Playing hurt, p.1
Playing Hurt, page 1
Woodbury, Minnesota
Playing Hurt © 2010 by Holly Schindler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.
Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.
First e-book edition © 2011
E-book ISBN: 9780738728155
Cover design by Ellen Lawson
Cover image © iStockphoto.com/Daniel Laflor
Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Flux does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.
Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.
Flux
Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
2143 Wooddale Drive
Woodbury, MN 55125
www.fluxnow.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
Thanks, as always, to the fantastic crew at Flux, particularly my editors, Brian Farrey and Sandy Sullivan.
And to Team Schindler—Mom (world’s best first reader and sounding board), and especially John, my brother, for unwavering support throughout a long journey and for always being at all my author events, camera in hand.
And to the incredible bloggers and readers I’ve met online—whose enthusiasm is priceless—you make each release an absolute blast.
Thank you, thank you, thank you …
Chelsea
end line
A camera winks at me from high in the bleachers like we’re sharing a secret. Fans in the home section of the Fair Grove High gym smile in envy as I hurry toward the bench, wishing some winking camera had ever, in their entire lives, shared a secret with them.
Other cameras follow suit, flashes popping at me from all over as I jog the last few steps to the huddle. Each step sends fiery sparks through my hips—sparks I’ve been trying to ignore during practice for the last week and a half.
I fight a grimace and tell myself I’m doing a good job covering up the pain. But when I glance up at the bleachers, I realize my little brother’s squinting at me from behind his thick glasses. He lowers his camcorder, wrinkles his face into a worried frown.
I try to turn my attention back toward Coach Tindell, but my eyes bounce from the dried-up apple-doll face of my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Williams, to my second-grade teacher (who’s wearing an absurdly large pair of papier-mâché basketball-shaped earrings), then to our mail carrier, to the boy who kissed me on the playground on the last day of the fourth grade, to two distant cousins, to Mack, owner of the Quick Mart down the block from my house (who constantly brags about patching the front tire on my cherry-red Camaro last spring the same way he might brag about patching up Brad Pitt’s ride). My Camaro is now parked in the Fair Grove High lot, slathered in well-wishes from my boyfriend, Gabe, who is as sweet as a box of Valentine’s Day candy hearts. Go Chelsea! he’s written with windshield markers. #23! And, Nitro! which is the only thing the rest of the team calls me anymore.
“Doesn’t look like a ball player,” I hear trickle from the crowd. The sentence has been following me everywhere, flopping around like an untied shoelace ever since I was profiled by USA WEEKEND Magazine, since I was pictured on the cover of their issue highlighting the best female high school athletes in the country. My airbrushed, ultra-flattering portrait revealed that I was toned but not body-builder enormous; that unlike the stereotypical female basketball player, I also have most-definitely girly addictions—to strawberry-tinted lip gloss, waterproof mascara, and my straightening iron.
Doesn’t look like a ball player. As that sentence floats, I get the urge to say something like, “Get real—women were playing basketball at Smith College in 1892,” or, “Wasn’t Title IX forty freaking years ago?” or, “I certainly hope we’re past making jokes about butch girl jocks.” Or, “How many more times, as women, are we going to have to prove that feminine and powerful can, in fact, be synonyms?”
“… thousand shots a day … set shots, lay-ups, free throws,” I hear drifting from the crowd. “Five-mile run, an hour at the weight bench.” They all know my daily workout routine. They all talk big about it, beam the way most people do when talking about their kids.
As I glance up at the bleachers, I see a couple of posterboard signs hovering above the heads of the crowd, the hand-painted messages screaming Chelsea Keyes—Pride of Fair Grove!
I wipe my sweaty forehead with my fingertips. The humidity in the gym hangs in the air like a soaking wet sheet on a clothesline. But the rest of the team is still smooth-skinned. Almost powdery. Not a single sweat-shine on any of their cheeks.
“Work ethic powered by nitroglycerin,” someone says from the front row of the bleachers. It should rev me, the way the Fair Grove fans are talking me up, thinking I’m like the active ingredient in dynamite. It should inspire me far more than Tindell’s quickie pep talk. Instead, the words sit heavy across my shoulders like a barbell. Like something I need to lift.
Our team breaks from the huddle; when I turn back toward the court, though, somebody’s got their hand around my wrist.
“Do you need to sit this out?” Brandon hisses. He’s standing up, right there in the front row of the bleachers, the entire town of Fair Grove watching him. I glance down at the camcorder, which he’s lowered but hasn’t turned off. The power light flashes as it records my every move.
I try to wrench my arm away, but he just grips me tighter. “You’re not hurt, are you?” he asks.
“Don’t be such a twerpy, jealous little sib,” I snap, far more nastily than I’d intended.
I jog back toward the center of the court, my hips firing bullets with each step.
“I don’t know why you torture yourself,” Brandon says. I jump, slam my finger down on the remote’s pause button. What should have been the first game of my last season as a Fair Grove High Lady Eagle freezes on my TV screen. Should have been. Things just didn’t work out that way, though.
