Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,11

and find it was better on the other side, like an old mattress.

“He’s so intense,” a younger girl I didn’t know said.

“Do you mean your panties are so intense?” her friend said.

Someone chuckled. But when Bobby broke into a jog down the length of the field, we all shut up and just watched him run. It was more mesmerizing than when the PBS nature show Nova filmed a lion chasing after an antelope in slow motion and you knew it would eventually snare the animal and tear part of its midsection away.

An involuntary, guttural half sigh, half purr came out of my mouth.

“Whoa,” someone else muttered.

“Wow,” a chorus of girls cooed.

“Holy shit.”

That was Candace, who slapped a hand over her mouth.

He ran back around, and absolutely no one was looking at his face. Finally he stopped, stood before us, and clapped his hands together. “Wow, this is quite a turnout!” he said, and I thought he looked at me. “I had no idea so many girls would come.”

“Happy to come . . . ,” someone behind me murmur-coughed.

“So, I’m Bobby McMann. Coach McMann to you, if you make the team. How many of you girls have played soccer before?”

No one raised her hand.

The day before, if you’d suggested we play soccer, we would have laughed our asses off. At our school, girls mostly participated in sports support: cheerleading, dance team, pep club to buck up the Powell Park Pirates. But sports just for girls had only really started a few years before. At my freshman orientation, the athletic director, Mr. Burke—after talking forever about how “very proud” he was of the tradition of excellence our school’s teams had—had stumbled his way through a paragraph he’d read right from a sheet of paper about how under Title IX, Powell Park was working “to offer females more equal opportunities to join teams.” He had been as enthused as he’d be reading instructions for a topical ointment.

I remembered the moment because at the time, Candace, sitting between me and Tina, had said, “I think I’d rather be permanently on my period than join a sports team.” Joining teams was something for other girls, like the handful of girls who played tennis or swam in the fall, or were on the softball or badminton teams in spring. Cynthia Weaver, who’d set school records for the 100-meter butterfly, was a real athlete, and we sometimes made mean jokes about her behind her big back. But it was fair to say most of us had ignored sports until now.

“Hmm.” That glorious frown came over his face again. “Okay, well, how many of you play sports?”

“Does roller-skating count?” someone said.

Bobby didn’t answer, just asked, “Anyone like to run?”

A few more people put up a hand. I did, too. I didn’t run as a sport, but technically I’d run before. I used to be the fastest kid on my block, when I was six or seven and boys and girls just did everything in a pack and our moms all cut our hair the same bowl-shaped way so you couldn’t even tell who was a boy and who was a girl.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Well, I played soccer at Southern Illinois University and it’s one of my passions. But what I really care about is getting the best out of my team. We’re the new guys on the block, though—” He stopped himself. “Girls on the block. I wanted a field for us at the school, but this one will have to do.” He gestured toward the spot where he’d just run and shrugged. “It slopes up a bit. Not great, but we can work with it.”

He dumped about a dozen soccer balls from his bag onto the ground in front of us. “I don’t have enough for everyone, so we’ll have to go in phases,” he said. “Looks like we have about sixty people. . . . Line up in twelve groups of five. Then let’s see you dribble one of these down the field and back.”

“Dribble like a basketball?” Marie asked, snapping her gum.

“Um, no, with your feet,” Bobby said, deftly touching a ball with the tip of his shoe and kicking it in little bursts, passing it from foot to foot as he moved it toward us.

It looked easy enough. I put myself at the front of a group that included Tina, Candace, and a couple of sophomores.

“And go!” Bobby blew his whistle, and the first twelve of us approached the balls on the ground