Hidden Lake isn’t actually hidden. Signs on nearby roads have arrows that point to it like a target, and a street called Hidden Lake Lane leads right to our busy town beach with a lifeguard on duty all summer long.
But a few hundred yards from the town beach is a rocky little cove that’s hard to get to. The only way in is a twisting, unmarked trail that leads down from the paved road and winds through briar bushes. Suddenly you pop out at the water’s edge and find yourself on a narrow beach that’s more pebbles than sand.
It was a Wednesday afternoon in July and the sun was sinking toward the trees on the far side of the lake. I sat on a beach towel, trying not to stare at Becca, who was twenty feet away in a red bikini. She was studying a book with great concentration and occasionally making notes with a pencil—probably memorizing vocab words for the SAT or something.
I had been out of the hospital for a little over a week, and had already had two follow-up visits with my dentist. I was off the pain pills and feeling better, except that I knew one more hellish conversation about the football team was going to kick off in my direction very soon. I was still two days away from my first shift back at work.
“You need to tell Brian,” Dad informed me the morning after our talk in the family room. He works long hours on a construction crew and most days he leaves home before I wake up, but on weekends he sleeps late and we all eat breakfast together.
“Why don’t you tell him?” I suggested.
“Because he’s holding a spot for you, so don’t you think you should be the one to let him know that you won’t be taking it?” My dad probably thought I wouldn’t have the guts to tell Muhldinger, and I admit I wasn’t looking forward to it. I couldn’t predict exactly how our new principal would react when I told him I didn’t want to be part of his mighty Lions, but I knew he wasn’t going to slap me on the back and wish me good luck in my future endeavors.
Near me, Dylan and Frank were discussing one of their recurring subjects of the summer—which team they were going to go out for in September, or avoid.
“Ping-Pong,” Dylan said. “I have a wicked backhand slice. I can literally bend the ball around a pillar in my basement.”
“The only problem is that there’s no Ping-Pong team at our school,” Frank pointed out.
“I can start one,” Dylan said hopefully. “Millions more people play Ping-Pong than football or basketball. It’s an Olympic sport.”
“Muhldinger’s not a Ping-Pong kind of a guy,” Frank told him. “He likes sports where people bleed.”
Dylan nodded miserably. “Not many injuries in Ping-Pong, unless you get a splinter from the racket. What about you?”
“I’m using the process of elimination,” Frank announced. “Figuring out the ones I definitely don’t want to go near.” He yawned. “Basketball is off my list for reasons having to do with mass and gravity. My vertical leap is…”
“Nonexistent.”
“I can get airborne,” Frank insisted, “but not for long. Football is also out. Collisions on frozen fields are not my idea of a good time. Forget cross-country. I just don’t see the point since the invention of the gasoline engine. I once went out for a long jog after lunch and fell asleep while I was running.”
It was probably true—Frank could sleep almost anywhere, especially after a big meal. I’d seen him fall asleep in theaters during earsplitting action movies and in math class in the middle of an algebra test, and I once found him snoring away on a leaf pile in his backyard while the blower that he’d been using roared beside him and his worried dog licked his face. I had no trouble believing that he could start to nap while in the middle of a run.
I knew Frank and Dylan were joking around, but it was also clear they were worried. They had been dismissing sport after sport, trying to figure out what would be the easiest and least dangerous teams. Now that August was just around the corner, their conversations were taking on real urgency. It was kind of pathetic that on this perfect summer afternoon the specter of Principal Muhldinger was looming over Hidden Lake, haunting us all.
I stood, walked down the beach to the water, and waded out three steps. Then I dove in from where it was knee deep and the cold lake swallowed me. I stayed under for as long as I could, and when I finally surfaced I was more than forty feet from shore. I turned over onto my back and floated. The sun felt warm on my face, and I tried to soak it in and clear my mind of worries about sports, my father, and an inevitable conversation with our new principal.
Someone broke the surface near me. I expected to see Frank or Dylan, but instead I glimpsed long black hair and the flash of a red bikini. “Hey, Becca,” I said, a little surprised. I figured she must have seen me dive in and followed me out here, but I didn’t have a clue why. We weren’t exactly friends. I had tried to chat with her a few times at work but she’d never seemed that interested.
Becca treaded water near me, and for a few moments she didn’t give any hint that she even knew I was there. I began to wonder if we had just randomly ended up in the same part of Hidden Lake.
Then she asked: “How’re your teeth?”
“Rerooting themselves. It’s nice to be able to eat again.”
