Sworn Enemies - Rebel Hart

1

Quinn

Despite that I wasn’t scheduled to report to work until ten o’clock, I was there bright and early at seven, just like always. I worked at the local recreational center, better known to most as MontRec, in the small, barely-a-coffee-stain-on-a-map town of Montpelier, Idaho. I didn’t own it per se, but the owner was almost a thousand years old and wasn’t hands-on. There was a manager above me, technically, but it was the owner’s daughter, and if she didn’t feel obligated to take care of the place, she wouldn’t. So, I showed up every day, first thing in the morning, to get the place unlocked and ready for business.

It was a Wednesday, so it meant three of my favorite things in the world were happening. One, lunch would be brought in for the rec center employees—pizza and pasta from Pizza Roma, the best pizzeria in barely-a-coffee-stain, Idaho. Two, it was Wild Wednesday—the day when all the kids’ programs take place at MontRec. I was the office manager, so I didn’t run any programs myself, but I liked to peek in on the kids when they arrived in the early afternoon. I could be biased, but kids from Montpelier were just cuter than the rest of the world. At least, that’s what I and all of their parents thought.

Third, football.

I was a major football fanatic. I was only six when my dad walked into my bedroom with a football and asked me to play with him. We started with catch, then went on to drills, and by the time I was ten, he was teaching me how to tackle. I might look like only five feet, seven inches of dainty damsel, but my dad used to say that the most dangerous thing in the world were bullets, and those were small, too. Tackling wasn’t about having fifty pounds over someone else. Sure, that would help, but it was really about the center of gravity. You can tuck and plow right into someone’s core and hit them perfectly to knock them off their balance. That’s what my dad wanted me to master, so I tied back my sunny-brown hair, narrowed my dark brown eyes, tucked my shoulders, and charged.

I must have fallen flat on my ass after hitting my dad posing as a brick wall about a hundred times. My tailbone and thighs bruised, but he kept pushing and pushing, and one day, under the roar of my mother screaming at my father to knock it off, I did it. I got him just above the belly button with my shoulder. I put some weight against my calves and thrust forward as I tackled, and he went flying backward, sprawling out across the grass as I had done dozens of times that day.

The high of knocking the wind right out of someone to sail past them and head for a touchdown, it was unlike any I’d ever felt. I chased after it so hard that I didn’t notice my dad fading into the distance behind me. I didn’t notice him fighting more with my mom, I didn’t notice when he started sleeping in the guest room, and I pretended not to notice when he started spending whole weeks away on business. Football kept me focused and kept my eyes on something that didn’t crush me.

By seventeen, I was the first girl accepted onto the varsity football team at my high-school, and my dad was long-gone. Moved to Detroit to be with his new girlfriend. Funny how life works. I spent all that time chasing the dream he gave me, and he wasn’t even there to see me realize it. I didn’t have time to worry about what he chose to do with his life, though. I had to help my mom take care of my baby sister, Honey. So, I came to the rec center for a job and never looked back. I refereed weekend games through high-school, became a part-time records keeper during college, and when I graduated, the owner made me the office manager. He said I knew the most about the place, anyway. It was with that promotion that I was able to leverage establishing an all-women’s football team—the Black Widows.

The Widows had practice on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, and we played other rec teams on Fridays. It was my favorite thing in the entire world. Wednesdays were even better because I got a double-dose of football. First, I’d have practice. Then, some of the Widows and I would retire