The Underdogs (9 page)

After exactly five minutes, Gene wiped his eyes one last time, held up his tissue, and tossed it in the middle of the circle. A few blew their noses one last time and threw theirs as well. Some tissues caught the wind and didn't make it to the center, but that was okay. When everyone had let go of their grief in the form of soaked tissues that dotted the lawn with white blobs that looked like doves in the dusk, Gene broke the circle and put one arm around my mom, and the other around Lisa, and hugged them both tight.

Then, silent but for some sniffling, we all filed back across the lawn and out of the pool area while Gene and Harmony stayed to retrieve the snotty tissues. I have to say, the Love Circle did its job that day. We got to say goodbye to Annabel, and we were together, which was the most important thing. I looked back on my way out, and as Gene bent down to pick up a tissue, a gust of wind picked it up and it flew away, taking our Annabel with it.

 

Before

First thing on the Monday morning after the disastrous pool party, Evie and I were sitting on the stoop outside the club's main entrance, killing time until tennis camp started so we could avoid navigating the packed lobby. Lucky finished up a cell phone call at the back end of the parking lot and bounded toward us.

“Dad, you're late for your staff meeting,” Evie said. Lucky waved his hands at us as if to say
Hey, isn't life great?
and smiled.

“You girls be good today,” he said. “Keep out of trouble, okay?”

He gave us one last wave, and off he went into the club without a look back at his daughter, or a thought as to how a twelve-year-old girl would spend her day without structure, activities, or adult supervision. As Evie watched Lucky go, I watched her, and I wasn't sure how this family dynamic with just her and Lucky was going to work in the long run. Without her mom, I mean. That morning was kind of depressing. It was a harbinger of things to come, as it turned out, because Evie's melancholy got worse after that.

In the following days, she refused to hang outdoors with me. I dutifully spent time with her in the back room, and I found myself in her dingy bolt-hole behind Court 5 on another beautiful day in late June that happened to be Cookie Wednesday—the one day each week when, instead of orange slices and fruit salad, the camp snack was, you guessed it, fresh-baked cookies. I watched Evie unwrap her second packet of Twinkies of the day. She peeled one of the long sponge cakes out of its wrapper, the moist brown part of the cake sticking to the plastic. Snack time was in an hour, but I suspected she wasn't going to show her face anywhere near the cookie platters.

She broke off a piece of Twinkie for me. As I chewed, I was thinking of ways I could coax her out of there. She ate her third Twinkie in three bites. She laid the fourth one, still in the wrapper, on the crate next to her. Then she went back to her book. I took a gander at the cover. Man, this was dire: the girl was reading
The House With a Clock in Its Walls,
a book supposedly for kids but with a dark, superspooky cover that gave me the creeps. I looked around the place. The camp lunch ladies must have gone on a shopping spree at Big Bob's Warehouse, because boxes full of chips and grape juice towered over us. The industrial refrigerator was buzzing annoyingly, and the hot air in there was stagnant and putrid.

This was bad. At the best of times, Evie's routine included at least
some
socializing. Sometimes, in the afternoons, she and I would take a walk around the building, looking for little chameleons behind the club, by the outdoor courts. Occasionally Evie would take time to watch some tennis while pretending she didn't care about the game. But now she'd started skipping more lunches, and instead of eating a healthy sandwich and salad, she'd head out to the Cumberland Farms mini-market down the road and use the spare change Lucky gave her to buy Ho Hos or Twinkies.

Evie turned a page crisply and loudly. I was bored. I was worried.

I took a swipe at her book.

She gasped as it flew out of her hands and onto the floor with a
thud
. “What are you
doing
?” She had to smile, though, and then she couldn't help but laugh, and that was a start.

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. I'm being antisocial. You want to talk?”

Duh. Of course I did.

