Shutout (6 page)

Everybody paused for a moment, and then I joked, “Well, you obviously didn't read
A Separate Peace
over the summer like we were supposed to,” and, at the same time, Sarah said, “Whoa. Somebody's a little touchy.”

Angus smiled at me and glared at Sarah. “If you've seen somebody die young, you know there's nothing good about it. This guy is a total idiot. Like you should kill yourself as soon as you win a race, because it's all downhill from there, and there's nothing else worth living for.”

“Uh,” Tom offered, “I don't really see anything in here about killing yourself.”

At that point the teacher, Mr. Gordon, interrupted us, and each group had to report to the big group. It wasn't clear
what the point of the whole thing was, but it was cool to at least get to talk about our opinions for once instead of just writing down the teacher's.

I don't know what made me do this, but after class as we were packing up our stuff, I said to Angus, “Hey, I'm sorry.”

“For what?” he said. His face was red like he was still upset.

“About whoever died young.”

His face softened a little bit, and he whispered, “Thanks.”

“My mom died,” I said. “When I was little, I mean. I don't really remember.” Now why did I say that? Our family status is so weird and complicated that I usually avoid saying anything that will make me have to explain it all.

“I'm sorry,” Angus answered. “It's . . . sometimes it's worse to remember.” We both stood there not talking until Angus added, “Well, see ya,” and bolted from the room.

After I got rid of my books, I headed to the locker room to get ready for soccer practice.

Lena was there, and she asked, “Hey, Manda, what happened to you at lunch?”

“I guess I disappeared,” I answered without looking at her. I needed to get out on the field and focus on stopping balls and not think about anything else right now. I opened a locker and took off my shirt and shoved it in there, pulling on my
SOCCER IS LIFE!
T-shirt and then wishing I'd brought another one because Lena and I bought those matching shirts at the mall at the beginning of summer, also known as a lifetime ago.

“Are you mad at me or something?” Lena asked.

“Why would I be mad? Just because you ignored me for a bunch of people you just met? Why would I be mad about that?”

“Oh my God, Amanda, we were having a conversation, and I just turned to say hi to some people, and then you were gone.”

“You didn't just turn to say hi to them,” I whisper-yelled at her. The older girls were filtering into the locker room, and I didn't want to have a big fight in front of everybody and be the subject of all kinds of gossip. “You joined their conversation and I sat there for
eight minutes
while you didn't say a
word
to me, and finally I left.”

Lena looked at me for a second like she was going to yell at me, but then my best friend swam up through the sea of Lena's new popularity and showed her face to me again. “Eight minutes? Really?”

“I . . . uh . . . I timed it.” I flashed my digital sports watch with the heart rate monitor that I'd gotten for my last birthday at her.

Lena looked at the floor. “Wow,” she whispered in the direction of her cleats. “That was bitchy. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” I answered.

“No, it's not. I'd be totally pissed if you did that to me. I won't do that again,” she promised.

“Cool then.”

“Friends?”

“To the end,” I said, and extended a hand. She clasped it, and it was funny how that one moment seemed to turn my whole day around.

And then practice was awesome. Mostly. We did the usual drills, and we scrimmaged, and my team won 3–2, not that I was keeping track of the score in a scrimmage. One of the goals against me was this amazing lucky shot right up in the corner of the goal that no human goalie could have possibly stopped, so I didn't feel too bad about that, but the other one I just guessed wrong and went the wrong way with my hands and watched as the ball sailed past my feet and into the goal.

“Nice job,” Ms. Beasley told me at the end of the scrimmage.

“I should have had that second goal,” I replied.

“Well, I think Kate accidentally deked you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the boys' team was practicing over to the left, and somebody obviously has a crush, so she was distracted and you saw her eyes going that way and thought that's the way the ball was going. Don't watch the eyes. Watch the feet.” She clapped her hand on my shoulder, and I felt better. For a minute.

Then Beasley—somebody dropped the “Ms.” at the beginning of practice and she rolled her eyes and smiled, so after that it would have suddenly seemed really uncool to call her Ms. Beasley—called us together.

“Okay,” she announced. “Tomorrow is our first game, and I want you to do your best, but I don't want anyone to freak out. I want to see you using what you've learned, but this is not the win-at-all-costs team. Don't get me wrong—it's more fun to win than it is to lose, but that's the reason to win—because it's more fun. Teams almost never go undefeated,
and we are going to lose some games. Which is fine, because you probably learn more from your losses than your victories. We're going to play everyone in the conference twice, so what I'd really like to see is you showing that you've learned something the second time we play a team. You'll know which players are dirty, which ones you should double, stuff like that.

“In any case, you've been working really hard, and I'm sure we're going to do well tomorrow.”

We started to get up, but then this red-haired senior with one jet-black streak in her hair and a
CHILD SOLDIERS RUN AMOK
shirt on walked over from the field hockey field, and Beasley said, “Hang on, girls. Two more things. One is, well, here's Rosalind.”

Rosalind, the senior with red hair, smiled at us. “Hey, guys. I just want to let you know that my stepmom runs the Charlesborough Yoga Studio over in Curley Square, and she gives deep discounts to Charlesborough athletes. So if you tell them at the desk that you play CHS soccer, you'll get any class for half price. It helps a ton with your flexibility, preventing injury, stuff like that. Maybe I'll see you there sometime!”

She waved her stick at us and ran back to the field hockey field, and I totally wanted to be her. She was confident and pretty and nice and looked like she had never felt unsure of herself or uncomfortable in her own skin or any of the things I felt all the time.

“I know you guys are busy, but I was injured constantly until I started doing yoga my sophomore year in college,” Beasley told us.

“You played in college?” somebody asked.

“Yeah,” Beasley said.

“Were you any good, Beasley?”