I relax my shoulders inside my worn-out Mizzou Tigers T-shirt, trying to act completely blasé as Brandon leans against my doorjamb in his rumpled pajama bottoms.
“It’s not torture,” I insist, flashing a smile. Brandon doesn’t buy it; he tosses a disgusted look at me, his braces gleaming in the TV glow.
I try to look away, but my eyes land on the old trophies that pose triumphantly on my bookshelves, all those tiny little brass sculptures of athletes dunking their metallic balls or going for victorious lay-ups. But they don’t really make me feel good anymore. Not proud. Just … furious at myself. I smile at Brandon, pretend this isn’t the case. “I’m just watching it,” I tell him. “Like some old movie on cable, you know?”
“Sure,” Brandon grumbles, rolling his eyes behind the lenses of his glasses, which shine, tonight, like two circles of moonlight on his face. “And that’s exactly why you only watch it in the dead of night, alone in your room. If it was all that innocent, you wouldn’t have to hide.”
I narrow my eyes, cross my arms over my shirt. Raise my eyebrow in a way that shows him I don’t intend to put the remote down. Or turn my TV off.
“I’m right next door, Chelse,” he informs me. “I can hear what you’re doing in here. Watching your last game over and over. Do you even sleep anymore?” He clings to the doorway, waiting for an answer.
Attempting to ignore his very existence, I push play. The court at Fair Grove High bursts back onto the screen. Our state-of-the-art glossy floor shines under the gym lights like skin coated with baby oil. The regulation markings—black paint indicating the half-court and free throw areas—are still as familiar to me as the lines on my face.
I lean forward on the edge of my bed and squint at the screen, at the former me, marveling at the way my player’s concentration has sharpened my senses; I’m just like a real eagle swooping in to tear the flesh from its unsuspecting kill. Which is exactly what I’d planned to do to the Aurora Lady Houn’ Dawgs, who’d come to my home court. Tear the juicy flesh from their vulnerable little puppy bones.
The cheerleaders along the sidelines are screaming their ridiculous fight song. The rhyme sounds awkward to me even now, watching it all unfold again for what must be the five-hundredth time.
Eagles, Eagles, we’re so regal. Rule the court like queens!
The camera lens swivels away from the court, zooms in on a pair of tan thighs bouncing beneath the violet hem of a pleated skirt. My entire TV screen fills with tight muscle.< br />
“Brand,” Gabe moans from somewhere off-camera. “The game. Shoot the game.”
The screen blurs as Brandon swivels again, clears as the view settles on Gabe’s beautiful face.
“Come on,” Gabe moans. “Help me out here.” He shakes his head, a few blond curls tumbling down toward eyes so green you’d think for sure, at first, they’re dabs of paint. Or contacts. They’re yeah, right green—only, it’s the kind of yeah, right that really does turn out to be true after all, the same way the rolling landscapes of the Emerald Isle turn out to be reality, not just something Photoshopped by an advertising exec for the tourism industry.
Gabe purses his full lips in distaste. “You could be a little proud of your sister, you know.”
The screen jiggles as Brandon turns back to the cheerleaders, three of whom are staring not at the camera, but just to the side of it. At my Gabe. Three of them wave with their fingertips. Giggle and shove their chests out, displaying their figures the way models on The Price is Right point out items up for bid.
“I just don’t get you,” Brandon says. “When you could have that …”
Gabe chuckles while the camera zeroes in on his left earlobe, then pulls back in a jerky motion. “Your sister’s more interesting,” he says. “’Cause I had to convince her.”
Gabe’s words pick me up like a Wilson game ball, toss me back into my junior year when the King of the Ladies-Pay-All Dance kept popping up at my locker door, winking at me in the hallways. Texting me during bus rides to away games. I can still hear the team razzing me like Gabe had cooties, their elbows in my ribs, because jealousy behaves that way sometimes. You don’t want that, do you, people say, pointing at the chocolate chip cookie you’ve got your hand on, wrinkling their nose, because the minute you agree, No, I really don’t, they can swoop in and pop the entire cookie into their mouth, making their cheeks bulge out like Dizzy Gillespie.
But even when I said it about Gabe—No, you’re right, he’s so not my type—he wouldn’t give up. Wouldn’t let himself be swooped up by anyone else. Not one of my teammates or the cheerleaders or the tennis girls in their short skirts or the debate captain or the salutatorian. He kept chasing me, telling me he just wanted to spend a little time bathed in the glow of my star. Nobody’d ever talked to me like that. And when I finally agreed to go out with him, the entire female population of FGH stomped their feet on the tile floor of the hallways. I swear, it felt like the Big Quake—the one that seismologists have long predicted for Missouri’s New Madrid Fault—had finally hit.
“I wish I’d never brought the stupid camcorder to that game,” Brandon says from my doorway.
