Did the heels have me off-balance? Was my child-sized dress cutting off circulation to the motor cortex of my brain? Or—possibly—when the biggest crush of your lifepublicly does not remember you at all…is that a little destabilizing?
Whatever it was, I just couldn’t get those tiny little balls into any of those tiny little holes.
I just kept smacking at them with my club. To no avail.
I’ll shock no one by saying that Finn most often got holes in one—or two. Three,max.
Brody, too.
But I was solidly, repeatedly, in the double digits.
Without ever voting, we’d all elected Finn our team captain by telepathy. And then Brody had appointed himself the scorekeeper, and—I guess in an effort to foreground that he had snagged the best of the two Burton sisters—he kept calling out loudly to ask for my score… and then pretending not to hear my answer.
“JoJo! What’s your total?” Brody would shout, waving his putter at me.
“Twenty-three!” I’d shout back.
“Three?” he’d respond, deliberately getting it wrong.
“Twenty-three!” I’d have to shout again.
And then Finn would look up from his practice putt likeTwenty-three? Who could possibly get twenty-three?
Brody did this on every round.
Twenty-three is a lot. I agree.
Even so, isn’t it poor teamsmanship to leave a player behind?
But leave me behind they did. Finn, Sean, and Brody would take their shots, high-five each other, and then move on to the next anchor, or pirate ship, or mermaid.
Like I didn’t even exist.
I tried to catch up, but shot after shot went too far, stopped too short, got stuck in valleys, bounced off walls, skittered off the course altogether, or got lost in the octopus’s tentacles. Once, at the sandcastle, I made a shot that went into the hole, circled around, and thenpopped out againto roll back to the beginning.
And Cooper, bless him, stayed with me the whole time, offering useless advice like “Keep your wrists loose,” “Find your center of gravity,” and “Bethe golf ball.”
“What does that even mean?” I said, swinging my putter and missing the ball entirely.
Somewhere around shot twelve or thirteen, Cooper would start putting his hands over mine on the golf club handle, willing them to absorb his know-how. Or, perhaps, just taking my shots for me.
This helped a little.
But of course, Cooper himself was taking shots in the teens, so I’m not sure how much know-how he really had to offer.
“I’m so much worse than I thought I was,” I said, when the rest of our team had rounded the sandcastle and we’d lost visual contact again.
“It’s those heels,” he said. “They’re messing with your depth perception.”
“I can’t believe Finn didn’t remember me,” I said next.
“Big kids never remember little kids.”
“He remembered everybody else.”
“Maybe he was playing it cool.”
“Did you see him squint at me like he’d never seen me before? I totally froze.”
