Summer in the City Page 4

  I did, and he waited in his position as defender in a one-v-one exercise.

  My initial moves were tentative. Josh played defense lightly, cutting me a break, which annoyed me. If I just had my other stick, I thought, as I made a lame feint to the left. But my father would never have put up with an excuse like that.

  “Come on, girlfriend,” someone yelled from the sidelines. “Strut your stuff.”

  It was the expression my best friend from Michigan used—strut your stuff. I began to move with more ease.

  “Watch your cradle,” said Josh. “Both hands. You’re going to lose the ball with that stick…. Better, that’s better.”

  “Thank you,” I hissed, then I took off.

  “Go get ’im, girlfriend!” my cheerleader hollered from the sidelines, and I did.

  I dodged, I rolled, I faked, I dropped the ball and scooped it up again. I shot, I missed, I played the carom off the pipe—I had him sweating now—and I shot again, then cursed under my breath as I missed widely. We both raced, sticks banging at each other. I hit his stick away. Scooping the ball, I started to run again.

  “Where are you going?” he called out, after a moment of watching me wander about the field.

  Heck if I knew, I just needed to work off the edge of nervous energy, needed to buy time and think about adjustments, before trying a second time.

  “Toward the goal, girlfriend, toward the goal,” my cheerleader called.

  We started again and now I was getting comfortable. Now, in my head, I was playing Dad. I was in the zone. I shifted to my left hand. Shot. Goal!

  I fetched the ball and dropped it neatly into Josh’s stick.

  He didn’t say anything, not an admiring “great shot, left-handed” nor a sneering “lucky shot, I could have played you tighter”—nothing. Oh, he was cool. Even while the others cheered, he was cool.

  “Ready?” he said, as he shifted to offense.

  “Don’t I look ready?”

  His reply was simply to cradle and run.

  As he went through the motions, I was aware that he was testing me methodically, seeing how well I could backpedal, noting how fast I could change direction, working to find out if I was stronger defending on the left or the right. I was also aware that if he had been playing my father, he would have left Frank in the dust. There is something about top-notch athletes—their arms and legs are strung differently, move differently. Josh could have gone to the goal whenever he wanted, but he was having fun running me all over the field, seeing how I adjusted to his moves. He kept it up for what seemed like eternity, testing my endurance, and I started to get steamed. Instinct told me when he was finally going to make his move to the goal. And with instinct taking over, girls’ rules went out the window. He made a quick feint to the inside, spun around, and—whack! Check—waist high and quite effective!

  The ball flew sideways out of his netting, and bounced away from the goal harmlessly.

  On the sideline his team erupted with cheers, then the younger girls imitated them and cheered, too.

  “Girls’ rules!” Josh shouted at me. His eyes blazed, turned almost amber. I knew I had ticked off a passionate competitor. And yeah, he was right, the check was illegal in girls’ lacrosse.

  Then he took a deep breath and got control of himself. He walked toward Mahler. “She plays like a guy.”

  Mahler nodded. “She’s all yours, Josh.”

  I saw the expression on his face, a fleeting one, for he was too much of a pro to show what he felt, but I had caught that hundredth-of-a-second look, and it translated roughly as, Don’t do this to me.

  “Right,” he said, then tossed his stick from one hand to the other and strode toward his team to pick up his clipboard. I slipped out my mouthpiece and followed him. My new campmates gathered around.

  “Name?” he said, his eyes on his clipboard.

  “Carvelli…Jamie.”

  “All right, Carvelli, you’re warmed up so you can sit this out. Everyone else, a jog lap, then Michelle and Mona, you lead them into stretches.”

  “I do what everyone else on the team does,” I informed him, which was obnoxious, given that I had just tried to sneak in a guy’s stick. He gave me a look that said so. I gave a little shrug and joined the other girls in their jog.

  Part of me was ashamed of the attitude I had adopted in the last fifteen minutes. I knew from listening to Dad over the years what a tough job coaching was and I’d always been respectful toward mine. Jogging with the pack, I wished I had gotten off to a better start, wished it was already next week and I was working out at a Y somewhere.

