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Sandra beat Birch to the field. She sat in her car until she saw another person clad in fluorescent yellow climb out of a pickup. Then she swallowed four ibuprofen and climbed out of her car, trying not to wince. She made her way across the parking lot to the other official. He smiled when he saw her. Her uniform had arrived that afternoon, so she stood out in the crowd. She was officially an official.
She stuck her hand out and introduced herself. He gave it a firm shake. “Harold. Good to meet ya.” He slammed the door of his truck shut and started walking.
She fell into step alongside him, wondering where Bob was. He’d said he’d meet her here, but she didn’t think he’d arrived yet.
“You ready for this?” Harold asked.
“I don’t think so.”
He gave her a hearty laugh. “Extra points for honesty. It’ll be nice to have a woman around. Us men are all about having pride, or pretending at least.” He strode confidently across the field, moving with more grace than she would’ve guessed possible, based on his rotundness.
He called the home coach by his first name and started a long boisterous conversation with him, one which Sandra felt decidedly left out of. She stood awkwardly nearby, her arms folded across her new sports bra, which had her smashed together with a force she found both uncomfortable and comforting.
As her watch ticked toward kickoff, she grew more and more nervous. So, she nearly leapt with joy when she saw Birch crawl out of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. A familiar face. A person who knew the rules of soccer. It was possible she’d never been so excited to see anyone ever.
He jogged toward her, wearing a big smile and pulling his yellow shirt over his head, as Harold called for captains. She returned the smile and then tried to sound confident as she shook hands with the middle school girls forming the captains’ circle. As Harold checked for barrettes and earrings, she tried to calm her nerves. How hard could a junior high girls’ soccer game be? She could do this.
Harold sent the girls out onto the field and then asked her which side of the field she wanted for the first half. She had no idea.
“The far side,” Birch answered for her. “Let you deal with the subs while she gets her feet wet.”
Oh yeah, the subs. She’d forgotten that was even a thing. Grateful for Birch’s wisdom, she headed for the opposite side of the field.
Harold blew the whistle, the green team kicked the ball, and Sandra forced her sore feet to move. She’d only gone about twenty feet when the ball changed direction with a decided lack of oomph. She learned something then, something that made her happier than any Christmas morning ever had: middle school girls were slooooow. Nothing against them. They were precious little athletes, but they were so much slower than their male classmates, and she was over the moon. She was the biggest fan of middle school girls to ever walk the earth. She could do this. She’d found her groove. She would just tell Mike White to only give her middle school girls’ games for the rest of her career. Oh, who was she kidding? She was only going to do this until she cleared Frank’s name. But until that happened, it was middle school girls all the way. The ball took a full thirty seconds to roll out of bounds, giving Sandra ample time to figure out who had touched it last and which way the ball should go as a result. She blew the whistle, pointed with her arm, and was almost having fun when a fullback fully flattened a striker for seemingly no reason at all. She audibly gasped, wondered why the ref hadn’t blown the whistle, and then remembered that she was the ref. She gave a loud tweet and scowled at the bully in the green shirt. Tempted to red card her and kick her out of the sport forever, she decided to just call it a push and gave the white team a direct kick.
The green moms were most unhappy with this decision. She couldn’t make out everything they were saying, but one voice rose above the rest. “Let them play, ref!” She tried to tune them out while wondering if they were right. Had she been too quick to blow the whistle? As she was wondering this, a white player elbowed a green player in the face, and the women behind her erupted. “Are you blind? Call it both ways, ref!” A few expletives reached her ears, and her jaw would have dropped open in righteous indignation if it hadn’t been clamped firmly around the whistle. Now she didn’t know what to do. Blow the whistle or don’t blow the whistle? She wished she was on the other side, dealing with the subs.
“It’s okay!”
She hadn’t even realized Birch was that close to her until she heard his voice. She looked at him, her eyes wide with incredulity.
He laughed and slapped her on the back. “No, really. First one was a great call. You missed the second one, but so what? Get your head back in the game. You’re doing great.”
Feeling only moderately encouraged, she tried to focus. But the green moms continued to scream at her throughout the first half, and when it was time to cross to the other side, she felt like she was crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land.