“You didn’t bring the camcorder, Gabe did,” I remind him. “You were just shooting while Gabe took notes for the paper.” Because, in addition to recapping the Eagles’ wins and losses for The Eagle Eye, our school-wide Monday-morning newscast, Gabe Ross’s mug shot showed up every week at the top of his sports column for the Fair Grove High Bulletin.
“I know what you’re doing,” Brandon tells me. He slathers me with such a disapproving look that I almost think, for a minute, we’ve traded our ages like baseball cards. Like suddenly I’m the one who’s two years younger. “You’re watching that last game to figure out where your big mistake was, right? FYI—there’s no mistake here, Chelse. It was an accident. And there’s no way to redo it, either. It happened.”
I stare at the edge of the bench, visible at the bottom of the TV screen, wishing like hell I’d been sitting on it. Just a game or two, I catch myself thinking. If I’d just sat a couple of games out …
“I’m serious, Chelse. Watching this crap is self-imposed torture. All it’s going to get you is hurt all over again,” Brandon warns. “I know it—just like I knew you were hurt that day at the game.”
“I’d been hurt a million times before,” I remind him in a near-shout. “Jammed fingers and pulled hamstrings and sprained ankles. Every athlete gets hurt. The best players just suck it up and push through it.” But my hip was different. I knew that—I should have known to sit it out. I start kicking myself internally all over again.
“Getting loud in there,” Dad says, with the same warmth as a corrections officer. He steps into view in my doorway, beside Brandon, a glass of water in his hand. The moonlight bleeds through my venetian blinds, casting horizontal shadows on Dad’s face the way the crossbars of a cell might.
I hit stop, so that my final game disappears and the screen fills with a late-night infomercial for a juicer.
Scratches, the gray tomcat Dad brought home for my eighth birthday, mews from my bedroom doorway and swirls his body between Dad’s legs. He slithers across the floor, then launches himself up onto my antique iron bed.
I’d bet that, for Scratches, the distance between the carpet and the top of my fluffy white comforter is practically the same as the distance between the gym floor and the rim once was for me. And Scratches is ten—a senior cat—but he can still make the leap. Here I am, young enough that an entire career in college basketball should be spread out before me. But I’m done. It’s over. Time has run out. Basketball is an hourglass with a whole pyramid of sand on the bottom.
Scratches climbs into my lap, then instantly starts purring and working his paws against my stomach. Okay, it’s not like I’ve completely let myself go. So my stomach’s still flat. But now that it’s not rock hard, it just seems—doughy to me. Especially when Scratches starts kneading like this.
“You’ve got finals tomorrow,” Dad barks at me. “Last finals of your senior year. Got those grades to think about.”
Right, I think. Grades are especially important now that I’ve blown my chances at an athletic scholarship. Grades are all Dad thinks about. But I don’t know what kind of an academic scholarship he thinks I’ll get at this point. It's May already, and graduation is looming so close that my cap and gown are hanging on the closet door.
“We were just watching TV,” Brandon says.
When Dad turns toward him, his face softens. “Just keep it down a little, ’kay, bud? Don’t wake your mom.”
Brandon nods.
“Bud,” I sneer when Dad disappears. “Of course.”
“Chelse, he just doesn’t—”
I push play again.
“You don’t exactly make it easy on him, you know,” Brandon insists.
“Gimme a break.”
As we stare each other down, I notice the cowlick that frays out from the crooked part in Brandon’s unruly hair. He tries to gel it into something like order during the day, but by evening, it’s always worked its way loose. Reminds me of the times when he was little, when it always stuck out in about three hundred directions; Mom could never get it to lie down. I think for a minute that if I could just stare long enough, Brandon’s cowlick might actually make him look seven years old again. Which would make me nine—a girl who’d only just begun to peel back her talent. A girl at the beginning of her story.
But the scruff on his chin and the silver hoops in his ears, which he wears even when he sleeps, won’t let me play make-believe. Won’t let me fantasize that I’m not a has-been who gets her only exercise at the Springfield YMCA pool, swimming laps in a lane marked by ropes and floaters while the white-haired AARP geezers do water aerobics nearby. That I’m not the girl those geezers bestow their wrinkly smiles upon while they wave, flapping their floppy triceps, like I’m one of them. Part of their fragile group.
Which I am. Which is why I haven’t stepped onto a basketball court in more than six months. Which is why I’m reduced to watching old footage of myself like a washed-up, middle-aged used-to-be with zero prospects.
“Forget it,” Brandon says finally, turning away. “You’re hopeless.”
I turn the volume up just to spite both Brandon and Dad. “Shut the door on your way out,” I call.
On the TV, Gabe scribbles something in his notebook just as a chant erupts. Hearing it, Gabe flashes that killer smile of his; on cue, my belly turns into a wobbly wad of strawberry preserves.
Gabe drops his pen onto the notebook on his lap and starts clapping, his angelic tenor providing harmony to the deep baritone just one row behind. The camera swivels until Brandon zooms in on Dad, whose face is flushed with excitement and happiness and even … the idea is as distant as my first day of kindergarten, but there it is just the same: pride.
