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“Easy does it.” Charlie, my best friend and teammate, plucks the phone from my grip and slips it back into my bag that’s shoved at the base of my cubby. “Let’s go take out our anger on a soccer ball and let your phone live to see another day.”
“‘An unknown redhead’!”
She grips me by the elbow and drags me toward the exit of our locker room. “Yes, I heard you. Just breathe. Get yourself out on the field, and we’ll deal with this.”
My heartbeat’s pounding in my ears. I barely register our trek out to the field, where Charlie salutes Karla, our Angel City coach, and then proceeds to jog out across the field. Stopping at the cluster of balls that sit in its center, she one-touch boots a ball my way, forcing me out of my head.
It’s like she knows me or something, that only a soccer ball flying toward my face could wrench me out of my spiraling thoughts. I one-touch it back to her, cracking the ball hard.
An audible grunt leaves Charlie as she takes my pass—or more accurately, line-drive—to the chest and drops it to the ground, then sends it flying across the field to me. I run onto it, then dribble her way. Stopping at Charlie’s feet, I set my foot on the ball and meet her eyes, hands on my hips. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” She tugs her short, dark hair into a ponytail at the top of her head. “My boobs haven’t been bruised in a while. They were overdue.”
I snort a laugh, scrubbing my face. “I’m mad.”
“Understandably so.” Charlie pokes the ball away from my feet and starts to juggle it. “You are not an ‘unknown redhead.’ You are Ziggy Freaking Bergman, and it’s about time the world knew it.”
“I’m trying, Char.”
Charlie lifts a tiny hand (she’s pocket-size and tiny everything), frowning up at me, hazel eyes narrowed. “You’re doing great. I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming this sexist news machine that fixates on male athletes and traditionally masculinized sports. You are one of the most promising, talented, highest-performing midfielders soccer has ever seen. You were a high scorer your entire career at UCLA, and you’re starting both this and the National Team. The tabloids should know who you are, and you shouldn’t have to do this ridiculous publicity stunt with that good-for-nothing Seb Gau—”
“Shhh,” I hiss, glancing around. “Charlotte, do not make me regret telling you that.”
“Simmer your soccer shorts. I said it quietly.”
“Charlie, I’m serious, if the truth gets out, it will undermine and ruin everything we—”
“We?” she says emphatically. “You’re a ‘we’ now?”
I clear my throat. “Everything I am trying to do.”
“Uh-huh.” Charlie folds her arms across her chest. “You’re not throat clearing your way past that one. Since when are you and that urchin a ‘we’?”
“We’re not a ‘we,’ it was just linguistically efficient to say it.”
Charlie raises her eyebrows.
Sighing, I gesture to the soccer ball at her feet. “Can we kick a ball around, please? Before we get yelled at?”
Charlie scowls but relents, flicking the ball up and juggling between her feet, then passing it to me. I juggle it up onto my thighs, down to my feet, before I drop the ball to the field and dribble far enough away to buy me space from Charlie’s mind-reading tendencies.
I love having a friend who knows me this well—except when I’m trying to keep some slightly murky feelings about a certain very complicated, badly behaved fake friend who keeps surprising me with tiny moments of goodness that threaten to make me actually like him. And given how attracted I am to Sebastian Gauthier, that is a very bad idea.
I’ll get a handle on it. I’m working on reining myself in. Until then, Charlie can’t know I’m torn about Sebastian. And if I stick too close, let her do her mind-reading, best-friend wizardry, she definitely will.
Charlie is my oldest friend, my only friend from when I was little and we still lived up in Washington State. We sent each other letters and doodles for years after my family moved down to LA for Dad’s job as an oncologist at Ronald Reagan Medical, but when I started struggling socially in middle school and my mental health suffered, I got really bad at keeping in touch. Charlie and I never stopped talking, but it spaced out for years, until she reached out and told me she was going to USC.
Our schools might have been rivals, but it did nothing to keep us apart—we started reconnecting then, building back closeness. Since we both signed with Angel City, the bond between us is strong as ever, and I’m so grateful for it. I’ve never really been good at making friends—too much social anxiety about trying to get to know new people, too much family to fill in my time and keep me busy so I never got too lonely or hungry for more than that. Charlie is the sweet spot—someone I had a foundation with and didn’t have to overcome profound anxiety to get close to, who’s known me nearly as long and as well as my family does but exists outside their chaos so I can turn to her when they’re driving me up the wall.
Charlie is my person—I can go to her for anything. Except for help with Project Ziggy Bergman 2.0.
Because Charlie hates publicity and loves being a nobody. Then again, if I grew up the child of two of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood at the time and was dragged across the tabloids for the better part of a decade during their tempestuous on-again, off-again relationship (I mean tempestuous—her parents have so far married and divorced each other three times), I’d want to be a nobody, too.
Charlie loves her private, peaceful life, and her partner, Gigi, who she met freshman year at USC. Gigi is a former child TV star turned celebrity stylist who loves flying under the radar, living behind the scenes now, too. Gigi and I were there when Charlie was weighing even going pro with soccer, knowing it would lead to increased visibility. But her love of the game won out, and the work of years in therapy made her feel prepared to handle the exposure signing with Angel City might lead to. Even then, it hasn’t been easy for her.
On top of her antipathy for being in the spotlight, she’d be the last person to know how to help me toughen up my image—Charlie is infinitely sweeter and better behaved than me. She’s always been like that.
When we met in Washington State, where she lived with her mom during her parents’ first acrimonious divorce, Charlie was the kindest, gentlest little kid in the eye of a truly terrible storm, unlike her older brother and sister, who processed the trauma of their childhoods by being absolute terrors. Harry was volatile—loud and angry, constantly getting into trouble and lashing out. Then there was Tallulah—deceptively quiet and deeply unnerving, like the silence right before an earthshaking storm.
