Playing Defense (Corrigan Falls Raiders) (4 page)

She trailed off, and I could see the excitement draining out of her. She’d had a crazy idea, and we’d listened politely, but we weren’t going to be sucked into her scheme. The problem was, I
liked
her crazy idea. “It’d be cool to be like the movies, where the one person is walking toward the big showdown and thinks he’s on his own, but then the others fall in behind him, not even saying anything, just backing him up.”

“And they might not even
like
each other,” Karen said, her excitement clearly returning. “They might have been bickering away for the whole movie, but when it came down to it, they were willing to die for each other.”

“I don’t really want to die for anyone,” I said.

Karen just grinned. “No, me neither. But a scaled-down version of that? Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“Like the Fellowship of the Ring,” I said to Annalise, who still didn’t seem impressed, so I gave up on her and focused on Karen. “It
would
be cool,” I said, and I meant it.

…

“Forget it, Winslow. I’m not going to spy on Dia for you,” Karen announced as soon as I walked up to the cafeteria table where she was sitting with the guys.

“What? Who’s Dia?”

“Clau-
dia
. Dia. She doesn’t like her name, so I gave her a nickname.”

I wished I wore a watch so I could check it. “Wait. This morning before school you said it was no big deal, you could scout her out. Now you’re calling it spying and giving her a nickname?” I wasn’t upset about the change, but it
was
a bit confusing. “How’d that happen?”

“We’re forming a sisterhood,” Karen said, as if her words made sense.

“A sisterhood?”

“We could have called it a team, but we don’t like sports. So we’re calling it a sisterhood.”

“A sisterhood of
what
?”

“A Sisterhood of Awesomeness.”

“Oh. Okay, yeah, that’s a totally normal thing to do. Nothing weird about that at all.”

“We will stand together against our enemies. Once more unto the breach, and all that.”

“I’ll tell you what, Karen: I don’t think you should be stoned at school. I don’t care if the cool kids are doing it.”

She grinned. “You’re jealous, because
I’m
on Dia’s team and you’re not.”

“‘Dia’? Did she actually agree to that?”

“Hell yeah. It’s her superhero name.”

“What’s yours? Ren?”

“It could be! With a
W
, like the little bird. Damn, that’s excellent, Winslow. Thanks!”

I pushed my cafeteria tray toward her. “You should eat something. Soak up the booze.”

“Your superhero name would be Slow,” she said with exaggerated sympathy. “I can see why this isn’t such a fun game for you.”

“It’d be Topher, you dunce. You’re doing first names, not last.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Topher’s really not bad.”

“Here comes Ler. Not sure if
he’s
going to like your game.”

She faded away then, off to cuddle up and be generally sickening with Tyler, and I ate my lunch a little more quickly than usual. I was supposed to be meeting Claudia—Dia?—in the library as soon as I was done eating, and I found myself actually looking forward to it. Karen was a pretty smart person, and as far as I’d seen she was a good judge of character. If she wanted to form a sisterhood with Claudia, that seemed like a good sign. It made me even more curious than I’d been before.

So I wolfed down my lunch and headed for the library. I stopped just inside the door and watched Claudia for a minute. She was sitting at the same table as the day before, and the same friend was beside her, and Claudia was frowning down at whatever she was working on like she was thinking it through. Then she smiled in satisfaction and jotted something down in her notebook.

She was still smiling when she glanced toward the door and saw me. Her expression kind of froze, then, until the smile looked fake and weird. She looked away and let her face relax, and I walked toward her cautiously. It had been a weird reaction, I was pretty sure.

When I got close enough to the table I asked, “You okay? You still on for tutoring?”

“I still need it for my application,” she said. Not quite frosty, but not friendly, either.

Which was fine. It was good, almost. Part of what I’d liked about her the day before had been how totally unimpressed she was with me. And of course, I’d liked the challenge of trying to charm her, or at least convince her to loosen up a little. So now in the library we were right back to where we’d been the day before, and I was right back to being determined to make Claudia Waring, princess of Grumpytown, into a happy, relaxed person.