  “So who taught you to play?” asked the girl who was jogging to the right of me. I recognized the voice as belonging to my personal cheerleader.

  “My dad.”

  “Obviously,” said a blonde girl with a bouncing ponytail, who ran on my left.

  “How come you never played on a team?” another girl called over her shoulder.

  “Didn’t have any. Lacrosse isn’t big in my part of Michigan.”

  “What sport did you play?” my cheerleader asked.

  “Basketball, Mona, obviously,” answered the girl on my left.

  “Maybe,” replied Mona. “But I hate it when people assume stuff like that. If you’re tall or you’re black, they insist that you play basketball.”

  I glanced sideways at her. “Actually, I did play basketball.”

  “Me, too,” she admitted—she was African American. “But I worship lacrosse. Fastest game on two feet.”

  “I’m glad we have an extra player,” said a girl who had pulled up alongside the blonde on my left, and who was also blonde. We were a herd of blondish ponytails bouncing along, with Mona, two Chinese girls, and a redhead being the only exceptions among the sixteen players. “One more for a substitution when we scrimmage. Last year, Josh worked us till we were dead.”

  Apparently, Josh had the same goal this year. This wasn’t some fluffy summer camp; he drilled us like he thought we were going pro, but he knew his stuff, and he knew how to teach.

  After three hours, we were dismissed with the instruction to keep drinking water. I flopped on the grass, then a strong hand reached down and yanked me up. “Shade’s over here,” Mona said. I followed her to a spot beneath some leafy maples.

  For a few moments we just sat and sucked on the straws of our water bottles.

  “You’re good. You’ll pick it up fast,” she said at last.

  “Only if I can still walk tomorrow.”

  Mona laughed. “Having known you since nine A.M. today, I’m ready to predict that you’d play on your knees if you had to.”

  “I would.”

  She smiled. Mona was one of those rare people whose enthusiasm and friendliness made you forget her terrific looks. She could have been a statue in a museum, right there next to the Greek gods and athletes, with her powerful body, long neck, and high cheekbones. Her hair was pulled back sleek against her head, with thin braids wound at the nape. Monalisa Devine—even her name sounded Olympian to me.

  We watched the other girls break into groups, with one large circle forming around the two blondes I’d talked to on the jog lap, Michelle and her sidekick, Brooke.

  “It seems like a lot of the girls already know each other,” I observed.

  “A lot of us go to school here. That group, for instance,” Mona said with a nod in Michelle’s direction.

  “You go to Stonegate?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t sounded so surprised.

  “I know, I don’t quite fit in with the silky blonde ponytail crowd,” she replied, then reached to pull on mine, as if to say, no offense. “It wasn’t my first choice. My grandmother is big into education—she’s a professor at Towson University. She raised me and wanted me to have the opportunities she had to fight for, even if it meant a lousy social life. Which it has. But the sports have been great, and if you want to learn, you definitely can in a place like this. Want a tour?”

  “Yeah!”
/>   The water had worked its magic, and I sprung up to collect my two sticks.

  “We’ll stash this stuff in my locker at the girls’ gym,” Monalisa said.

  Halfway across the field we passed Ms. Mahler and Josh in an intense conversation. Ms. Mahler turned to look at us, which prompted Mona to smile and wave. Josh acted as if he didn’t see us. When we had passed them Mona laughed to herself. “The big M, as we call her, is not at bad as you think. She’s a fixture at Stonegate and dates back from the time when people didn’t take girls’ sports seriously. So when you came in here carrying a guy’s stick and assuming you could just jump right onto varsity, you set her off.”

  I nodded. “I can understand. I think I set both of them off.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Josh. He gets kind of strange and gruff when he’s doing camp, probably because we’re so close to his age and some of us knew him when he went to school here. He’ll be a sophomore at Hopkins.”

