Playing Defense (Corrigan Falls Raiders) (7 page)

“Ms. Waring?” The principal appeared in her doorway, scowling. I don’t think I’d ever had a teacher or anyone else in authority frown at me like that, and I wanted to immediately start apologizing. I just wasn’t sure what to apologize for.

“Yes?” I said. I sounded like a scared little girl.

“Come inside, please.”

So I did, and she gestured impatiently for me to sit. On the hard plastic student chairs, not in the leather armchairs I’d been treated to when I’d come in to be congratulated on various academic achievements. “Claudia, you were with Chris Winslow in the cafeteria this morning before school.” She made it sound like an accusation, and I was uncomfortably aware that she’d left the door open so Chris could surely hear everything either of us said. Was she playing some sort of game? If she was, I’d let her win, if it meant I could just get out of there.

“I was,” I confirmed timidly.

“Why?”

“Why? I mean—what do you mean? I was there, and he came in and we were talking. There wasn’t really a ‘why,’ I don’t think?”

“What were you talking about?”

It was such a simple question, but I didn’t want to answer it. Partly because it would take a fairly detailed answer and I was too nervous to think I’d do a good job of making things coherent, but also because, in some strange way, I wanted to protect the Sisterhood from her. I felt like it was a baby, just trying to figure out how to walk, and I wasn’t sure it was strong enough to stand up to scorn or even too many questions. It was delicate, and for whatever reason, Ms. Walker seemed really hostile. When delicate and hostile meet, delicate doesn’t tend to do too well. And I somehow felt sure that Chris would have known the same thing, and hadn’t told her anything about the Sisterhood, either. It wasn’t a secret society, but it wasn’t any of Ms. Walker’s business, either.

So I gathered all my courage and expressed it as a shrug. I know, not Shakespeare-level defiance. Not “lay on, Macduff” or “we few, we lucky few.” But for me? It was a hell of a lot further than I’d ever gone before. “I’m his tutor. We talked about math tutoring. A bit about hockey. Some other things, as well, I guess. May I ask why you’re asking?”

“No,” she said shortly.

Oh. So I sat there for another little while, and then she waved her hand at me. “You can go back to class.”

I was barely out of her office when Chris leaned over so his head was in the principal’s doorway. Without even standing up he said, “Can I go?” and I guess she said yes, because he stood up and we ended up leaving the office together.

“What was that about?” I demanded as soon as we were around a corner and I felt safe. “Are we in trouble for something?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Not you, for sure. And probably not me. I mean, I didn’t do it, so I definitely shouldn’t be in trouble. But—” He shrugged. “I guess if you believe in karma, I’ve got something coming to me for other stuff I
didn’t
get caught for. Maybe. But I’m hoping this all just goes away.”

“That was—” I’d been about to say scary, and it was true. I had been scared. But at the same time, I was telling the truth when I finished the sentence with “exhilarating. I have no idea what just happened, but it really felt like the Sisterhood in action, somehow.” I frowned. “Not that the Sisterhood is going to cover for you if you do stupid things. That’s not what it’s about.”

“I didn’t do the stupid thing,” he said quickly. “This time, at least. Someone else was stupid this time. Not me.”

I nodded. I believed him. He was a sister, after all, but he was also Chris. And for whatever reason, that meant I trusted him. “It’s okay,” I said.

“I’m sorry you got dragged into it. I was hoping she’d call Karen down, not you.”

I wasn’t sure how to take that. He’d wanted Karen to come because she was better at this sort of thing, obviously. I mean, nobody was ever going to have to challenge
me
to expose my inner niceness, not when I was such a wimp all the time. I tried to sound brave as I said, “It was interesting. I feel like—I don’t know. Like an anthropologist or something, learning about this new culture I’d always been faintly aware of but never really explored. So now I know what it’s like to be called to the principal’s office, right? Not an experience I want to repeat, but it’s okay that it happened this time.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sure. You can take notes or something, right?
Gorillas in the Mist
?”

Well, Dian Fossey was more famous for her primatology than her anthropology, but I didn’t think Chris needed me to point that out right then. So I just said, “Something like that, sure.”