That’s why I flopped into the chair next to her and said, “So, you’re Dia now, starting a Sisterhood of Awesomeness?”

Her friend made a disgusted sort of snorting sound beside her, then stood up and said, “I’ll be reading.”

The friend stalked away, and Claudia turned to me. “Maybe I am. Sometimes. But right now I’m Claudia the tutor, starting a functions assignment.”

“Functions?” It was a lot easier to be charming when I had some basic idea what I was talking about. “Chemistry went well yesterday. Maybe we should stick with chemistry.”

“You’ve got a functions quiz tomorrow, right? We should get ready for that, then go back to the chemistry. And you need to be working on all this at home, too. Just a half hour a day isn’t going to be enough to get you caught up. You should be spending at least an hour a day staying up-to-date, and then
extra
time for catching up.”

“What, for every class?” I stared at her. The time for charm was over. “That’s…that’s three hours a day, outside of class time, just to cover the basics, plus more to get caught up?”

“You only have three classes?”

I nodded.

“What’s your third?”

“Geography.”

“Are you behind in it, too?”

“No, I’m doing okay.” Because geography made
sense
, and was about something
real
, something I could see.

“So you don’t need to do the extra half hour for it. Only four hours a day.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ve got morning workout, then school, then practice, then dinner, then, I don’t know, maybe I’d go crazy and watch half an hour of TV or something, just to pretend I have a life. Where are you seeing me fitting in four extra hours of schoolwork?”

“Your mom wants you to be able to go to university, right?”

I wished I hadn’t told her about that, but there wasn’t much point in trying to deny it now, so I shrugged.

“So if you want to get in, you can’t just
pass
the courses, you have to actually do well in them. If you just scrape by with barely a pass, you may as well be taking the easier classes, because you’re not going to be able to get into any school anyway.”

“Okay, that’s good! Say that again, so I can say it to my mom.” I pulled out my cell. “Or we could call her right now, and you could tell her, and then I can go change classes.”

“I’m not going to make
excuses
for you.” Claudia sounded scandalized, but underneath that, maybe a little amused, too. Was that Dia showing through?

“Come on,” I tried. I didn’t actually expect her to agree, but I wanted to see what she
would
do.

“If you put me on the phone with your mom, I’m going to tell her you seemed really smart yesterday. I’ll tell her you learned a week’s worth of chemistry in half an hour. I’ll tell her the only thing holding you back is lack of effort.” She leaned back in her chair and smiled smugly. “So, sure, why don’t you make the call? I’d
love
to talk to your mom.”

I quickly stuffed my phone back in my pocket.

Like most Ontario Hockey League players, I’d moved away from my family in order to play semipro and have a chance at the Big League. We were billeted with local families until we turned eighteen, and then technically we had the choice of getting our own place, if we could afford it. But the team really encouraged us to stay in our billets until we were out of school, and I kind of liked the family I lived with, the Bradfords. They were totally hockey-crazy, which was fun, but completely unathletic themselves. When I’d first moved in I’d tried tossing a football to the son of the family, who was only a couple years younger than me, and he’d somehow managed to bounce it up into his face, giving himself a bloody nose
and
a black eye. I’d thought his parents would be mad at me but they just seemed to accept the injury as the only possible result when one of them was stupid enough to attempt a sport.

Anyway, the point of all this is that my mom was about four hours away, down near Windsor. Whatever parenting she was doing was long distance, and I liked it that way. I didn’t need Claudia getting on the phone and screwing up a good thing.

“I’ll work,” I promised her.

“Good. So sit down and stop trying to be lazy.” She didn’t sound like she was scolding, just prompting me to perform the next step in the tutoring process.

So I did as I was told, and we worked on math for the next half hour or so, and there were a couple times when I could almost see a glimmer of logic to it all. A couple times when things almost made sense. And then a second later I’d get confused and everything would be a mess again. But at least I was getting those little moments.

