Authors: Brendan Halpin
“If I have to,” I said, smiling. “So, uh, how was your conversation with Rachel?”
“You mean you didn't manage to overhear the whole thing? It couldn't have been for lack of trying.”
“Oh my God! I was clearing out cobwebs like you asked me to!”
She gave me this “who do you think you're kidding” grin, and then said, “Well, it was awkward. I'm a little frustrated with Rachel right now, to be honest.”
“Why?” It was comforting to know that somebody besides me was frustrated with the Zaleski family.
“She called to ask if we wanted to get together tomorrow to celebrate the end of your grounding, and I had to tell her that you and Lena aren't really speaking right now.”
“She didn't know that? Isn't that kind of weird?”
Mom looked slightly embarrassed. “I think so. But apparently Lena's been able to use her phone and computer for the last two weeks, and Rachel assumed it was you she was talking to all that time.”
I exploded. “Two weeks! Two weeks she's had her phone back! The whole thing was her idea! That is so totally unfair!”
Mom gritted her teeth. “Well, Rachel and I discussed what we thought an appropriate punishment was at the time, but apparently she had a change of heart.”
Could life get any more unfair? Lena got me in trouble and I ended up suffering more than she did. I hardly knew what to say.
“So Rachel wanted to know if you had any ideas about who Lena might have been communicating with for the last two weeks.”
“Yeah, I've got some ideas, and so would she if she talked to her daughter once in a while.”
Mom smiled. “Yeah, that's pretty much what I told her. Lena's grades are slipping, and Rachel's really worried.”
I rolled my eyes. Like I cared about Mrs. Zaleski's worries.
I still couldn't believe Lena had been off grounding for two weeks.
“Listen,” Mom said. “I know this is a really hard time, but let's just focus on the fact that we're having your new friend over tomorrow. There are a lot of good things happening too.”
Well, I was glad that Shakina and her family were coming over, but losing Lena still hurt.
The next day after school, I was thinking so much about getting to practice to talk to Shakina that I forgot about trying to avoid Lena. So I walked into the locker room and there she was, right in front of me. She acted like I wasn't even there, and for some reason it made me furious.
“Are you ever going to get sick of pretending I don't exist?”
She opened her locker and pretended I didn't exist.
“I mean, you got ungrounded two weeks ago and I'm still grounded! How long are you going to hold this against me?”
Lena pulled on her uniform shirt. I really wanted to punch her just so she would have to admit I existed.
“Six years, Lena. Six years. I can't believe six years means less to you than a very stupid boy. You know what, on second thought, just keep pretending I don't exist, because I don't know you at all. I guess I never did.”
She closed her locker slowly and walked out to practice with varsity and not watch our game. I threw my uniform on and slammed my locker door. I don't know how long I had been slamming my clothes and locker around before I realized Shakina was standing there.
“Well,” she said, “I'm glad I'm not trying to shoot on you today.”
This got a smile out of me, and I greeted my yoga buddy with “Namaste. I'm a being of pure light, breath, and energy.”
“Yeah. I can tell. You wanna talk about it?”
“You know, I'm bored with the whole thing and it's happening to me. Tell me something that's happening with you.”
Shakina talked about how her brother was annoying and how he got away with everything and she was supposed to take it because she was older, and she was ready to kill him. “He's so embarrassing. I'm sorry we have to bring him tonight. Mom said she wouldn't leave him locked up in his cage.”
“All the boys can disappear and be annoying together, and hopefully we'll have a good time.”
We won our game 4â2, which of course was a disappointing score to me, but I was happy because Shakina scored two of our four goals. I made two great saves near the end of the game to preserve the lead, and a weird thing happenedâI heard an extra voice cheering me on. My parents and Dominic were in the stands sitting with Shakina's mom and a kid I assumed was her brother, and there were a few other parents in the stands, but somebody yelled out “Great save!” who didn't seem to be any of the usual suspects. And yes, attendance at our games is so pathetic that it's not just possible but actually quite easy to pick out the voice of every single person cheering for us.
