Playing With the Boys (24 page)

Ryan looked around desperately. Lucy could almost see the wheels turning in his head. Should he just run it himself? But before he could make a choice, both linebackers hit him at almost the same instant. BAM! And BAM! He was sacked.

Coach Offredi threw down his clipboard, pissed. “I TOLD YOU TO GET RID OF IT, CONNER!” he screamed.

God, that man was loud
.
Lucy wished she could tap him on his walrus shoulder and say sarcastically, “Oh, wait? Did you want him to get
rid
of it?” She guessed that sort of humor wouldn’t go over too well, but it was the type of joke she and Annie made to each other all the time. She looked back toward the stands, to the spot where her friends
weren’t
. It made her miss Annie all the more.

And suddenly, she saw something. She blinked quickly, hoping she was mistaken. No—this couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t.

sixteen

She spun back around to face the field, putting her head in her hands.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Lucy muttered. “This isn’t happening. Please tell me this isn’t happening. . . .”

Nervously, Lucy glanced over her shoulder again. Her dad was staring at the cheerleaders, confused. He was obviously looking for her. Little did he know, he simply wasn’t looking in the right place. When the cheerleaders set down their pom-poms to take a water break, he approached.

“Oh my God,” Lucy gasped, horrified. She cringed through her face mask as she saw Kendall explaining something and pointing toward the Beachwood bench, right in her direction
. Of course, Kendall had no problem selling her out.
Lucy tried to hunker down in front of Benji.

“Hide me,” she begged Sascha, who was sitting on the bench next to her.

“What’re you doing?” he asked, annoyed. “Lucy, seriously, get up. Coach Offredi is gonna kill you.”

“So is my dad,” Lucy insisted. She panicked. “I can’t let him see me. I have to hide. I have to . . . um . . . yes! I have to pee.” She sprang off the bench and sneaked as inconspicuously as possible to the nearest opening in the chain-link fence surrounding the field. Once she was through it, she bolted toward the locker room, unsure whether her dad had seen her make a break for it or not.

Bursting through the doors of the girls’ locker room, she ripped off her helmet and frantically paced, not sure what to do. She couldn’t go back up there. But she had to. She couldn’t leave in the middle of the game. Her teammates were depending on her. But her dad would kill her if he saw her. She tried to think fast.Was there
any
way on the planet that Kendall and Regan hadn’t ratted her out? Maybe out of guilt . . . or some sense of loyalty that didn’t exist . . .She shook her head, knowing she was a goner. Of course they’d told. Kendall had probably done it with a big smile plastered on her face. Nothing would make her happier than finding yet another way to make Lucy’s life hell.

She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was matted down. Helmet head definitely wasn’t her best look. She put her helmet back on and took a deep breath. She couldn’t hide out down here forever. Sooner or later, she was going to have to face her dad. But did it really have to be now?

When she emerged from the locker room , she heard a voice.

“Stop right there, young lady.” Young lady? Where was “kid?” She realized it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that her dad was standing there. At the top of the stairs. With his arms folded across his chest. And the look on his face wasn’t a good one.

“You lied to me,” he said. “You’ve been lying to me for weeks.”

Lucy rubbed her lips together. She didn’t know what to say. She
had
been lying to him for weeks.

“I know,” she admitted. “And I’m sorry.”

Her dad shook his head. “Cheerleading,” he mumbled to himself. He looked at her. “And I was stupid enough to buy that.”

“You weren’t stupid,” she said protectively. “You just . . . trusted me.” She looked down at her mismatched cleats, feeling terrible.

“And you betrayed that, Luce. You do realize how grounded you are? And how serious this is?”

She sighed. “I know.” A lecture was coming, but now just wasn’t the time.“It is serious, and I know I’m grounded, like, for life and we should . . . you know . . . talk about it. Maybe after the game?”

He interrupted. “I don’t give a damn about the game!”

“Well, I do!” she said, defiantly. That was it. She couldn’t take it anymore. She’d tried to be nice. She’d tried to be accountable for her actions, but no more. Beachwood was on the field. Without her. This conversation had gone on long enough. “My teammates are up there—and they need me!”

“They need you? They don’t need you,” he scoffed. “Lucy, this is a
boys’
sport, that
boys
play—you don’t belong out there!”

“How would you know? You just forbid me to play! Without even hearing me out—”

“Oh, I heard you—and the answer was no!”

Lucy threw her hands in the air, exasperated. “It’s like I have no rights or something. I barely have a say in my own life!”

“That’s not true—” her dad started to say.

“Yes, it is!” Lucy exploded, interrupting him. All the emotion she’d been trying to contain for months—for
years
—came pouring out of her. “You just—you decide these things, like, arbitrarily! Without any consideration for what I want. I’m the one who agrees. I’m the one who doesn’t argue, who tries to make everyone happy, but it’s not fair! When do I get what I want?You decide I can’t play football, then that’s it, end of discussion, and I’m supposed to tell Coach I’m not playing.” Tears formed in Lucy’s eyes as she continued to rant. She pushed her hair out of her face.

“You decide we’re moving across the country, and next thing I know, I’m packing my whole life into suitcases and leaving all my friends! You decide it’s time to pull the plug, and just like that, Mom’s gone!”

“Lucy, I—”

“No!” Lucy yelled. She angrily pushed by him and headed toward the field.

He firmly grabbed her arm. “Lucy, we’re going home.”

She ripped her arm from his grasp. “You can go wherever the hell you want,” she spat. “But I’m not coming with you.” She ran back to the field, leaving her dad shocked and stunned.

