Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,26

their hair for split ends instead of warming up, like we knew at this point he wanted us to.

“We’re missing some people,” Bobby said, looking around. A few girls had ditched, and he sighed as he dumped the soccer balls out on the field. “You guys should be stretching if you get here before me.” He seemed annoyed, even more than he’d been the day before. In the same tone, he told us, “By next week we’ll have a soccer goal at either end of this field. I’ve been pressing the school for a more permanent practice space on school grounds; they can’t make it happen right now, but I did get them to work with the park district to put in some nets here, so it’s a step in the right direction.”

None of us were really paying attention, and then Dawn Murphy raised her hand and said, “I need to leave early today.” Dawn was one of the few girls on the team who wasn’t outwardly interested in Bobby—she seemed to genuinely like playing soccer—but she was a mystery in other ways, too. After her sophomore year, she’d disappeared, and everyone had assumed she’d left because she’d gotten pregnant. When she’d returned this year—as a senior—whispers followed her around, as people wondered if she’d given the baby away or if her mom was raising it. No one ever asked her outright and Dawn didn’t volunteer anything. These last few practice days, she had been in a hurry to leave, and some of the team had gossiped that she had to get home to her baby.

“Look,” Bobby said, “I don’t think you all realize how hard it is to get a school board and a park district to cooperate on outfitting this space as a soccer field. Real nets are going to give our practices more purpose, right?”

We mumbled “yesses” and “sures” from our spots on the grass, where our stretches were as lackluster as our enthusiasm for goals. No one cared about the school and park districts cooperating, and our apathy only made Bobby crabbier.

“Dawn, go ahead and leave if you have to.” He blew his whistle and said, “The rest of you, a hundred jumping jacks. Go.”

“Not fifty?” Candace said, with her arms folded over her chest as though to protect her boobs from further discomfort.

“A hundred,” he replied. “You can do it.”

I wasn’t proud of it, but by that point I was frustrated with him for barely having noticed me once that week, after all the ways I’d worked for it. And maybe everyone had some grudge against him, because we half-heartedly clapped our hands overhead, putting little effort into the jumping part of the jacks.

“More energy, team,” Bobby said, as he pumped up one of the soccer balls. “Now, twenty push-ups.”

“What?” Joanie Fox asked. “It’s soccer, not football.”

“We can make it fifty if you’d rather.” Bobby’s tone was icy. I was pissed at the other girls for putting him in such a foul mood, but I was more pissed at him. It’s not like any of us knew what we were doing. We’d all told him we hadn’t played soccer before. Why was he being so serious? Were we supposed to make him a crown because he’d gotten us some goals?

We started the push-ups, but everyone was sort of faking them. While we were doing that, Bobby took out a stack of cones and made four rows of four halfway down the field. No one got up off the grass when we finished.

Bobby said, “Stand up. Take a ball. Dribble down your row, around each cone, then back. Take it slow if you have to. I want to see you keeping the ball close the entire time. When the person in front of you passes the first cone, next one goes.”

There was none of his usual smiling or encouragement, and as we slowly got to our feet, he said, “Let’s move. This isn’t optional.”

“What about the flag thing?” Candace asked, looking with dread at the cones. “I thought we had to be good at that first.”

“I changed my mind,” Bobby said. He blew his whistle and put his hands on his hips. We set off. I was in line after Tina, who was doing pretty good until she knocked over the second cone. I took off behind her, but I peeked back at Bobby to see if he was watching me—even though I was mad at him, if I saw him smile at me, all would