Since my last visit, Polly had outfitted the condo’s second bedroom with a new queen-sized bed for me, a small desk that looked out the window, and a poster of a Manchester United soccer player. “I went to the little shop in Evergreen Park that sells British imports, and that was all they had,” she said. “But you can decorate however you want. Your Dad and I are hoping you might want to stay overnight more often.”
“It’s perfect,” I said, looking forward to telling Joe about what was sort of a punk rock move on Polly’s part. My dad probably hated the poster.
I was keyed up thinking about the game, but eventually the clean scent of the soft sheets lulled me to sleep, and I didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at seven. I dressed in my soccer gear and took both my duffel bag and the garment bag containing my bridesmaid dress that was hanging on the closet door. I neatly put the heels and the new Estée Lauder makeup bag in with the rest of my stuff.
Polly was already up and had a breakfast of toast and eggs laid out for me. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Is that your uniform? It’s cute. Who’s your game against?”
“Actually . . . St. Mark’s . . . the boys’ school,” I said. It felt a little wrong to tell her when I hadn’t told Mom, but Polly had asked outright. What if lying to a bride on her wedding day was bad luck? I explained how I’d challenged Ken.
“Wow,” Polly said, nodding as she took a slow sip of her coffee. “This Ken sounds like a real jerk.”
She paused, and I was so nervous she’d tell me I couldn’t possibly go head-to-head with a bunch of angry boys on the day of her wedding. She put her coffee down on the counter and crossed the kitchen toward me. She took away my plate with one hand and put her other hand on my shoulder. “Sounds like you need a bigger breakfast if you’re going to kick their asses.”
We’d agreed to meet at the gate outside the field a half hour before the game. Everyone was even earlier than that, and everyone was nervous.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Dana asked me.
“We can’t call it off now,” I said. My captain voice was my normal voice, just louder. “They’d call us chickens.” That seemed worse than anything else they’d called us.
I pushed through the gate, aware of my teammates behind me.
The stands were empty. We’d obeyed Bobby’s request not to risk the game or his job by spreading the word—and really, I didn’t expect people who saw us challenge St. Mark’s at the party to remember it had happened or believe the game would actually occur—but I thought maybe someone would show. At the very least, some assholes from St. Mark’s who wanted to heckle us. I wished Joe was there, but I thought it was nice that he didn’t blow off his sister for me.
“There were more people at our Wisconsin game,” Joanie said, squinting toward the bleachers as if she might have missed spotting a crowd.
“Next game, we’ll tell everyone to come. But this is still a big deal, audience or not,” Wendy said.
“Yeah, I feel . . . strong,” Marie said. “Or maybe it’s just that all my anger converted itself to muscles.”
“Like the Hulk?” Sarah said.
“I guess, if he had to put up with more assholes,” Marie said.
“Whoa,” Tina said, as we stepped onto the field. St. Mark’s soccer field—or pitch, as Joe would remind me—was only used for soccer, not football or anything else, and it had benefited from the expensive tuition the school charged. Even though there’d been some cold nights the last few weeks, the grass here was summer green, and the white lines on the field were crisp and new. “Did we die and go to heaven? Because I was hoping for a beach.”
“Wow, what a field,” Bobby said, sounding like the Country Mouse visiting the City Mouse’s opulent home for the first time. “Let’s go warm up.”
We had no idea if there would be a place for us to change, so we’d all worn our uniforms to the field and didn’t bring much extra stuff with us. My dress bag was in Tina’s car for later.
A brisk wind whipped by, activating a patch of goose bumps on my legs as I stretched. We took a lap around the field and kicked some practice passes with the bag of balls Bobby had brought. It was quarter after nine.
“Do you think they got the time wrong?” Dana asked me. “Didn’t we say nine?”
“Yeah,” I said, peering across the field toward the school.
“They’re gonna show, right?” Dawn said. “They wanted to play us.”
“Maybe their coach wouldn’t let them come?” Franchesa suggested.
“I guess we have more time to warm up,” I said.
We ran up and down the field, working on our passes. We lined up to take practice kicks at the goal.
But we grew more listless as it dawned on us that we’d been stood up.
“They’re not coming,” I said. Dawn kicked a ball, hard and off-kilter, so it landed in the empty bleachers. No one else moved for a minute, almost like we couldn’t. The air had gone out of us. It was worse than heartbreak. It was insulting.
