“Ok, now you’re just being—”
“There.” Willow nodded at me. She stood straight and crossed her arms, smiling smugly. “That’s exactly what I was going for. Take a look.”
I did go into our bathroom, climbing over the box that partially blocked the door so that I could see myself in the mirror. And she was right. She had worked hard to make me prettier.
“See what I mean?” she asked. She was on the other side of the apartment but she didn’t have to yell her question or even raise her voice. I’d been so glad to find this place because it was affordable, was equipped with both an indoor shower and floors, and seemed to have a sufficient supply of heat and hot water. However, it was small, maybe even cramped. When Willow and I were here together, we were really on top of each other, but it worked ok because she was gone a lot.
A lot. That was a problem, but one I wasn’t going to deal with today because we had enough going on. It was enough that my head started to hurt and I reached up to press—
“What are you doing? Don’t touch your face!” my sister yelled, and our next-door neighbor thumped the wall. He was always home and he had the ears of a bat.
“I’m not,” I told her, and removed my thumbs from my eye sockets.
It was time to go and we got into my car. I had told myself that I wasn’t excited, not worked up, not emotional. My sister remarked a few times that I was driving too fast or too slow, and she also mentioned that I hadn’t needed any color on my cheeks.
“You’re so red. Seriously, Zo, you have to calm down! This is not the way to play it today.”
She was very good with things with boys, so I knew that she was right. But almost everyone in northern Michigan shared this level of emotion with me right now, because this was a special day that they regarded as more important than their birthdays, Christmas, and the Fourth of July combined: this was the Woodsmen football team’s Fan Day.
In years past, I hadn’t given a fat rat’s butt about Fan Day. I’d listened to my bandmates go on and on about waiting in lines to meet the players, to tour the stadium, to see the cheerleaders, and to do the thousands of other things that they freaked out about on an annual basis. Before, I had thought that they were silly.
Now I had changed my mind. I agreed that it was a big deal, a very big deal. I had been looking forward to this day for weeks and months. It was the day that I was going to see Everett again.
“Maybe we should talk about this,” my sister said. “Do you have a strategy?”
“Do I need one?”
“Yes,” she responded immediately. “You need to have it worked out in your mind so that you don’t come off as crazy and desperate.”
“I’m not either of those things!”
“Zoey…”
I didn’t have to look at her to know that she was rolling her eyes. But I really wasn’t! Everett and I were friends, and the evidence was clear on my phone because I’d heard from him. Several times! He’d sent me a picture of a band practicing near his house, for example, and I had written back. Then I’d forwarded a post I’d seen about the Junior Woodsmen, that management had started to plan for a few renovations on their facility. Last winter, an online petition had circulated that asked the owners of the team had to do something about that place, because it was a disgrace. The petition had gotten attention from Woodsmen fans, leading to a whole lot of signatures. I was aware of that because the person who had started the petition was me.
“Good thing for those guys,” he had written back. “I’ll be at Woodsmen Stadium.” I hoped that was true.
Fan Day was the first time that many of the Woodsmen players showed up again in Michigan. Everett had been in Arizona for the past few months but he was at Woodsmen Stadium today, too. So were some of the other guys from the Junior Woodsmen, but not to meet with fans. This was the beginning of their tryout for the real team. They had a meeting with members of the coaching staff, who also didn’t participate in most of the funactivities. They were already getting prepared for the upcoming season and they were all business.
As was I: prepared and all business. Except I was very nervous and I didn’t know what I should say.
“If you were me, how would you handle this?” I asked my sister, and she had ideas. First, she said that she would be a little bit pouty, because in all the time that Everett had been away, he hadn’t made much of an effort with me.
“A few texts? Some pictures?” she scoffed. “He should have done more.” She further advised me not to explain what I was pouting about. “If he really cares, he’ll figure it out!” She told me not to mention, ever, how much time I’d spent reading about him and the two other Woodsmen quarterbacks, Kayden Matthews and Dallas Laforet. I had been almost as dogged in my research of them as I was in my pursuit of a teaching job.
“There are other things,” my sister continued. She told me not to discuss my problems, none of them. I wasn’t supposed to tell him how hard it had been to move us out of the motel room using only my little car, on three tires and a spare because one had gone flat and the videos I’d watched about patching it hadn’t worked for me. I also wasn’t supposed to say that the year had ended really badly at school.
“That was good news because I graduated,” I countered. A few times, I hadn’t thought I would make it, but I had. “He already knows because he said congratulations.”
“But he didn’t give you a present, and you should also be mad about that,” she said. She was using the know-it-all voice again. “Anyway, I meant at your elementary school.”
I hadn’t told her everything about what had happened there, but she had noticed how upset I had been (in a room the size of ours, you couldn’t miss much about the other person). My cooperating teacher hadn’t been very encouraging or positive when we’d had a final meeting to discuss how my semester in fourth grade had gone. “I could write you a recommendation,” Phil had said reluctantly, “but it would be better to ask for one from someone else.” I had tried my best in his classroom but it hadn’t been enough to make him believe that I would be a good teacher.
Willow had a lot more to tell me about how to purse my lips, how to meet Everett’s eyes and then slowly look away, how to adjust my back and shoulders to present my breasts at the best possible angle, and more. Eventually, I tuned her out, because there was just too much wrong with me to try to fix. It was overwhelming, as was the traffic as we got closer to the stadium and the number of cars increased by a thousand percent. Everyone around here wanted to go to Fan Day.
Then I realized that she had moved away from my appearance and various flirting techniques and was asking something else. “So, have you? You know, have you heard from anybody? Is anybody bothering you?”
“What?” I asked, confused.
