For Keeps

IT’S THE LAST day of preseason soccer. Coach is making us run until our feet fall off. School starts on Monday, and his torture sessions will shrink to two hours, so right now he’s going psycho.

The problem is, I was up all night, and every cell in my body needs to be in bed. Bed, the one place I wanted to go after Mel’s party but couldn’t, because when I got home my mom was in the living room watching The Tapes. And that is never a good sign.

Whenever she gets stressed about something (e.g., seeing her long-lost ex-boyfriend’s parents in Shop-Co), she busts out this box of ancient VHS tapes. Other people’s parents might drink, or smoke, or inhale a box of Twinkies to feel better. My mother’s drug of choice? Beverly Hills, 90210—the old-school version.

It’s like some weird kind of therapy for her, watching angst-ridden teenagers act out their dramas. Who will Kelly choose—Dylan or Brandon? Why is Brenda such a bitch? Will Donna ever have sex with David? Even though my mom knows all the story lines by heart, she still watches the tapes over and over. She actually cares how things turn out for the characters, like they’re her family, the siblings she never got to have. Which kind of makes me feel bad for her.

I felt especially bad last night, so even though I was tired after Mel’s party, I sat next to my mom on the couch and watched 90210, and ate the popcorn she made, and didn’t mention the name Tucci once. No sense whacking her over the head with it. There would be plenty of time to discuss the possibility that Paul Tucci’s parents have moved back.

But now, running sprints, a trickle of panic juice seeps into my head. What if they didmove back? Will Paul Tucci show up? And if he does, will my mom be able to handle it? Will I?

We run to the center of the field. It’s me and Liv and Jamie Mann and Kara Ballensweig and Lindsey Ore, and all the other girls we’ve been playing with since fifth grade.

If we want to make it to states this year, Coach has to push us to get there, so even though we’re gasping for air like beached fish right now, we kind of respect him for torturing us.

I remember when I first made varsity how I thought it was so cool to be shouting “Team!” instead of “Lady Hurricanes rock!” like we did in middle school. There I was, this skinny little freshman among seniors, shorts down to my ankles, bangs flopping in my eyes, feeling like I’d just won a spot at the Olympics. Now I’m one of the veterans. I’m also five foot nine—practically an Amazon—the second-tallest player on the team. If you saw me next to my mom you’d laugh. She’s five three. Do I really need to mention where the height genes came from?

I try not to think about it, but sometimes, during a big game, when everyone else’s father is in the stands, I imagine Paul Tucci showing up. I don’t picture him waving to me or chanting my name or anything, just being there. I know it sounds stupid. And anyway, who needs a father when you’ve got a mother like Kate Gardner, the human megaphone? (Go, Josie! Goooooo, Josie! Shoot! Shooooot!). Or when you’ve got Liv’s two dads—Pops and Dodd—sitting next to my mom, banging cowbells like mad?

Liv and I laugh about it now, but when we were in second grade—before we knew any better—we tried to convince my mom to marry Pops or Dodd so we could be a “real” family. We had the whole wedding planned. We would be the flower girls, of course; Liv’s brother, Wyatt, would be the ring bearer; and the cake would be three-tiered, white with pink roses. Whichever dad didn’t get to marry my mom would be the DJ and play the Grease soundtrack.

Somehow no one else seemed to think this was a great idea, so Liv and I eventually gave up the dream of being related and settled for our parents being friends. Which they still are. They do things like cook dinner for each other on the weekends and bring in each other’s newspapers when it’s raining and drive each other’s kids around after practice.

“Need a ride home?” Liv asks as we walk from the field to the locker room. She’s wearing the vintage ’70s soccer jersey she found in the bargain bin at Retro Ruby’s, with the green and yellow collar flapping out to her shoulders so it looks like she has wings. Her hair is braided and pinned up in two Princess Leia buns. Only Liv could pull this off.

Last year, when I first started working at Bananarama, I thought I’d landed the easiest job on the planet. I mean, how hard could it be to scoop ice cream? But that was before I realized Boss Bob’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Not only does he switch the schedule around every ten minutes, he also insists that the spoons be lined up in perfectly symmetrical rows on the counter and that every sprinkle be picked up off the floor before we close at night. Bob will have a hissy if I’m late for work, but right now I’m too thirsty to care.

