Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink (19 page)

Mr. Auggy led her to a bench by the wall at the end of the sixth-grade wing, a place no one ever sat because it was full of splinters. He took off his sweatshirt and spread it on the seat and motioned for Lucy to sit on it. She plopped herself down. With his foot on the bench and his forearms resting on his knee, he looked straight into her eyes.

“Miss Lucy,” he said, “did you actually see Dusty and Veronica mess up your cubby?”

She shook her head.

“Did you dust for fingerprints and find theirs on your belongings?”

“No!” Was he serious?

He appeared to be, as he searched her face with his eyes. “Do you have any other evidence that they’re the ones who did it?”

“No. I just know.”

“Female intuition?”

“Huh?”

“It’s that thing girls get inside that they can’t explain. Or so they tell me.” Mr. Auggy tilted his head so the silky part of his hair slid across his forehead. “Is that what tells you Dusty and Veronica are the culprits?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy said. “I’m not, like, your average girl.”

“I know that.” Mr. Auggy sat beside her. “You’re better than the average girl.”

Lucy gave a nod. “Better at soccer.”

“Better at a lot of things. Better than a girl who would accuse somebody for any other reason than that they actually did it.”

“Who else would do it?” Lucy heard herself blurt out. “They hate me because I’m not Hispanic — only that was never a big deal before because they just left me alone, but now that I have to play soccer with them — ” She turned her face away from his. “You’ve seen how Dusty makes me fall down on purpose every chance she gets — only you never blow your whistle at her.”

“Because I’ve never seen that.”

Lucy looked at him sideways. He had his hand over his heart like he was about to say the pledge. “Honest.”

Then he wasn’t a very good referee. She sighed.

“What’s the point anyway? I’m not going to play soccer here anymore, and then I don’t have to deal with them. Maybe we can just go back to leaving each other alone.”

“You’re better than that too.”

“Better than what?”

“Better than somebody who quits without trying to work things out.”

Lucy shrugged. “What’s to work out? I’d have to learn Spanish or dye my skin or something.”

“Did you know I went to college in France?”

Lucy blinked. What did that have to do with anything?

“I butchered the French language. I must have sounded like a baby just learning to talk. But this one guy — his name was Alain — asked me to play on a soccer team he was getting together.” The small smile appeared. “He didn’t care that I called everything the wrong name. He wanted me because I knew how to pass and shoot.”

“Oh,” Lucy said. She was kind of interested.

“Alain put guys from about ten different countries together, and some of them had governments that were practically at war with each other. But when we were on the field, we just concentrated on the game.”

“Did you win a lot?”

The smile turned into a grin, though still small. “We kicked tail. And we got to be friends. George, a guy from Africa, I didn’t trust him at all when we first started. I thought he hated my guts because he hated all white people. But I just went to see him last month for Christmas.”

Lucy felt her eyes widen.

“Sometimes I think about what I would have missed if I hadn’t learned to focus on what was really important. I kind of think wars would stop if everybody just got out there and played soccer. You think so?”

“Me?”

“You’re a better than average girl. I know you have a lot of thoughts in there that you just aren’t saying.”

Lucy grunted. “I think that’s kind of a good thing most of the time.”

Mr. Auggy laughed.

“So — ” Lucy drew a circle in the dirt with her toe. “I should come back and play soccer with Dusty and Veronica? Even if they hate me?”

“I can guarantee you they don’t hate you. I have a white mother, and they don’t hate me — and they might, especially because I’m a teacher telling them what to do.” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Lucy, as into the way things look as those two are, it would drive them batty to see a cubby throwing up on the floor like that right across from theirs. I don’t think they’re guilty.”

“Then who did it?”

“Don’t know — but I do suggest you apologize to them.”

“Do I have to?”

“As a better-than-average girl — yes, I think you do. But it’s up to you. I can’t squeeze it out of your mouth.”

Neither could she.

“I will say this, though.” Mr. Auggy rubbed his hands up and down on the tops of his legs. “You’ll need to do it before you come back out for soccer. And you’re cheating yourself if you don’t, because, Miss Lucy, you are a natural-born soccer player. ”

He stood up and hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, and Lucy remembered she was sitting on his sweatshirt. As she scrambled up, he gave her the small smile and said, “I want to teach you everything I know.”

So after school, Lucy waited by the neat, color-coded binders in Dusty and Veronica’s cubbies until they appeared, and she did squeeze out an apology, even though she would rather have been at the dentist having a tooth filled without any novocaine. They looked at each other, and Dusty said, “Okay,” and Veronica nodded, with her mouth, of course, open. Lucy was sure that conversation wasn’t going to stop any wars.

But at least it meant she could play soccer at recess, and she had to. Mr. Auggy said she was a “natural-born soccer player.” Besides, since Dad was making her stay home with Inez and Mora after school, she would only get to play twice a week — on Saturday and Sunday with her own team — if she didn’t participate at school.

J.J. wasn’t having a good time. Lucy could tell that, even though he didn’t talk about it much — or about anything else, really. He spent most of his time on the soccer field trying to keep from being hit in the head, the shoulder, the backside by balls shot at him by Gabe. Mr. Auggy didn’t catch most of that, and even though Carla Rosa pointed it out — “Guess what — he did that on purpose” — J.J. always shook his head and crammed his jaw down hard and kept playing. And Gabe kept smiling like everybody worshiped him.

Maybe it worked in France, but it wasn’t working in Los Suenos, New Mexico. Lucy tried to focus, though, on passing and dribbling and kicking. Every day she learned something new and figured she was pretty close to being taught everything Mr. Auggy knew, like he said. Once she got everything down, it was going to be all about her team on their big dream field.