“All right. Let me offer you a simile about my life. You probably don't know what that is, but let me give you an example.” She adjusted her rear end on the hard crate and tightened her ponytail. “If Celia is like a forehand winner,” she said, “then I'm like…”

She looked off into the distance, and I followed her eyes to a mass of cobwebs up in a corner of the ceiling until it came to her: “I'm like … a defensive lob: slow, round, and desperate.” She looked at me with a satisfied expression.

I wasn't amused.

“Okay,” she tried again. “Look, Chelsea. It's not your fault everyone loves you around here, and that you've got Beth, and that my parents are total losers who don't want me.”

Whoa. That was
not
true.

“It's a fact, Chelsea. God, how many times has Lucky left me here—totally forgotten about me—since my mom went out west?”

Okay, that was true. But to be fair, Lucky had been coming here for, like, fifteen years and it had been only a couple years that he'd had a kid to think about. Lucky was a longtime fixture at this place, having started his tennis career here at sixteen. He disappeared after college when he'd gone on the pro circuit and traveled to exotic places to play tournaments. He made it to number one hundred ninety-nine in the world, which is actually quite impressive, contrary to what tennis novices might think of that number. And then he quit. One day he walked through the club's front door again, and Gene hired him on the spot.

Evie continued trying to explain her philosophy to me. “It's not that I expect my parents to
change
,” she said. “It's more that I want different ones entirely. In fact, I want to get out of my life. I want to be someone else
so bad
, Chelsea. Have you ever felt that way? No, you probably haven't…”

I had to admit I hadn't. It's weird, but even though I retained clear, terrible memories of what had happened to me when I was younger, I was still okay with being me. As my mom liked to say,
It's your entire story that makes you who you are, not just the happy things.

“I'd love to be anyone but me,” Evie said wistfully, reaching for that last Twinkie. “Anywhere but here.”

I took that in and realized I'd failed this time. I hung my head and sighed. I wasn't equipped to talk her down from this one. But we'd get there. I wasn't giving up on her.

 

Before

So Evie and I were secretly following Annabel on the July day when my mom figured out Annabel was in love with a mystery man. Annabel was easy to spot in her hot-pink halter top. After she'd handed Nicholas his lunch of meat sandwiches, Annabel glided toward the women's locker room. Evie and I picked up the tiniest hint of a hum coming from her, a happy tune I couldn't place. But just as Annabel was about to enter the locker room, Evie touched my shoulder and froze. We weren't the only ones tracking her.

Patrick was perched on the back of the main lobby's big sofa, which happened to be directly across from the entrance to the women's locker room. Annabel swanned into the locker room, and Evie and I pretended to walk on by Patrick, eventually settling about ten feet away from him at one of the tables in front of the TV.

The expression on Patrick's face as he watched Annabel disappear into the locker room was indescribable, but I will try: picture love, plus anger, plus longing, plus sadness, plus … a dash of hatred. In that order. Annabel hadn't acknowledged him when she passed by, so we couldn't be sure she'd even seen him. That was the thing with Annabel. She didn't show her cards or let on what was really happening with her. You just caught glimpses of who she might be, of who you thought she was, of how she was willing to portray herself on a given day. In any case, I didn't think Patrick would've noticed Evie and me if we'd started juggling kittens with a clown chorus singing behind us. This was another one of those times Evie's social invisibility worked in our favor.

She whispered to me, “We should follow her in there.”

I thought about that, but before we could make a move, Annabel stormed out.

We were shocked. We'd never seen Annabel storm anywhere. “How the—” she seethed at Patrick. “
How
did you do this? How did you get into my locker?” She was spitting mad. She shook something at him: a piece of notepaper folded perfectly down the middle. “You're sick, you know that?”

Patrick looked at her with ice in his eyes, a closemouthed, self-satisfied smile on his face. I'd never seen him like this; I'd never seen anything sinister from him.

“This kind of stuff is why—” Annabel shook her head, and again refrained from finishing the thought. “You'll never be the man he is, and you know what? You can say what you want, write what you want, think what you want. I guess I can't stop you.” She crumpled the paper in her hand and jabbed her index finger at him. “But the next time you touch anything of mine, I'll call the police. You got that?”

