The Football Girl Page 9

  “Better get that cleaned up,” Marina said during our cooldown back in Boardman Park.

  I squirted water onto it straight from my bottle. “That’ll have to do,” I said.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you fall like that,” Lexie said.

  “I missed a step,” I replied.

  “I’m sure you’ll get hurt worse than that playing football,” Marina responded.

  “You mean if I go to football camp.”

  “Now it’s an if?” Lexie asked. “I thought you were done with cross-country.”

  “I never said that. I said I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I still don’t. But I know I want my friends. I need you guys.”

  “What happened?” Marina asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tess, nobody texts out of the blue for no reason. Something must have happened. So spill it. What’s the drama?”

  “Caleb and I had a fight.”

  “About what?”

  “Guess.”

  “You’re kidding me. Is any relationship in your life safe from this sport?”

  “Can I just tell you the story, and then you tell me I’m right?” I said with a smile.

  “Sure,” Marina replied.

  “He keeps saying I’m a great football player, but he obviously doesn’t want me to actually play. He won’t come right out and say it, but every time it comes up, he has a new reason why it’s not a good idea. Like, It’s a rough sport, Tessa. You might get hurt. Or I’m cool with it, but a lot of the other guys won’t be. Or now it’s Tessa, you don’t get how bad it is for a dude’s reputation if he tackles a chick.”

  “He said chick?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  Lexie scrunched up her face. “So, tell us again why you won’t just run cross-country? Is it still about the catch?”

  “You mean the pass I dropped?”

  “Sorry, the drop. Oh, and Congress, right?” Lexie added with a smile.

  “It is about the drop,” I said. “And it’s about Congress. Put those things together, and I’m just not in the mood to go with the flow. I’m tired of being invisible and stressing about meeting other people’s expectations. I think I have to go my own way, or I won’t be happy and I’ll make you and everyone else around me miserable. Plus I really like playing football.”

  “There are other sports,” Marina said. “Soccer.”

  “Meh.”

  “Lacrosse.”

  “No.”

  “Field hockey.”

  I shook my head.

  “Volleyball.”

  “Stop.”

  “Play football, then,” Marina said. “What’s the worst that could happen? I mean, besides injury or death.”

  “It would change things. With Caleb.”

  “Well, what do you like more, football or Caleb? If you had to choose.”

  “If I had to choose? I choose both.”

  “You just said it would change things.”

  “Well, maybe it doesn’t have to,” I said, trying to think positively. “So we had a fight? Who cares? He’s probably just worried about me. I bet once he sees me play in an actual game and I don’t get hurt, he’ll get over it. Hopefully Congress will too. Maybe for once she’ll notice and be proud of me.”

  “Hmm,” said Marina.

  “You know what I should do? I should definitely show up at that football camp.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Lexie.

  “It’s aggressive. They’ll respect that. It’ll show them I’m serious. We’ll get all the weirdness out of the way, so by the time the season starts, it’ll be ancient history and we’ll be one big happy team.”

  “I hope all your dreams come true,” Marina said, like she thought I was living in a fantasy world. I could tell she was being sincere, though.

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry I wasn’t totally honest with you and Lexie before.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Lexie said. “You’re crazy. But you’re forgiven. And we’re sorry too. You’ve never been invisible to us.”

  Maybe it was crazy, but knowing I had my friends back, I was more tired than ever of worrying about what everyone else thought. It was time to do what I wanted to do. The truth was, I liked being the football girl. It had become my thing. I’d made it happen. Without it I was a face in the crowd, another girl waiting to get noticed, hoping someone would pick her for the team, ask her to the dance, or tell her how smart she was. From now on I wasn’t going to ask for permission or say I was sorry or sweat it with Caleb or Mom or anyone else. This was about me catching footballs. Game on.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 23

  Summer started slow. I spent a lot of time helping out at the shop. Tessa was always running with her friends. One day I played two-on-two football with Dobie, Nick, and Julian. I must have been off my game, because I couldn’t throw straight or catch. The guys called me out when we were done.

