her office, talking on the phone. We see her through the glass, opening and closing the blinds, hand coiled around the plastic wand. Staring out the window to the parking lot. Open, shut, open, shut.
When she hangs up, she opens the office door. The shush of the door swinging open, and it’s beginning.
She opens the door and sees us, and the nod of her head, permitting entry.
The office smells like smoke, like the sofa in the teachers’ lounge with that hard stain in the sunken center. Everybody has a story about that stain.
There’s a picture on her desk of her little girl. Coach says her name is Caitlin and she’s four years old with a bleary mouth and flushed skin and eyes that glaze so dumbly I wonder how does anyone have kids.
“She’s so cute,” spurts Emily. “Like a doll or something.”
Like a doll, or something.
Coach looks at the photo, like she’s never seen it before. She squints.
“They get mad at me, at day care,” she says, like she’s thinking about it. “I’m always the last one to pick up. The last mom, at least.”
She puts down the photo and looks at us.
“I remember those,” she says, nodding at the flossy bracelets banding up and down our forearms.
She tells us she made them when she was a kid and she can’t believe they’re popular again. Friendship bracelets, she calls them. But we would never call them that.
“They’re just bracelets,” I say.
She looks at me, lighting a cigarette with a twiggy old match, like the man who sells us jugs of wine out of the back of his store on Shelter Road.
“We called this ‘Snake around the Pole,’” she says, lifting the one on Emily’s wrist with a crooking finger, her cigarette flaring.
“That’s a Chinese Staircase,” I say. I don’t know why I keep correcting her.
“What’s that one?” she says, poking at my wrist, the cigarette tip flush on my skin.
I stare at it, and at Coach’s cool tanned finger.
“A Love-Me-Knot.” Emily grins. “That’s the easy one. I know who made you that.”
I don’t say anything.
Coach looks at me. “Guys don’t make these.”
“They sure don’t,” Emily says, and you can almost see her tongue flicking.
“I don’t even know who gave it to me,” I say.
But then I remember it was Casey Jaye, this girl I tumbled with at cheer camp last summer, but Beth didn’t like her and camp ended anyway. Funny how people you know at camp can seem so close and then the summer’s over and you never see them again at all.
Coach has her eyes on me, and there’s a shadow of a dimple in the corner of her mouth.
“Show me,” she says, poking out her cigarette. “Show me how to love-knot.”
I say I don’t have any of the thread, but Emily does, at the bottom of her hobo bag.
We show her how to do it, then watch her twist the strands, to and fro. She picks it up so fast, her fingers flying. I wonder if there’s anything she can’t do.
“I remember,” she says. “Watch this one.”
She shows us how to make one called Cat’s Tongue, which is like a Broken Ladder crossed with a simple braid, and another she calls the Big Bad that I can’t follow at all.
When she finishes Big Bad, she twirls it on her finger and flings it at me. I see Emily’s face flicker jealously.
“Is this all you guys do for fun?” she says.
And no, it’s not.
“It was like she was really interested in our lives,” Emily tells everyone after, her fingers whisking across my new bracelet.
“Pathetic,” Beth says. “I’m not even interested in our lives.” Her finger slips under the bracelet and tug-tug-tugs until it snaps from my wrist.
The next day, after school, the parking lot, I see Coach walking to her sprightly little silver crawler of a car.
I’m loitering, fingers hooked around my diet soda bottle, waiting on Beth, who is my ride and occasionally sees fit to make me wait while she talks up Mr. Feck, who gives her reams of pink fluttery hall passes from his desk drawer.
I don’t even realize Coach has seen me until she beckons, her head snapping toward her open door.
“Well c’mon then,” she says. “Get in.”
As if she knows I’ve been waiting for the invitation.
Driving, Coach is shaking one of those strange, muddy-looking juices she’s always drinking, raw against your teeth. I don’t think any of us have ever seen her eat.
“You girls have lots of bad habits,” she says, eyeing my