Michigan vs. the Boys Read online

  Instead he flops onto my bed and rubs his sock feet on my pillow.

  I push the number to dial from Trent’s phone. “I’m telling Coach to give you sprints at practice. Russian circles. Backwards. I know you loooooove those.”

  “Like you loooooove Coach.” But he lifts his feet from my pillow and sits like a normal human being at the foot of my bed.

  Coach answers. “Manning, what’s up?”

  “Hey, Coach.”

  “Did I not kick your butt around the rink enough at practice?”

  “Um, it’s not Trent.”

  “Mich! Make sure you tell your brother he sounds just like you.”

  I look over at my brother, who scowls. He’ll be talking like Vader for the next week. I do feel a tiny bit better already.

  “Well, this sucks, doesn’t it?” Coach says. “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m thinking of taking up knitting.”

  “I could use a sweater.”

  “I might only be up to scarves by Christmas.”

  “So I guess this means you’re hanging up the skates.”

  The framed team picture on my desk catches my eye. I can barely stand to look at Brie next to me in the back row, both of us proudly wearing our green-and-gold jerseys. We would have been at the center of the team, in the place of honor, at this year’s team picture. And the next year’s. Two years of my life have been taken from me.

  I sigh. “I don’t have much of a choice.”

  “Well, what are your choices?” Coach asks.

  “I wasn’t kidding. I have no options. Principal pulled my team out from under me. Closest school team is an hour away, and four of my teammates took their last roster spots because my parents said no. Don’t have the money for tuition at a fancy private school like Brie, unless you want to spot me fifty grand. And that’s it. I’m out.”

  I feel his empathy through the phone. “I’m sorry, Mich.”

  “Want a forward? I’m quick on the draw and I cycle fast.”

  “Absolutely. You’re hired. Just drop three years from your age.”

  “So, hang a half-naked Selena Gomez poster in my room and obsessively check my chin for hair growth in the mirror?”

  Coach laughs again. “You been stalking me, Michigan?”

  Well, hell, I do need a new hobby.

  “How about a consolation prize?” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “I can take one more assistant coach on my bench. Come coach with me.”

  With my finger, I trace an X over Brie on our team picture. Over the swimmers. The Silver Lake girls. The early retirees. My own photo is the only one left, hanging on to nothing, all by myself.

  Or I could spend my afternoons yelling at eighth-grade boys. “I’m in.”

  * * *

  “You’re my new coach?!” Trent uses his hip to block me from the bathroom sink. Our nightly ritual. Morning ritual. Anytime-either-of-us-needs-something-from-the-bathroom ritual.

  I manage to get my fingertips on the toothpaste and slide it across the blue tile. “Ha!”

  Trent digs in to his stance, angling his body between me and my toothbrush. “How ’bout I’ll actually listen to you at practice if you let me have the bathroom first?”

  I plant my bare feet firmly on the linoleum and sink my weight into my lower body. “How ’bout I won’t make you do extra push-ups if you let me get my toothbrush?”

  “Only way you’re getting that toothbrush is if you push me out of the way.”

  So I do. It takes longer than I’d like to admit and we’re both panting and red-faced, but I win. For once this week.

  * * *

  Saturday morning. Departure day for Brie. It’s a seven-hour drive to get to Chicago, six if Mr. Hampton lets Brie drive. She’ll stay at a hotel with her parents tonight and they’ll move her into her dorm room tomorrow morning. She’s going to have a roommate and a new team and a bathroom she won’t have to check her way into when she needs to pee.

  It’s a brutal goodbye. There’s crying and Kleenex and croaked promises. And yet, somehow, there’s excitement. On Brie’s part. Me, I’ve got nothing. Except a long trek home by my car-less self.

  As I walk past the high school, I’m drawn to the closed-off pool. It’s not an area I go by often. It’s attached to the farthest edge of the school, an afterthought by the building committee back in the days when education regularly included things besides math and language arts. I took swim lessons there when I was younger, but I’ve spent more time in pads than swimsuits in the last eight years.

