Текст книги "Deeper"

Автор книги: Robin York

Соавторы: Robin York,Robin York
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

I convert West’s cash into a money order and send it off to the Internet-reputation people, but I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never opened my mouth.

The next weekend I eat dinner with Bridget, and we walk to the Dairy Queen in town afterward, leaves crunching under our feet. I eat a hot-fudge brownie sundae so big that I have to lie down on the red lacquered bench afterward and unbutton the top of my jeans. Upside down, I look out the front window and down the street. I can just make out the chalkboard easel outside the Gilded Pear.

Nate took me to dinner there last year before the spring formal. West was our waiter. Every time he came to the table, it was more awkward than the last. By the time he brought the check, his conversation with Nate was so thickly laced with irony that I felt like they were performing a scene in a play.

The kind of play with sword fighting.

I didn’t break up with Nate because of West. Honestly.

But I probably broke up with Nate because of the possibility of someone like West.

“Did you finish your paper last night?” Bridget asks, and because I’m distracted by the memory of West in his waiter uniform—black slacks and a white dress shirt—I say, “Mmm-hmm.”

“And your reading for Con Law?”

“Yeah.”

He had his sleeves rolled up. His deep tan against crisp white cotton.

“So you have no excuse not to go to the Alliance party with me.”

“What? No.”

I sit up. Bridget is smiling her worst, most evil smile. “Yes.”

“I really don’t want to.”

“You really have no choice. You don’t need to study, it’s time for you to get back out there, and this is the easiest, best party, because at least half the people there will be gay. Possibly two-thirds, if you count the bis and the people who are ‘experimenting.’” She does the air quotes with her fingers. “Plus, we had so much fun last year. Please.”

Two hours later, I’ve got a beer in one hand and Bridget tugging at the elbow of my other arm, pulling me toward the dance floor.

The Queer Alliance party is in the Minnehan Center, which is the campus building designated for large-scale fun. It’s got the movie theater and this room, which is a huge, high-ceilinged hall with a stage, a disco ball, and a little cubby on one wall where the party’s hosts push an endless parade of Solo cups across the counter to the crowd of students.

You can’t get in to parties at the Minnehan Center without a student ID, but once you’re in, there’s no such thing as getting carded. The student worker who hands out wristbands performs a cursory ID check that miraculously results in everyone at the party being legal.

The beer is always free. The music is always loud.

The Alliance party has a soundtrack that brings out the inner ABBA in everybody—and also a lot of exhibitionist streaks. As far as I can tell, I’m the only person in the room in jeans and a T-shirt. Bridget’s got on a gold sequined tube top and tight black pants that flare out over platform shoes. She’s a disco queen.

She picks a spot at the edge of the dance floor just as “It’s Raining Men” comes on. Arms raised, jumping up and down, she hoots along with a hundred other people. “Dance with me!” she shouts.

I shake my head.

Then I drink the beer, downing it quickly so I can get away from her disappointment and grab another.

By the time we’ve cycled through half the soundtrack to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and all the good Gaga, the dance floor is roiling, and I’m relaxed enough to join in, bumping hips and slapping hands with Bridget. I smile to see Krishna come up behind her. He grinds on her, and she rolls her eyes, but she likes it. He pulls us into the group he’s dancing with—some people I don’t know, although I’m pretty sure one of the girls is named Quinn.

I recognize her because she hung out in Krishna and West’s room last year. She’s blond and big—a good four or five inches taller than me, with broad hips and a generous chest and a smile that seems to include a lot more teeth than it ought to. She keeps grabbing my hand to spin me, and I get sweaty and a little dizzy. Krishna fetches us another round of beers, and we drink them quick, licking the foam off our lips. He pulls out his phone. The screen lights up his face in the dark room, making him look mischievous and almost enchanted. He glances at me, grins, and types something.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting West.” He lifts the phone, and before I can stop him, he takes my picture.

