Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,30

moment, but then she sucked in a breath and drew herself up. She shook her head. “I hate quitting,” she said. “Are you guys sure you want to give up already? I thought we were having fun.”

“I’m not cut out for it,” Candace said, which Tina seemed to accept. That Candace wasn’t made for sprinting and push-ups was no surprise. But Tina gave me an unswerving stare, like my motive for quitting had spelled itself out on my T-shirt.

“We could join something else,” I offered. “Soccer’s a drag, isn’t it?”

“This is because Coach McMann was an asshole, isn’t it?” Tina said. “You should do what you want, but I think you’re making a mistake. He’s a coach—he’s probably going to yell sometimes.”

Her comments only made me want to quit more. If I was just another player for Bobby to yell at, then there was no reason for me to be there. Candace felt like she could just stop showing up and it would be no big deal. I wanted Bobby to know that I was out of there. And for him to feel terrible about it. So I decided to be late for lunch and went to the athletics office.

A few of the assistant football coaches—how a team so bad needed so many coaches was a mystery to me—were bent over a desk. They looked up as I walked in. “What do you need, honey?” one said, as though I was lost.

“Sorry,” I said, apologizing reflexively only because I could tell they didn’t want me there. “I need to talk to my coach. I mean, Mr. McMann.” He wasn’t my coach anymore.

I wove through the room, crowded with baskets of kickballs and footballs and jump ropes dangling from an old coatrack. The office smelled like stale sweat and something medicinal.

“Oh, heh,” the coach said, lifting his shirt a bit to scratch his hairy stomach. “We’ll watch our language with a lady present.”

“Okay,” I said, only because I didn’t think I could say “fuck off” to a teacher.

Bobby was sitting alone at a small desk in the corner of the office, and when he looked up and saw me, he beamed. My insides went into overdrive.

“Susan,” he said. “What brings you here?”

He was so happy compared to yesterday, the speech I’d memorized left my brain. “Um, hi,” I said, tilting my head to one side. “I . . .” Alone with him, but not alone, I didn’t know what to do. I looked at his lunch—two sandwiches on some sort of unpleasant-looking brown bread. I crushed my lunch bag in my sweaty palm.

He stood up and reached for something behind me, his wrist lightly brushing my bare arm. Then he backed into his seat and put an overturned bucket next to his desk. “Sorry, I don’t have another chair, but have a seat.”

I sat, trying to remember the exact words I wanted to use as I scanned the room, with its old calendars and schedules, the Green Bay Packers poster that served as a dartboard. I was turning up a blank. “Um, so, I . . .”

“I think I know what this is about,” Bobby said, and his voice was deep but soft. He leaned across the desk toward me, and I was so startled, I drew in a sharp breath. “Can I tell you a story?”

I nodded, relieved he was going to talk since I couldn’t remember how.

“When I was a kid—not in high school, younger—I was pretty small for my age, and kind of uncoordinated. My brothers played football, just like my dad, and they never let me join in because I was the runt. Every now and then, they’d let me be kicker.”

He looked somewhere over my shoulder, like he was trying to see the memory clearly. “And that’s how you started playing soccer?” I said.

He shook his head. “No, I hated being kicker. Mostly because my dad would be yelling at my brothers to run faster or take a harder hit or whatever and then he’d pat me on the head and say ‘good job’ even if I hadn’t done one. Like I wasn’t even worth the trouble to yell at.”

“So you yell because you care?” I said. God, did he hear how dumb that sounded?

He nodded. “I’m not proud of it,” he said, “but, yes, I was being hard on you guys because if I say ‘good job’ when I know you can do better, that’s like lying to you. And to me, that’s worse. Do