SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

1:11 A.M.

ALI

They descended upon the desolate gas station like a tornado touching down. Their cars barely screeched to a stop in front of the fuel pumps before doors were flung open and girls spilled out. While the drivers gassed up, the rest either sprinted inside to pee or danced to the weird oldies song piped in from speakers somewhere over their heads, half of them in pj’s, half in normal clothes, an electrified mix of headlights and fluorescent making them appear to glow.

Ali is just holstering the gas nozzle when Mel shouts that she’s found it, the home address for the head coach of Oak Knolls. None of the girls have their phones with them, they’ll all follow Mel. The girls quickly climb back inside their rides, click their seat belts. Engines start.

As she drives away, Ali sees the night cashier in her side mirror. He’s behind the store window, rubbing his bald head and laughing.

Oak Knolls is maybe fifteen minutes from West Essex, straight north on the highway, two exits past the mall. Ali doesn’t love driving on the highway. Merging traffic scares the crap out of her. But at this time of night, the roads are theirs. Over and over, the six cars change lanes and shift positions, pulling alongside each other to beep and scream and wave, then dropping back and crossing three lanes without bothering to signal. Each ride is so overstuffed with girls that their long hair spills out of the open windows.

Ali plays her music louder than it’s ever been. Her brother James got her hooked on hip-hop and the bass ripples through her, mini sonic booms. Between that and the rush of the wind at sixty-five miles per hour, Ali feels like she’s in a deprivation tank. She couldn’t hold on to a thought if she wanted to. Which is great because she doesn’t.

Ali takes the long curve of the Oak Knolls exit and feels the pull of inertia, her body straining against her seat belt. The brightness of the highway dims to that of a country road. Stars appear.

Her music is turned way down. Ali glances over at Grace. Quite a bold move for a newbie riding shotgun in an older player’s car. “You got something against hip-hop?” she asks, and immediately moves to turn the volume back up.

Grace laughs. “No! I just don’t want us to wake the town up.”

“Right. Okay.”

About a quarter mile farther, they reach Oak Knolls. Ali, the last car in line, sees the traffic light go yellow, and the car ahead of her guns it through. Ali gets stuck at the red. Not a big deal, she can still see them. It’s more annoying. Another pause.

She lets out a huff, twists her neck until it cracks, turns her stereo off because the volume is too low to really hear the song anyway. On her left, she sees a grassy postage stamp rimmed with white curb, there to set off a wooden sign proclaiming Welcome to Oak Knolls. Next to it, a smaller sign is pushed into the grass on thin metal stakes, like the kind people put in their front yards at election time. It says Varsity Girls Field Hockey State Champions.

After rolling her eyes, Ali scans the intersection, left to right and then left again. Not a single car to be seen. Only the taillights of the last car in the Wildcats’ caravan pulling farther and farther away.

Ali tells herself to run the red. Just run it. There’s no way she’s getting a ticket. And even if she did, even if there were one of those red-light cameras sneakily mounted somewhere, what would a ticket even cost? Like fifty bucks? Her father would probably just pay it, thinking he’d done it. She looks left and right and left again. She looks at that stupid sign.

Kearson leans forward from the back seat. “It’s green,” she says helpfully.

“Thanks,” Ali says.

As Ali continues forward, her passengers—Kearson and two juniors in the back seat, and Grace in the front—chat about how cute the downtown area of Oak Knolls is, pointing things out to one another. A cupcake café with pink awnings. A bookstore called Never Not Reading. A tiny theater with a glowing marquee that looks like it’s been around since movies were invented.

“You couldn’t pay me to live here,” Ali says, announcing her way into the conversation. “Oak Knolls is a complete dump.”

The girls laugh and Ali laughs too, even though she used to love going to see movies at that theater. Unlike the multiplex in West Essex, they put real butter on their popcorn, not butter-flavored oil.

If the cupcake café was open when the movie let out, she’d stop in. Not for cupcakes—the best ones really did come from Park & Orchard in West Essex—but the incredible frozen hot chocolate they made. And it was at the bookstore where she’d first seen a shelf talker for the dystopian series she’d gobbled up two summers ago.

But Ali doesn’t come to Oak Knolls anymore. She doesn’t want to risk accidentally running into Darlene Maguire. Ali knows she’ll face her eventually, but she wants it to happen on the field, when she’ll know it’s coming. The worst thing would be to get ambushed. What if Darlene made some racist gesture again, only in front of Ali’s family? What if baby John-John was with her?