He nodded and flashed me a smile, but it somehow didn’t seem quite as warm as his usual ones. I guessed he was probably a bit stressed out after the ordeal in the office. “Okay, then. Sorry, and thanks, and see you for tutoring at lunch, right?”

“You bet,” I said. “Thanks for the experience.”

“Anything for science,” he replied, and we both headed back to our classes.

…

“I
aced
it,” I told Claudia as I pulled the library chair out from beside hers and straddled it. “The functions quiz? We reviewed the answers in class, and I got sixty-one percent!”

She squinted at me, and didn’t say anything.

“Okay, maybe by your standards that isn’t acing something. But we’re talking about
me
, here. I passed! And it was a hard quiz. There are smart people in that class, and a lot of them were
not
happy with their marks.”

“Chris,” she said patiently. “If you were failing before this quiz and you learned enough to get a passing grade in one half-hour tutoring session? Hate to break it to you, but you’re one of the smart people in that class. You’ve taken an important step, but sixty-one is
not
enough to get you into any university worth going to.”

“I could still make the NHL, you know. I’m getting scouted. I might not be a sure thing like Tyler, but I could be a professional hockey player. They don’t need to know shit about functions.”

“So, wait. Are you backing out of the challenge? I mean, I just want to know what we’re talking about here. Are we just chitchatting, or are you saying you don’t want to get any better at math?”

“Shit. No, I’m not backing out of the challenge. I want to get better at math.” And I wanted to see her at the hockey game, even if she was only going as an anthropologist who wanted to see the gorillas in their natural habitat. Was that weird? I guess I just felt like at school, I was a gorilla in a tutu or something, stuck in a circus doing stuff that isn’t natural to me. On the ice, I was a gorilla in the jungle. Or, shit, I guess I was a gorilla in the damn mist.

The point was: sure, maybe I was part of an alien culture that she didn’t really want to be part of. But—I don’t know. I at least wanted her to see my culture at its best, not its worst.

It pissed me off a bit that I was worrying about all this, to be honest. But I’ve never been able to stay pissed off for long, especially not when I’d just gotten 61 percent on a damn calculus quiz. “I know I’m not done learning math. I’m just enjoying the moment.”

“Okay,” she agreed. She smiled. “Way to go. That’s a huge improvement. I’m looking forward to seeing what you can do when you’ve spent even more time on it.”

“You
are
a future guidance counselor.”

“No. I’m a future engineer. Which means I understand the importance of hard work.”

“What are you bad at?” The words sort of popped out of my mouth, but once I’d heard them I was interested in the answer.

But Claudia didn’t seem too enthusiastic about giving it. “What do you mean?”

“I suck at school. You know that about me. I could tell you some other weaknesses, but I think I’m already at a disadvantage. So I thought it would be nice to hear what
you’re
bad at. As a sister, not a tutor.”

“I guess I’m bad at going to hockey games. Right?”

I sighed. “That’s not really a skill, though, is it?
Anyone
can go to a hockey game. You might not like it, but you’re not
bad
at it.”

“So why did you think I should go to a game as a growth opportunity?”

“I don’t know.” I frowned, trying to remember what had been going through my head. “I guess I thought you’d be good at pretty much everything. Like, if you tried, you could do it. So I said it because it seemed like something you wouldn’t have tried yet.” And then I pulled my courage together and added, “And because I like the idea of you watching me play.”

She stared at me for a moment, then said, “Oh.”

That was all. I’d put it out there, and she’d left me hanging. She actually looked back down at the papers spread out in front of her and said, “We should work on chemistry today. Because you’re catching up in math, and because you’re going to spend time on math this weekend. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. The scientist can’t get too close to her subjects, after all, so we should keep the focus on business. Or, okay, we were still sisters, but that was something different. And sisters probably didn’t hook up in her world.

I mean,
sisters
don’t hook up in my world, either. I wasn’t trying for some big incest thing. I was just…damn it, I didn’t know
what
I was doing.

But Claudia clearly knew what
she
was doing. She was tutoring me in order to have something to put on her university applications, and she was giving me challenges in the Sisterhood because that was the point of the whole thing. Not because she wanted to spend more time with me.