“I don't know . . . I guess so.”

“Like how good were you?”

“My senior year I was the eighth alternate for the national team,” Beasley practically whispered, her face bright red.

“So you were the twenty-ninth-best player in the United States?” I said, and then I was immediately embarrassed, but apparently not as embarrassed as Beasley was.

“I don't know . . .” Beasley offered, and then everybody was talking at once. How cool was that? Our soccer coach was in the top thirty players in the whole country! There's no way Geezer was ever that good at anything.

“Why'd you stop?” I asked, and the whole team fell silent.

“Well, Amanda, it's a long story, but the short version is that, no matter what your shirt says, soccer isn't life. It's really fun and beautiful and cool, but there are other things in life that are fun and beautiful and cool, and if you want to play soccer at that level, you have to give up a lot of the other fun, beautiful, and cool things.”

I realized I was going to have to chew on that idea for a while. Since pretty much everything that was beautiful and fun and cool in my life came from playing soccer, it was hard to imagine anything else.

“But enough about me,” Beasley said. “Let's talk about you. Now you know our games are always going to take place before the varsity games, against the same schools and on the same fields. So unless I get a specific written excuse from your
parents saying that you have a medical appointment or a funeral to attend, I expect you to stick around and watch every varsity game.”

We all made a shocked, unhappy noise at this, and Beasley just raised her voice over us and kept talking. “There are two reasons for this. One is that it's simply the right thing to do to support girls' soccer. You guys know that compared to football or basketball games, our games are not going to draw big crowds. At some of the away games it is possible that you'll be the only people there supporting varsity, and so you need to do it. Period.

“The second reason is that you can learn a lot from watching these games. You can really dissect what's going on in the game when you're not under the pressure of playing it, and that's going to make you better players. Not to mention that you will all be varsity players sooner or later, and so you should see the kind of system that Coach Keezer runs. Also, you'll be playing against some of the same girls next year and the year after, so if you've seen their games, you'll have a leg up when you do get on varsity. I know none of you are actually going to do this, but it would be a great idea to keep a notebook on what you see.”

We sat in grumpy silence for a minute, probably thinking about how we'd have even less time to do homework on game days now. Finally, Shakina Williams, who was a pretty good forward, said, “So does that mean that varsity will be supporting us at all our games?”

“Well,” Beasley stammered, “since we can only get the half buses, we have to travel separately, and the schedule—”

“So basically no, is what you're saying.”

“Well, some of them will be there sometimes. I guess that's the best I can offer you.”

“But,” Fiona Goldberg objected, “isn't it simply the right thing to do?”

Beasley looked up to the sky like she thought it might tell her whether she should say something bad about Geezer. I held my breath, hoping that one of those moments where teachers dish on each other was coming.

“Girls,” she said, “if you wait for everyone else to do the right thing before you do the right thing, then you'll never do what's right. You have to do what's right even if other people aren't. Maybe even especially if other people aren't.”

Nobody spoke for a minute until Shakina yelled out, “Beasley's droppin' the wisdom!” That broke the tension. Everybody laughed, and Beasley said, “Okay, get outta here. And get a good night's sleep tonight!”

I did not get a good night's sleep that night. It was a weird feeling: I was lying in bed with my eyes closed and everything, but it felt like I had forgotten how to fall asleep. Sometimes my heels hurt at night after I've been running really hard, which I can usually ignore enough to fall asleep, but not when my mind is in overdrive. The longer I lay there, the more my heels seemed to hurt, and the more times I looked at the clock, the more stressed I got about not being asleep, and the more hyper and awake I became.

I felt really angry and alone. I was sure pretty much everybody else in the house was asleep (because Mom and Dad go right to sleep as soon as they go into their room and shut the door, and they always have, no matter what the evidence named Dominic suggests). When I got up and looked out my window at the dark street with those sickly yellow puddles of light from the streetlights, it seemed like everybody else in the world was asleep too.

I decided to go watch some TV for a while. Maybe that would clear my head. I shuffled downstairs and found the TV already on. Dad was sitting on the couch, and he looked surprised when he saw me.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “Welcome to the club.”

“Dad, you're so random. What are you talking about?”

“Let me guess: you were lying there in bed with thoughts racing through your mind, and you felt like you forgot how to fall asleep. Like there was some switch in your brain that turned it all off, and you just forgot where it was.”

I hadn't thought of the part about the switch, but it was actually a pretty good description of what I'd been feeling. “Yeah.”

“Well, I'm sorry. Bad genes. Insomnia, I'm afraid, runs in the family. Which is why I'm sitting here watching
Satan's Cheerleaders
at one a.m.”

“Is it any good?”

“It's way worse than any movie with that name should be. It's got Yvonne De Carlo, and you know, I always had a crush on her when she was Lily Munster—”

“Dad, TMI.”

“Well, anyway, check her out.”

I looked at the TV. “You had a crush on the old lady?”

“When she was . . . forget it.”

We sat in silence watching the crappy movie for a few minutes. I could tell Dad was dying to say something, so finally I barked “What?” at him.

“I want to give you some advice, and I know it's going to be hard to take, but I just want you to listen.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes you won't be able to sleep. And that sucks, but the only thing you can do to make it suck less is to just accept it. There are worse things in the world than being tired, and that's the worst that can happen. The more you stress about why this shouldn't be happening, the worse it'll be.”

“But I have a game tomorrow.”

“And you'll be so high on adrenaline that you'll probably play great and then come home and collapse. And the good thing is, if you're tired tomorrow, it will mellow you out a little bit and keep you from stressing all day.”

“I hope so,” I said, and turned my attention back to the movie. It must have been really crappy, because the next thing I knew, Lena and Courtney from varsity were laughing and punching me really hard in the stomach.