“What do you want to do, Susan?” Bobby asked me.
I took in the disappointed faces of my teammates, hating that the only option I could think of was to leave. Then a clatter rose from the equipment shed at the far end of the home bleachers.
“It’s them,” I said, feeling a thrill for a second. Maybe there had been a small miscommunication, but now the game would go as planned. I smiled at my team. “They’re here.” A happy medley of relief filled the air.
That is, until two dozen soccer players, naked except for their cleats, burst from the shed and ran toward us, whooping and hollering. They all waved something white—underwear, it looked like—over their heads.
“What the—” I started to say, as the herd barreled right through the center of the circle we’d formed. We jumped back and stumbled over one another to get away from the nude mass of boys. One of the guys—not Ken—tossed his underwear onto my shoulder, and as I tried to swat it off me, another boy squirted me with something. Liquid splattered my face and entered my stunned and open mouth. It was floral and vinegary. The acidic taste made my lips pucker. I spat at the ground.
They’d doused us all with it. By the time everyone had wiped the liquid from their skin, hair, and, in a few cases, eyes, the boys’ pale naked butts were far away, headed toward the school.
“Assholes,” Dawn yelled, kicking away the graying briefs that had landed on her cleats.
“Cowards!” That was Tina.
If the boys heard us, it didn’t matter, because they were disappearing inside the building. The last nude boy, who I recognized as Ken, took a few steps back toward us and yelled, “Go home!”
I opened my mouth to hurl an insult at him, but I felt like I had when the wind was knocked out of me. The words were there in my throat but stuck under my rib cage. My insides felt scraped and dry, as massive tears came to my eyes. I used the back of my hand to wipe them away, hoping no one would see.
The awareness that I was utterly useless to stand up for us against a team of naked boys made me want to sit in the middle of the field and curl into a ball. Had they been watching us as we practiced and waited? Of course they had, and they’d been laughing at us. That was the worst part.
I started to run toward the door where they’d gone. “Susan, no,” Bobby said, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“But those assholes,” I started, and I couldn’t keep the tears from falling. Bobby took one of the towels out of the equipment bag and handed it to me. I held it to my face, pressing it tight against my skin. “They can’t do this,” I sputtered.
I wasn’t being captain-like, I knew, but fury had started to spiral inside me, twisting around hurt. I blinked away more tears that were pushing at my eyes and spat more of the vinegary taste from my mouth. It smelled like soap and salad dressing.
Joanie, whose jersey was wet in places, smelled it. “Did they . . . douche us?”
Wendy sniffed the damp ends of her hair. “This is definitely Summer’s Eve.”
“And the underwear . . .” Marie started to say, gingerly plucking a pair that had caught in Franchesa’s ponytail. “They’re dirty.” She wrinkled her nose and whipped the tighty-whities away.
“Please let me go . . . do . . . something,” I said to Bobby, trying to think of what, if anything, I could possibly do. My mind was blank except for seeing the naked guys running at us over and over.
As angry as I was, the tears kept reappearing. It was my fault this had happened, and as captain, I had to fix it. My stomach churned, imagining what all those boys together would say to me if I confronted them. But if I let them get away with it, I wasn’t a good captain.
“Look,” Bobby said to me and the rest of us. “You have every right to be angry. But sometimes we bring our best selves and it’s not enough—”
Tina scowled at him. “So we’re supposed to be the bigger people? After that?”
I leaned my head on her shoulder in gratitude. It was like she had read my mind. I had no interest in hearing one of Bobby’s big speeches right now. He might be our coach, and under other circumstances, I would probably love hearing whatever calm, high-minded suggestion he was about to make, but today I didn’t want that Bobby.
I wanted St. Mark’s to pay.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. Or what I’m going to do,” he said. “We have all the area coaches’ numbers in the athletics office. Home numbers, too. I’m going to drive over right now and track their coach down.”
“But we weren’t even supposed to be playing this game. You’ll get in trouble,” I said.
“I promise, I won’t.” He patted my shoulder very gently. He looked from me to the team. “I still think it’s great that you came ready to play. It’s a shame your opponents couldn’t do the same.” He picked up his equipment bag and started for the gates. When we didn’t follow him right away, he turned and said, “Come on, let’s go. I’ll handle all this, and you all can go . . .” He seemed stumped for the right word for what we might do after getting sprayed with Summer’s Eve and pelted with dirty underwear. “. . . recuperate.”
