Or maybe she just takes pity on me, and figures I need a distraction from this morning’s appointment.
Whatever the reason, she starts to talk.
“I started playing tennis when I was six,” she says, turning back to meet my gaze. “The summer after first grade, my parents put me in a tennis camp for a week. I loved it, and I was good at it. The instructor told my parents I had a lot of potential.”
The light turns green, and I reluctantly drag my eyes back to the road. Fortunately there’s hardly any traffic yet.
“And I’m pretty sure it was the first time anyone thought I had potential,” she continues, “because the teachers at school sure didn’t. I wasn’t the slowest kid in my class, but I was average. Barely.”
“You were six,” I interrupt.
“Yeah, but even at that age, they could tell, and I could too. And it surprised everyone, because the rest of my family is really bright. My dad’s a Greek history prof and my mom has a master’s. And my sister Hayley learned to read when she was three or something.”
“Ah.” It’s probably unfair, but I dislike Hayley already.
“Anyway, I begged my parents to let me take tennis lessons. At first it was once a week, but I kept asking to do more, and by the time I was ten I was playing every day. I started competing in junior tournaments, and I did well.”
Ally pauses and takes a deep breath. “Then, when I was fifteen, I went to a tennis academy in Florida. My parents didn’t want to let me go at first—it was really expensive, and they thought I should be focusing on school. Tennis was a hobby, not a career. But I convinced them that if I went to Florida, I’d have a real shot at a tennis scholarship in the States.”
“You went to Florida by yourself?”
“Yeah, I boarded at the academy. It’s where I met Sarah Hayes, we were roommates. I won quite a few junior tournaments and got some good scholarship offers. I could have gone to Stanford. But I turned them all down to join the pro tour.”
She sighs. “My parents thought I was crazy, my dad especially. A lot more players go the college route now, and join the pro tour after they get their degree. So they have something to fall back on if tennis doesn’t work out. But I didn’t want to go to college. There wasn’t anything I really wanted to study, and it felt like it’d be a distraction from tennis.”
She goes quiet for a beat. I wish I could see her face, but we’ve made it to the highway and I really have to focus on the road.
“So you joined the pro tour,” I prompt.
“Yep,” she says softly. “I joined the pro tour, and it all went to hell. It was a whole different league from the juniors, which shouldn’t have been surprising, but somehow it was. I felt like I couldn’t win anything, and I didn’t understand it. And since I wasn’t winning much, I wasn’t earning much, and I had to keep asking my parents for money.”
“That must have been tough.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see her shrug. “They helped me out, but I could tell they thought it was a bad investment. And in their defense, they’re well off, but not so rich that they didn’t notice the money. Anyway, I limped along on the tour for four years, hoping for a breakthrough that never came.”
“You did better than most people,” I point out. “Most tennis players never even make the pro tour.”
“I know that,” she replies. “But I hadso much potential, Drew. I was the runner-up at the Wimbledon Juniors. I didn’t need to go to college because I was going to be a star. In retrospect, it was a big mistake.”
I remember the videos of her matches, of the look on her face when she hit a good shot, and something pinches in my chest. “You decided to chase your dream. I wouldn’t call that a mistake.”
She gives another little shrug. “Maybe not.”
“You didn’t consider a career in sports?” I ask. “Like being a tennis pro at a club or something?”
“No. After I quit, I didn’t want anything to do with tennis. I came home, and my parents offered to pay for me to go to college, but I didn’t want to do that either. It would have felt like admitting they were right, that it’s what I should have done in the first place, and I couldn’t do that.”
“So what did you do instead?”
“I went out to the west coast, around Vancouver,” she says. “Surfed and mountain biked in the summer, skied in the winter.” She pauses. “When you’re staring at the ocean, the fact that you can’t hit a ball over a net more times than the next girl doesn’t seem to matter very much.”
“Yeah.” I can see what she means. “When did you come back?”
Ally sighs. “I’d been there for almost two years when I got sick with a horrible flu. It might have been mono, I don’t know, but whatever it was knocked me completely flat. I’d been working as a waitress, but it didn’t pay very much, and anything extra went to sports. So when I got the flu and couldn’t work for a month, I couldn’t pay rent. I had to call my parents and ask for the money to fly home.”
I feel another pinch in my chest at the thought of her in Vancouver, sick, broke, and presumably alone.
“It was a wake-up call,” she continues. “And I was lucky; my parents sent me the money and let me move home. I got a part-time job as a barista and enrolled in community college, got adiploma in medical office administration. You pretty much know the rest.”