  She turned to look over her shoulder, then waved her stick at him. I turned as well and Josh, who had been watching us, quickly showed us his back and continued his conversation with the big M.

  “Hmm,” Mona said. “Maybe you did set him off.”

  Chapter 6

  “Monalisa Devine,” my mother repeated. “What a wonderful name for a romantic heroine. I keep lists of names, you know.”

  I felt as if I were eight again, coming home from school, having a snack with my mother and talking over my day. It was a little weird, but nice. We sat behind the living room and stairway, in a small room with one window and the only AC unit on the first floor. Mom’s house was like a train, with the living room, den, dining room, and kitchen lined up one behind the other, the house narrowing toward the rear to create an airway along one side.

  “Are there other camps you can sign up for after this one?” Mom asked. “I’m doing all right financially, Jamie. I’d be glad to pay for another camp.”

  “There are all kinds of camps going on at Stonegate, guys’ lacrosse in the afternoon, basketball next week, camps for underprivileged kids. It’s wild. But I really should get a job, Mom.”

  “It’s going to be hard to get one now, especially with you leaving for orientation in August.”

  “I know of a job,” Viktor said, entering from the stairway hall. My head spun around. I wished he’d learn to make noise when he walked.

  “They need a receptionist at the health club.”

  “Your health club?”

  Can a guy smile coyly? Viktor did. “And your mother’s.”

  “That’s perfect, baby. And I’m sure they’d let you use the facilities as part of the benefits.”

  Oh, great, I thought, I could work out right next to my mother and be instructed by her boyfriend. I seized upon Mom’s wise observation that most people didn’t want to hire for a six- or seven-week period.

  Viktor shrugged. “I won’t tell them if you don’t. You have to look out for yourself, Jamie. It isn’t your job to worry about the problems of the manager and owner. That’s the way the game goes.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, and took another chocolate cookie from the bag in front of me.

  Perhaps I was being unfair. If Mona had said, “Hey, Jamie, you have to look out for yourself,” maybe I would have heard it as a rallying call for a girl’s right to do whatever. But coming from Viktor, I heard it as selfish and sneaky. I just could not cut the man a break.

  “Where did you get those?” Viktor asked, as my mother reached for her third cookie.

  “The bakery.”

  He looked at Mom as if she had just thrown back her fourth martini.

  “Rita, I’m surprised at you,” he said disapprovingly.

  My mother gazed at the little white bag. “Jamie needs energy.”

  “Try one, they’re good,” I told him.

  “Thank you. No,” he answered coolly.

  “Are you going to be downstairs for a while?” I asked him. “Because I’d like to take a shower.”

  He understood that I expected full privacy on the second floor, at least for twenty minutes. “I’ll stay down here.”

  As I rose to leave the room, I heard Mom say to him sweetly, “If you don’t want this last cookie, darling, I’ll take it,” and I laughed to myself.

  At dinner we made up for our sins from the bakery with some kind of veggie-and-tofu thing that Viktor made and that was, I had to admit, pretty good. After cleaning up, Mom and Viktor went for a walk down The Avenue. There was a building for lease, which he wanted her to see. I read the sports page and feature sections from cover to cover and wandered restlessly about the house. No baseball game was scheduled that night, and I felt a little shy about asking Ted to play catch with me. At last I grabbed my basketball and headed out back. I had noticed that several houses down, at the corner where our alley joined another alley at a right angle, there was an old hoop mounted on a board.

  The basket had no net and the ball banged loudly against the wooden backboard, rattling its rusty hoop. There were certain shots I couldn’t take because one fence or another was in the way, but just the bounce-bounce-shoot rhythm soothed me. I had been shooting about fifteen minutes when Ted came out.

  “Hey, Jamie.”

  “Hey, Ted, want to shoot around?”

  “The thing is, I’m a great fan, but a lousy player.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me. I’m just fooling around.”

  He opened the squeaky wire gate at the end of the yard and stood watching for a moment. I sensed he wanted to play, and passed the ball to him.