Liv and I stand in line at the water fountain to fill our bottles. When we’re finished, we start to enter the locker room, but something grabs our attention. It’s the boys’ team. Two dozen pairs of legs, sweaty and dirt streaked. Two dozen sets of cleats, clacking against the pavement.

And really, it’s hard to do anything else. Especially for certain members of our team—the ones who would rather talk about boys than play soccer. The Makeup Mafia, Liv and I secretly call them, because they actually care what they look like on the field.

Right now Lindsey and Jamie and this other girl Schuyler are flipping their hair all around and sticking out their boobs because the guys are approaching. It’s kind of fascinating to watch, the way they fluff themselves up like peacocks whenever a little testosterone appears.

Then there’s me, with the pit-sweat circles down to my waist, and the hair sliding out of its ponytail and sticking to my cheeks. And the gummy white stuff that I know for a fact is stuck in the corners of my mouth, but I refuse, on principle, to wipe away.

So what if Matt Rigby is looking at me right now? So what if he’s a senior and his body looks like it was chiseled from pure marble like Michelangelo’s David?

If Riggs is going to stare at me with those big blue eyes, I am going to stare back, but if he thinks I’m about to wipe the schmutz off my face just to impress him, he can forget it.

We have this history, Matt Rigby and I. Last year, when I was a sophomore and he was a junior, there was this New Year’s Eve party and I needed a ride home, so he drove me. Riggs had a girlfriend at the time, Missy Travers, a senior who was also my soccer captain. Not only was Missy beautiful, she was a great captain. Before every game, she would type up these little slips of paper with inspirational quotes on them, and we would stick the slips of paper in our shin guards. She would give us rubber bands to put on our wrists, and whenever we screwed up we’d have to snap the rubber bands to make ourselves forget our mistake, because if we dwelled on it then our game would be messed up.

Everyone loved Missy. And because Missy and Riggs had been an established couple for more than a year, I didn’t give it a thought when he offered to drive me home from the party. Missy was in Quebec for a week, on the Canadian-U. S. exchange. It wasn’t like Riggs had anything better to do that night. He was just being a nice guy, I thought, walking me from his car to my front door. The sidewalk was icy. He didn’t want me to slip.

It was also crazy cold, I remember, and I wasn’t exactly dressed for the weather. I had on the green silk shirt I’d borrowed from my mother, black leggings, and ballet flats. If I’d been wearing heels I would have been taller than Riggs, but because of the flats we were the same height. So when he smiled at me under the porch light, his mouth was right across from mine.

I don’t know how it happened, exactly. One minute we were talking and the next he was leaning in, pressing his lips to my neck. At the same time, his fingers were tracing the outline of my body—shoulders to ribs to waist to hips to the tops of my thighs—so softly I shivered. He must have thought I was cold because he wrapped his arms around my back and kissed me again, this time on the lips.

Matt Rigby is kissing me!That’s what I was thinking. Followed by, He is such a good kisser. How did he get to be such a good kisser? Followed by, Oh, God.

He looked me straight in the eye and said that he and Missy had “an agreement.” While she was away, the two of them could do whatever they wanted, with whoever they wanted to do it. If Missy wanted to kiss some guy named Pascal, for instance, on the ice at some Canadian hockey rink, that was A-OK.

I didn’t think Missy would do that—I knew for a fact that she kept an eight-by-ten picture of Riggs in her locker, and she actually kissed it before practice—but I let myself believe what he told me. I let myself do all sorts of things that night. . . . Clothing was removed. . . . Certain body parts were touched. . . .

Now whenever Riggs looks at me, I feel a little zing down my spine, a combination of hormones and guilt. Not that Missy ever found out what happened between us. I would have heard if she had; the Elmherst High School grapevine works fast. All I know is when she came home from Quebec, it was business as usual for the two of them—holding hands in the caf, cheering at each other’s games, prom. She probably never even noticed the way Riggs would look at me whenever our paths crossed, which is the same way he is looking at me right now. His come-hither look, Liv calls it.

Liv thinks the whole thing is hilarious. When Riggs and I finally break eye contact and enter our separate locker rooms, she elbows me in the ribs. “Easy, Hester,” she says. As in Hester Prynne. As in The Scarlett Letter, which we read in sophomore lit and which has haunted me ever since.