We looked at one another like we had no choice but to trudge behind him toward the street. When he reached his car, he said, “I’ll let you know what their coach says at practice on Monday.”
After he’d driven off, my teammates and I stood there, and I knew no one wanted to go home. “Should we get something to eat?” Dana suggested.
Most of us shook our heads or mumbled, “Not hungry.”
“Me neither,” Dana said.
“We don’t have to let these guys get away with this,” Tina said, directing the comment at me, as if together, we’d find the right solution.
“Are you thinking . . . revenge?” I said.
“Not Carrie-at-the-prom revenge, but yeah. Light revenge?” She tossed the idea out but seemed nervous, like she thought the team might call her crazy.
“Yes, that’s exactly what we need to do,” Marie said.
“Why should they get away with this?” Dawn extended a hand to Tina to slap five. “Even if Bobby gets ahold of their coach, he’ll probably just laugh when he finds out what his players did.”
“What do you have in mind?” Wendy said, slinging an arm over Tina’s shoulder. “Because I’m in.”
Ideas started to fly. “We TP their houses!” “We fuck up their cars!” “We’ll break into their cafeteria and pee in their soda machine!”
“Those are all good suggestions,” I said. Finally, with the team rallying around our revenge plot, my energy had started to return. “But we need a punishment that fits the crime. We need to hit them where it hurts—”
“Their dicks?” Marie said.
“For sure,” Dana said. “They can put them back where they came from.”
“Their moms?” Joanie said.
“No, I mean . . . never mind,” Dana muttered. Tina and I traded an amused look.
“I think she’s trying to say she wants them to put their dicks away forever,” Dawn said.
“Screw that,” Marie said. “I’d like to see them run through here when we’re prepared for their dicks.”
“They’re more than their dicks, guys,” Arlene said, like this was something she’d learned in kindergarten. “They’re bad people no matter what they have between their legs.”
“I think we need to settle on a plan so we can stop saying ‘dick,’” Franchesa said.
“Please,” Tina said.
“And we don’t give their dicks any more attention,” I said. “They think the world revolves around them as it is. But . . .” I pointed at the ground, where one of the pairs of underwear lay. It had a telltale butt-crack-length brown stain up the back of it. So did several of the others lying in view. “I think that even though they’re assholes, they don’t know how to wipe theirs.”
“Disgusting!”
“Do you guys think there’s sideline chalk in that shed?” I said. “Because I have an idea.”
Just as I suspected, the boys had been too stupid to lock up the shed. Inside, there was white chalk and line stripers, for marking off lines on the pitch and the football field. We took everything and returned to the soccer pitch.
“We have to work fast,” I said. “Who knows how long we have!”
It took us about an hour to mark the pitch. We went over every letter with a second coat of chalk, and then a third, ensuring that it wouldn’t be washed away if it rained before next week. Heck, it would take hours to erase it even with firehoses.
“Is this kind of mean?” Joanie said when we were done. “Like, is it beneath us?”
“I think it’s perfect,” Marie said, hoisting her paintbrush in the air. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but nobody whines louder than a man whose ego has been bruised.”
Once we’d put everything away, we all walked to the top of the bleachers to stare down at our work. It reminded me of what I’d told Joe about listening to “Gimme Shelter,” that feeling of going up high to look at my life. In this case, though, I was looking at the St. Mark’s soccer field, where we’d painted, in bright white letters:
EAT SHIT, ST. SKID-MARKS!
We’d then used a pair of pliers we found to pick up the pairs of shit-stained underwear and draped them over orange cones down the length of the field.
I laughed, imagining Ken’s anger mounting in him until his skin was redder than his hair. Joe was going to declare this very punk rock.
“I wish I had a camera,” Marie said.
“I know,” Franchesa said. “We’ll just have to remember it.”
“I might block some of it out,” Tina said. “But this part’s good. I can’t wait until those assholes and all their friends come to school on Monday and see it.”
“I still wish we’d gotten to play the game,” Dawn said.
“What game?”
A male voice yelled up from below and behind us. I spun around and looked down at the ground beneath the bleachers.
Two police officers were standing there, and from the looks on their faces, they didn’t think our work was as good as we did.