  I wonder if the pool looks as empty and lonely as I feel.

  A ragged chain-link fence runs the perimeter of the building, with yellow construction tape hanging from it in uneven swags. One whole wall is missing, offering a glimpse inside the natatorium. The pool is empty of water but filled with construction debris. Black lane lines jut up through piles of drywall and cinder blocks, all covered with a thick layer of dust. Straight across from the hole is the wall I’d remembered, painted green with large gold varsity letters proclaiming it the home of the Owl River Muskrats. The gold threads no longer sparkle under the construction dust, and wires dangle in front of the pennants. The list of titles won spans the years back to 1968, but the longest stretch of pennants is at the most recent end of the wall. They almost all belong to Jack Ray.

  It is exactly as empty as I feel.

  But not as lonely. The chain-link fence dips forward as hands grip it next to mine. Jack Ray leans over the metal rail, his eyes on the wreckage.

  It doesn’t matter that we’ve never been introduced. That we’ve never spoken. He’s an ally. “They didn’t even take your pennants down,” I say.

  He shrugs. “They’re just pieces of cloth.”

  “Where do you swim now?”

  “I’m lucky,” he says. “I’ve been with a regional club for years. I train with a private coach over at the university or the Rec Center. I just swam here because I liked the guys. It gets lonely training by yourself.”

  “You are lucky.”

  “So that was all true about you guys having nowhere to play?” He looks at me, and I feel concern coming from this stranger. Concern that I wish my parents had shown. Or Brie’s parents. Even Brie.

  I nod. “Yep.”

  He turns back to the empty pool. “If I didn’t have a team or a pool, I’d still have to swim. I’d jump in a lake if I had to. Guess it doesn’t work that way with hockey.”

  “I like skating outside. But you can’t play a real game without a team.”

  “True. It wouldn’t be as fun if I never got to race.”

  “What was — is — your event?”

  “Mostly freestyle sprints.”

  I nod; I do know what that means.

  “One hundred and two hundred fly. Two hundred IM occasionally. Free relay and medley relay whenever I can.”

  “OK, now you lost me.” But that explains the plethora of pennants on the wall.

  “I hear Laura’s recruiting former hockey players for the girls’ swim team.” I don’t miss the hint of bitterness in his tone. It’s how I feel when I see the male hockey players wearing their team jackets in the school hallway.

  “Yeah, but she was smart enough not to invite me.”

  He squints at me, his face relaxing almost to a smile. “You can swim, right?”

  “Well enough to tread water until a lifeguard gets to me. You can skate, right?”

  “Well enough to … aw, who am I kidding. But I’m not afraid to fall.”

  Oh, dear Lord, that smile. Please tell me that was flirting because I am swooning hard. I always knew Jack was crush-worthy, with his dark hair and matching eyes and what could be assumed, from his swimming statistics, to be a solid swimmer’s body under that hoodie. Added benefit: I’ve never seen him
act like a buffoon in the school hallways.

  But mostly this conversation is the first time all week I’ve felt like someone was on my side. Even my own team doesn’t seem to understand what I’m going through. What we’re supposed to be going through together.

  “Brie — Gabrielle Hampton, my best friend, from hockey —”

  “I know who she is.”

  “Yeah, she’s kind of hard to miss.”

  He does this eyebrow-lift head-nod thing that conveys I’ve got that right.

  I sigh. “She left this morning. Like thirty minutes ago. To play for a private school in Chicago.” My throat tightens again.

  His head droops. “I’m sorry, Michigan.”

  And he knows my name. My inner cheerleader does a few high kicks and shakes her pompoms. The roller coaster of emotions over Brie leaving and Jack arriving has me so dizzy I’ll never walk straight again.

  “Are you thinking of going, too?” he asks.

  I snort. “At twenty-five grand a year? Who has that kind of money?”