Finally, at the speed of a herd of turtles, Saturday came. Lucy shoved most of the debris in her room under her bed, cleaned Marmalade’s litter box, and put away all the clothes Dad folded.

Dad felt the stickers in their squares on the chore chart and, except for telling her to take care of what he loved, didn’t say much. Lucy felt a little lonely as she stuffed a bottle of water and her soccer ball into her backpack — which now smelled like school bathroom soap — but once she met J.J. and Januarie on the sidewalk and kissed Mudge on the nose, it was all about soccer.

“How come that cat lets you touch him and nobody else?” Januarie huffed as she struggled to keep up with them on her bike.

“He loves me, I guess,” Lucy said.

“Do you love him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Better than all your other cats?”

“I love them all the same amount — I just love them different.”

“But do you love him the MOST?”

“Januarie — ” J.J. said.

“I brought cookies,” Lucy said quickly. J.J. wasn’t snarling, yet, and she’d like to keep it that way. There should be no snarling in soccer.

And there wasn’t much. It felt so free to run down their bigger-than- life-itself field on that seamless-sky morning without having to worry that Dusty was going to trip her, or that Gabe was going to pick a fight with J.J. She could practice the words Mr. Auggy taught them to use with each other without a worry in the world.

Sort of.

“Cross it!” she called out to J.J., which meant “send a ball, high in the sky, to the center.” But there was no one there to trap it.

She wanted to try “man on,” which meant, “hurry up, there’s a player on you,” only there was never anyone on anyone else. In fact, they looked pretty lost out there with only five players.

Lucy pulled J.J. aside when they called for a water break, and Januarie was serving it in plastic cups just big enough for a swallow.

“We need more people,” she said to him in a low voice.

“We’re okay just like we are,” he said.

“No, seriously. We can’t use all the stuff Mr. Auggy’s teaching us with just us.”

J.J.’s eyes narrowed down so that they almost seemed to meet over his nose. “I’m not playing with Gabe.”

“Did I say Gabe?” Lucy said.

“Then who?”

“I don’t know.”

“And not Januarie.”

Lucy glanced over at his round sister, who was currently telling Oscar he could not drink out of the only bottle she had.

“Don’t be such a pig,” Lucy heard her say. Mr. Auggy would be buzzing his head off.

“We’re okay,” J.J. said. “We keep Januarie quiet with my dad, and we just play. That’s what we always did before, only this is better.” He jerked his head toward the field — and froze.

Lucy did too.

Three figures stood at the edge of the field, the afternoon sun shaping them into silhouettes of Gabe and the Gigglers. Lucy’s team stared over their cups.

“Who told them we were here?” J.J. said.

Lucy chewed on her thumbnail. This could ruin things worse than Januarie ever could.

“Did you?”

Lucy looked up to find J.J. slicing her with his eyes.

“Me?” she said. “Why would I do that?”

“You just said you wanted more people.”

“Not them!”

By then, Gabe was coming across the field with the two girls trailing behind and Lucy’s team bringing up the rear. J.J. was doing his hands-in-his- armpits thing. Januarie was whimpering like a wounded Chihuahua. And Lucy was tired of everybody messing up every single thing. She stepped in front of J.J. and waited for Gabe and the Gigglers to get to her.

“This is our field,” she said.

Dusty peeked around Gabe. “Hi, Lucy.”

Lucy ignored her. “We found it. We cleaned it up. And we don’t have to play with you here.”

Gabe lifted his chin at her. “Does my old man know you’re hanging out here?”

“Your what?” Lucy said.

“His father,” Veronica said. “He calls him his old man.”

“Shut up,” Gabe said.

Behind him, Oscar gave a loud buzz.

“What does you father have to do with it?” Lucy said.

“Guess what? He’s the sheriff.” Carla Rosa gave Gabe a wary look and stepped backward into Emanuel, who also stepped back and let her dump to the ground.

“Okay, so he’s the sheriff. Big deal.” Lucy folded her arms. “He doesn’t own this field.”

“Neither do you.” Gabe shrugged his too-big-for-him shoulders. “But he says who gets to hang out in vacant lots.”

“It ain’t vacant,” Oscar said.

Gabe smirked. “It will be if I tell him it is.”

“Oh, puh-leeze,” Lucy said. “You do not tell the sheriff what to do, even if he is your father. I’m so over you.” She nodded at Januarie. “Give me the ball. We’re playing soccer.”

“Not for long if my dad thinks it’s too dangerous.”

“It’s not dangerous. What’s dangerous about it?”

Gabe grunted. “He’ll find something.”

Suddenly he sounded like every other kid complaining about his parents. Dusty stepped up next to him.

“His dad’s kind of a control freak,” she said. “But, anyway, why can’t we just play with you?”

“Why?” said Lucy. “Because you’ll take over. Because you’ll trip me and make me break my face. Because Gabe will finally make J.J. mad enough to stop backing down, and he’ll go off on Gabe with all the mad he has stored up inside him — and it won’t be fun. I just want it to be fun.”

“Okay,” Dusty said. “So I won’t trip you — not like I ever did — and Gabe will be nice to J.J.” She gave Gabe a poke in the side. “And we’ll have fun because that’s all me and Veronica want anyway.”

Lucy stared. Had she actually said all of that out loud? She was going to have to start putting duct tape over her own mouth.

“Okay?” Dusty said. Lucy noticed for the first time ever that Dusty’s face was the shape of a heart and that her eyes were more gold than brown. At the moment, they looked hopeful and nothing else.

Lucy was hopeful too that someday — soon — they could play real soccer.

“Okay,” she said. And without looking at J.J., she took the ball Januarie had tossed to her and ran onto the field. “Same teams as at school,” she said to the air.

“Me too?” Januarie cried.