Shutout (7 page)

“What the hell!” I yelled. I opened my eyes and found myself on the couch with Dominic, clad in his SpongeBob pajamas, jumping up and plopping his butt onto my stomach.

I was awake in an instant. “You little monster! I'm gonna wake you up tomorrow pouncing on your guts. You freak! What is wrong with you?”

Dominic, manipulative little monster that he is, turned on the waterworks at this and went crying to Mom and Dad's room.

“Amanda!” Mom called down.

“What?” I called back up.

“I need to speak to you.”

I trudged up the stairs thinking about how I was going
to go into Dominic's room after he fell asleep tonight and pounce on his guts and hopefully make him spew all over the place.

I got up to Mom and Dad's room, where the scene didn't look good. There was Dominic, red-faced and crying, snuggled into the crook of Dad's arm while Mom looked at me.

“Well?” she asked.

“I couldn't sleep last night and got up and fell asleep on the couch, and the next thing I knew, some freak in SpongeBob pajamas was bouncing up and down on my stomach.”

“Amanda. That's it for the name-calling. You dehumanize people when you call them names.”

“Yeah, well, they have to be human in the first place for that to work,” I said, and Mom gave me the Look of Death and I shut up.

“Now, Dominic, you didn't tell us the part about jumping on Amanda's stomach while she was asleep. How do you think that made her feel?”

I rolled my eyes and walked away before Mom could extract an insincere apology from the little twerp and before I'd be called on to give an insincere apology of my own.

But then, forty-five minutes later, as I was running out the door, Dominic came up to me without Mom shoving him in my direction and, looking at the floor, he mumbled, “I'm sorry I jumped on your stomach.”

And now I saw that he was a goofy kid and not some demon from hell sent to make my miserable life more miserable,
so I just kind of tousled his hair and said, “I'm sorry I called you a freak.”

“It's okay,” he said.

“All right then, buddy,” I said. “You gonna come to my game today?”

“Yeah!” he yelled, his face bright. I have to say this: the kid was my number one fan.

“I'll see you then,” I said. I called goodbye to everybody else but Conrad, who was still in the shower because he was obviously planning on being late, and left for school.

On my walk, I couldn't help thinking that if yesterday sucked and it didn't start with somebody slamming sixty pounds into my stomach, how horrible was today going to be?

As it turned out, less horrible than I feared. Maybe it was because, like Dad said, I was tired and felt kind of dazed all day. So classes came and went and I didn't even really notice. At lunch, Lena didn't have time for me again, but at least this time she kept turning back to me and going, “What do you think, Amanda?” Which was still not enough to get Duncan to pull his eyes away from her, but that was okay because I was too tired at that point to charm him with my sparkling wit anyway.

Maybe this was my big opportunity to get in with this group, but I was too tired to make interesting conversation.

And, anyway, I wasn't sure I wanted to get in with this group. At least not as Lena's sidekick, which was all I would ever be to them. I didn't want to be popular with a bunch of
kids I didn't even know. What I wanted was for things to be like they used to be, where it was Lena and me together against the world. Even with her remembering I existed, it still wasn't like it used to be. I wanted them all to go away, even the cute boys, so I could have my best friend back.

Our game was at home, and so Lena, who knew I was completely exhausted, went over to the store across the street after school and bought me an energy drink. I didn't know how drinking a barrel of sugar and caffeine would affect my sleep tonight, and I didn't really care. I had a game to play.

Lena sat with Dominic and Dad. Mom had apologized for not being able to get off work early enough, which was fine. It's weird, because of course both my parents are corny and embarrassing, especially Dad, but I always appreciate a parental representative in the stands at my games.

Lena was the only member of the varsity who showed up to watch our game. “I see your friend's the only one doing the right thing,” Shakina observed before the game started.

“Yeah.”

“Well, what do you say we put on a show for her? Maybe she'll tell the rest of them to come next time.”

I answered “Yeah!” maybe a little too loudly, because
Shakina looked kind of embarrassed and everybody on the field looked at me. “Uh, too much caffeine, I guess.”

In the first half, we did put on a show. The other team only got three shots on goal, and I stopped all of them easily, even the one that was perfectly placed right in the corner of the goal. We were up 2–0 at the end of the first half, and I felt great.

And then, in the second half, our offense collapsed, or else their offense woke up, but in any case, pretty much the whole half was played on our side of the field, and the shots just kept coming. My caffeine buzz from the gross orange drink was starting to wear off in a major way, and I felt a little sluggish. Even so, I managed to make four saves, including one penalty shot after Marcia got called for a totally unintentional handball in the box.

So any game where you stop a penalty shot is a good one, right? Well, it would have been except that I let in two goals in between my four saves, and I guess I lost a step or something by the end of the game, because we lost when the other team got this incredibly cheap goal on a weak shot that came limping out of a crowd of players in front of the goal. I should have seen it sooner, and even seeing it late, I should have been able to get to it. And might have if I'd been more awake.

When the game ended, I sat in the goal with my head in my hands. I couldn't sleep at least partly because I was nervous about soccer, and the lack of sleep that came from being nervous about soccer had made me suck at soccer. It was like stuff just kept piling on.

I had really wanted to prove that a mistake had been
made, that I belonged on varsity. Not that I thought they'd move me up, but I wanted Geezer to see how good I was and know that she'd screwed up. Instead, all I'd done was confirm her belief that I wasn't ready for varsity.

Well, the good news was that Geezer hadn't watched our game anyway. “Amanda,” Beasley commanded, “get up and congratulate the other team.”

This was always the worst part about losing—like it wasn't bad enough to get beaten, you had to go up to the people who'd made you look stupid and
thank them
for it.

