Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,113

(I thought I looked like a brunette Judith Light on One Life to Live, but I might have been delusional from my TV fog.) Before I’d opened it all the way, Tina stepped inside.

“I know you’re not sick,” she said. She set down my equipment bag on the floor. “I told Bobby I’d give this to you. It was in his car.”

“Thanks,” I said, thinking maybe I’d throw it away later. Tina was studying my hair. She pointed at me like she’d figured something out. “Are you sneaking out somewhere? Candace told me you guys had a fight, and something went wrong with that Joe guy.”

Wordlessly, I led her to the kitchen and she followed me. “Okay, you’re starting to scare me,” she said.

I opened a can of Cheez Balls, set it on the table, and got us two bottles of soda from the fridge. I sat. She sat. We each ate a Cheez Ball.

“Do you have anything else to eat? I’m starving. Practice was rough,” she said. I wondered what they’d learned. Bobby had promised to work with us more on improving our fakes, which he was probably good at, because he was one.

I pulled lunch meat and cheese from the fridge and set it in front of Tina and opened my bottle of RC. “I’m done with soccer,” I said finally, like I thought this would go down easier with the food. “It’s stupid. We can’t even get a game.”

Straying from the real reason was shitty of me, but as I said it, I thought maybe it could be true. Hadn’t this whole thing really only been an experiment to see what could happen with Bobby? I’d learned that. I’d screwed up a real thing with Joe for an imagined thing with Bobby.

“Bullshit,” Tina said, flicking a Cheez Ball at my hair. It stuck to one of my sprayed curls. I plucked it out and ate it. “What happened at the wedding?”

“Me. I happened. I . . . called Joe ‘Bobby’ at the exact worst time, because I’m an idiot, and that didn’t go over well at all.”

“Poor Joe—that had to mess with his ego,” Tina said. “But you can fix that, can’t you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him.”

“Well, first things first. You should try,” she said. “But what does it all have to do with Bobby and soccer?”

“I don’t want to play for him anymore.” I liked the way the words stuck in the air, their finality. I had never been sure about what I wanted, but it was nice to know what I didn’t want.

“But do you want to play soccer?” Tina said, taking a big bite of her sandwich. I was almost jealous because the hunger after practice was so much more gratifying to satisfy than the hunger after sitting around all day and curling my hair was.

I thought about the field, and the feeling when I ran, and the surge in my chest when I managed to knee the ball—a new trick—and kick it off the top of my foot like it was something I was born doing and not something I’d only recently learned. I thought of what Joe had said about sports, how they got you to do ridiculous stuff but that was sort of the point. I sure as hell wanted to play soccer. Goddamn it. I wanted to not want to.

“Yeah, I wanna play. I miss you guys,” I said. “But I don’t want to play for him. He’s . . . not who I thought he was.”

“So? What does he have to do with it?” she said. There was no escaping her penetrating stare. I squirmed.

“He’s the coach.” I wouldn’t meet her eyes as I rolled a piece of bologna and bit it.

Tina got her impatient look, like I was being intentionally dense and she was annoyed to have to exert herself to enlighten me. “I don’t know what went down and you’re obviously not going to tell me,” she said. “But who cares if he’s not who you thought he would be? I love driving, and you didn’t see me not getting my license because the DMV sent me out with a tester who called me princess and asked if I knew which one was the brake. I hated that guy. I wanted to open the passenger door and push him out, I was so angry. But I wanted to drive more. I think you like soccer enough that even if a