The phone rang Sunday morning and I picked up expecting Polly, or Tonia, or maybe my grandma, who’d called last week and whose message I realized I’d forgotten to give Mom.
“Hey, champ, how’d it go? You up for a practice?” Joe’s voice came over the receiver instead. And he sounded like nothing had ever happened between us. Technically, nothing had, but I’d resigned myself to not hearing from him again. I’d even told myself it was for the best, because the choice was kissing Joe and having things fizzle out when he started kissing someone else, or ceasing our soccer-lesson friendship because the kiss hadn’t happened. Either path led to the same result, and the second version was a lot less messy.
Still, his question, asked with his usual eagerness, shot a happy jolt through my chest. Maybe there was a third path.
“If you’re up for it,” I said. Then, because thinking about it had called up the awkward feelings from back on the blanket, I added, “I’m sorry I reacted the way I did the other day. I mean, I still think it’s better if we stay friends. But I could have handled it better.” It had felt good apologizing to Tina, and bringing up the other night with Joe got it out of the way, so it wouldn’t hang unspoken between us.
“No need to apologize. We did the right thing, by not . . . you know,” Joe said. His voice was plain for once, like he’d peeled off the joking layer. “I’ll pick you up in an hour?”
“Okay,” I said, grateful that he wasn’t making me explain, and that he had said “we.”
Mom came into the kitchen as I hung up the phone. “Are you practicing today?” she asked. I couldn’t read her tone, but she didn’t sound too mad.
I nodded. “Yeah, I figure it can’t hurt.”
She didn’t say anything else and went to pour some coffee into her Powell Park Title Co. mug.
“Mom,” I began. She looked up. “I’m sorry. I know you and Dad are trying to be good parents, and you care about me and all that. I took out my disappointment about the game on you.” Another apology. Normally, I said sorry automatically, for stuff that wasn’t even my fault, like when someone bumped into me. The apologies I needed to make, like this one, didn’t exit my mouth as easily. As my pile of sorries mounted, they made me think of the one Bobby deserved, and how it would be even more difficult to deliver.
She set down the cup, crossed the kitchen, and wrapped me in the hug I’d needed since yesterday. “It’s all hard,” Mom said. “I can’t expect you to be perfect if I’m not. I’m glad you’re practicing today.”
“Me too,” I said. It wasn’t the ideal truce. It still nagged me that Mom thought the soccer team and my place on it had come too easily.
“I can’t tell you what to do with your opportunities, but I worry that I haven’t taught you how to make most of them.” The hug melted some of the frost. After how I’d treated her, at least I’d be able to look my mom in the eye. “Just promise me you’ll think about what you want?”
I wanted lots of things—another game, a win, a pair of Jordaches, a paper on Great Expectations to materialize, already written. In the big, life-changing sense, all I could think of really and certainly wanting was so cosmically huge: to meet Bobby on another plane of existence where we weren’t student and coach.
But I knew Mom was talking about the big stuff I wanted in this dimension. And that seemed much harder to figure out.
“I will,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
When Joe showed up, I didn’t wait for him to honk, and I also didn’t wait until we got to the field to tell him about the game. “We lost,” I said, the second I plopped into the car. I sank into the comfortable contours of the Nova’s passenger seat, checking Joe for signs that what had happened meant our friendship wasn’t going to work, but he pulled away from the curb with his same loose grip on the steering wheel and I relaxed.
“And . . . ,” Joe said, looking over. “I’m waiting for the part where you tell me how the team lost but you did something fucking amazing.”
I cringed and picked at a hangnail. “I had a fucking amazing hangover,” I said. “We kind of had a motel room party the night before.”
“Really?” Joe said, glancing over at me. “What were you thinking?”
I banged my fist on my knee. “I don’t know! I’m so stupid. I thought I could keep the team in check, but wave some peach schnapps in front of my face and apparently I become a dumb sheep.”
Joe snickered. Which annoyed me, because it felt like he was stifling a giant laugh.