I grab his arm, blinded by the flash and by my panic. “Don’t send that.” The sudden brightness sent me reeling back to my memory of that night with Nate. The surprise of the flash. His hand on my head, dick in my mouth, choking me so I had to concentrate to keep from gagging. “Krish, don’t.”

But he’s not listening. He’s grinning, jabbing at the screen, and I’m trying to wrest the phone out of his hand when I hear a little whoosh that means it’s sent.

“Damn it!” I punch him in the shoulder, frustrated and upset, frustrated with myself for being upset. It’s just a picture. It doesn’t matter.

Except that I’m crying.

“What’d I do?”

Quinn reaches out for me, but I’m already gone. I rush toward the door, pushing through bodies, the music and the lights pounding too loud. I had more to drink than I should have. I let my guard down, feeling safe, feeling okay, but there’s nothing okay about me.

Frozen on the screen of Krishna’s phone with my hair falling all around my face, my T-shirt scooped too low, askew, sweat shining on all that exposed skin—I look like a mistake waiting to happen.

Then I see Nate, and I remember I’m a mistake that’s already happened.

He’s between me and the door. By the time I realize it, he’s looking at me, and there’s nowhere to escape to. I can’t dance now. I have to get out. So I keep going, chin up, hoping my mascara isn’t streaky and pretending the men in my head aren’t shouting at full volume.

Let’s see that dirty pussy, baby. I want to eat it out. I’m going to rail the living fuck out of you.

“Caroline!” Nate props his hand in the doorway so I can’t get past. He smiles his drunk smile. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.”

I think of West, leaning in the doorway at the bakery as he walked me out. Telling me to text him when I was home safe.

I look at Nate, blocking my exit. His eyes crawling down my shirt.

Was he always this way?

He’s got a beer in his other hand, and his sandy-brown hair is a little long, curling around his ears. He wears a polo that brings out the blue of his eyes over these horrible navy pants with tiny green whales on them that he loves to put on for parties. He insists he wears them ironically, but I always used to tell him it’s not possible to wear pants with irony. You put on whale pants, you’re wearing whale pants.

Douche, West says in my head.

“Why shouldn’t I be here?”

“You haven’t been around much.”

“I’ve been busy.” I try to look like West when he’s gone blank. Like I could give a fuck about Nate.

“Josh said he saw you with that sketchy guy from across the hall last year. The dealer.”

“So?”

“So I’m worried about you, Caroline. First those pictures, and now you’re hanging out with him. … What’s going on with you?”

I’m speechless. I mean, literally, I can’t make words. There are so many, they jam up at the back of my tongue, and I don’t know which ones I’d say even if I could shake them loose.

The nerve of him. The nerve.

He hitches his arm up higher and takes a sip of his beer, as though we’re going to be here awhile, shooting the breeze. “We’re still friends,” he says. “We’ll always be friends, you know that. I just don’t want to see you getting hurt.”

That’s the thing that unlocks my throat. We’re still friends.

He betrayed me. He broke my life, then pretended I was the one who did it. He lied, because he’s a douchebag, and douchebags lie. And now he’s standing here, blocking my exit, telling me we’re still friends.

“You know what, Nate? Fuck you.”

I duck underneath his arm, half expecting him to hip-check me and pin me in place. Half certain that he really hates me enough, wants to hurt me enough, that he’d do that.

He doesn’t, though. I get past him, run down the hall to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and climb up on the lid of one of the toilets, feet on the seat so I can drop my head down between my knees.

I keep it there until I can breathe.

I keep it there until I figure out that the low humming sound I hear isn’t inside my head. It’s my phone. In my pocket.

When I pull it out, there’s a message from West. Are you ok?

I’m not okay. Not at all. But seeing West’s name on my phone—seeing that he’s asking, when he’s never texted me before except to type out one– or two-word replies to my home-safe messages—it helps.

I’m fine, I type.

Well, actually I type, im gun3. But somehow the miracle of autocorrect sorts it out.

Where are you?

Minnehan party.

I know. K sent me your pic. Where at M’han?