  “I miss about ninety percent of the time,” he said self-consciously.

  “Perfect!” I replied. “You’ll boost my ego, and believe me, I need it.” I told him about my first day of lacrosse camp, the powerful Ms. Mahler, my face-off with Josh, and my struggle to learn the girls’ game.

  Ted listened quietly as we took turns shooting—he really wasn’t bad—then said “Josh Hammond? He’s an incredible midfielder. You ought to see him play, Jamie. Next year he’s going to be Hopkins’s best all-around player. I predict it.”

  “Well, he’s got a bit of an attitude,” I said.

  “He doesn’t on the field. He’s intense, but he’s a team player. Actually, even off the field—he was in my lab last semester, and he didn’t act like he thought he was cool or anything.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to argue about it, especially since I may have been the one that caused the attitude. We continued to shoot.

  “If you have any advice for me, Coach…” Ted said.

  “Just a little. Relax your wrists.”

  The ball swished through the ring.

  “Beauty!”

  “Where do you think the foul line would be?” Ted asked.

  I drew an imaginary line with my toe, and he positioned himself behind it.

  “It’s a tie game, three seconds left, and Wu is at the foul line,” I said in an announcer’s voice. “Ted has been the anchor of this year’s team and is sporting a seventy percent free-throw average.”

  Ted laughed at that, and I lined up along the imaginary lane.

  “Will Wu’s team go to the NCAA Semifinals?”

  Ted tossed up the ball. It came caroming off the rim.

  “Rebound!” I screamed. “Carvelli has it. She dribbles, she clears, she turns, she shoots!”

  Swish!

  Ted’s laughter was joined with someone else’s, a quiet, resonant laugh. We both turned around.

  “Hey, Andrew,” Ted said. “Just get home?”

  “About ten minutes ago.”

  He was smiling at me. “Hello, Jamie.”

  Sometimes, “hello” is a word intended to start a conversation. Sometimes it’s a word used simply in passing. Once in a great while, if said slowly and with a slight tilt of the head, it expands into a long and tantalizing moment of just looking at each other. And did he ever know how to say it that way!

  “Hi.” My response was unimagina
tive and short. “Want to play?”

  He laughed quietly. “One-on-one with Jamie in the moonlight.”

  A girl who had experience in romance rather than sports would have taken that bait and then offered her own, but I said, “You mean two-on-one.”

  He looked amused. “Two-on-one. You against Ted and me?”

  “Okay.”

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  “Don’t laugh too hard,” Ted informed his roommate. “You haven’t seen what she can do.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen some. But actually, I came out to ask for help unloading my Jeep.”

  “Did you get the bookcases?” Ted asked.

  “Yep, I’m parked out front.”

  “I can unload,” I offered.

  “You can admire,” Andrew replied, and opened the gate for us.

  I tossed my basketball into my mother’s yard and followed them through the house. I was told to hold the door, and did so, but thought it was dumb given all the boxes that needed to be brought in.

  “Are you building a library?” I asked.

  “He has a library; he’s building shelves for it,” Ted replied. “Andrew’s an English major. And a writer.”

  “No kidding! My mom’s a writer.” The moment I spoke those words, I wanted to suck them back into my mouth.

  “She is?” Andrew looked at me with surprise. “She is?” he said, turning to Ted as if wondering why Ted had never mentioned this. “What does she write?”

  I hesitated. “Books.”

  He laughed.

  “Popular fiction,” I said, thinking it sounded better than steamy romances. “That’s why she’s home so much.”

  “Oh. I assumed she was just a divorcée living off her husband’s income.”

  “Mom supports herself. She always has.”

  Hearing the edge in my voice, he threw up his hands in surrender. “I never really talked to her, Jamie, so I didn’t know. I’ve just seen her, and that blond guy, going in and out.”

  I didn’t identify “that blond guy” for him.

  Ted had sat down on the floor and opened one of the boxes. “These bookcases are going to be terrific,” he said.