  “Geez, that’s worse than most colleges.”

  “Yeah. If her dad thinks fifty grand is going to finally buy Brie an A, he’s mistaken —” I swallow the end of my sentence. Trashing my best friend and she’s barely out of town. Well done, Mich. “Anyway, no private schools for me. I’m going to help coach my brother’s bantam team instead.”

  “If you’re good enough to coach boys, why don’t you go out for the guys’ team here?”

  “Oh! No. I mean, we all joked about it the other day. But no, it’s a different game. Girls don’t check.”

  “But you’re wearing all that padding, right? So you must be used to some kind of hitting.”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s plenty of physical contact. And we hit the ice hard sometimes. Checking is more of a strategic thing.”

  “So learn.”

  “I doubt they’d let me play.”

  “You don’t know unless you ask.”

  “I’m sure they’d say no if I asked.”

  Jack flashes a full smile that paralyzes me. “Then don’t ask.”

  4

  Walking into the rink is bittersweet. Walking into the rink next to my brother, pubescent stink wafting off his hockey bag, well, that part just sucks ass.

  At least I still have my home rink. At least it’s not a pile of rubble like Jack’s pool.

  Although an outsider might not agree with me. The Owl River Community Ice ain’t The Joe. A handful of the low-hanging lights burned out sometime in my youth and haven’t been replaced yet, leaving a couple of dim spots on the ice. It smells musty in here, too, especially on the damper days in springtime. And the locker rooms are fricking freezing.

  But it’s the same faded green carpet and yellowed bleachers that my friends and I played tag on while Dad’s P.D. buddies played against the fire department. The familiar buzz of the old scoreboard, the Say No to Chew poster in the locker room hallway, permanently flecked with — of course — chew stains. The spot on the home bench where Brie’s sophomore-year boyfriend Daniel etched his initials. When they broke up, she and I sneaked a bottle of purple nail polish onto the bench and painted over them.

  This will always be home. Even though home is currently overrun with belching bantams.

  Today is only tryouts for the season. The boys will get split into two teams, AAA and AA. They’ll start real practices next week. Coach Norman wants me in half-pads so I can demonstrate drills safely, which is the most on-ice action I’m going to see this season. I push into the women’s restroom with my bag.

  “Oh!” I start to back out of the one-seater bathroom. There’s a half-dressed girl sitting on the floor, taping up her shin pads. “Sorry. Didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

  She shrugs her blond hair over one shoulder and unwinds a roll of pink tape around her pad. “No worries. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  “OK if I throw some pads on?”

  “Of course. I don’t care if you see my sports bra.”

  “Ditto.” I’m used to sharing not only a locker room but also a shower room with my entire team. Modesty left us back in junior high. I know exactly who has the biggest boobs, who has the paunchiest tummy and who I’ll never share a razor with because I know where it’s been.

  I pull down my warm-ups to shove shin pads into my pant legs. My mind is on Coach Norman’s practice agenda, on how good it feels to breathe the cold damp air of the rink again. I’m admiring my shiny new whistle when something occurs to me. “Wait. Are you trying out for bantams?”

  The girl looks at me like I’m a moron. “Well, I’m not here for figure skating practice.”

  I grin. “No, you are not. I don’t remember seeing a girl on Trent’s team before.”

  “I’m new to town.”

  “You’re not going out for the U14 girls’ team?”

  “I checked out their practice. They’re kind of a lot younger than me.” She shrugs. “It’s OK. I’ve always played with guys.”

  That’s the non-ego way of saying I’m too good. I’m curious to see how she fares out there. Best of luck to her. If she doesn’t gag on their stench, she’ll be fine.

  We don’t even get through warm-ups before the first idiot makes a comment to me. While leading team stretches, I instruct the boys — and one ballsy girl — on a frog stretch.

  “Ooh, Mich,” Trent’s best friend moans. “Just like that. That feels so good!”

  I get to my feet, stride over to him and look down. “Start pushing.”