  “What’s wrong with you, dude?” Dobie asked as we sat on the bleachers drinking water in the late-morning sun.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t have it today.”

  “Didn’t have it?” Dobie repeated. “You played like a…” He stopped himself.

  “Like a what?” I asked.

  “Like my—my grandmother,” Nick stammered.

  “No,” I said to Dobie. “You were going to say like a girl.”

  “So what?” Dobie said. “It’s just an expression.”

  I twisted the cap onto my half-filled bottle of water and threw the whole thing at Dobie’s head.

  “Hey!” he said. “What’s your problem?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “It was just an expression.”

  Dobie stood up. “Do it again,” he dared me.

  I rose to face him. “Say I played like a girl again,” I replied.

  Nick jumped in between us. “Take it easy,” he said. “I’m sure you’re both sorry. Let’s just go get Slurpees or something and forget it happened.”

  “I got a better idea,” Dobie said, staring at me. “Why don’t the rest of us go get Slurpees, and Caleb can go crying to his girlfriend. Or did she dump you?”

  “She didn’t dump me,” I said.

  “That’s funny, because I haven’t seen her in a while. Is she too busy getting ready for football camp?”

  “Shut up, Dobie.”

  “Do us a favor,” Dobie went on. “If you do see her, will you talk some sense into her? Tell her to find her own sport.”

  It was a good thing Nick was blocking my way, because I was ready to go after Dobie. Dobie hopped off the bleachers and started walking in the other direction. Julian followed him.

  “Come on, Nick,” Dobie called.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Nick said. “He doesn’t mean it. Tessa’s cool, man. Dobie’s just blowing off steam.”

  I nodded. “If you say so.”

  Nick followed Dobie and Julian away from the park while I stayed on the bleachers by myself. The fight with Dobie didn’t bother me. Dobie had a temper and liked to get under my skin. We’d be fine. But I realized I did really want to see Tessa. Not to talk sense into her, whatever that meant. I just missed her. Nothing was as much fun when she wasn’t around. I hoped this football thing would be over soon so we could hang out the way we used to.

  FRIDAY, JULY 1

  I had this crazy idea that if I left Caleb alone, he would decide on his own that he was making a big deal out of nothing. He did not have to worry about me or choose between me and football. We could be more than one thing to each other at the same time. In my mind he’d show up on my doorstep and say he liked me whether I was the football girl or not. So I waited for him to call, or text, or ring the bell.

  In the meantime, Mom’s campaign was going well. Mom stuck to her main issues. If someone asked her about me, she would say “I’m proud of my daughter” without saying why. I wished she could come up with one reason, even if it had nothing to do with football. There were more people every d
ay around the house. Volunteers mostly, who came to make phone calls, put up signs around town, or stuff envelopes.

  Dad put me in charge of watching social media for anyone talking about Mom. It was an easy job. I set up alerts for Jane Dooley, Councilwoman Dooley, and Mayor Dooley and waited for my phone to buzz. Dad acted like I was saving the world.

  “Great catch!” he’d say whenever I showed him a tweet or post that mentioned Mom. “Let’s capture that.”

  Dad never told me exactly what he meant by that, so I just took screenshots and saved them to my gallery. Every few hours, he would call me over and show me a graph with yellow, green, and red lines that went up and down. It reminded me of a hospital monitor.

  “Is Mom dying?” I finally asked, nibbling on a rice cake.

  Dad frowned at me. “These are analytics,” he explained. “See. You can tell how many times people are going to the campaign website throughout the day, how long they’re staying there, and what pages they’re reading.”

  “So you’re spying on them?”

  “We’re learning from them,” Dad said. “What they like. What they don’t like. If we post a video and nobody watches it, we take it down. If lots of people click on it, we move it to the front of the website.”

