plaid shirts, choker necklaces and ponytails in scrunchies. Mr. Haggerty gave us ninety-one out of one hundred. Jamie was mad. I was thrilled.
Wednesday was Meme Day. Thursday was Halloween, for which I dressed, lazily, as Megan Rapinoe, wearing her jersey and a silver chain necklace. Friday, School Spirit Day. I wore my soccer sweatshirt, but not because I felt spirited. I was just tired of dressing myself by then, and it was the clothing item closest to my bed when I rolled out of it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been as miserable as I was. Every day since our ill-fated kiss, Ruby had texted me, numerous times. Not about the kiss itself, or what it meant, but normal things, like what we would have talked about before. At first I was excited to see her name on my screen, relieved that she would not be taking the total shunning route. But then a day passed, and then another, and she remained so insistently friendly that it started to make me feel worse than if she’d never texted me at all.
As if that weren’t enough to worry about, Ronni and I had the Beach Cup that weekend, the last tournament of the club team season. Held on the UCSD campus in La Jolla every early November, the Beach Cup was a college showcase, attended by hundreds of coaches looking to make their final selections for the following season. On Saturday every team played three or four games, and on Sunday, depending how well you did, you played up to four more. If, like most girls on my team, you’d already accepted a school’s offer, the Beach Cup was low-stakes, a chance to show off, gossip about the other teams, and eat parent-provided snacks on the sidelines. You went home bone-tired and sunburned but essentially happy, impressed with all your body could handle. I’d felt that way as a junior. But going into the same tournament as a senior with no set college plan, it felt like stepping onto a rope bridge stretched precariously between two canyons. I couldn’t see the other side, and I couldn’t see where I’d land if I fell. After the Beach Cup, the school season started up. And if by our first game, a week after the cup, I still didn’t know which college team I’d be playing for, my soccer career was as good as over. Some no-name D-II school would surface, offering me the chance to be their very best player, and that would be the last you ever heard of Quinn Ryan.
So it was with this outlook on life that I arrived home on Friday, having bailed at the last minute on the team carbo-loading at Kate’s house, citing family obligations. (Mercifully, Ronni, understanding I needed to be alone, changed the subject on the team group text so everyone would stop harassing me.)
I staggered in the door, weighed down by my bag, which was filled with a season’s worth of water bottles and socks and various trash. I felt my pocket vibrate but ignored it, sure that Kate or Janelle was still giving me shit. I let my bag drop to the floor and threw myself on the couch before retrieving my phone.
I gasped. My team hadn’t texted me. Ruby had.
What are you doing tomorrow night
I gasped again. I bolted upright, watching the text bubble reappear, then disappear, reappear again, disappear again. What was I doing tomorrow night, she wrote…? As if tomorrow weren’t Saturday, the most datelike of all nights? As if—oh my God—tomorrow weren’t also the night of the homecoming dance? For a brief, deranged moment, I wondered if Ruby Ocampo was about to ask me to the dance. Then I pictured her saying or even thinking those words—Will you go to the dance with me?—and burst into laughter. There was no way.
So then what?
The bubble returned and I held my breath.
David’s having a party
if you wanted to come
I exhaled. I had to admit: I was ever so slightly disappointed she wasn’t asking me to homecoming after all. But this…this was better. This was a party for people too cool to care about homecoming, of which I was not one.