Bathroom.

There’s a pause. Then, K’s a fucking idiot.

I overreacted.

It’s ok. Everybody has an off night.

Why is it that when other people tell you things you already know, it’s soothing?

Why is it that when West tells me I’m okay, I believe him? Not that he can make me okay, but just to have that touchstone.

I want to tell him about Nate, but I want forget it happened even more.

Are you still at work?

No. Just got off. A pause. That sounded dirty.

I smile at the phone.

You should go back in there. K said you’re helping him pull chicks. Another pause. But they’re all dykes.

Homophobe!

Not me. Quinn will tell you—all those girls call themselves that.

They call themselves women, I type, but that’s not what I meant to say.

Womyn, I try a second time, but it autocorrects to Women.

I give it a third shot. W-o-m-y-n. Fucking autocrochet.

There’s a pause, and then West writes, Autocrochet? I’m dying.

I blink at the screen. Oh. Yeah, it seems I typed that. Glad I can amuse you.

I take a deep breath. It takes my fingers three tries to make the words Come dance?

A longer pause.

Need to sleep.

I’m sure it’s true. He only sleeps about four hours a night during the week. He told me he uses the weekends to catch up.

OK. Sleep tight.

Another pause, and I’m starting to think we’re done, that I should leave the bathroom, go home, and go to bed, when another bubble pops up. Caroline?

Yeah?

Tuesday is cookie day.

Tuesday, back at the bakery. I don’t want to wait that long to see him, but that’s the way it is. Right. See you then.

By the way.

Nothing for several seconds.

You look fucking hot.

No tooth gap in sight.

Those words—what they do to me. My heart is so light, I think it might be made of air. It might float up and escape through the gap between my front teeth.

I take a screenshot and put the phone away.

Still smiling, I climb down and wash my hands, listening to the thumping bass beat from down the hall. My toes move back and forth on the floor, one foot’s tiny acknowledgment of the rhythm.

My eyes are like that, too. Sparkling with their own tiny acknowledgment.

It’s the second time he’s told me that.

When I come out of the bathroom, Bridget is making her way toward me with Quinn.

Or, more specifically, Bridget is weaving down the hall, and Quinn is watching her like a hawk, moving in to steady her every time it looks like Bridget might hit the deck.

The sad thing is, Bridget only had two beers. She has no alcohol tolerance whatsoever.

“Caroline!” she shouts.

“Bridget!” I shout back.

“I saw Nate.”

“So did I.”

“And I kicked Krish in the nuts for taking your picture. I mean, not really, but metaphorically I did.”

“She chewed him out like you wouldn’t believe,” Quinn says.

“Did Nate make you cry?”

“No. I’m okay.”

“Do you want to go home? Or we could get you some more ice cream.”

I consider it. But I recognize the song that’s on, and I don’t want to go back to the room and hide. “No, I want to dance.”

“Really?” Bridget peers at me, blinking blearily.

“Kind of. I mean, mostly I want to kick Nate in the nuts. Or smash his perfect nose in.”

“Your boy already did that,” Bridget says. I widen my eyes at her in the universal signal for oh my God, shut up, you idiot. I am hoping against all hope that Quinn didn’t hear or won’t understand.

“Your boy?” Quinn asks.

She’s got one eyebrow up. That eyebrow knows everything.

“Bridget is a little drunk,” I say apologetically. “And we have this kind of running joke about West—”

“Which is … ?”

I try to think of a diplomatic way of putting it, but Bridget beats me to the punch with: “That she wants to climb into his pants.”

Yes. Those words actually come out of her mouth.

“I am going to kill you,” I whisper.

I can’t look at Quinn. I might possibly never look at Quinn again.

She clears her throat. Taps her foot.

God. I have no choice. I look.

She’s still got that eyebrow up. There is no tiring her eyebrow. It is an endurance athlete.

“Do you?”

I don’t know how to answer the question. I mean, yes. Yes, of course I want to climb into his pants.