 

Before

I couldn't sit in that storage room with Evie for another day. Sure, I'd still hang out with her as I always had, but I couldn't stay cooped up in that room
all day long
like she'd started doing. Nothing I did was helping get her out of there, so one day I just hit the wall; I had to skedaddle. It was so hard, leaving her behind. It went against everything I stand for. My protective instinct is fierce for Evie; it had been that way since we'd met.

July was around the corner, and it was going to be a scorcher today. I walked with Evie toward Court 5 and back to her hideaway after Lucky dropped her off at the club's front door, and sat with her while she got situated with a can of Cran-Apple from the vending machine and her latest tome, the one about the scary doomsday clock. She was slogging through dark novels when it seemed to me she'd be a lot happier reading
Summer Cool: The Book
, obsessing about boys, and splashing in the pool like the other girls her age I'd seen around the club.

But I knew it was hard for her. Things were getting worse. Tad and his cohort had been working really hard this summer to find new fat-related insults. She'd tried out a few comebacks on me, such as
I won't always be fat, but you'll always be a moron
, and
I won't be fat forever, but you'll forever be stuck with that ugly face
.

They sounded pretty good to me, but it wasn't the same when it came time to make a stand, mostly because Tad never confronted her by himself. It was always in a crowd, always when he had reinforcements, while Evie stood alone. The one time she did summon the courage, during a rare assault when no one else was in earshot, she snapped back, “God, Tad, can't you think of anything more original? That doesn't even make sense.”

“Yeah!” He cackled. “It doesn't make sense because you can't hear it. All that blubber is blocking your ears.”

Evie didn't talk back after that. It was so stupid because I didn't think she was fat. Just bigger than some other people, and so what? The girls were mean, too, but mostly behind her back, pretending like they weren't talking about her when clearly they were. For the most part, their cruelty lay in excluding Evie—like she was a terrible person who smelled horrible.

But even with this awfulness, I didn't want Evie throwing her summer days away over those dopes. So on that day when I'd had enough, I let her know I was taking off. She squinted at me, looking a bit lost and definitely surprised. We'd spent practically every hour of every day together for the past two summers.

Well, she was welcome to follow, but I couldn't take it back there another minute. I wandered up to the front desk to see my mom. I'd go back and check on Evie later, of course.

*   *   *

This happened for a few days. I spent more time at the front desk than ever, and one day my mom finally said it.

“Why aren't you with Evie? She still hiding away in the storage room?” She hopped off her stool. “Look, Chels,” she said. “No one can make a person do what they don't want to. The kid drew a crappy hand in life, I'll give 'er that. But only Evie can make the choice to come out of her funk. Everyone makes a choice.”

I felt really sad hearing that, because I didn't see Evie making a different choice anytime soon. My mom saw my distress and her voice softened. “We'll make sure we stand by her, support her, and do our best to make up for that father of hers. Okay?”

She squinted at me, then pulled me in for a hug and a kiss. I got it, I really did. But it didn't seem fair that Evie was punished every single day simply for being who she was. It seemed to me it wasn't
Evie's
funk. It seemed to me the world had put its funk on her, and she was having a hard time standing strong because she was alone. If she was supposed to be facing life by herself, where were Evie's weapons? Where were her instruments for fighting?

I didn't have the answers. It was one of the hardest things I had to do that summer, to leave Evie alone with her pain. If Evie wanted to hide in a musty old room all day when the sun was shining and there were a million corners to explore and no one to stop us from exploring them, I had to let her. I had to give her the gift of tough love.

 

After

Nearly two weeks into the investigation, Evie and I were tired, hot, and a little irritable after another day of trying to keep up with the detective. We found the lobby empty and plopped down on the sofa. Evie laid back and closed her eyes. It was so quiet … and then—