Shots on Goal (6 page)

It got noticeably cooler as the sun went down. Eileen picks up my sweatshirt, the one that had the bottles wrapped in it, and asks if she can wear it. “That’s not real clean,” I say.

“It won’t kill me,” she says, pulling it down over her head. The shirt says
Sturbridge Soccer
, and since she doesn’t play, but I do, I get a little uneasy about how that will look at the game. But I let it go.

Shannon stands up and puts on her jacket, and we all start heading toward the path. I’ll come back for the gym bag tomorrow.

You run the gauntlet of most of the school on your way from the ticket booth to the bleachers. Joey and Shannon are holding hands, with Eileen on one side of them and me on the other, but I can tell people are looking at us as if me and Eileen are together. Which I suppose we are.

I want to get to the bleachers, to be inconspicuous, but Joey leads Shannon toward the refreshment stand, where everybody from our team is hanging. Herbie and some others are over on the dark side, near the bathrooms. Herbie’s leaning against the building with a cigarette in his mouth, and Rico and Trunk and Hernandez are there, too.

“Were you on your bench before?” Shannon asks Herbie.

“Of course,” he says.

“Like an hour ago?” she asks.

“Probably. How come?”

“Told you,” I say.

“We were up on the hill,” Shannon says.

“I know.”

“You could see us?” she asks.

“I could pick you out a mile away, beautiful.”

She blushes and laughs. Herbie, too.

Rico and Trunk and Hernandez are staring at Shannon,
who’s got two fingers through one of Joey’s belt loops. Eileen pulls on Shannon’s arm and says, “Let’s hit the bathroom.”

They walk away without saying anything.

“What’d you guys drink?” Herbie asks.

“Wine,” Joey says. “Guy at work got it for us.”

“You get them drunk?”

“Think so,” Joey says. “Hope so.”

Herbie turns to me and smirks. I kind of roll my eyes. Rico says something to Hernandez under his breath and they giggle. I glare at them. I didn’t hear what they said, but I know what they’re talking about. I start to explain about helping Joey and all, but stop after one word. “She’s—”; then I say screw it to myself. “I’m going to take a piss,” I say, and walk away.

Girls generally take longer in the bathroom than guys, so when I come out they’re coming out, too. Shannon puts her arm around my shoulders; that makes me feel sort of warm but also like I’m her little brother or something. My hands are at my sides.

“Let’s get munchies,” Shannon says.

So we go to the refreshment window and she asks for four Cokes and two lollipops. “Okay, Eileen?” she says, turning to her.

“Yeah. Get me a purple one.”

I reach for my wallet, but Shannon says she’ll pay. She takes her arm off my shoulders and pulls out her wallet. She takes out four dollars and sets her wallet on the counter.

She picks up two of the Cokes and Eileen takes the others.
“Would you put my wallet in my pocket?” Shannon asks me. She eases her butt toward me, and I slip the wallet into the right back pocket of her jeans, which is a tight squeeze. I do it as carefully as possible. Eileen smiles and shakes her head. Then we walk back to where Joey and the others are.

We sit about fifteen rows up at the forty-yard line: Joey-Shannon-me-Eileen.

We fall behind early, but Lenny Olver takes a pitchout in the second quarter and goes forty-eight yards with it, tying the score. The band breaks into “Born to Run” and the cheerleaders do a kind of sexy dance.

I nudge Shannon.

“Why aren’t you down there?”

“Cheering?”

“Yeah.”

She shakes her head. “I’m too flat.”

I tilt my head and look closer, and she puts her hand in my face and her other arm over her chest. But she’s laughing.

I give her a look that lets her know what an outrageous statement she’s made, but she clicks her tongue and says, “Well, I am.”

I look past her at Joey, who’s squinting toward the field. He can’t see worth a damn without his glasses. Maybe he can’t hear, either, because he hasn’t said anything since we sat down. He’s just there. In my way.

After the game Shannon and Joey disappear, so me and Eileen walk slowly toward her house. I know where it is because she pointed it out from the cliff. We walk along
Maple, which is a block above Main and is quiet and dark. There’s no sidewalk here, so we walk in the street.

