Page 29 of Base Block

“What are they saying?” I demanded.

“Nothing bad. It was a remark about your—hell, the OL coach is yelling that we have to go to another meeting. Are you good?”

I said yes, I definitely was. I had already cleaned up my knees and hands and they hardly even hurt anymore, and I didn’t bother to mention my fall.

“Then I’ll see you after the game,” he told me.

We said goodbye. The night was very long and quiet, except for a dog barking in the distance. The next morning, the trumpet sounded at dawn with some kind of military song, but I was lying awake. I was already nervous, because this was game day.

I had a ride there, so I walked down to the complex’s parking lot to wait for it. Heidi and another woman were coming to pick me up early, since traffic got bad around the stadium hours before the game started as fans showed up for tailgating and for the activities that the team planned for them. There was a special show by the Wonderwomen dance team, there were games for kids, and there was also a job fair. I was interested in getting to that.

I had put on my Woodsmen dress (Callum’s T-shirt). Today, I wore it with the thrift store belt and I worked for a while on getting the drape just right. I had already sewn the sleeves into pouches to make pockets, which I tucked inside. I carried my new house key, my driver’s license clipped to some of Callum’s money, and a lip gloss that I’d bought. I had done my hair very carefully with the old hot rollers, in case we made it on camera. That would be great for his brand—I needed to look good.

“Oh, my Lord! You look awful!”

I glanced down at my knees, which Heidi was pointing at through her car’s window. Anara, the woman who had talked about drunk shrews on our tour of Woodsmen stadium, had leaned over into the driver’s seat so she could also see my injuries. “I fell yesterday,” I explained to them. I put my hands in my pockets so they couldn’t see my scraped-up palms.

“Camels have natural pads on their knees to protect themselves from the hot sand,” Anara remarked. “Too bad you didn’t have those, too.”

“I didn’t know that about camels. How interesting,” Heidi told her and seemed to mean it. I didn’t know that about camels, either, and I learned quite a bit more because their conversation about desert animals went on for a while. It saved me from having to explain that I’d been running from a friendly dog.

Despite how early we’d left, we still had to join a line of cars waiting to turn into the stadium. But after we pulled down the main drive, we got special treatment. Heidi had a pass on her phone that her husband George had gotten for her, and it allowed us into one of the back lots that was near where the players, coaches, and other personnel got to park. I looked and yes, there was Callum’s green hatchback next to one that looked like a spaceship had dropped it off because it was so futuristic and fancy.

“Callum should get a new car,” I said as I got out of Heidi’s back seat. “He deserves it.”

She got out too, and took a moment to switch her stuff into a little purse that was the correct size for the stadium regulations. “George knew a guy who made it on the Towers one season,” she remarked. “He bought a new car, a new watch that was all diamonds, big studs for his ears, and a boat.”

I could picture that exactly. Minus the boat, Damian had bought all those things for himself, too, plus a bunch of huge TVs. His rental had come furnished like the condo where I was now living, though, so the unopened TV boxes were still in his garage there.

“Unfortunately, that guy got cut the next season,” she continued. “Then he had all kinds of stuff that he couldn’t sell for half of what he bought it for.”

“Callum wouldn’t be dumb,” I informed her.

“I’m not saying that, and I don’t think that Towers player was dumb, either,” she quickly told me. “I just think he got overwhelmed by the opportunities. It’s hard to look at the money in your bank account and not want to spend it.”

I nodded and mentally put a red X over the new truck I’d been picturing. Callum was ok with his green car and he also needed to save his money…because you didn’t ever know. “How did you get to be friends with Anara?” I asked as we started to walk toward her. She was crouching on the pavement to examine something there, something that looked like a squished bug.

“We met on that stadium tour and I got the feeling that she has a hard time relating to people. She had just told one of the other women that her nose was similar to a proboscis monkey, and then she talked about their mating calls. It wasn’t a great introduction to that group.” She glanced at me. “I don’t think she meant to be rude.”

“I don’t care about stuff like that,” I said and her expression relaxed.

“Good. We’ll have fun together!”

Woodsmen Stadium had been exciting on our tour. But now, with so many people wearing orange, chanting, and eating hot dogs? It was over the top with energy. The job fair was packed but Anara and Heidi waited patiently as I submitted my name at as many places as I could. Then they wanted to go to the reception for the families of new players, so we went into one of the huge conference rooms inside the building to get something to eat and meet everyone else. I saw familiar faces from our tour of this place, the women whose boyfriends and husbands had already made the team at that point. I had thought that they were snobby and rude back then but they seemed nicer now. They wanted to know where I had gotten my dress and several of them also wanted earrings like mine.

“I made them,” I said, touching the metal.

“How?” one asked and I explained it. She said that she was going to take her husband’s shirts and make dresses, too, and I told her that I could sew them for her.

“Callum got me a sewing machine. It wasn’t expensive,” I added to Heidi. “He thought I’d have fun with it because I like to make my clothes.”

“Why?” another girl wanted to know, her nose wrinkled. She was Jenae, which I remembered because she had written it in the shape of a heart on her nametag for the stadium tour.

“Because I’m wearing pieces that nobody else has,” I stated. I had dealt with people like her in LA, and there were magic words to use with them. “My wardrobe is custom and bespoke.”

“Ooh, custom,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “Bespoke.”

But mostly, everyone was very nice and the food was good, too. I was careful about eating, since I didn’t want to grow out of the shorts I’d cut off and skirt I’d made (and had lately reinforced on my new machine). But Heidi said she was starved and she proved it, and Anara talked about a type of mole that had poison in its saliva to paralyze worms so that it could stockpile them for future meals. She was doing kind of the same thing by putting pretzels in her clear stadium bag to eat later, during the game. It was lucky for me that we went to the reception, because one of the Woodsmen employees saw my gross knees and asked if he could get me some bandages. Those covered a lot of the damage.