Playing Hurt - By Holly Schindler Page 0,30

there has to be some sort of river or muddy stream, or one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes for all I know. Point is, I can smell it—that funky summer scent of a sweaty body of water. And every deep breath I suck in, trying to calm my nerves, mixes with the bite in my mouth, making whatever I’m eating as bitter as a forgotten birthday.

Our silence pulls itself tight enough to feel dangerous. The awkward tension between us is a string on Brandon’s bass, getting stretched by a tuning peg. One more turn of the peg and everything we’re trying to accomplish with our strained celebration will snap in two.

Clint must feel it, too, because he abandons his dinner, saying, “Come on.”

I don’t know where we’re going, but anything would be better than this. So I eagerly follow.

Clint sticks his hands into a bouquet of tall grass. I’m horrified—literally, horrified—when he plucks a large orange ball from the overgrown patch.

“What are you doing?” I snap as he dribbles the scuffed ball a couple of times. In slow motion, Clint passes me the ball. It hits the concrete once, then bounces up toward me.

Instinct kicks in—I hold my hands out, and I catch. Good God, I catch it; the ball hits my palms, its skin like a hedge-apple. It’s the first time I’ve even touched a basketball since my final hook shot. Without thinking, I raise the ball to my nose and smell it. Earthy. Alive. Like always.

“Show me what you’ve got,” Clint says, casually swinging his arms and clapping his hands once in front of his hips.

Doesn’t the moron know that just touching the ball has caused the worst kind of ache to thunder through me? That it’s like touching the warm skin of a man I love while he shakes his head, telling me no? That’s what it’s like for me to hold this basketball. It’s like looking into the eyes of the man I love, who suddenly refuses to love me back. You can’t have me.

I pass the ball back to him and plunk myself back into my chair.

“What’re you doing?” he asks. “Come on—simple game of Horse.”

Fire eats the inside of my stomach. “I have reasons. I can’t jump, okay? The doctors told me no high impact—”

“You don’t have to jump, you know.”

“It’s not the same.”

“What was it you said to me outside, before?” Clint asks. “That you love how history sticks around?”

I shrug, shake my head, not sure what he’s getting at.

“Basketball’s your history, right? Why don’t you love it anymore?”

I glare at him. “You don’t know anything about what I love. And that’s not fair, twisting my words against me. I wasn’t … basketball’s different.”

“How?” Clint presses.

I glance up at the moon, which hangs so close to the backboard it actually looks like a ball about to slide through the hoop. It’s crazy, but I find myself even resenting the moon.

“Today on the boat?” Clint says. “I timed you. A full minute and ten seconds passed from the moment you realized you’d hooked that walleye to the time you started reeling. A minute and ten seconds. It’s a wonder that fish didn’t break your line and swim away.”

“So what?”

“So what’re you going to do now, sit in that chair like one of those old men who hang around outside bait and tackle shops? Just sit and watch the world go by?”

“Who are you to make any judgments about me, ten minutes after you meet me?” I screech, and even as I’m trying to bury my anger, to shove it deep down inside of me, to stay cool in front of Clint, rage keeps popping up like that crazy Whac-A-Mole arcade game. No matter how hard I try to smack it down, it just keeps rearing its ridiculous head.

“What do you do, Chelsea?”

“I don’t even understand what that question is supposed to mean.”

“What do you love? What do you do with all that passion inside, now that the thing you loved the most is gone?”

I hate the way he’s trying to corner me, and there’s no replacing basketball … there just isn’t. I want him to feel just as uncomfortable as I do. I want to attack—want to hurt him back—but I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about his soft spots.

But then again, I think, as the muffled band launches into a slow song, there is that face he made when I said I had a boyfriend …

So I pull myself up from