“It’s not funny,” I said. I twisted a thread from my sweatshirt around my finger so tight, the skin turned purple.
“Okay, we’re not practicing today,” Joe said. He turned his car away from the park and headed down Central.
“Where are we going?” I said. “I obviously need to practice.”
He ignored me and pressed play on the 8-track. The Doobie Brothers came on.
“Can we please change it to the radio?” I said.
“Nope. You can punish yourself with the Doobie Brothers until we reach our destination.”
“Fair.” I looked out the window, trying to determine where we were headed.
Joe was singing along with the song. I cleared my throat and raised my eyebrows. “What? It gets in your head!” he said.
Five minutes later, he turned into the parking lot for Fun Time Central, a place in Elm Ridge with go-karts and mini golf.
It was a chilly, windy day and the arcade building was the only part of the place with signs of life. Joe and I went inside. “Wait here,” he said, and he jogged off, leaving me in front of the Skee-Ball machines. I watched as a mom pushed out through the glass door of the arcade dragging two screaming children after her. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the building as the kids pelted one another with SweeTarts.
“Okay,” he said, returning and holding out a handful of tokens. He pointed at the machines. “We’re ready.”
“Skee-Ball?” I said.
“Why not? You need a win, and everybody wins at Skee-Ball.”
“Ugh, I hate it when you make sense,” I said.
We skeed our balls in more or less companionable silence. Or silence against a backdrop of arcade machines chiming and kids screaming—what were they feeding these banshee children? But Joe was right. Skee-Ball wasn’t my game, but every so often, my ball sprang past the lower tiers of points and made its way into the 50-point hole, giving me a little surge of pleasure.
Next to me, Joe seemed to be effortlessly hitting the 40s and 50s, but he wasn’t talking himself up with the same bravado he did at our practices. I wondered if it was because of the other night, or because he was really trying to cheer me up so had tempered his bragging.
It took a while for our tokens to run out, and when they did, Joe ripped off his strip of winner tickets and handed them to me with a big grin.
“Prize time,” he said. We walked to the wall of stuffed animals and case of trinkets, where a couple was engaged in some quality groping. The girl held a teddy bear. My stomach tensed, and I sidestepped a little farther away from Joe.
“See, it’s called the Redemption Counter,” Joe said, acting like he didn’t see the couple. He pointed at the sign above the prizes.
I asked the attendant for two packs of Fun Dip, some Blow Pops, and a chunky Tootsie Roll I’d give to Mom. I handed one of the Fun Dips to Joe. “And this was me redeeming myself?”
“You get it. You sure you don’t go to Catholic school?”
We ripped open the Fun Dips and each wet the candy sticks to dip in the sour-sweet powder. We were headed to the car when Joe stopped, his dip stick thoughtfully to one side of his mouth, and said, “I think it’s good you screwed up your first game. Now you know how much you want to play.”
“Yeah, I just wish I had realized that before the schnapps.”
“Well, in your next game, even if you totally fuck up and are a disaster on the field, it won’t be because you decided to get drunk on peach schnapps. If you’re going to get in trouble, put yourself on the line for something good.”
I stuck out my tongue at him, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. After what Mom had said about going for what I want, I worried I’d never know what that was. I’d gone to tryouts because of Bobby, but I couldn’t call that putting myself on the line, since I knew in the back of my mind that Bobby was a fantasy. And if I really wanted a win, why had I so expertly steered myself toward a loss?
We got into the car. As he started it, I realized I didn’t want the day to end. Hanging out with Joe now that we knew what we were was even nicer than it had been before.
Joe stopped in front of my house and shut off the radio. “I’m helping my dad paint a house next weekend, but we’ll pick up lessons soon. We can work on some footwork stuff or even face off a bit,” he said.
“Sounds good,” I said. It was a good plan, just what I wanted, but I still felt off.
“Don’t worry, champ, you didn’t blow your only chance.” He glanced in my direction and gave me a small smile.