Liv thinks now that Missy and Riggs have broken up and Missy has left for Stanford, I should stop feeling so bad about what happened last year and “jump his bones already.” Liv says the sexual tension is so thick between us, “you could chop it with a hatchet.” She is full of little nuggets of sex wisdom that she gets from the magazines Dodd brings home from the hair salon where he works. Liv’s message is always the same: Look, Josie, you can’t stay a virgin forever, and you certainly don’t want to be one of those poor girls who hold out until college and lose it on a La-Z-Boy at a frat party, so what are you waiting for?

Not that I’ve experienced heartbreak firsthand, but I look at my mom and her deer-in-the-headlights approach to dating, and I get it. She’s been crushed. She doesn’t want to start all over with some new guy, just to get blindsided by another Arizona girlfriend.

I hate that Paul Tucci broke my mother’s heart, but to be honest, a small, secret part of me is glad he did. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t know what I know, which is that a girl has to protect herself. And I don’t mean Trojans! Because no matter what those sex-ed teachers say about how great condoms are, there’s not a condom in the world that can protect you from heartbreak.

When I get to work, Boss Bob is on his knees, scrubbing the floor with his bare hands. This is supposed to be my job, after the customers leave, and I use a mop. But sometimes Bob can’t help himself. He also can’t help disinfecting the ice-cream scoopers and wiping nonexistent caramel smears off the counter every two seconds. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Wipe, wipe, wipe. It’s like his mission in life, to make everything sanitary. I almost feel bad for him, but then I think, If you hate messes so much, why run an ice-cream shop? Why not a bleach factory?

The fact is, Bob does hate Bananarama. The only reason he works there is he inherited the business from his parents. Ever since they died, he’s been coming up with new business schemes. First he wanted to start a bead shop. After that it was a pizza parlor. For the past few months his big dream has been to open Elmherst’s first European-style café. FedEx packages keep arriving on the doorstep. Not that Bob tells me what’s in them. My job isn’t to ask questions; it’s to lug boxes down to the basement and stack them in perfectly symmetrical rows against the back wall. Bob is just a bitof a control freak.

“I need you to restock the napkin dispensers,” Bob says. At full height, his head comes up to my shoulder. His hair is a coppery fringe around a shiny circle of scalp—quite possibly the cleanest scalp in the universe.

“Mom working today?” Bob asks. As if he doesn’t know. Twilight Books is two stores down from Bananarama, and my mom’s Volkswagen—aka the Green Hornet—is parked outside.

Bob’s crush on my mother is so obvious, it’s painful to behold. Give it up, I want to tell him. It’s never going to happen . Instead I nod and say, “Yeah. She’s working today.”

Of course, I can’t blame Bob for feeling the way he feels. He isn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last to fall under the Kate Gardner spell. In eighth grade, my earth science teacher, Mr. Bond, could barely get the words out around her at Parents’ Night. He kept saying the same thing: “Y-You’re . . . J-Josie’s mother?” Then there was the cable guy, Russell, who after he installed our modem made about five hundred excuses to drop by and see how things were “working out.” There’s Len from the post office. And Kara Ballensweig’s dad, who flirts with my mom during soccer games, even with Kara’s mother sitting right there. I could go on and on. But now, as I’m beginning to fill the napkin dispenser, Bob is snapping his fingers in my face.

“You have a customer.” Snap, snap. His hands are milky white and pudgy at the knuckles, like a toddler’s. “Customers first. Napkins after. OK?”

“OK,” I say. Bob is such a stress ball. It can’t be healthy. I want to tell him to close his eyes and breathe, picture a babbling brook. Instead, I assume the ice-cream position. “Welcome to Bananarama! Forty-one Flavors of Fun!”

“What do you think, monkeys?” It’s a woman with frizzy red hair, about my mom’s age, and two freckly boys in matching dump-truck shirts. “Pistachio? Butter pecan? Peach?”

Finally, the mother orders—two chocolate cones, waffle variety, with sprinkles, rainbow for Joel and, uh—“Do you want sprinkles, Matt? . . . Chocolate or rainbow? . . . OK, Matt wants rainbow too.”

I am so not going to think about Matt Rigby right now. In fact, I’m not going to think about him for the rest of the day. Because, let me tell you, I have many more worthwhile things to think about.