Shutout Read online

  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!”

  3

  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.

  Shakina and Marcia waved to me from their table. I stood there like an idiot for a minute. Lena still hadn’t seen me, but either way this was a bad choice. I could go and sit with Lena and be a good friend and be mostly ignored and feel like a loser, or I could go and have a nice conversation with Shakina and Marcia and have a better lunch experience but look like a bad friend.

  I decided to be a bad friend when Duncan went and started hovering around Lena yet again. No wonder she wasn’t asking me about Conrad anymore. I didn’t want to spend the whole lunchtime seething about how the guy I’d been nursing a secret crush on since mid-August when soccer practice started, a guy who was not only gorgeous but also taller than me, had also decided to pick Lena and cut me from the dating varsity. Well, I suppose he would have had to notice me in order to cut me, but still.

  So I went and sat with Marcia and Shakina and talked and laughed and made myself not look over to where Duncan was drooling over Lena and not get jealous and not care.

  On the way out of lunch, I saw a bunch of dorky boys I knew sitting at a table being goofy. I swear, they acted more like Dominic than like me, even though we were the same age. Down at the far end of their table, eating by himself, was Angus Beef from English class, reading a book. I’d had to make a hard choice, but at least I had two tables to choose from. How much must it suck to have nobody t
o sit with at all, to have your only option be to sit alone, excluded even from the group of boys making fart sounds? Angus looked up at me and waved, and I waved back. “Whatcha reading?” I asked.

  He held up the book. Animal Liberation. I had no idea what it was. “Any good?”

  “I’m not sure I agree with the whole thing, but it definitely makes you think,” he said.

  I had nothing to add to that. “See you in class then.”

  “Cool,” he said, and buried his head back in the book. Well, at least he didn’t seem to mind his social outcast status. He may have even chosen it. Weird.

  I went to my locker to get my stuff for English, and Lena stopped by. “Hey! Where were you?” she asked.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said, trying to sound more casual than I felt. “How come you never called me back last night?”

  “Oh my God, I am so sorry. Courtney was breaking up with Jonathan, and I had to hear all about it and she wouldn’t let me off the phone until like nine-thirty, and then Mom told me it was too late to be on the phone and blah blah. Were you avoiding me because you’re mad?”

  “Oh no,” I lied. “Not at all. Marcia was feeling really bad about the handball yesterday, and she stopped me to apologize, and she was being kinda high-maintenance, and it took me five minutes to convince her that it wasn’t a big deal, and by that time I was already sitting there. Besides, it looked like you had somebody better-looking to talk to.”

  “Amanda, Courtney is not better-looking than you.”

  “I’m not talking about Courtney,” I said, smiling.

  Lena broke into this great big grin. “Is he the cutest thing on the face of the earth? It hurts my eyes to look at him. Too bad he likes Courtney.”

  “No way, he totally likes you.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “No, I could read the body language from across the caf.” True. I read his body language during lunch when I was not looking over there and not getting jealous. “It’s all about you.”

  “His friend Jared is having a party on Saturday and he asked us to go, but I thought he was just being polite and asking me because I was sitting there. Oh my God, you have to come with me. I mean, I wasn’t even going to go, but you have to go with me. I’m freaking out.”

  I patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t freak out. Of course I’ll go with you.”

  Of course. Because Mom and Dad will be delighted with the idea of me going to a kegger. Because I’d love to stand there feeling awkward while Captain Gorgeous hits on my best friend! Being a good friend completely sucks sometimes.

  I was the first one at soccer practice that afternoon, and when I went to grab a ball, Beasley told me, “Grab a seat there first, Amanda. And don’t sit on the ball. I hate it when people do that.”

  “What’s up?” I asked nervously.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  Everybody looked at me when they came to practice, and I just shrugged. Finally, when everybody was there, Beasley said, “Okay. Who can tell me something they learned from watching the varsity game yesterday?”

  All the girls looked at each other. I guess we were expecting her to go over what happened in our game. Finally I raised my hand.

  “Amanda?”

  “Well, I saw how important subs can be. The other team thought they had the offense figured out, but the offense totally changed when Lena came in the game. It took them two goals and a lot of yelling from their coach before they stopped marking Courtney and started paying attention to Lena.”

  “For all the good it did them,” Beasley joked. “Great, Amanda. You’ve just earned your starting spot in the next game.”

  A lot of girls gasped when she said this. She’d told us to bring notebooks, but if anybody besides me had brought them, nobody had used them, and now she was giving out the starting positions based on who had something to say about the varsity game! I was really glad I went first because I didn’t have much else to say.

  “I told you I wanted you paying attention to what was happening in the varsity games. You’ll be earning your starting positions for every game by showing that you’re not just playing the game, you’re studying it and trying to get better. Now, who’s next?”

  It took an agonizing twenty minutes for ten girls to come up with stuff to say, and so we spent a shorter time running around than usual, but I’d never spent so much time analyzing a soccer game before.