“You are not good for my positive worldview,” I told her.

“What?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” But she was still frowning, so I made myself smile and say, “Hey, how about some chemistry? That’d be really good about now.”

So we worked on chemistry and didn’t talk about hockey or anything else, and it was fine.

At the end of the session, after she’d gone and dragged her friend out of the stacks, she met me at the door. “I’m looking forward to seeing you play,” she said quietly, and then she was out the door and heading down the hall, walking faster than she’d walked on any previous day.

I caught up to her in about three strides. “Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

That was all I got, but it was absolutely enough. At least for right then.

…

Oliver joined as soon as I let him. Karen’s half sisters were in as well, although her half brother was apparently too busy.

“I think it was the sisterhood part that threw him off,” Karen confessed as we pretended to proofread each other’s essays in English class Friday morning.

“Oliver didn’t really like that, either,” I said. “But once I told him Chris was in, he calmed down about it.”

“I tried that with Matt, but he said it was easier for someone like Winslow.” She shrugged. “I’m not too broken up about it, to be honest. I felt like I had to ask him, once we decided we were taking guys, but it was really Miranda and Sara I wanted.”

That was when Ms. Coyne arrived, toting her laptop. “Things are going well, then?” she asked as she settled into the desk between me and Annalise, who had decided she’d rather work on her essay alone.

I wasn’t sure what Ms. Coyne was talking about, but decided to take the safe approach. “We’re just at the proofreading stage,” I said, holding Karen’s essay up as evidence. “Seems good so far.”

Ms. Coyne smiled tolerantly. “Excellent. And your
other
project is going well, too?”

“It’s great!” Karen said, abandoning the essay cover story and clearly relieved to be able to talk about the Sisterhood. “Claudia’s going to the hockey game tonight, and she’s going to help Winslow study on the weekend, and I’ve done three random acts of kindness already today, and I made sure people saw me doing them. Not in, like, an
obvious
way, but not sneaky, either. I think I want to challenge Sara, my younger half sister, to join a club at school. She’s at least as quiet as Claudia, or maybe even quieter. But I’m not sure what to do with Miranda.” She turned to me. “Do you have a plan for Oliver?”

“I have an idea. But I need to think about it some more and see if it’s really fair.”

“I think the whole thing is great,” Ms. Coyne said. She seemed almost as excited as Karen. “And I hope you don’t mind…” She clicked a couple keys on her computer, then turned the screen around to show us. “It’s not a public site, and you don’t have to use it. But I was playing around last night and I ended up putting it together, and I thought I’d show it to you just in case you got inspired…”

Karen and I peered at the screen and saw a collection of boxes, one of those things where you just saw a thumbnail and then could click on it and get more details. Ms. Coyne clicked on one and a rough stick figure appeared with “Karen” written beside its head and “Awesomely Nice” written near its waist. “So now you can add something about the random acts of kindness, here,” she explained. “And it’d be great if you could find some photos or something, some sort of evidence or souvenir.”

Karen and I just stared. I was feeling a little overwhelmed, and I think Karen was in the same boat. Ms. Coyne’s laugh was a bit awkward. “This is way too much, isn’t it? I got carried away. I loved your idea, but it’s
yours
. I can’t just swoop in and start pretending I’m part of it.”

“No, it’s…” I stopped and looked at Karen. “This is really cool. But what’s it
for
? Like, who would look at it?”

“You guys,” Ms. Coyne said. “Everyone who’s involved in the project. It’d be interesting right now, but you’ll
really
appreciate it down the road.” She stopped, then shrugged. “At least, you might. I mean, this could all fade away, I suppose. Most new ideas do, after all. They’re exciting for a week or two, but then they’re too much work, or they get boring, and they just die off. But if it doesn’t?” She leaned in, her enthusiasm as contagious as when she convinced a bunch of jaded teenagers to care about poetry. “If it doesn’t fade out? If you can hang on to it and keep working at it? It could change your lives. And if that happens, I think you’ll like having something like this, something that will help you remember all the awesome things you did.”