — he probably knew about this, right? — when the front door opened and a man in a police-looking uniform stepped out. J.J.’s father was with him.

Even from across the street, beyond the fence and half-hidden by the shadows of the cottonwoods, Lucy shrank down in fear. Mr. Cluck was as mean-faced as ever. He was a lot skinnier than he was the last time she’d seen him — sort of like a half-starved junkyard dog — and his eyes were all baggy like he’d had the flu. But the way he walked through the debris in the yard with his fist clenched, as if he were hoping somebody would jump out of an old rusted bathtub and pick a fight with him so he could punch them in the face — that was just as frightening as it had ever been. Lucy’s stomach tied into a knot.

“You’ve got ten minutes,” she heard the officer say. “And you can only take what I can fit in my trunk.”

Mr. Cluck didn’t answer as he bent down, jaw muscles twitching, picked up a rusty hammer, and thrust it into the duffle bag he had swung over his shoulder. Who would want that? Who would want any of that nasty stuff?

“I don’t know what you’re going to do with that trash,” the officer said as if he’d heard Lucy’s thoughts.

“It’s mine,” Mr. Cluck said.

It only took two words for Lucy to want to escape into the house and never come out. His voice sliced into her, just the way it had right there on the corner, the day of their first-ever soccer game last winter when he had come out screaming at J.J. and dragged him away. And exactly as it had that Easter Sunday morning when he had growled at Lucy to get off his property and stay away from his family. She knew the vicious voice had been used in even worse ways on J.J., and that was what terrified her the most.

That, and the way he suddenly got very still and then straightened from the waist to stab his dagger gaze right into her. Lucy gasped out loud.

“What are you lookin’ at?” he said.

“Cluck,” said the officer, “just take care of your business.”

Lucy didn’t move. Neither did J.J.’s father. He merely stood with a handful of rusty metal tools, looking as if he wanted to hurl them all at her. And then he smiled.

“Cluck!” the officer said again.

Lucy didn’t wait to see what happened after that. She pressed a growling Mudge to her chest and scrambled back into her house. Dad turned off the audio book he was listening to on the Napping Couch and tilted his head.

“What’s up, champ?” he said.

“I just saw Evil smile, Dad,” she said. “It was the ugliest thing I ever saw.”

It took a while to remember that she had something good to tell J.J. – about nobody being able to cheat in soccer. When she did remember, she didn’t get to talk to him until they were all headed to the bleachers Monday morning for the big camp assembly. She asked Kayla to save her a seat in their team’s section and pulled J.J. to the back of the crowd. Gabe made his usual kissing sound when he saw them, and Lucy felt another stab of homesickness. Things were pretty bad when she was missing
that.

She took a moment to see if J.J. showed any traces of having talked to his dad, but as soon as Gabe had moved on to harassing Veronica, he just said, “You told Hawke, right?”

“Don’t have to.”

“Why?”

“Nobody’s going to get away with it, J.J.”

Lucy told him about what she’d read. His face told her she was clearly nuts.

“These kids don’t read books,” J.J. said.

“But referees do. I’m telling you, we don’t have to worry.”

“You think everybody’s as honest as you.” J.J.’s dark eyes seemed to grow darker. “They aren’t.” He folded his arms across his chest, leaving a lot of arm still hanging out on either side. “My dad came over yesterday.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t have to talk to him.”

“Good.”

“He acted weird.”

“He always acts weird, J.J.”

Lucy didn’t mention Mr. Cluck smiling at her and giving her the creeps. Besides, the microphone squealed.

“We gotta go sit with our teams,” Lucy said. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

“At home.”

“No, at lunch.”

Before he could argue, Lucy broke away and skittered to the seat Kayla was saving for her. She didn’t see Rianna until she leaned over Lucy’s shoulder from behind.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said into Lucy’s ear.

Why did this girl’s breath always feel like it was coming out of Aunt Karen’s blow-dryer?

Lucy was glad Hawke started right in, telling the camp how proud he was of all of them and bringing the boys’ Select Team onto the field to demonstrate different ways to score goals.

“They get to perform because they’re boys,” Rianna said to Lucy.

Or because they were some of the best soccer players Lucy had ever seen besides professionals on TV. They did make it look beautiful. Nobody charged or hit or kicked or pushed. They might have been absurd little creeps like Oscar and Gabe off the field, but when they were playing, they were gen-tle-man-ly.

Everybody cheered when the exhibition was over, but Lucy could tell the crowd was getting restless for Hawke to give the VIP award. She thought Rianna was going to chew up somebody’s ball cap any minute.

“You’ve been so focused on your game,” Hawke boomed out, “you probably haven’t noticed me watching you — all of you.”

“I have,” Rianna said to Lucy. “I don’t miss that much.”

“I’ve seen excellent dribbling, great shooting, awesome goalkeeping — ”

“Come on, give the award already,” Rianna said.

Lucy scrunched her shoulders.

“But what has impressed me most,” Hawke said, “is the good sportsmanship I’ve observed. The person I am giving this award to today is a team player who cares about the performance of the entire team, who cheers the other players on whether it’s in a drill or a practice game — ”

Rianna scooted herself to the edge of her seat, so that her knees pressed into Lucy’s back. She put a pair of sweaty palms on Lucy’s shoulders, and Lucy realized what she was preparing herself for.