  I would never admit Mom was right, but I was learning something. I’d always thought Dad made a big deal over the numbers because he just wanted people to like Mom. I could see now that it was really about getting people to listen to her.

  “Why is the green line going up here?” I asked, pointing at the screen.

  “I’m not sure,” Dad said, squinting. “Why don’t you check into it?”

  “Me?”

  “Would you, please?” he asked. “I need to meet with some of the volunteers.”

  I studied the graph and figured out that the green line showed how many clicks Mom’s tweets were getting. It looked like mountains and valleys. Up meant more clicks, down meant less. I checked out the popular tweets and saw that they all had photos. That made sense. Who didn’t like photos? When I pointed this out to Dad, he whacked me on the back so hard, I almost fell over. “Fantastic, Tessa!” he said, before hugging me.

  I smiled as Dad wrapped me up in his arms. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Even if he was proud of me for something that was more important to him than it was to me, it still felt good.

  Finally, right before the Fourth of July, Caleb texted me.

  Wanna hang.

  Is that a ? Never mind. Sure. Come over tomorrow.

  Cool.

  SATURDAY, JULY 2

  Tessa’s dad showed me through the house and out the back door. The first thing he did was hand me a staple gun. “Just fire a couple of these into the wooden stakes and toss it there,” he said, pointing to a stack of signs piled up on the deck.

  “Sure, Mr. Dooley,” I said.

  “Call me Alan.”

  “Okay, um, Alan.”

  I started stapling signs. Tessa was at the picnic table stuffing envelopes. After a few minutes her mom came outside.

  “Hi, Caleb,” she said. “Thanks so much for helping today.”

  She sat at the picnic table and opened her laptop.

  “My pleasure, Mrs. Dooley.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “Call me Mayor Dooley.”

  “That would be pretty cool,” I said.

  “Too bad you can’t vote,” she said.

  “He wouldn’t vote for you, Mom,” replied Tessa.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “Because you’re a Democrat. And he’s a Republican.”

  I was surprised Tessa said that. I wasn’t even sure it was true. My dad was a Republican, and I was pretty sure Charlie was too. But I wasn’t really anything. I’d run for student council last year, but the only thing I’d stood for was bigger lunches.

  There was a sharp edge in Tessa’s voice. I didn’t want to be in the middle of a fight with her mom, so I tried to say something that would make them both happy.

  “I might vote for her,” I said. “I can be open-minded.”

  “You know she wants to raise taxes?” Tessa asked.

  “For our schools,” Mrs. Dooley added. “And technically the mayor doesn’t raise taxes. The state does. But I support using taxes for our schools.”

  “But not the football stadium,” Tessa added. “Even though everyone else in the town wants it.”

  “In a perfect world, we’d all have everything we wanted,” Mrs. Dooley said to me. “But that isn’t the way it works.”

  “I don’t think my dad wants a new stadium,” I said. “He really doesn’t like paying for anything. But he likes football.”

  “Tessa says you’re a good athlete, Caleb,” Mrs. Dooley said. “Are you going to play football this fall?”

  “I’m going to try out,” I said. “And there’s a football camp this summer me and my friends are going to do.”

  “That sounds great,” Mrs. Dooley said.

  Tessa tossed a stack of envelopes into a box on the ground. “I might do it too,” she said casually. “Remember? I talked about it during the interview?”

  “Do what, sweetie?” Mrs. Dooley asked.

  “The football camp.”

  Mrs. Dooley looked over at Tessa and frowned. “We can talk about it later.”

  Tessa kept going. “Remember how you said you were proud of me, and how you wanted me to be successful? Or did you just mean successful in a way that helps you?”

  “You’re taking both comments out of context,” Mrs. Dooley answered. “I also told you I didn’t think it was a good idea.”

  “You know you can get concussions in any sport?” Tessa asked.

  “It’s not just about concussions, Tessa.”