And no. No, no, no, I don’t want her to know it, or for West to, or for anyone alive to, basically, up to and including Bridget.

I say something that comes out a lot like Hnnn?

She grins. “I’ll be sure to tell him that.”

“I will hurt you if you do.”

“Man, you are all over the threats. First that guy Nate—oh, shit, is he the one who published your naked pictures?”

She says it straight out, without any sense of shame or the least hint that it’s a thing we’re not supposed to talk about.

It shocks me so much, I just say, “Yeah.”

“No wonder you’re so full of rage. You know what you should do? You should play rugby. Are you fast?”

“Um, no?”

Bridget says, “She is so fast.”

Quinn is smiling. “You can tackle people to the ground. It’s awesome.”

“That sounds awesome.” Bridget again.

“We practice on Sundays at eleven. You want to come, too? We could use a new hooker.”

“Thanks, but I have to save my athletic awesomeness for track.”

“Oh, right. I’ll settle for the blow-job queen here, then.” Quinn says this completely without malice. She rubs her hands together. “Now, are we dancing or are we going to stand out here jerking off for the rest of the night? Because you know if we don’t get back in there inside of two minutes, Krishna’s going to have his tongue down some poor girl’s throat.”

Bridget wrinkles her nose. “He is. And I want him to dance with. He’s so pretty. Like a Christmas decoration.”

“He would make the world’s most beautiful gay boy,” Quinn agrees. “Let’s go reclaim him.”

I’m not really done with the rugby conversation, but Quinn sticks out her elbows, so we link arms and kind of half-run, half-skip down the hallway like drunken Musketeers. We wave our wristbands at the security guy, who is so, so bored with his job and utterly unfazed by us.

By the time we get back on the dance floor, I’ve got another beer in my hand, and I’m laughing, thinking of Quinn and Bridget and Krishna.

Thinking of my phone in my back pocket and that screenshot I took.

I don’t have one thought to spare for Nate.

“I brought you a present.”

West looks up from the floor scale, where he’s dumping big scoops of flour into the largest mixing bowl. “Yeah?”

I shake the white plastic bag I’m holding. “Corn nuts, Mounds bar, two Monsters.”

“You know the way to my heart.”

“I know the way to keep you from turning into a little bitch on Wednesday nights.”

West smiles and takes the bag. He cracks an energy drink right away, closing his eyes as he takes a swig from the can.

He looks tired. Wednesdays are his worst, because he’s got lab in the afternoon. Most days he naps after class, but on Wednesdays he has to get through all his classes on four hours of sleep, then go to lab, work his library shift, and head straight to the bakery again.

“What are you mixing, the French?”

“Yeah. You want to start the dill?”

“Sure.”

I check the clipboard hanging by the sink to see how many loaves Bob needs. West comes right up behind me, flattens one hand against the cabinet where the clipboard is hanging, and rests his cold drink against my neck.

“Aaagh! Don’t!”

He exhales a laugh and moves it away, but he doesn’t stop caging me in.

If I shifted over a few inches. If I pressed into him. His whole body, solid against mine.

“You have a good day?” he murmurs.

Gah. What is he doing to me? I don’t even think West needs to check the clipboard. It’s all in his head already.

He’s wearing this red plaid flannel shirt, unbuttoned. The sleeves are turned up, cuffs loose, and they flap when he uses his hands. I think about running my palm up his forearm. Feeling the soft fuzz of hair, the satiny skin underneath.

I think about turning around to face him.

But I just breathe in. Breathe out. Keep my voice normal when I answer, “Yeah, not bad. I ran into Quinn at lunch, and me and Bridget ended up sitting with her and Krish.”

“Second time this week you had company at lunch.”

I get up the nerve to turn around and smile as though I don’t want anything from him, expect anything from him, need anything from him. “I know. I’m practically a social butterfly, right?”

West is sort of almost smiling. I feel like I’m an experiment he’s running. What will she do if I do this? “You get any sleep before you came here?”