“Ali, you missed the turn,” Grace says, but her eyes aren’t on the road. She’s focused on Ali’s hands, gripping the steering wheel, the tendons flexed and taut. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Ali says, more sharply than she intends to. She tries to soften it with a smile, but it comes to her face like a stick dragged through wet cement.

She’s always had a fire inside her. A heat Ali could stoke to help her dig deeper, run faster, work harder. Bright but controlled, like coal shoveled into an engine bolted to the base of her spine. But since the championship loss, it’s turned into a different kind of flame. One that’s more unpredictable and dangerous, like the spark off a frayed wire. She never knows where or when it might zap her.

When Grace brought up Darlene Maguire earlier, Ali totally stumbled. Same thing when Coach delicately broached the subject at the Psych-Up. Ali barely managed to keep her cool when watching the video Darlene had posted; inside she was screaming. Driving her teammates through Oak Knolls, Ali’s about to have a panic attack.

Ali suspected that Coach had been talking about her in his speech tonight. He watched that very first crack appear. Now she’s barely holding it together. And tomorrow, when Darlene comes at her again, she’s going to fall apart.

The road comes back into focus. Ali pulls a U-turn in the center of the street, doubles back, and makes the turn.

“I bet that’s the house,” Kearson says.

Ali drives past a generic little box with gray vinyl siding and a waist-high white picket fence. There’s a field hockey sticker on the bumper of the car parked in the driveway. Two red field hockey sticks, turned upside-down, their hooks making a heart shape.

The other five cars are parked around the corner and halfway down the next street, next to a small playground. The girls are already outside and conferring with one another. She barely puts her Jeep in park before the girls riding with her bail out the doors and hurry over. Ali moves more slowly, a pace befitting the drag on her team she believes herself to be.

She is the last to reach the team huddle. Same as on the field, when during a time out, the girls circle up and feverishly plan their next attack. Sometimes her teammates will have already reached in, their stack of hands bouncing like a trampoline, and screamed, Let’s go Wildcats!, and their charge back onto the field spins Ali like a top.

Similarly, Ali expects to find that a strategy to grab the bulldog has formed without her. But no. They’re all hesitating.

“So … how should we do this?” Phoebe says.

Mel shrugs. “I mean, we want it to be a team effort, but we can’t all go up to the house and take the dog. We’d get caught for sure.”

For a moment, no one else says anything to the team. But plenty of girls whisper to one another.

“Do you think we could get, like, arrested for this?”

“Probably. I think it counts as theft even if we’re only planning to borrow the dog for a little while.”

“At the very least, we’re all getting suspended if we get caught. Maybe three days, but probably five.”

“Definitely five. Principal Meyer suspended Alan Wallows for five days, even though all he did was get caught using fake money in the cafeteria vending machine.”

It’s not that any of her teammates want to back down. It’s that, now they’re here and no longer just spitballing, it’s a lot harder to step up. It’s not surprising. They are all good girls, who do well in school, don’t drink or do drugs, never get detention. The idea that one of them is going to volunteer to do this potentially illegal and season-ending stunt seems more and more unlikely with each passing second. Oak Knolls is their rival, sure, but only because that’s the team who bested them.

Except that’s not the way Ali feels. For her it couldn’t be personal.

“I’ll do it,” Ali says.

“Wait,” Mel says. “Seriously?”

It’s not clear if Mel’s relieved or not that Ali has stepped up. But Ali’s made up her mind. She bends over, reties her sneakers with double knots, and tucks away the slack so there’s no risk of tripping.

The thing is, Ali has always, always felt a part of this team. These girls, some of whom she has known for years, they’ve traveled together, played together, hung out together. She knows their parents, knows who they’ve made out with, knows how their sweat smells, knows who bites their nails, who snores, who is in remedial classes, who takes medication.

But Darlene Maguire robbed her of that feeling.

“Yup. The rest of you can be my lookouts. Or just wait here. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“I’ll go with you, Ali,” Grace says.

“Grace, I can do it on my own.”

“I know that,” Grace says. “But you don’t have to. I’ve got your back, remember?”

Ali rubs a hand through Grace’s blue hair. “Team first, always.”

The energy picks back up immediately. Girls bouncing on their toes. Clutching each other.

“Here, Hamburger loves these,” Phoebe says, passing Ali a granola bar. “It’s our secret. I give him one every night. My mom has him on some stupid diet. Anyway, you can use it to lure the bulldog over.”

