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When they let go, I watched my dad walk toward his bedroom, and even though it was only a couple of steps, I could tell that he hadn’t had too much tonight.
“He’s ok,” I said gratefully, more to myself than to Bowie. “He shouldn’t have been smoking, but he was ok to drive.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I’ve been watching him since I was a little girl,” I explained. “I’ve always known that I had to be careful. Sometimes the things we did weren’t safe, like we’d go out on the lake to look at the stars but the boat would rock so much, and once he couldn’t get us back to shore…anyway, I watched and I got to know all his warning signs. He was ok tonight but I hope he didn’t spend a lot on buying rounds for the bar or leaving huge tips like he does sometimes. Sorry. Never mind.” I stopped complaining. This wasn’t Bowie’s problem.
He was still standing, and now he started heading for the door. “I’m going to go,” he told me again. “Thanks for making dinner and keeping me company when you probably wanted to take a nap.”
“No, I couldn’t have relaxed until I knew my dad—you don’t have to leave,” I said, but I could recognize the horrible awkwardness of this situation. Bowie had come to hang out and dance, but instead he’d gotten sucked into our uncomfortable family drama. He’d had to watch me sniff my dad like a bloodhound looking for clues and listen to maudlin stories about the night we almost drowned when the rowboat had sunk. “Yeah, ok,” I said. “Thank you for coming over, too. Times like this are hard and I appreciated you being here, even though I know it must have been weird.”
He stopped, halfway outside. “It wasn’t weird. I’m sorry I barged in and scared you earlier. See you, Lissa.” He closed the door behind himself, and then he was gone.
∞
“I’m not saying that what happened on Fan Day was totally your fault. Events and people conspired against you. The weather, the Woodsmen team officials, the company that manufactured that stage and decided to coat it in ice or vegetable oil or whatever they did to make it so slippery. The thing we have to do now is rise above all that,” Coach Rylah told us. “We have to forget the horror of Fan Day. We have to move past the embarrassment to our squad, to the Woodsmen organization, and to the football league in general.”
I looked over at Trinity, the first girl to fall, and mouthed, “You did great!” She looked like she might cry. No one had actually been injured, though, and today we were in the studio for our practice. We had finally been allowed back inside, but our locker room was still out of commission so we’d had to change in the bathroom again.
“No, it wasn’t totally your fault. But ask yourself this:mikä sinun nimesi on?” Coach Rylah stared pointedly at each of us as we sat on the floor looking up at her. No one really knew how to answer. “Well, Wonderwomen?” she prompted. “Mikä sinun nimesi on?How are you going to respond to that?”
“Present?” Brielle ventured.
“I think maybe we should move on to rehearsal,” Danni suggested. “Ladies? Are we ready?”
That was something we understood and we all nodded and said yes. I, personally, was very ready to stop rehashing Fan Day, to forget all the embarrassing and upsetting things that had happened: the falling, the hand on my breast in public, the worry about my dad, the exposure of our family problems to Garrett Bowman. That last one had been an unforced error and I couldn’t understand myself at all. Why had I told him those things?
I thought of how other girls would have been entertaining and fun in his presence. Not me, though. Apparently, I preferred to be depressing and morbid when I had a Woodsmen player in my cottage. Right, my cottage: the place where no Woodsmen player should ever have been. I rubbed my forehead, engulfed by worry.
“Ha!” Sam called out. He showed the screen of his phone to his counterpart. “My wife downloaded a Finnish translation app for me and I know what you just said. You asked, ‘What’s your name?’ It wasn’t anything do with what we’re talking about.”
“No, that’s not what I said,” Rylah told him. “Your app is wrong.”
“Which is more likely, that an app used by millions of people can’t translate a common question, or that a woman who spent ten days in another country isn’t actually fluent in their language?”
Coach Rylah turned to us. “Let’s get going, ladies,” she said, and we were all glad to do that. We worked hard for the rest of our time together, very happy to be out of the rain.
Afterwards, in the four-stall bathroom that was our current changing area, Jalesia held up her own phone. “I figured out what Rylah meant about the feather when we were doing crunches,” she told us. “Ancient Egyptians believed that the hearts of dead people were weighed on a scale with the feather of Maat on the other side. If your heart was lighter than the feather, then you went to paradise. It doesn’t relate to what she said also about shawarma. That’s a meat dish that sounds delicious, but I don’t know what any of that has to do with abdominal strength.”
“I told you guys that shawarma was food!” Malina crowed. “And it is delicious. We should all go out for dinner.”
“Thanks for looking it up, Jalesia,” Pressley said. “I learn so much new stuff from Coach Rylah. It’s almost like being in school, if the teachers had always been wrong.”
We discussed the rest of our practice and it seemed like we all felt pretty good about it and that we were leaving Fan Day in the dust.
“Sidney N., how’s your knee?” someone asked her.
“It’s fine,” she answered. “I iced it a little, but it didn’t even hurt this morning. I feel great.”
Good, I was glad to hear that.
“How did it feel to have Bowie carrying you around?” Ani asked, and laughed. “He’s making moves on us this year!” Her eyes slid to me and she put her finger over her lips, like she was keeping a secret. I shook my head and frowned, because there were no moves happening. None at all.
Sidney N. laughed, too. “He wasn’t doing that! He carried me and said he hoped I was all right and then he took off the second I said that I was. He didn’t even try to get my number. I wouldn’t have given it to him,” she quickly added, because there really might have been an informer in our squad, someone tattling to the coaches. Or maybe there were actually detective gnomes like I’d imagined before, little guys in fedoras and carrying big magnifying glasses. Probably it was one of the Wonderwomen, though.
“Did you say something, Sissy?” Danni asked me.
“No. I coughed,” I told her, but I knew that I’d been talking under my breath again, a habit I’d been trying to break.