“A few hours. And I took a loooooong nap after class, too. See, look.” I turn my cheek to show him the imprint from the throw pillow. “I was trying to read for English, but I fell asleep on the couch and permanently branded corduroy into my face.”

He steps even closer to see the faint lines that remain all these hours later. He lays his fingers lightly along my jaw, using them to tip my face up toward him.

This is how he’d kiss me. Just like this, with a drink in one hand and a casual half smile, competent fingers putting my lips where he wanted them.

I inhale. Don’t get too excited, Caroline. He’s just looking because you told him to.

“Nice,” he says. “I’m jealous.”

“Of my nap?”

“Of your pillow.”

I stand there with heat crawling up my cheeks, breathing through my open mouth, trying to convince myself he didn’t mean it.

Yeast, idiot. Dill and onion flakes and poppy seeds. Focus on the work.

I can’t, though, because it’s impossible to look away from his eyes. They’re gray-blue today, storm clouds and tiny sparkling flashes of lightning.

What do you want from me? Take it. Whatever it is. Please.

He swigs the rest of his Monster drink, and I watch the column of his throat. He’s all stubbly, like he always is on Wednesday nights. No time to shave. With his head tipped back, his eyes closed, I notice how blue and bruised the skin beneath them looks. I notice how the brim of his black ball cap presses into the back of his neck, how his dark hair’s longer than it was last month, curling behind his ears and up into the fabric of his hat. He looks weary and … I don’t know. Precious. I wish I could give him something other than snack food I picked up at the Kum and Go on my way here.

I wish I could give him rest. Ease.

I wish he’d stop torturing me like this, where I’m so tuned in to him I feel like I might explode, and he’s so mellow I can’t even tell if he’s doing it on purpose.

His forearm tenses when he takes the drink away from his mouth, then contracts when he crushes the can. My attention catches on what looks like a black leather cuff on his wrist.

“What’s that?”

He looks where I’m looking. “Bracelet.”

“I know, doofus. Is it new?”

“Yeah.”

Abruptly, he turns, tosses the can across the room into the recycling bin, and goes back to measuring out ingredients.

I don’t even think. I just walk to where he is and grab his hand while he’s got the honey container tipped upside down over the bowl. “Careful!”

I don’t think he’s warning me about the honey.

“I want to see.”

It’s the kind of bracelet you can buy at a booth at the county fair—a stiff strip of leather, with an embossed pattern of a few red and blue roses, and his name pressed into it and painted white. The black dye has turned his wrist slightly blue.

“Fancy.”

He tugs against my grip, and I look up into his eyes. I want him to tell me where he got it, because someone must have given it to him. It’s new. He’s wearing it to work, even though it’s kind of cheap and tacky, so it must mean something to him. But I can’t just come right out and say all that, and I feel like I shouldn’t have to.

“My sister sent it.” He pulls his wrist away.

Even though there isn’t really room between us, he squats down, forcing me to take a step back so he’s got enough space to pull the bowl off the scale and carry it over to the mixer. I can’t even lift those bowls when they’re full, but West makes it look easy. He turns the mixer on. The dough hook starts its banging, rattling song.

He has a sister.

“How old is she?”

“She’s nine. Ten in the spring.”

“What’s her name?”

“Frankie.”

“Frankie like Frank?”

“Frankie like Francine.”

“Oh.”

When he looks up from the machine, his eyes are full of warning. “You got any other questions?”

I shouldn’t. I know better. The more I ask him right now, the faster he’ll shut down.

“Why didn’t you ever say?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“If I’d asked, would you have told me?”

West shrugs, but he’s scowling. “Sure. Why not?”

“I don’t believe you.”

He shakes his head, but he doesn’t say anything more. I watch as he goes over to the shelf, flips the top bread recipe to the bottom of the pile, and starts working on whatever is next on his list. His lips move in a whisper, words he’s making only for himself. He could be repeating the ingredients on the list, except it’s just like the clipboard—I know for a fact he already has those recipes memorized.