  “I’m kidding! It’s a compliment, Mich.”

  “Ten push-ups. Now. Or it goes up to fifteen. And that’s Coach Manning to you.” So cool. I’ve always wanted to say that.

  As the kid drops to his gloves, the team counts aloud, giggling into their facemasks. Coach Norman nods approvingly in my direction.

  The girl is good. I realize I wanted her to be. I wanted her to come out and rise above their crap and outskate them and out-skill them and she does it. She completely kills tryouts.

  “Do you think we’ll get to share a locker room with Megan?” Trent asks, as I drive us home in Mom’s car. Making a note to hang an extra tree off the rearview mirror because one is not going to cut it for Trent’s bag this season.

  “Definitely not.”

  “Do you think she’ll smash us if we hit on her?”

  “Definitely yes.”

  Coach Norman didn’t even hesitate to put Megan on the AAA team. The guys are thrilled she’s there. Whether that has to do with her gorgeous blond hair or her gorgeous wrist shot, I don’t know.

  * * *

  I’m antsy this evening and a long list of math problems is not holding my attention.

  My mind keeps returning to the ice. I wasn’t even playing tonight, just demonstrating drills. But I desperately craved the opportunity to demonstrate one more drill so I could take another shot, dish another pass, let my heart race against my feet on another sprint. I’m like a dog who gets a whiff of barbecue from the neighbor’s yard and paces the fence hoping for another whiff, even though there’s no chance someone’ll drop a burger on my side.

  My phone is maddeningly silent. Nothing from Brie for two days now. I texted her about tryouts earlier, but I guess her fancy new boarding school is more interesting than eighth-grade boys. Shocker.

  A run is what I need, although it’s not like I have anything to train for. My mom will give me hell about homework if she sees me slip out, but by this time she’s usually zoned out in front of the Lifetime channel, dulling the pain of another day in a job she hates, in a town she hates even more. I bang around in the laundry room a bit, pretending to look for something, before sneaking out the back door.

  The sky is turning dusky; the sun is gone, but its remnants are enough to run by. I didn’t bring music because nothing fit my mood: post-prac
tice adrenaline plus post-team depression. Instead I listen to my breath, faster than it should be because I haven’t been training properly in the last few weeks. And my solitary footprints, not as fast as they should be because I haven’t been training properly in the last few weeks.

  I wonder if Brie’s running right now with her new team. If the Silver Lake defectors are running with their new team. Or lifting weights or even having a captain’s practice. I wonder if Laura and the other swimmers are training right now, although I don’t think swimmers do much running.

  I’m not used to training on my own. I need to know that somewhere, someone else is running. Matching my pace, pushing me forward. Spotting me from a distance.

  Of course they are running. They all have a season to prepare for, whether it’s on frozen or chlorinated water. I’m the only one with no destination at the end of this run.

  Swimmers make me think of Jack, and before I realize it, my feet have led me to the empty pool again. The open building gapes like a cavernous mouth in the twilight. I stop at the fence and replay our conversation.

  Pathetic. I’m so pathetic, running at night by myself, swooning over a boy I barely know. I never would have done this before losing my team.

  OK, I still would have swooned over a boy I barely know. But at least I’d be running with my best friend.

  They didn’t even take his pennants down. If they tore the rink down, I’d like to think someone would remove the ancient team trophies in the glass cases lining the lobby, tarnished and dusty as they are. Even if it’s first place for the local beer league — a cheesy plastic skate glued to the front of a stein — someone worked for that trophy. I climb the fence, carefully lifting myself over the pokey metal fringe at the top. I drop to the ground and tiptoe through the pockmarked, debris-strewn site.

  I make my way to the pennant wall, my sneakers crunching concrete pebbles into the tiled pool deck. I can just barely make out which pennants are Jack’s. They’re only cloth, he told me. They don’t matter to him. Assmont can tear the building down, but he can’t take away what Jack has already achieved.