The St. Ambrose School for Girls(31)

“I can help you,” Ms. Crenshaw says again.

Hot RA stops and looks over at us, although his eyes are not particularly focused. “Oh, I’m good. Thanks. Hi, Stephanie.”

I twist around to see who’s come up behind us. But there’s no one. He thinks my name is Stephanie.

“It’s a perfect day for this,” Ms. Crenshaw says. “Isn’t it?”

She’s pushing her words, like my mother does, and her eyes are shiny as she stares at Hot RA. She’s locked on at his face, but I have the feeling she’s drinking in the full sight of him. Not her, too, I think. Then again, he does this to girls and women of any age, turning them into distracted, mooning adorers. I wonder how his wife copes. Then I think of their argument and suspect I have my answer.

“Yup.” He smiles in an absent way, like he has no idea what he’s replying to. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’m just going—”

“I mean, if they had called Mountain Day last week?” Ms. Crenshaw makes a phew sound between her thin, un-sensuous lips. That she doesn’t seem to know she has coleslaw juice on her chin makes me cringe. “What a disaster it would have been. The heat, right? Could you have imagined?”

Sally, have you seen this lawn, I hear in my head.

“Yup, it was a scorcher all right.” Hot RA’s eyes are wandering around the crowd as if he’s looking for the coast guard as his boat takes on water. “So I think I’ll get everybody ready for the touch football—”

“And that storm. What a storm that was. Did you remember to put the windows on your car up?”

“I did. Yup.”

I can see he’s annoyed at the mothering, and I want to tell Ms. Crenshaw to stop this.

She breaks out a tsk-tsk forefinger. “I had to remind you before.”

“Yup. You did.”

“Nice leather bucket seats like you have.” She makes that phew sound again. “I mean, they have to be expensive to fix if they get waterlogged.”

As if the raindrops would tear at their hides and necessitate their immediate replacement.

“Yup. Okay, time to start the game.”

“I’ll keep looking out for your windows.”

“Yup, okay. Thanks.”

Ms. Crenshaw opens her mouth to keep talking, but before I can beg her to let the poor man go, Hot RA solves the problem by turning away as if somebody, across the field, or perhaps the country, has said his name urgently.

As he walks off, Ms. Crenshaw’s eyes are focused on what is below his waist on the back side, although there’s no lust in her face. It’s more like somebody in a museum coveting a piece of art that will never hang in their own home.

“Come on, Sarah,” she says, clapping me on the knee. “Let’s go play. You can be on my team and we’ll do this together.”

She leaves her half-eaten plate on the tabletop, all that slop fermenting in the sunshine. Eager to seize her moment, she jogs after Hot RA, ready to join him in a game I’d venture to say he’d prefer to play with anybody but her. When I don’t sign on for her parade of one, she motions to me with the same hapless insistence with which she beckons me to answer her in class.

The last thing I want to do is run around after a ball, but I slink off the table and shuffle through the grass in her wake. I don’t do well turning people down.

Then again, me being picked for anything happens so rarely that I am out of practice when it comes to refusing invitations.

With Hot RA involved, interest in whatever game is about to happen is strong, pulling many girls off tables and onto the field. Ms. Crenshaw inserts herself into his atmosphere as an asteroid so large it cannot be ignored by claiming the captainship of the other team, and she does this even though it is doubtful she has much experience with touch football. I can tell, as he looks over at her with exhaustion, that he wishes he’d proactively given the nod to one of the other residential advisors as his chosen opponent—like, before we even left the dorm. He’s stuck now, though. And no matter the outcome of the game, this is another car-window-watch-out situation, an opening for dialogue. At least on her side.

I picture them on campus ten years from now, with Ms. Crenshaw bringing up “that Mountain Day from nineteen ninety-one.” For the one hundredth time.

“Fine,” he says, his smile brightening as he looks at the girls who approach. “Let’s do touch football with five on each side.”

“Sarah’s on my team,” Ms. Crenshaw announces with a smile toward me.

In her mind, she’s reaching a hand across the divide of picked-last that she imagines I have always been on. She’s not at all far from the truth, but I wish she’d leave me out of everything. I’m like Hot RA, manipulated and stuck.

“I’m over here.”

As Greta steps free of the crowd and speaks up, I start to think of an excuse to get out of the game. With her on Hot RA’s side, she’s liable to come after me, tackling me into the grass, streaking my blacks now with green rather than brown—

Greta does not go to stand behind Hot RA. She comes over to me and Ms. Crenshaw. There’s a confused moment of quiet in the crowd. Even Hot RA does a double take, and so does Ms. Crenshaw. The only people who don’t seem shocked are the Brunettes, but then they care only about following Greta, not about any particular destination she may take them to—no, I’m wrong. Stacia is confused. Because Francesca goes and stands with Hot RA.