Fuck you, Greta.
There’s a moment of confusion in the field. No one can understand what’s happened. And then the opposing team starts jumping up and down and cheering, Hot RA running out into their midst and getting swarmed by those he chose at the beginning. Especially Francesca.
My team falls silent as their declarations of survival evaporate. They are all disappointed, but none seem surprised. Their expressions are of self-censure, as if they knew they shouldn’t have trusted any job to somebody like me. These girls trudge off the field, heading for the Igloos full of iced sodas.
Greta does not leave the field. She’s set her crosshairs on me, like she would blow me out of my cheap sneakers if she could.
I have no regrets. I’ve voluntarily placed myself in hot water, and the result of my freedom of choice improves my lot in life here at Ambrose for no other reason than it relieves the sting of randomness. Greta could have been in another dorm. I could have been born more inside the normal neural bandwidth. I could have slept through the night way back at the beginning. There could have been someone, anyone, on campus, on the planet, who she’d rather have tortured. Instead, like the ball that came to me through no skill of Ms. Crenshaw’s and no finesse of my own, I’m Greta’s lucky catch for the game of at least this semester, and likely the whole of my sophomore year.
But I’m choosing her ire now.
As I proceed back toward the picnic tables, no one pays any attention to me. The other girls who were uninvolved in our largely incompetent contest have transitioned quickly to other topics of discussion. Or maybe they’re all studiously ignoring me, shutting me out from discourse that they neglect to recall they’ve not included me in thus far anyway.
There’s one face that’s turned to me, however, one set of eyes that meets my own.
Strots is sitting on her tabletop, her fellow athletes in a loose configuration around her, a fist not fully closed. She’s looking right at me, and there’s a wise light in her eye. After so many years of her being in end zones and scoring goals, she knows what I did. She knows I could easily have held on to that ball and gotten the points and kept my team alive. She knows that I made a conscious choice, that that was not a fumble.
Strots smiles at me. It’s a closeted smile, a mere lift to one corner of her lips. But I catch it.
And I smile back, also in secret.
Strots gives me a nod of respect and then refocuses on Keisha, who’s debating another member of the field hockey team. I continue over to the table I was at, the table on which Ms. Crenshaw’s coleslaw has passed its congealed, brewing stage and is now moving on to dehydration in the sunlight.
As I resume my perch, Ms. Crenshaw does not come over to engage me and commiserate. She’s received an unexpected boon. Hot RA is talking to her sincerely, his hand on her shoulder, his eyes kind as he attempts, I assume, to frame the very expected loss in a favorable light. What he fails to see, or deliberately ignores, is that his attention is the win for my geometry teacher. Her face is turned up to his with the rapture of a sunflower to the unimpeded summer sky. She’s drinking in this nourishment, as for once, the object of so much of her effort—monitoring those car windows against the weather must be a lot of work—sends in her direction exactly what she’s been trying to receive, a Hail Mary ball caught in the only end zone that matters to her.
I’d like something cold to drink, but Greta’s by the Igloos with the cold sodas and there’s a small crowd of spectators around her. From time to time, one or two of the girls glance in my direction, and then look away quickly as they see me staring. I have a feeling that Greta will not leave those coolers until it’s time to get back on the bus. She knows I must be thirsty, but she also knows I won’t tread into enemy territory.
But it’s okay. Everything is okay. The angle of the sun has changed and my table is now in the shade, sure as if the tree beside me approves of my actions and is showing it by granting me cover. The afternoon is cool outside of the direct rays, and as my heart rate begins to return to normal, my body temperature drops.
I think back to the moment that football left my grasp and bounced onto the ground. I took something Greta wanted away from her. I thwarted her superiority. I got her back.
Even if I will pay for this, I’m quietly happy. And this version of a positive emotion is not accompanied with the clanging, hallucinatory success and mastery that I felt for those twenty-four hours after I dyed my clothes back to some semblance of wearability, the mania running amok and taking me all the way to the White House, before it was dashed just as quickly by a memo designed to mislead me.
This happiness is of a calmer nature. It’s satisfaction.
And I have a feeling it’s going to last for a very long time.
chapter ELEVEN
That night, I can’t resist. Twenty minutes before curfew, I leave the dorm via Tellmer’s front door. As I walk to the right, I hunker into my sweater and look up at the windows of the phone room. There are five girls with buff-colored receivers pressed to their ears. Two have propped a hip up on the windowsill, and the others are sitting on top of the tables that are pushed back against the walls, talking stations for the inmates. Seeing all of them sitting where they should not, their feet on chairs or wedged into the vertebrae of the radiators, makes me think about all of us out at that field on those picnic tables. I wonder whether the inability to use furniture properly is a hallmark of our generation.
There are security lights tucked into the eaves of my dorm’s roofline, right above the frieze of composers, and from the fixtures flows illumination that is warm in tint but does nothing to mediate the temperature. The night is colder than I anticipated and I wish I’d brought my jacket, but one advantage to my black clothes is that I disappear into the shadows as I pare off from the walkway, my boots making no sound, as the leaves have not yet begun to fall.
I’m careful to veer far away from the parking lot, where Hot RA’s Porsche is parked, along with Ms. Crenshaw’s Toyota Camry and the third-floor married couple’s station wagon. As I continue along, I make it seem to any casual observer as though I’m headed to Wycliffe next door. Once I am certain I’ve gone far enough, I double back and penetrate the brush and tree barrier, finding the dirt footpath that Greta and the Brunettes first showed me.
The path is close to the riverbed, and it must get flooded during torrential rains like the one we had the other day. This may explain why there are, from time to time, river stones embedded in the dirt, transplants from the bed that were migrated by a rushing force with sufficient power to carry them out, but not enough strength to bring them back in. The only other impediments in my way are the granddaddy trees that are spaced very far apart, their strictly enforced territories appearing to have been negotiated by virtue of the reach of their massive arms.
When I arrive at my split-trunk maple, I hide my body and lend my ear at the same time, the deciduous skyscraper accepting the lean of my weight as if I am but a newspaper section blown by the wind against its towering torso. In the icy blue moonlight, Greta, Francesca, and Stacia are where they always go, sitting on that outcropping about thirty feet in front of me. The huge stones are smooth, just like the other river rocks, but they’re mesomorphs among minors, three or four enormous, mountain-worthy boulders that have inexplicably been dropped at the head of a deep and whirling pool within the river’s course.