And I was getting little moments of seeing Claudia more clearly, too. I liked them at least as much as the math. She was smart, for sure, and serious, but she wasn’t totally boring or anything. She’d get impatient with me when I wasn’t trying as hard as she thought I should be, but she was really nice when I was putting the effort in and just not getting anywhere. I spent the last ten minutes of our session working through a problem, and at the end of the time she looked over my shoulder and said, “Wow. No. That’s not right at all. But it’s really
interesting
, you know? I can see what you were doing. You just went a bit off track right there. Everything else is
good
, Chris.”

“You just told me the answer is wrong.”

“Answer, shmanswer.” She grinned at me, and her eyes were bright, like she actually thought this math stuff was fun and was excited by what I’d done. “That’s just a detail. A computer could give you the
answer
. The important part is all the rest.”

“That sounds like the opposite of math, to me.”

“Maybe that’s why you don’t like math. Because maybe you’ve never really understood what it’s about.”

The warning bell rang then, and she started gathering her stuff up. It took me a bit longer to do the same. It was pretty hard to believe, but I honestly wouldn’t have minded sitting there all afternoon and doing more math with her.

But Claudia was already off to drag her weird friend out from wherever she’d hidden in the bookshelves, so I got ready to go and waited for her by the doors. She gave me a bit of a look when she came by, like maybe she hadn’t thought I’d be waiting?

Like maybe she hadn’t
wanted
me to be waiting?

I’m usually a pretty confident person. Mostly because I’m clueless, so I miss a lot of the subtle insults that other people get all upset about. I’ll be honest: it works well for me. But I think maybe doing math had gotten my brain churning a little too much, because suddenly I was having all kinds of strange thoughts, like maybe Claudia didn’t really want her smart friends to see her with a dumb jock, or maybe she just didn’t like me and didn’t want to spend an extra two minutes around me when it wasn’t for a reason that she could put on her university application.

Damn. It must be annoying to walk around with all that crap in your head all the time! I shook off the negativity, smiled at Claudia, and fell into step beside her as we left the library.

And if she didn’t like my company, she was polite enough to not say anything.

…

In only one day, I’d almost stopped noticing the attention from everyone as Chris walked me to my locker and then to chemistry. I started to understand how Karen had seemed so completely unaware of her high status. Apparently the social ladder had rungs that were only visible from below, and once you’d climbed them you stopped even noticing the levels below you.

Not that my
brain
wasn’t noticing things. My brain is
always
noticing things, and if there’s nothing real to notice it’s more than happy to make something up. Like when I’d been walking toward Chris in the library and his sunny expression had clouded over for half a second? My stupid brain immediately told me that he was anticipating the embarrassment of being seen with me and wishing I would just go away and leave him alone. Which…hello, brain? He was
waiting
for me. He could have left any time. But reality has never gotten in the way of my brain’s ability to make me worry about stuff.

Still, as soon as I was back beside Chris and we were talking, I calmed down again. He was just so relaxed, so easy to be with. Like the whole “Dia” thing? That should have been brutally embarrassing. It had been stupid of me to tell Karen, a practical stranger, that I didn’t like my name. But she’d taken it well, finding a cute little nickname to joke us past my over-share, and it all should have been over. Except she’d clearly told Chris Winslow about it, so now
he
knew this weird, strangely personal thing about me, and I should have been embarrassed. But it was pretty hard to be uncomfortable when he so clearly wasn’t.

And that sense of comfort apparently made me want to press my luck. So when I was at my locker and had my door open, ready to hide behind, I asked, “Why did Karen want to join my group in English class today?” Then I stuck my head inside my locker so he wouldn’t be able to see my face if he said something that made me uncomfortable.

Instead, though, he laughed. “Is that what she did? I don’t know. I mentioned you to Tyler…just, you know, saying that you were tutoring me and you seemed nice…and he kind of ran with it. He’s used to being in charge of things, and when there’s nothing to actually do he kind of makes stuff up. So he asked Karen to spy on you. Was she weird? She’s usually pretty cool.”