“But I’m still sorry I blew the first one,” I said. I turned to get out of the car, but I felt a hand on my arm, and turned back toward him. He was leaning toward me, looking at me. An unbidden thought flew through my mind—how stunned Joe would be if I kissed him—but it was gone just as quickly.
“Stop being sorry,” he said.
At school on Monday, I had more than one moment of thinking it would be better not to go to practice at all. I couldn’t imagine what kind of speech Bobby would give us, and I also worried that, with the weekend to think about it, he’d decided to cut us all loose for so blatantly breaking the rules of his contract. Or just for being jerks.
When practice rolled around, Tina and I were the first two to arrive, and everyone else came soon thereafter. We all seemed a bit sheepish around each other, like we’d spent Saturday revealing our deepest secrets or grossest habits and now, in the daylight, were embarrassed to be around one another.
“It’s so cold out, isn’t it?” Marie broke the ice. She looked at me like I might be mad at her, because the party had been her idea.
“Yeah, I think I feel my leg hair growing,” I said with a laugh, freeing her of blame. She smirked.
“My nips are going to slice through my shirt,” Joanie said, looking down at her Happy Days T-shirt. “Poor Fonzie.”
“Maybe we should warm up?” I suggested. “Till Bobby gets here?”
Tina said, “Good idea. Maybe stretches first? Since it’s cold?”
“Can someone show me that calf stretch again?” Arlene asked.
We stretched and then did side runs, where you more or less galloped sideways. As we cut through the brisk air, Joanie called, “So much cold air just went up my cooch, my fallopians have icicles on them.”
“I think I just queefed a snow cone,” Lisa said.
We were holding our sides laughing when we finished. Bobby still hadn’t shown, however. “Should we do laps?” I suggested, and everyone agreed. No one wanted to admit that he might not be coming. We were on our third trip around the park, all of us anxiously looking toward the curb where Bobby usually parked to see if he’d arrived yet, when his Datsun pulled up.
“I knew he wasn’t ditching us,” Dana said.
“You said ‘He’s ditching us’ literally two minutes ago,” Tina said.
Bobby got the equipment from his trunk and was trying for a stern expression as he approached us, but I noticed the slightest flicker of pleasure at seeing us taking initiative. When we’d run a few more laps, he blew his whistle for us to come in, and without bringing up Saturday at all, he got us started on passing drills.
I worried Bobby was quieter than usual, maybe regretting coming back, but once I had a ball between my feet, I felt content. For the first time since Mom told me to think about what I wanted, I felt an inkling of what that might actually be. From now on, I would focus on soccer. No more drinking. No more parties. No more obsessing over Bobby. Soccer was enough.
When I got a chance to dribble swiftly toward the goal, I switched feet to pass the ball to Tina with my left instead of my right foot, and I executed the move better than I had in weeks of bumbling it. I was good at this.
We all were better than we’d been when we’d started the season, of course, but I knew in that moment that we were also truly good. If Bobby had shown up today expecting us to prove that—even sober—we weren’t worth his coaching, we were defying his expectations.
When Bobby called an end to the drills and told us to get ready to scrimmage, I thought of what Joe had said, how I’d have another chance. I wanted a real game, but a scrimmage was something.
After ten minutes, no one had scored, but not for lack of trying. Arlene and I plowed into each other going for the ball, and I said, “Sorry.” I couldn’t break the habit of saying it when I ran into someone or when they ran into me.
“Don’t be,” she said. “It was a clean hit.”
“I know, it’s a reflex,” I told her, then filched the ball and started kicking toward her goal.
“Hey!” Arlene said, but she didn’t sound mad.
“Not sorry!” I called.
I wished I could hold on to the feeling when Bobby called us in from our scoreless scrimmage. But besides that brief look of approval he’d given when he saw us running at the beginning of practice, Bobby had shown no signs that he’d forgiven us.
Finally, after a pause that stretched on for a long time, he said, “That was a great practice.” His smile suddenly appeared, the way a flower starts as a tight bud and blooms overnight. “You’re looking like a real team.”