The thought of going back out to that field makes me sick. Actually, physically ill. When I don’t move, Chaney prompts me, “You don’t need a pass. You’re good to go.”
As if I need her to tell me that. Me, who’s worked in the attendance office for the past three years. She waits for me to jump up and run back out into the heat and dust so that Shupe can march me around. My whole being is so repelled at the thought that I can’t make myself move. She’s still waiting when she’s called away again.
I see my life branch into two paths. One … I don’t know where One leads. But Two, the other, the one where I go back to band practice, is certain to end up with Tyler seeing me at some point in that stupid pirate hat. And no matter what, that must never happen. I go to the nurse’s computer, boot it up, log on with my attendance office aide password, and Google “heatstroke.” When Miss Chaney comes back, I report to her that I am “dizzy, nauseated, weak, disoriented, and having difficulty breathing.”
Her diagnosis is immediate: “Heatstroke. God, how many times do I have to warn Shupe? You require immediate transport to an emergency room. Let’s get a parent or an ambulance over here, stat!”
Since Mom is doing her morning consults at Parkhaven Medical Center, I call Dori. Dori lives to be a bad girl. This will be right up her alley.
“Aubsie Doodle,” she answers on the first ring. “What’s up, buttercup?”
“Mom,” I whimper as Chaney eyes me sharply. “Can you pick me up? Mom? I’m sick. Mom.”
As expected, Dori is rarin’ to go. “Gotcha. A little cutting action, you’re getting a jump on the old senioritis. Hells to the yes.” Dori works so hard at being hip that half the time I don’t know what she is saying. “You shouldn’t be in school in the middle of summer anyway. I am so there. Daughter.”
“She’s on her way,” I whisper to Miss Chaney.
A minute later, Chaney gets a call to “inspect suspected contraband” and rushes off after warning me not to leave until she returns. I am grateful to all the stoner kids who like to spend the summer leaving baggies of grass clippings and oregano planted around the school just to start the year off with Chaney’s paranoia in high gear.
When Dori shows up, I rush her out before Miss Chaney can stop us. Outside, Dori can’t wait to announce, “Welcome to the dark side. Really happy I can help bust you out of Parkhaven Penal Colony. You gonna go hook up with your besties and blaze up or just chill?”
“I actually don’t feel good. I just didn’t want to bother my mom.”
Her hectic eagerness falls away. “Oh.”
Out on the field between us and visitor parking, I can see the team practicing. I step back so that the school building hides me from view and ask, “Can I wait here?” I try to sound especially weak and pitiful.
“Sure, Aubsie. I’ll go get the car.” She is so nice that I feel bad about not wanting to be seen with a woman who has hemoglobin-colored hair and a barbed-wire bracelet tattooed around her arm.
The instant she leaves, I peek around the corner of the building. Through the distance and the dust, a hunched-over player shoves the ball between his knees and Tyler takes it. Everyone on the field—players, coaches, the water boy—they all focus on Tyler as he dances away, pulling his arm back like a Roman javelin thrower or the tribe’s best hunter, the one all the rest depend on for food. He yells orders at the others tramping aimlessly around the field. Pointing with his free arm, he hurls the ball in such a way that it spins as it flies through the heated air, landing in the hands of the exact player he had pointed to.
Dori pulls up in her Toyota RAV4. Still staring at Tyler, I get in and, for one second, Dori watches with me. What the players are doing is suddenly so obvious that I can’t believe I have never seen it before. I take Dori’s silence to be a sign that she is seeing what I am. I am wrong.
She clucks her tongue and goes, “Can they be any more ridiculous? All those steroid cases in their tight pants. Why don’t they just drop trou,