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“That’s what we want for you,” she agreed.
“So if you talk to him, Valerie, or if Kevin texts with him again, could you please tell him that I’m sorry? I’m so sorry.”
I was. I repeated those words out loud as I went back to my car and drove slowly through the marina’s parking lot. I was sorry that Ward had seen me with a Woodsmen player. I was sorry that Bowie had been over at my house. I was sorry that I’d been friends—
No, I wasn’t sorry about that. I wasn’t sorry that I’d met Bowie and we’d spent time together. I had enjoyed every moment of it, and now it was gone because I’d ruined everything. I’d started about a thousand messages to tell him how much I appreciated his help with my house and how much I appreciated him in general. Then I hadn’t sent anything at all.
I knew exactly how I would come off. I knew exactly how this situation looked to him and to everyone else who might have gotten a glimpse into it. Here I was, some pathetic, weak fool. The kind of woman you’d see in a horror movie who did stuff like stay in the house even with the weird noises that startled her and who would open the door that obviously had all the scary stuff behind it. The kind of woman you would watch and yell at, asking, “What are you doing, you idiot? Get out of there! Run! Stop acting like that!”
I knew it, ok? I knew it. If another of the Wonderwomen had told me a story like mine, about dating the same guy since she was fifteen, I might have suggested that she play the field a little before she settled down. Or if she said that her boyfriend had put a tracking device on her car, or that he picked out her clothes, or that he made decisions about who her friends were—I already knew that those things were red flags. It said so on every website about domestic violence, it listed them on a poster that hung in the student health center at the college where I went to get the birth control pills that Ward didn’t know I took.
Because what if I got pregnant? What if I had a little girl, and Ward called her a stupid bitch? What if he pushed her, or held her around the neck, or hit her only in places that her clothes would cover?
I had to pull over and stop in a fast-food parking lot, because it wasn’t safe to drive if you were crying. And then things got worse.
“Sidney H., Quinn, Brielle, Trinity,” Coach Sam barked out after practice ended. Then he swiveled and stared hard at me. “And Sissy. Rylah and I need to see you in the office—”
“We don’t have an office out here at the practice facility,” Rylah reminded him. “We’ll see them in the lobby.”
He went on as if he hadn’t heard. “We need to see you immediately, and it’s not about the shit—craphole effort you ladies just put in, either.”
The five of us looked at each other but we already knew what this was about. Sam started in on us immediately when we reached the dirty lobby, before he even fetched one of the rusted chairs stacked against the wall. He always needed to sit after practice to rest his back, but right now he was too worked up.
“What the hell are you doing, Sidney?” he demanded. “You can’t go posting that stuff about having to get dressed in our dance studio. You had to know it would get back to us.”
“Because of the tattle-tale,” Trinity muttered.
“I’m not sorry,” Sidney H. told him. “I think everyone should see how it sucks that we don’t have a locker room.”
“Yeah, it sure does,” Sam said. “That’s why Rylah and I have been trying to figure out something better for you ladies.”
“We’re trying our best,” our other coach agreed. She had unfolded a chair for him and pushed his shoulder until he sat in it. “I would say we’re working harder than the Grand Canyon diggers.”
Sam swiveled to look at her. “The what? The who?”
“The people who dug out the Grand Canyon,” she told him, waving her hand in dismissal. “Sidney H., this was a bad idea. And you girls who posed for her—”
“It was my idea,” I interrupted. “I thought of it. I convinced them to do it.”
“She didn’t need to convince us,” Quinn said. “I’m out a flat iron and a brand-new eyeliner now, because that just went down the drain today. It literally went down the drain in the bathroom sink because there’s no place to put on makeup in the Junior Woodsmen locker room.”
“Those guys don’t generally wear too much eyeliner,” Sam stated.
“We don’t care if we get in trouble for this,” Trinity said. “We wanted to make a point.”
“Uh, I don’t want to get in trouble,” Brielle interjected. “I didn’t really get what we were doing when Sissy had us pose all smashed together and I’m real sorry about it.”
Quinn gave her a death look. “The rest of us knew exactly what we doing,” she announced. “I’m not sorry at all. I want my eyeliner back.”
Sam glared at her too and then turned on me. “What were you thinking, Sissy?” he asked. “You, better than anyone, should know about discretion. At the risk of using words that no one understands,” he continued, glancing over at Rylah, “I mean that you should have kept your mouths shut. Aubin should have taught you better.”
My anger flamed. “Aubin doesn’t have anything to do with this!” I shot back. “It’s not fair that we’re changing in the bathroom. Fan Day wasn’t fair either, and we should have posted about that, too.”
“Damn it! I know perfectly well that they’re treating you girls like shit!” He jumped up from his chair, grabbed at his back, and swore so much that my ears almost lit on fire. When his pain receded, he sat down very gingerly and Rylah stepped in.
“No more,” she told us. “No more posts with complaints like this. Stick to the Woodsmen Family Handbook from now on, or you’re all going to get it. Caprese?”
We nodded silently. The Woodsmen Family Handbook had a large social media section to direct our online behavior. The Family Handbook was also the guide that told us how we shouldn’t have anything to do with Woodsmen football players, that all contact with them should only have been incidental and/or unavoidable. My contact with Bowie hadn’t been either of those things, and now I was thinking about that again.