Mel warns them, “Don’t do anything unless it’s totally, totally safe. If it’s not, we’ll just come up with another idea.”

The girls cluster up in a tight circle, put their hands in, and do a whispered Let’s go Wildcats! cheer. This time, Ali’s hand is smack-dab in the center, as if held by every single one of her teammates.

The girls skitter through the dark, squatting behind trees and parked cars, spreading out through the night. Footsteps dulled by the runways of grass between sidewalk and pavement. Most houses dark. Quiet of crickets. An airplane high overhead.

Grace and Ali pause behind a tree and scope out the scene from a few houses away.

All the downstairs lights are off. One upstairs room flickers, the flashing blue light of a television.

Ali shares a nod with Grace and the two creep forward, prowling low past hedges and trash cans and parked cars, until they are each clutching slats of the white picket fence. Peering into the yard, Ali sees a little doghouse, a water dish, some chew toys. But no sign of the actual bulldog.

“Here, puppy, puppy,” Ali whispers.

“I guess their coach actually does bring him in for the night,” Grace says.

Ali gives a soft whistle.

Nothing.

She unwraps the granola bar and waves it around so he can smell it.

Nothing.

Ali looks over her shoulder. All the eyes glowing in the dark. What will their confidence be like tomorrow, knowing they walked right up to the edge of this moment, with all they had to prove, and then froze? Ali knows better than anyone. She’s never quite recovered.

On the field, she is her team’s last line of defense. If she can’t deliver, the Wildcats don’t have a chance. She let them down once. She will not let it happen again.

“I’m going around back.”

Grace looks nervous but she still follows Ali, and together the girls sneak around the side of the house. They peer over the rear fence, but the bulldog isn’t in the backyard, either. Ali does, however, spot a doggy door flap on the back door.

An idea comes to Ali hard and fast and sudden, a wave breaking on the shore, pulling away everything else in her mind. Coach talked about having a strong mental game earlier tonight. She is laser focused. She whispers to Grace, “Let me see if I can lure him outside.”

Grace, for the first time, looks worried. “Ali, please. This was a dumb idea. I’m sorry I said anything!”

“Stay here and tell me if any lights come on.”

Ali opens the back gate and silently tiptoes into the yard. She shakes her car keys ever so quietly as she ascends a short set of back stairs. She’s got her granola bar outstretched. “Here, puppy, puppy,” she whispers. “Where’s the good doggy?”

A low growl comes from inside the house. Nothing threatening. More like a cat’s purr.

Crouching on her knees, Ali lifts the flap to the doggy door.

Her eyes dart all over the kitchen. A butcher-block countertop. Open shelving on the walls. A white ceramic pitcher holding wooden utensils. A furry blob splayed on a braided rug in front of the kitchen sink.

The bulldog is staring right at Ali. He doesn’t lift his head, just blinks his wet eyes.

“Hey, buddy.” She fumbles for the granola bar. “Here, puppy, puppy.”

He sniffs the air and gives a deep, throaty bark.

Ali freezes, waiting for someone to come downstairs and investigate.

But it’s quiet.

She pushes her arm as far through the doggy door as she can get it.

At last, the bulldog lifts himself off the rug and lumbers over, stopping to stretch his squat hind legs, a trickle of doggy drool dripping out from the side of his underbite. Ali is careful as she reels him in, pulling her arm back an inch at a time, beckoning him closer and closer, and finally letting him lick the granola bar. She then takes hold of the bulldog’s collar and leads him through the doggy door.

Once he’s outside with her, Ali scoops the bulldog up in her arms. He’s heavy and warm. Bristly fur. She breaks off a piece of the granola bar and lets him sloppily gobble it off her hand.

“You’re such a good puppy!”

“Holy shit, holy shit!” Grace says when Ali carries him down the steps and through the back gate.

“Come on! Let’s get out of here!”

She and Grace jog down the driveway and out to the center of the street, barely able to keep themselves from laughing, the bulldog licking Ali’s face as she jostles him in her arms. The rest of the girls, shrieking with excitement, peel out from behind their cover. And suddenly everyone is running, a wild pack, close to one another, not letting anyone fall behind. They sprint, hair blowing, high on endorphins. Bare-faced. Some of the girls hold hands, pull one another along. They know love. This is love. Better than with any guy because this is forever.

They dive into their cars, too many girls for too few seats, chests heaving, hearts racing.

Exhilaration.

They already know they will never forget tonight. And it’s only just getting started.