  I listened to Tessa and her mom go back and forth, and only one thought went through my head. Please don’t ask me what I think. Please don’t ask me what I think. Because I would have to either lie or tell Tessa that I agreed with her mom.

  I left that day without actually talking to Tessa. But I’d have to be deaf to think she had changed her mind about anything. The tone of her voice told me she was more determined than ever to play football. It was totally Tessa, and it made me like her even more than before. I just wished I could tell her that deep down, I didn’t see any way this could end well for her or for us.

  —

  Everyone was home for dinner that night. Mom made Dad close the shop early even though it was still light, Charlie had a day off from the gym, and Luke had nothing better to do.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” Mom said as she started bringing food to the table. Chili dogs, corn on the cob, potato salad, green beans, and watermelon.

  There wasn’t much chatter for a while. We were too busy eating. At one point, Luke was two-fisting a slice of watermelon and a chili dog. I was pretty sure I saw him spit out a bean and a seed at the same time.

  “This is great, Mom,” Charlie said at last. “I’m going to miss your chili dogs.”

  Mom smiled. “I can tell you how to make them.”

  “It won’t be the same,” Charlie replied.

  “Have you found a place to live?” Dad asked.

  He lives here, I thought, unsure who to be mad at—Dad for pushing Charlie out or Charlie for letting it happen.

  “I’ve got a few leads,” Charlie said.

  “You know, other than college I’ve only lived in two places,” Dad said. “My parents’ house and this house.”

  “Good story, Dad,” Luke said.

  “It might sound boring to you, Luke, but the way I saw it, sticking with what I knew was better than searching aimlessly for something new.”

  Charlie put his glass down hard enough to rattle the table. “Dad, starting a program five hours away is not searching aimlessly. I have a plan. Physical therapy is a real thing. And I think I can be really good at it.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Charlie,” Dad said. “You’ve made up your mind. Y
ou’re leaving. We’ll be here. And we’ll be fine.” He looked over at me. “Right, Caleb?”

  I wasn’t sure what Dad meant by that. He might have been talking about the next few years of high school and football for me and for Luke. On the other hand, knowing how Dad felt about change, what he’d said made me wonder if he was thinking of a future where Luke and I would be running the business. That was a little scary. For the first time, I could understand why someone would want to take a chance on something new when they could, even if everyone else was telling them they were nuts.

  SUNDAY, JULY 3

  The next day, Mom and I drove across town to the developments with the new homes. Wide sidewalks, brightly painted houses, green lawns, and neatly mulched gardens. Everything was just a little too perfect.

  “Oh, look!” Mom said, pointing to a large brown house. “There’s one.” She looked in her rearview mirror and smiled.

  “One what?” I turned around in my seat. Whatever it was, I’d missed it.

  “A campaign sign,” Mom replied. “ ‘Jane Dooley for Mayor.’ ”

  “Guess we can skip that house, then,” I said.

  “Ha ha,” Mom replied, coming to a stop in front of a small park.

  To my surprise, Beth was standing on the sidewalk with the cameraman. Mom and I both got out of the car smiling, but for different reasons.

  “Hi!” Mom said. “I’m so glad you could join us.”

  “Me too,” said Beth. “Tessa, it’s nice to see you again.”

  Mom ended up doing most of the doorbelling herself. That meant I was really going on a walk with Beth.

  “So are you excited about high school?” she asked.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “Would you really like to be on the football team?” she asked. “Just between us.”

  “I want to try.”

  “But they won’t let you?”

  “No, it’s not that. I think they have to let me.” I told her about the research I’d done.

  “So what’s holding you back?”

  It was so tempting to tell Beth that my mother would not let me play football, that she was only going along with this whole charade because it made her look good. As long as Mom was the star of the show, it didn’t matter what I did, and that was what bugged me. She would look like a giant hypocrite if that was in the newspaper. Her slogan was Own the day! The only thing that stopped me from telling Beth all this was the knowledge that I still needed Mom to sign the permission slip for football camp, which started in two weeks.