Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,38
every goalie has his weakness. Like, Ken the Lame, this guy at St. Mark’s who took over my position? Fucker practically lays out a red carpet to the top-right corner of the goal for everyone who wants to take a shot on him.”
“Why didn’t you go back, after your leg got better?” I asked. I’d been thinking about it all morning, since it was so obvious that he loved to play. “You’re really good.”
He shrugged and pursed his lips for a second. I could tell immediately he didn’t want to talk about this but also didn’t want to admit he didn’t want to talk about it.
“Started my band, didn’t like the whole jock thing,” he said after a moment. “Especially at St. Mark’s. All that ‘Strength, Honor, Courage’ crap, but the best athletes are all the worst people. Being on a team mostly means blindly following whatever the shittiest guys want to do. Like the Webs, the guy you shot down. He’s a turd. The teams are mostly turds.”
He loaded the cones into the trunk of his old Nova and I threw the soccer ball in beside them. For the first time that day, he seemed unsettled, and I felt bad for making him talk about his ex-team.
“So what’s your weakness?” I asked as I opened the passenger door and dropped onto the ripped seat next to Joe’s.
He looked over and smirked. “Nice legs,” he said.
I slugged him in the arm. I’d called it. He took nothing seriously. “You’re lucky you’re a decent teacher.”
Ten
After Joe dropped me off, I walked to Sportmart again, this time to buy my own soccer ball. At the rate I was spending money, I’d be babysitting Randy the Terrible forever.
Later, I was practicing positioning myself on the shag carpet in the den while I watched The Love Boat when the phone rang. It was Candace.
“It’s Lasagna Night tomorrow—are you coming?” she said. I could picture her on the phone in her kitchen, which was nearly identical to the phone in our kitchen except hers was a pukey shade of green and ours was more a baby poop shade of yellow.
Picking up the phone to hear Candace on the other end was as familiar as the rumble the radiator made when our house’s heat kicked on, or as reliable as the drawer next to our stove being filled with the rubber bands and twist ties my mom saved from bags of produce and bread. But as soon as her voice came over the line, I realized I’d been nervous about us ever since she’d quit the team and I hadn’t. I knew she wasn’t angry, but I was worried she was hurt. I didn’t want our separate decisions to be a sore spot—more a clarification that we were who we were, the same as the tacit agreement that she would always wear a mud mask at our sleepovers and I would not. (They made me claustrophobic.)
When I said, “What time?” and she brightly answered, “The usual,” I knew I was worrying over nothing. Our friendship was solid. I could almost smell her mom’s spaghetti sauce and feel the scratchy fabric of their couch.
“Okay, I’ll be there,” I said. I didn’t ask if Tina was coming, for two reasons. One, Tina usually had to eat Sunday-night dinner at her house; and two, from the way Candace had been acting the last week, I knew she wanted to feel like it didn’t matter to me if Tina came, too.
Lasagna Night happened once a month at the Trillos. When we were younger and our dads worked together, my whole family went. Mr. Trillo and my dad had met working for the phone company out of high school. Now Mr. Trillo managed a team at a steel mill in Chicago and my dad still worked for the phone company, but no longer had to climb telephone poles. They were still friends, but the days of my whole family attending Lasagna Night had faded toward the end of elementary school.
As I headed out the door the next evening, I called goodbye to my mom, who had a textbook open next to one elbow and a pile of bills and her checkbook next to the other. If someone wanted to paint her portrait, that would be the pose she’d be in.
“Lasagna Night?” she said, as she flipped back through the check register and then looked at a bill again, like the amount might change.