  That night, getting ready to leave for yoga class, I was feeling uncomfortable about the whole thing. I was afraid I wasn’t going to know what to do and everybody was going to make fun of me. Plus I had these tight leggings on.

  “Do you have enough water?” Mom asked.

  “Why do I need water to stretch?” I said.

  “Didn’t you say this was a hot yoga class?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “But I thought that just meant hot like cool, like hey, this class is hot, it’s got it goin’ on, it’ll make you really hot, they play hot jams on the stereo, something like that.”

  Mom actually laughed at me. “No, sweetie. It means it’s going to be ninety-five degrees in the yoga studio.”

  “What!? Who thought of this? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. No way am I going to go stretch in a sauna!”

  “Well, I guess you’ll have to tell Coach Beasley that you were scared—”

  “I’m not scared, okay? It just seems bizarre. But fine, I’ll try it.”

  So I filled up two water bottles, and when I walked into Charlesborough Yoga Studio, I told the lady behind the counter that I played CHS soccer.

  She smiled and asked me for seven bucks, then directed me to the classroom.

  I looked around the class, and it was all women Mom’s age, plus a few guys, and then me in the back slowly unrolling the purple yoga mat Mom had given me.

  I was totally embarrassed, but then Shakina came in looking just as scared and uncomfortable as I felt, and she ran over and unrolled her mat next to mine.

  I didn’t know how I was going to break this to Mom, but the class was awesome. The heat made my muscles that were always so tight feel like they’d melted into these wonderful flexible bands of goo.

  And the instructor was tall. I estimated her height at five feet ten inches, same as me, and she had these skinny legs and practically no boobs, and she was beautiful. She looked so confident and so comfortable in her body, and she looked great because of that confidence she gave off. If that’s what yoga does for you, I thought, I’m in.

  Plus I had a great time with Shakina. We both screwed up all the time, and the instructor, whose name was Portia, kept coming over and correcting our form and being encouraging, and then when she left, Shakina and I would giggle about how bad we sucked at yoga.

  Of course, there was the kind of dorkified stuff about saluting the sun and listening to your breath and all that stuff. I guess you were supposed to turn off your brain and not think about how freaking hot it was or how unflexible you were or the easy goal that you should have saved. Mostly it didn’t work because my brain is always running through all this stuff at like a mile a minute, but right around the hour mark of the ninety-minute class, just for a second, it did work. I was bent into an impossible position with sweat pouring off me, and I was breathing, and I wasn’t thinking. Even when the motor of my brain started up again, I felt this incredible relief. My brain was overjoyed to get a break from running on the treadmill of my thoughts. It felt great, and I wanted more. More than my heels not hurting, more than my legs feeling soft and flexible, more than liking my body, I wanted to be able to think nothing soon.

  After the class, Portia stopped us and said, “Thank you, girls, for giving it a try. I hope I’ll see you again.”

  She walked away and we giggled. “Oh my God, that was so hard,” I said. “I am never making fun of my mom about yoga again.”

  “I know, right?” Shakina answered. “I thought this would just be stretching, but it was tough. Are you gonna come back?”


  I wasn’t sure whether to answer truthfully, but Shakina seemed nice enough not to mock me if I revealed that I was kind of into yoga. “Well, I have this problem with my heels, and my legs haven’t felt this good since I was like eleven, so yeah, I think I’m gonna have to come back.”

  “Oh good. I didn’t want to be the only one here. I have these back problems”—she gestured at her enormous breasts, which made me think maybe the pointy nubs had their advantages after all—“and I’m like you. My back feels like jelly right now. It’s amazing.”

  “Cool! Hey, do you want to get a slice of pizza or something before the Saturday class?”

  She smiled. “Yeah. Sounds great!” It wasn’t until Shakina’s mom picked her up and we said goodbye that I remembered that I was supposed to be sneaking out to a kegger with Lena on Saturday. Well, probably those didn’t start at seven o’clock anyway, so I’d probably be able to do both. Still, I would much rather have gone to yoga class and rented a movie. But if my friendship with Lena wasn’t exactly hanging by a thread, it was definitely changing. Me failing to be her wingman, wingperson, or person of wingness seemed like it might be a blow that our new, not necessarily improved friendship might not recover from.

  I was thinking about this when Mom picked me up. “So how was class?” she asked brightly.

  “It was okay,” I said, and I was annoyed by Mom’s big grin, so I didn’t say anything else all the way home.

  4

  We won our game on Friday, 3–1. Of course I’m never happy with anything but a shutout, but it was still a respectable game. This time most of varsity was there for the second half. It was an away game and even though their bus was later than ours, they still got there forty-five minutes before their game, so what else were they going to do but watch us play? Well, sit in the stands and gossip and ignore our game, actually. Except for Lena, who watched and cheered. It made me happy to hear her voice.

  Lena and I hadn’t eaten lunch together again, but that was okay because I enjoyed hanging out with Shakina and Marcia.