I could tell from the look on Beasley's face that I'd hear a speech about how I'd be cooling my aching heels on the bench if I couldn't conduct myself like a good sport, so I got up, got in line, and slapped the hand of every girl on the other team, muttering, “Good game,” even to the girl whose penalty shot I'd stopped, who greeted me with a friendly “You suck.”

Still stinking of sweat and failure, we dutifully trooped into the bleachers with Beasley to cheer on varsity. I didn't want to look like too much of a brownnoser, but I had actually brought a notebook and a pen in my soccer bag. I looked around to see if anybody else was taking notes. They weren't, so the notebook and pen stayed in my bag.

We cheered for the varsity. I know this is bad, but I did enjoy the fact that the varsity goalie had a worse game than I did. By halftime it was tied 2–2, but really they should have been up 2–0, because both of the other team's goals were cheapies that could and should have been stopped.

Lena hadn't started, but they brought her in for the second half and she set the team on fire. I was proud to be her
best friend. You could see the hate in the other team's eyes, because they had been paying attention to Courtney the whole first half and ignoring the wing, and now every time they turned around, Lena was streaking up the wing and crossing to Courtney in the center. They couldn't take the ball from her and they couldn't catch her—all they could hope to do was intercept the cross or stop the shot. (Which they actually could do from time to time because their goalie, unlike ours, could actually play.)

The final score was 5–4. We cheered our lungs out, and it was fun, though it didn't do much to take the sting out of our own humiliating defeat. It was also sort of painful to me, because I knew that, even with the horrible game I'd had, the margin of victory would have been bigger if I'd been in the goal. It was great that they'd scored five goals, but if you need five goals to win, you're in trouble because most teams won't let you have that many.

Unless you've got Lena on the wing with fresh legs in the second half. Then maybe every team will give up five goals or more.

One thing did make me glad I wasn't on varsity, though. We knew this from practice, but Geezer was a screamer. She spent the whole game screaming at her players for every mistake they made, and we never once saw her crack a smile or compliment anything anyone did right.

When the game ended, we could hear Geezer berating the team from way up in the bleachers.

“What do you think she does when they lose?” Shakina asked.

We all shook our heads like we didn't want to know.

As we were gathering up our stuff to go, Beasley said, “Amanda, can I talk to you for a second?”

Uh-oh. She'd waited for a whole other game to end before doing it, but now she was going to drop the bomb on me for my horrible performance. “Yeah?”

“Well, two things. One is that you played a really good game. Don't let one mistake make you think otherwise.”

“But—”

“Expert talking here, okay? I did not see one player on any team today who had a perfect game.” Really? Because it sure looked to me like Lena did.

“Okay.”

“The other thing is that I did some research on Sever's disease.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, and you should consider taking Rosalind up on that yoga thing. I really think it will help you.”

“Okay. I guess I'll try it.”

“Great. I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes you will.”

I tried not to sulk too much at home, but it was hard. Lena called, and two weird things happened. The first one was that she did not mention Conrad once. She usually managed to make some fake-casual question about him within the first thirty seconds of our call, but she didn't mention him at all this time. The other thing was that instead of our usual marathon conversation, we were only on the phone for a few minutes—okay, twenty, but still—when she got another call
and said she had to go and she'd call me back. Who was more important than me? Well, I never found out because she never called me back.

Dad looked like he wanted to say something to me a couple of times, but Mom gave him this look that shut him up, and I was glad. She knew that there was nothing anybody could say that wouldn't make me feel horrible, so nobody said anything.

Well, I guess I should say there was nothing either of my parents could say to make me feel better because at dinner, Dominic said, “That was awesome the way you stopped that penalty kick! Nobody ever gets those!” And that did make me feel better—even if I'd muffed an easy shot, I'd gobbled up a nearly impossible one.

I did homework. Lena still didn't call back. I thought about calling her and asking since when did she not call me back, but I decided she was going to have to come to me. I was sick of thinking about stuff that made me sad, so I got online and looked up the schedule for Charlesborough Yoga Studio.

Mom came and snooped over my shoulder like she always does when I'm online, I guess to check that I'm not chatting with some creepy pedophile or something.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked, all fake casual.

“Oh. Well, we get half-price classes at this yoga studio, and Ms. Beasley told me she thought it would be a good idea for me to do it, so I figured I would take one class to see what it was like.”

Mom stared at me for a minute and then said, “Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?”

“What?”

“I have been trying to get you to go to yoga with me ever since you got your diagnosis. And you always made fun of me with all kinds of stuff about tight clothes and how you weren't going to go imitate a dog and how the whole thing was the stupidest, corniest thing you could even imagine. Does any of this ring a bell?”

It did. Slightly. My memory was that after I stopped doing the stupid stretching exercises that didn't help my Sever's disease at all, Mom suggested I take yoga and I said I was too busy. But I did think those things about the clothes and the dogs and the corniness, so unless Mom had read my mind, I must have actually said them.

“Well, Mom, you know, high school is a time of transition, and—”

She laughed. “I'm gonna call Ms. Beasley and have her tell you you'll play better if you clean your room.”

She walked away shaking her head, and I called after her, “So can you take me to this seven o'clock class tomorrow night?”

I could hear the amusement fighting with the annoyance in her voice as she called out, “Yes, of course!”

They ought to give grades for lunch. I mean, if you think about it, it's the part of the day that requires the most knowledge and the most thinking. You have to understand all the rules about who sits where, even though nobody has ever written them down and nobody explains them. So every day is a high-stakes test, especially when somebody changes one of the factors you've come to take for granted.

Take today, when I went to lunch ready to sit with Lena, even though I still hadn't heard from her since she lied about calling me right back last night. I had dropped my folder on the way out of history class, and the time it took me to pick my papers up and put them away had made me late enough to lunch that Lena was already deep in conversation with Courtney when I got to the cafeteria.