“Kind of stupid this town is more about football than anything else. Our soccer team is gonna be better than we are,” Nick said.
I grunted in agreement. We could lose every game and still turn out more of a crowd than the soccer team. Thankfully, we didn’t lose every game, but we weren’t making state either.
The crowd of mostly parents and a few students cheered with every good play, which was often. I got into it more as time went on, feeling less and less self-conscious when I cheered for Jack. Errr, the team, when I cheered for the team.
The score remained low, which was normal for soccer, but we won. Jack and his teammates met the opposition in the middle with a round ofgood gamesbetween them. Claps, shouts, and whistles faded slowly, and then all of us in the stands stood and funneled to the exit.
For a moment, I was stuck on a higher step from the bottlenecked crowd. Jack walked off the field, lifting his head as he went, then froze. I froze. Our eyes locked, and my gut clenched in reflex.
Nick babbled to entertain himself as we waited, but I didn’t hear a word of it. For seconds—maybe minutes, I wasn’t sure—Jack and I stared at each other across the thirty-five or so yards. A player bumped his shoulder as they ran past, and Jack lifted his shirt to wipe sweat off his face, eyes reconnecting with mine when he dropped it.
This wasn’t the few seconds in class with students laughing around us. This wasn’t us toe-to-toe, ready to blow up at any moment. I didn’t know what this was, but it was different. The unaffected expression he usually held wasn’t there, but what was didn’t make a lick of sense.
Jack tucked his lips between his teeth, then adjusted from one foot to the other.
Surprised. Nervous. Shy?
Or maybe I needed my eyes checked.
“Finally.”
I jolted and glanced at Nick as he stepped into the flow of moving traffic. It seemed my daze hadn’t lasted long, and no one was the wiser about the stare down with Jack. Before I lost the vantage point, I glanced toward the field. Jack wasn’t in the same spot, and he wasn’t among the few players left gathering gear.
Whatever I’d wanted to make clearer with this experiment had backfired.
I needed to get out of here.
Cara said bye to her friends and then happily filled the silence between us with the antics of her classmates as we left. When we got home, I called Momma and handed the phone to Cara so she could get her in a better mood before she handed the phone back to me.
Momma was too busy to say much and didn’t have anything bad to say about Daddy for a change.
She’d been the prom queen, and Daddy had been the older med student when they’d met. Neither had come out and said it, but I’d figured they’d married for all the wrong reasons. They looked like the happy couple and found out later it took more than that to make it work.
I wouldn’t make that mistake.
And on the subject of mistakes, I called Sasha. We made as much sense as Momma and Daddy, and she probably expected me to marry her one day.
“Hey, babe,” she purred into the phone. “I was just thinkin’ ’bout you.”
“Yeah? What about?”
At moments like this, I understood what my parents probably thought at one point. This was easy. I gave her an opening, and she went with it. It took little effort on my part. Sasha had forgiven me for brushing her off during my punishment and was now onto more important things in life: Homecoming.
“I’m wearing white with these tiny pink flowers. You’ll have to wear white too.”
“I’ll be in my uniform,” I said.
“They’ll give you time to change into a suit.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but if they did, the thought of putting on a suit fresh out of sweaty pads was just—no. I groaned, wondering if I could opt out of the whole thing.
“You have to wear a suit, baaabe. You’ll be king, and I’ll be queen. It’s perfect.”
It definitely was not perfect. It was very, very far from perfect, but telling her that now, telling her I wanted to break up, would be worse before Homecoming, right?
“You’re still taking me to the party at the Beach this Saturday, right?”
“Yeah,” I said automatically but couldn’t remember when we ever discussed it.