I go back to the dill bread, furious and hot, my heart aching.

He has a sister called Frankie. He’s wearing her love for him on his wrist, and I’m glad for him. I’m glad there’s someone else in the world who cares about him enough to press the letters of his name into leather, word into flesh, an act of memory.

I do it sometimes, in the dark. Lie in my bed, staring at the crosshatched pattern of springs supporting Bridget’s mattress above my head and drawing the letters of West’s name on my body.

W-E-S-T across my stomach, around the side. I use my fingernail, only my fingernail, and bring up goose bumps.

W-E-S-T along my sternum. Over my collarbone and down the swell of my breast, tripping and catching on my nipple.

His name feels like a secret, and now he’s wearing it on his wrist. I want to know all about this girl who put it there. What she looks like. If she’s got freckles, fair hair or dark, like his. If she’s scrappy or ethereal, funny or serious, scrape-kneed or ladylike.

I know that she loves him, so I want to know everything else.

But West doesn’t want to share her with me.

I shouldn’t keep trying to scale these walls he puts up. I’m a terrible climber.

I don’t like arguing, and he doesn’t owe me a thing.

“Get down on your hands and knees,” Quinn says, pointing. “And put your arm over Gwen’s back.”

The grass is cold. Dampness soaks through the knees of my sweatpants more or less immediately, but I have a feeling it’s not the worst thing that’s going to happen to me in the next few minutes. I’m tacking myself on to what Quinn calls the “scrum”—a word that sounds enough like scrotum to make me uncomfortable.

But not as uncomfortable as I feel slinging my arm around a stranger’s back.

We are a tightly formed cluster of three rows of women, hands clutching shirts, shoulders into shoulders, and hips into hips. Quinn says that in a minute our eight people are going to shove against their eight people, and then the ball will get rolled down the middle and … something. She briefed me on a lot of these rules on the way over, but when she said I’d be tackling people, she failed to mention the largeness of the people I’m meant to tackle.

Behind me, another player puts her head down and jams her shoulders into the two second-row players I’m flanking. She grasps a fistful of my T-shirt with one hand.

“All set?” Quinn asks.

“Um, no?”

She gives me a sunny smile. “You’ll figure it out.” She starts jogging backward to the sidelines, where she grabs a ball. “All right, let’s do this thing!”

Seconds later she’s rolling it between the two halves of the scrum, and my whole side of the formation is lurching forward. I have to scramble to hold on to Gwen as the grass tries to slip out from beneath my shoes. There’s grunting and shoving, another rapid forward lurch, and someone shouts, “Ball’s out.” The whole thing kind of collapses and dissolves at the same time, and I just stand there, dazed, as everyone else on the field runs away.

“It’s your ball, Caroline!” Quinn shouts. “Follow it!”

I spend the next half hour feeling like a very dumb kid sister, trailing after the older girls and shouting, Hey, wait up!

Since I have two older sisters, this is, at least, a role I’m familiar with.

Whenever I get the ball, I get rid of it as fast as possible. I am, it turns out, deeply terrified of the idea of getting tackled. Tackling also scares me. One time the opposing team’s ball carrier runs right at me, and I tell myself I’m going to take her down, but then when the moment comes, I just grab ineffectually at her shirt. Because I suck.

Still, it’s kind of fun. Right up until the parking lot beside the playing field begins to fill with cars and a van that says Carson College on the side.

Carson is a school about twenty-five miles from Putnam.

The van is full of college women in black rugby jerseys and matching shorts.

It occurs to me that perhaps Quinn made me wear a blue shirt for a reason.

And that Quinn is, in fact, a lying liar who lies, and she’s manipulated me into a rugby game, not a practice.

The Carson girls who pile out of the van are so much bigger than our girls. Sooooo much bigger.

Also, they have a coach—a real, honest-to-goodness, grown-up faculty-member coach. Putnam Women’s Rugby doesn’t even have proper shirts. It’s just a club whose membership seems to consist mostly of Quinn’s friends, many of whom were complaining a few minutes ago of being hungover.