As she approached the sidelines, it quickly became apparent that her dad was only one of her many problems. Her teammates were scurrying around frantically, while Coach Offredi lectured Benji, gesturing wildly. As soon as he saw Lucy, his tack changed.

“What the hell?” he asked, stomping over. “Where the hell have you been?” His walrus mustache was so close to her, she could barely stammer out a response. Even his mustache looked pissed.

“I’m sorry. . . . I just . . . I just . . . it was a . . . um . . .” She had to think of a lie he couldn’t get mad about—well, at least any more mad a than he already was. His face was so red, Lucy half expected steam to shoot out of his ears as from a boiling teapot.

“It was a girl . . . thing,” she said quickly.

“For ten minutes?” he asked incredulously.

“You know, a . . . um . . . feminine issue,” Lucy stammered. Coach Offredi’s eyes widened. Obviously this wasn’t a subject he was particularly comfortable talking about.

“Listen,” he said, pointing a fat finger in her face. “I don’t care what kind of issue it is—you don’t leave the field without telling me. We just got a delay of game called on us.”

Delay of game?
Lucy didn’t know what that meant. Except that maybe that . . . the game was delayed?

“They gave us a five-yard penalty because you weren’t here!” he barked.

“Well, why didn’t you just call a time out?” Lucy retorted.

Coach Offredi put his hands on his hips. He looked more and more walrusy with each passing second. “Are you talking back to me?”

Lucy shook her head no and looked at the field. Five yards didn’t seem like such a big deal. “We had a fourth and five on their twenty! But with that down penalty, we’re back to their twenty-five, which means, Little Miss Feminine Issue, that you have a forty-two-yard field goal to kick!”

This time it was Lucy’s eyes that went as wide as saucers. She had to kick the twenty-five yards on the field . . . plus the ten yards of the end zone, plus the seven-yard set behind the line. She’d never kicked a ball that far in her life. And all because of her stupid five-yard penalty.

“Now get out there!” he ordered, practically shoving her onto the field.

Lucy glanced up at the scoreboard, trying to figure out what she’d missed. Apparently a lot, because Carter was up by two, leading the low-scoring game. If she could score this three-point field goal, they would overtake Carter by a point and would just have to try to hold them off in the fourth quarter and run out the clock.

Lucy lined up behind Caleb and Benji and the rest of the field goal unit.The lights shone down upon her. The crowd seemed to go silent. Her heart felt like it would pound right out of her chest. A sense of being totally overwhelmed flooded over her, almost like a wave. She didn’t know if she could kick the ball that far. In fact, right now, with her dad watching, she didn’t know if she could kick the ball at all.

She looked up toward the goalposts. They looked a million miles away. But as she looked up and past them, she couldn’t help but think of her mom. She tried to imagine what her mom would think of this. She would have laughed at Lucy’s pathetic lie to Coach Offredi. . . .

“You
didn’t
use the period excuse!” she could picture her mom saying. “That’s just wrong,” she would laugh. “But good going!” She would have been able to talk to her mom about everything. She would have been able to ask her mom to convince her dad to let her play football; then she wouldn’t have had to sneak around and lie. If her mom were here, everything would be different. They would have still been in Ohio, she would have been with all her friends, and she wouldn’t have been standing in the middle of a football field with a pissed-off coach and about forty pissed-off teammates staring her down.

She took a deep breath. She could feel her dad watching her.

Forget about everything,
she told herself. About her dad. About Regan and Kendall. About Pickle, Max, and Charlie. About Ryan. And Benji. God, the list was long. About everything. All she needed to think about was making this field goal. That was all that mattered right now. That was the only thing she could control.

She looked in front of her, at the backs of nine blockers, Caleb among them, ready to snap the ball to Benji, who was already kneeling down. He gave the silent signal.

Caleb snapped the ball back. Within two seconds, Benji had it solidly in his hands. He placed the ball on the ground for Lucy. His left index finger held it in place. Lucy lunged, her foot striking the ball a moment later . . . and the ball sailed up and up . . . passing over the heads of Beachwood’s blockers and the outstretched hands of the Carter defenders, heading toward the goalposts. Lucy, her teammates, the fans, even her dad watched breathlessly . . . as the ball fell just two yards short of the crossbar.

She gasped, stunned.

She hadn’t made it.

The hope of three points was now gone. And Carter still maintained their lead. On the sidelines, Coach Offredi threw his clipboard to the ground. One of the junior coaches scurried to pick it up and place it back in his hands, as he huddled the Beachwood defense together, screaming at them to go out there and kill.

“Don’t let them gain a yard,” he yelled. “You have twelve more minutes to beat the crap outta them! Let’s do this now! You get an interception, you cause a fumble, you get the ball back! Don’t let them into that end zone!”

But with Lucy’s missed field goal, Beachwood was fast losing momentum, and a pass down the sidelines into a Curtis receiver’s hands might as well have sealed Beachwood’s fate. Curtis scored again. Moments later, they made their PAT. They were up by ten.

Lucy sat sullenly on the bench, desperately wishing this game would just be over so she could be put out of her misery. There was a ray of hope when Beachwood got onto Curtis’s ten-yard line and Ryan nailed a pass to Nick, who drove and slid into the end zone. TOUCHDOWN!

Thank God,
Lucy thought to herself. She jogged onto the field and kicked a field goal. This one easily sailed in. Now she had to kick off to Carter. She jogged and picked up the tee off the sidelines. Coach Offredi grabbed her face mask.