I looked down to the end of the stands, and there, sitting by himself, was Angus. I didn't really know what to make of that, so I basically forgot about it. Or I tried to forget about it, but once we got into the locker room the rest of the girls wouldn't really let me.
“Hey, Amanda, who's your boyfriend?” Marcia asked.
“What are you talking about?” I said, even though I knew exactly what she was talking about.
“I mean, I didn't hear him cheering for anybody else,” she said.
“Yeah, well, who knows. I mean, the kid is in my English class, and that's about it. So I have no idea.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. After a few more jokes about my cheering section from the other members of the team, the subject was dropped, and then when we went into the stands to cheer on varsity and take notes, he was gone. Varsity won their game and officially clinched their berth in the state tournament with two weeks left in the season. Lena was smiling and hugging Courtney and running around the field, and I had a lot of notes to take while everybody else was cheering.
I did not look at Stephanie, their goalie who allowed 2.43 goals per game to my 1.75, not that anybody kept track of such things, as she ran around celebrating.
I wondered for a minute: if I'd made varsity, would Lena have forgiven me by now? It's pretty hard to pretend somebody doesn't exist when you have to play on the same team. Or would we even have gotten into trouble in the first place? If I hadn't been so afraid of losing my connection to her,
would I have said no to the whole stupid party thing? Or if I hadn't been so jealous of her, would I have felt like I had to tell Mom about it?
I guess you can drive yourself crazy thinking about what might have been, or how things might be different, but the fact is that you have to live in the real world where stuff can't un-happen. I wasn't on varsity, and Lena could never un-call me a bitch, and as much as I wanted to live in a world where she was still my best friend, that wasn't the world I was in.
I was pretty down about varsity making states because I am petty like that, so I had totally forgotten about Angus being in the stands for our game until Dad, on the car ride home, had to be corny and embarrassing and say, “So, Amanda, looks like you have a fan club.”
Mom hit him on the arm.
“Dad, I barely know that kid. He's in my English class.”
“Well, he certainly seemed to appreciate your play today,” Dad said with this cheesy grin.
“Yeah, well, maybe his mom was late picking him up or something. I don't know.”
“Really? Because, speaking as a man, I have to say that I never attended a girls' sporting event unless there was somebody on the team I had a special interest in cheering for.”
Ugh, Dad was such a cheeseball. “Dad, I told you, I hardly know the kid, and, anyway, I'm like five inches taller than him! How completely ridiculous would that be?”
Dad suddenly lost his grin and got interested in the road, and I realized I'd just described his relationship with the woman who gave birth to me.
“Mom?” I asked, hoping for a lifeline from the woman who had hit her husband in my defense just a couple of minutes ago.
Mom turned around and looked at me. “Amanda, you dug this hole. You're gonna have to dig yourself out.”
“Dad, you know what I mean. It's like I'm enough of a freak already, andâ”
“I'll just say this and let it drop,” Dad interrupted. “The average height of a man in this country is five nine. If you never look below that line, you are, by definition, going to miss out on half of the quality guys.”
“Yeah, well, all other considerations aside, Dad, the kid's kind of weird and I do not like him like that.”
“That's fine.”
“I know it is! It's fine and it's none of your business. End of discussion!”
“I'm justâ” Dad started, but thankfully Mom hit him again, and it really was the end of the discussion.
Dinner with the Williams family was great. Dad's special errand to avoid cleaning and Mom's wrath turned out to have been across town to the Asian market, and he made this four-course Asian meal that even I had to admit was delicious. The Williamses seemed to like it too: Shakina asked for seconds of the drunken noodles, which you don't do if you're just being polite.
And everybody seemed to get along really well. Both Dad and Mr. Williams love horror movies, so they spent the whole meal geeking out about which movies they'd seen, and their wives kept having to remind them that the dinner table wasn't really the greatest place to talk about severed heads.