Whereas the members of the Carson team look like they ate rare beefsteak for breakfast. The coach has a male assistant, who appears to be our age but has a whistle and a clipboard and therefore looks far more official.

I am in way over my head. I start trying to think of a good reason to beg off.

I have to study.

Lame.

I sprained an ankle.

When?

I need to do … things. Elsewhere.

Right.

I lace my fingers behind my head and look at the sky, searching for inspiration.

But I find something else there instead.

I find that it’s a perfect November day in Iowa.

The sky is so blue, it hurts.

The wind feels good on my face. The Carson players are chattering with our players, Quinn’s talking to their coach, and everyone seems so happy.

I have nowhere else I’m supposed to be today, and I realize suddenly that there’s nowhere else I want to be.

I like this.

I try to remember the last time I did something completely new and scary—something I liked—and I think of West at the bakery, his backward black hat and his white apron.

I’d like to send him a text that says, I’m playing rugby with Quinn, but instead I turn around and jog toward her so I can ask her to give me a better idea of what on earth it is I’m supposed to be doing.

Shit is about to get real.

Half an hour later, Quinn is muddy and smiling, and she yells, “Isn’t this great?” from across the field. We are getting our asses kicked by the Carson team. I have no idea what I’m doing at least 80 percent of the time.

“It’s awesome!” I yell back.

Because it is. It is awesome. I’m high on how awesome it is—how good it feels to run, how solid the ball is when I catch it, how firm beneath my arm.

It is awesome until the instant I get hit by a truck.

Okay, fine, the truck is a person. But she feels like a truck, and she knocks all the air out of my lungs. I lie on my back, blinking at the sky, trying to breathe with these air bags that completely refuse to work. I bend my knees and lift my hips up for reasons that are unclear to me. Probably I look like I’m trying to mate with the sky, but it doesn’t matter, because down at the other end of the field something exciting happens, and no one’s paying attention to my death.

A dark shape blocks my view of the sky. A male voice says, “You got the wind knocked out of you.”

I’m not dying. This is excellent news.

I’m so grateful, I could kiss him.

I still can’t breathe, though.

“Turn over on your side,” he tells me, and his hands urge my hip toward him. I turn, because he has a soothing voice, and I like his whistle. I stare at his hairy calves and his black socks and his shoes that look like they might actually be specifically for rugby, with cleats on them and everything.

I experiment with breathing again. Nothing happens. My eyes are starting to feel like they might pop.

“Don’t panic. Your diaphragm is having a spasm, but it’ll relax soon. Just take it easy. Close your eyes.”

I do as I’m told. After a few seconds, the constriction in my chest eases and I’m able to inhale.

“Good.”

I breathe. I open my eyes. The grass is blurry. I blink at it, but it doesn’t come into focus.

“I can’t see.”

He hunkers down and squints at my face. “Do you wear contacts?”

Oh. “Yes.”

I blink again, and now I recognize this. This is what the world looks like with one contact in.

The guy is kind of blurry, too, but in a nice way. He has really short brown hair in tight curls and a dimple in his chin.

“You think one got knocked out?”

“I do. Was that woman made of bricks?”

He smiles. Dimples there, too. Dimples all over the place. “She probably outweighs you by a hundred pounds. That was pretty hard-core. You want a hand getting up?”

I take his hand, thinking, I got hit so hard I lost a contact.

“I’m Scott,” he says.

I’m so distracted, I barely hear him. I’m too busy thinking, Oh my God, I got tackled and I’m not dead. I’m totally hard-core.

“Caroline,” I say, but I guess I must have mumbled, because he spends the next five minutes calling me Carrie while he fetches me some water from the Carson Athletic Department cooler and insists I use his folding chair.

I watch the game and try to figure out more of the rules. I ask Scott to explain the tricky bits. He does, and when he dimples at me, I go ahead and smile back at him.