experience, watching me play soccer was the fastest way a girl could fall for me. At least, it had worked on Jamie, and she didn’t even like sports. Once after a game she even told me I looked sexy (!). So yeah. That was my whole brilliant plan.
I showed up for Wednesday night’s practice having yet to ask Ruby to come to Saturday’s game. Clearly, there was something wrong with me. But in my defense, I was in a real catch-22 (a term I only knew because Jamie had once explained it to me). The longer I waited, the less likely it was for Ruby to even be available to consider saying yes to something as dorkily mainstream as attending a sports function on a Saturday night, but it would also be uncool to ask her too many days in advance. I figured that formula worked out to make Thursday my best option. If Ruby already had plans, maybe she’d tell me she’d come to the next one. Even in the grand scheme of my triumphant, redemptive senior-year tour, I told myself, I could afford to delay the Ruby-seduction timeline by one week.
Until I couldn’t.
At our halftime water break, Ronni appeared at my left elbow, taking a seat on the bleachers behind me. I watched in confusion as she patted the spot next to her, the metal clanging a little beneath the gold rings I’d never seen her without on her forefinger. My heart rate picked up speed. Ronni was not the type to “goof off,” as our club-team coach would call it, during practice. Believe me, I had tried. When the whistle blew she ran off the field, drank water, and ran back out, not-so-subtly encouraging the rest of us to follow her, no matter how many water-break minutes we technically had left. She did not just casually sit down. So I stayed standing, hoping I might freeze in place whatever bad news she wanted to give me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Again she patted the bench.
“Okay, stop doing that. You have the worst poker face on earth and I know you have something bad to tell me and me sitting down isn’t going to make it any better.”
“It’s not bad, necessarily,” she said unconvincingly.
“Just tell me.”
She took a deep breath, and the worst sentence I’d ever heard rushed out of her mouth, too fast and way too loud. “Alexis-told-me-that-Jamie-and-Natalie-Reid-are-talking.”
“Shhh!” I sat down. I felt like I might throw up.
Normally Ronni would have reminded me she’d told me to sit in the first place, but I must have looked upset, because she stayed quiet. I felt her examining me, and I sank my head into my hands to give my face some privacy. But that only made me look more upset, and soon I felt Ronni’s hand on my back, so I leapt up again. I noticed our teammate Kate watching us over the lip of her water bottle, but when we made eye contact she looked away.
“Why couldn’t you have told me this after practice?” I hissed.
Ronni gave me a patient, patronizing look. “If I’d told you after practice, you would have asked me why I didn’t tell you sooner.”
She was right, so I was silent. For a second.
“What kind of ‘talking’ are we talking about?”
Ronni looked away. “She didn’t say.”
“Alexis? I find that hard to believe.”
Ronni glanced at me apologetically. “There may have been a suggestive tone.”
That was the problem with talking: it could mean anything, or everything. I had spent a portion of every day since the Sweets show hoping and praying that what I’d seen was all there was to see. I kept telling myself they hadn’t left together, and now that seemed idiotic, even puritanical. They were both single. They were both drinking. They were both, apparently, into girls. Of course something happened.
“When?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Ronni.
“But something definitely happened?”
“I don’t know.”
I had seventy more follow-up questions, at least, but Coach Tara blew the whistle before I could ask any