Mom and Mrs. Williams talked about craft projects, and Shakina's brother, Jerry, worshipped Conrad as a god. As soon as dinner was over, all three boys went off to play video games and, like, fart and punch each other, or whatever dorky stuff boys do when they're together.
Shakina and I went up to my room and talked about how we couldn't find clothes that fit us. Whereas I could probably get away with an ace bandage, Shakina needed special sports bras that didn't even work all that well, and she apparently had trouble with tops like I had with pants.
“I don't know why they can't make clothes for real people,” Shakina said. “I mean, who are these clothes made for anyway?”
Well, I reflected, not for the first time, they seemed to be made for Lena. But I didn't want to say that.
“I don't know. I mean, models are all tall, but pants don't ever fit me.”
We were silent for a minute, and then Shakina asked, “So, you think we're going to have to go to every state tournament game, even if it's two hours away?”
“Is it even a question? You know what Beasley's going to say.”
“Yeah, I do. I guess I justâthis is wrong, but if I'm going to go halfway to Connecticut for a soccer game on a Tuesday night and fall behind in my homework, I'd rather be playing than watching.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
“Well, you actually could. I mean, you are better than their goalie. But, you know what?”
“What?”
“If you had made varsity we might not have gotten to know each other.”
“That's true. And I would have had Geezer. And God knows what kind of trouble Lena would have gotten us into.”
“It's weird. When we first moved here, I got like four e-mails a day from Emilyâshe was my best friend in Philadelphiaâand then it went down to two, then one, and now I haven't heard from her in weeks.”
“Wow. I'm sorry.”
“Thanks. I don't get how we could be such good friends for so long and now it's like I don't even exist anymore.”
“Yeah.” I was getting sad and wanted to change the subject, so I suggested, “You wanna go down to the basement and throw the circuit breaker so the power goes out right in the middle of the boys' game?”
Shakina smiled. “That is evil! Of course I do!”
After the Williamses left, Conrad and Dominic went off to plot their revenge, and I was pretty sure I was going to regret my evil plan, even though it had been funny when we flicked the switch and the boys started screaming like somebody had killed them.
I found Dad in the kitchen washing dishes. “Hey, kid,” he said. “Thanks for introducing us to such cool people. Raymond and I are taking Dominic and Jerry to the comic book convention next weekend!”
I stared at Dad. He'd actually used the words “cool people” and “comic book convention” in the same sentence. Well, as long as everybody was happy, I was okay.
“Yeah, they're nice.”
“Go see Mom. She's got something for you.”
I went into the living room, where Mom was watching some detective show. “Hey,” I said. “Dad told me you had something for me.”
“I do,” she said, reaching into her purse. “Here.” She pulled out a box with a new phone in it. A phone that played music and took pictures and was not Dad's five-year-old piece-of-junk hand-me-down phone that I'd been using.
“Oh my God! Really? I mean, is it really for me?”
She smiled. “Doing the right thing is never easy, but sometimes there are rewards.”
Varsity finished the regular season at 14â2. We ended up at 10â6, which would have been an amazing record if we weren't totally in the shadow of the magnificent varsity.
Our last game was at home, and Angus was there cheering for me again. It was weird, because when I saw him in English he didn't make any special effort to talk to me or anything. I mean, we were on the same side of pretty much every argument that started in class, but we didn't really talk directly to each other except to say hi in the halls.
Varsity was playing their first state tournament game at home. If they won that one, they'd play a regional game that would be within an hour's drive, and if they won that one, they'd play for the state championship somewhere halfway between Charlesborough and wherever the other team came from.
Beasley trained us well, because the entire junior varsity
showed up to the varsity's first postseason game with notebooks and pens even though our season was over and we couldn't earn starting positions for the next game. Maybe some girls were thinking about staying on Beasley's good side for next season, but honestly I did it without thinkingâI just brought a notebook to varsity games the way I brought a notebook to history class. It was automatic.