“I heard about what happened from Meg. Her dad works for the volunteer ambulance corps. It sounded like a real bad accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
She gave me a curious look. “Somebody did that to you intentionally?”
“After I intentionally put myself in the stupid position of trying out for the football team.”
Becca slowly stretched out on her back and floated a few feet away from me. “At least it paid off. I heard you made varsity. That’s a big deal.”
At Muscles High it certainly was, but I was pretty sure she was being sarcastic. “I’ve decided to turn that great honor down.”
She studied my face. Her hazel eyes sparked in the bright sunlight. “Wow. Muhldinger’s not going to like that at all.”
“I haven’t told him yet. Not looking forward to it. But whatever. A lot of people have more serious problems than whether to play on a stupid football team.”
“That’s probably true,” Becca admitted and fell silent. We floated near each other for a while. We had worked together at Burger Central all summer and had never had more than a thirty-second conversation. Now at least we were sharing a deep silence.
Wind rippled the water, and I could hear the lifeguard’s whistle all the way from the town beach. A dragonfly looked us over as possible landing pads and whizzed past. “It’s nice out here,” she said, and I couldn’t figure out why she suddenly sounded uncharacteristically nervous. “That stupid book gave me a headache.”
“What were you studying?”
“Would you like to go to a movie sometime?” she asked.
“What?”
“Multivariable equations,” Becca said quickly. “They’re the most common algebra problems on the SAT. The whole trick to them is isolating the variable—”
“Wait a minute,” I said, cutting her off. “Did you just ask me out?”
“No big deal. I’ve been studying a lot lately. I thought it would be fun to see a movie, but if you don’t want to, no problem.”
“How’s this Friday night?” I asked, maybe a little too quickly.
Becca gave me a shy smile, and it was one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen. Who knew that such a serious girl had a smile like that hidden away? “Friday’s great. We can go right after work. You pick the movie—I’ll see anything.”
She turned and glanced toward the beach, and I thought she was going to swim off, but then she looked back at me and said: “I’m glad you’re not going to play football, Jack. What’s happening at our school is disgusting, and making us all join sports teams is … fascistic.”
“Right,” I said, trying to remember exactly what “fascistic” meant.
“Somebody needs to tell them to shove it.”
“If there’s one thing I never wanted to be, it’s a rebel.”
But she was busy giving me advice. “When you tell Muhldinger, don’t try to reason with him. These people are total wackos, and he’s off the scale. Just say your piece and get out of there fast, before he eats you alive.”
She wasn’t exactly making me feel better. “Believe me, I’m not planning to get into a debate with him on the value of football.” To change the subject, I asked her the question that had been bothering Dylan and Frank: “So what team are you thinking about going out for in September?”
Becca didn’t hesitate. “The one that’s going to cost me the least time and effort. I saw on the school Web site they may start a C-team for soccer.”
“What’s the criteria?” I asked.
“At the C-level they’ll take anyone with a heartbeat,” she said. “But it’ll probably never happen because they need to find a coach and dig up enough other teams for us to play. If they get it together, it will be a Dumpster team for nonathletes, which suits me just fine. See you on Friday.” Then Becca dove under, and she must have had lungs to match her long legs because she didn’t surface again till she was all the way back to our cove.
I floated on alone in the middle of Hidden Lake, smiling for the first time since I had gotten my face mashed. Friday night was not far away. I was kind of in shock at the idea of taking Becca to a movie, but I also found myself thinking about soccer—a sport I had fooled around with. We’d played in gym class, and with my speed I’d always been more than decent at it. I had a surprisingly strong shot with my right foot, but I’d never thought about joining a team. I’d watched some MLS games on TV with my dad—he’ll watch any sport known to man. But he had a football player’s dislike of soccer, and after a while he’d mutter, “One hour and the score’s still zero to zero. I’d rather watch ice melt,” and switch the channel.
At Fremont, with its crazed cult of football, soccer was barely tolerated. The varsity boys and girls rarely won any trophies to contribute to the Fremont case on New Trophy Day, and the JV teams were invisible. Becca was right—a C-team would be a joke, if anyone noticed it at all.
But that probably meant we could control things a little bit—I was pretty sure Frank and Dylan would join up if I did, and Becca could get her best friend, Meg. If we found the right coach, I could spend the fall hanging out with friends and not worrying about setting records or crushing opponents or getting crushed myself.
I licked my tongue over my messed-up teeth. Becca might also be right that, like it or not, my new role was to tell Muhldinger to shove it. There was probably no better way of doing that than turning down the mighty Fremont football team in order to play on a remedial soccer squad with a bunch of slackers.