I don’t know what to do with my hands. We don’t say anything, but she keeps looking over at me as we walk.

“Pretty good game,” I say after we’ve gone three blocks.

She lets out her breath. “Yeah.”

We walk another block, and then my hand brushes hers by mistake. “Oh,” she says.

I stick my hand in my pocket. She stops suddenly and steps to the side of the road and bends over.

“What are you doing?” I say.

Then she pukes. Not much gagging, just a couple of quick wet heaves.

I step back and look away. “You all right?” I ask.

She walks back a few feet and doesn’t answer. I hear her say “Shit” to herself. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve, which of course is really
my
sleeve.

After a minute we start walking again.

“You make me really nervous,” she says finally.

“I do?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, you’re out with me, but I don’t exactly seem like your first choice.”

“Oh.”

“You never take your eyes off her.”

I start scratching my jaw. “No?” I stop walking. “Sorry,” I say.

She shrugs. “It’s okay. Sometimes I can’t stop looking at her, either.”

We come down from Maple toward Main. She lives near
the river, on Court Street. We cross Main a block up from Herbie’s bench, which is already occupied. When we’re about a half block in from Main, I hear somebody, sounds like Hernandez, shout, “Go for it, Bones!”

I pretend not to hear. So does she. But Hernandez is due for some sharp elbows at practice next week.

“You feeling okay?” I ask, the first thing I’ve said in a few minutes.

“Yeah,” she says, slowly drawing out the word, like a sigh. She laughs once, almost like a huff of air coming out. “I have a knack for graceful performances like that.”

“Me, too,” I say.

“Yeah? Like what?”

I stop walking and put my foot up on this low cement wall in front of a house. “I was in this play in kindergarten. It was a third-grade play, but they needed some little kids to be stuffed clowns in a toy shop. The toys came to life at night when the shop was closed. So me and two girls from kindergarten got to be in the play. Mostly we just sat there, but in one scene we got to do somersaults and stuff.”

I catch my breath. She sits on the wall about two feet from my shoe. “So I do a somersault and bang my nose on the floor, and blood starts gushing out. They had to stop the play for a while, then they just pulled me off the stage and finished without me.”

“Sounds cute,” she says.

“My mother thought so.”

“I’ve thrown up in school twice,” she says. “Once on the playground in kindergarten and once in seventh grade. All over my desk. Never even felt it coming.”

“Hit anybody else?”

“The girl in front of me, a little. Mr. DiPalma just threw a handful of that green stuff on it.”

“Magic Puke-Away.”

“Yeah. But what stunk was that the nurse wouldn’t even let me go home. I sat in her office for like two hours.”

“You ever wet your pants?” I ask.

Her eyes get wider. “Nice question.”

“I did. Not in school, but at a track meet. In first grade.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear this one.” But she’s smiling and leaning toward me. I sit down.

“It was the Y program. There were more than a hundred kids in it, so there’s twenty heats or so in the hundred meters, and I’m in the eighteenth one. And it’s cool and drizzly, and I’m nervous because this is my first real race. And we finally get to the starting line and get down in our starting position, and I focus on the track ahead of me. The starter goes ‘Take your marks,’ and I stretch out my legs and set my fingers down at the line. ‘Set …’ and I raise up on my fingers and lift my butt, and I feel this warmth spreading over my crotch, and hear this tinkling sound hitting the track. And the starter starts laughing, and he walks over to me and squats down. He’s real nice about it. He just says, ‘There’s a bathroom in that building near the finish line,’ and he pats me on the head.

“Then we go, and I win the race and keep going, right into the bathroom. Which doesn’t really make a lot of sense, since I’ve already gone. So I just pull my shirt out of my shorts and stretch it as low as it goes. But I have to do the long jump next, and the sand sticks to my wet shorts.”

We both crack up. Then we stop. I stop because it dawns
on me that we’re sitting here in the dark on this cement wall, me and her. And I remember Shannon’s remark about making out. And Hernandez’s crack about going for it. We both move our heads about an eighth of a turn and look at each other, then turn back a quarter turn. I start chewing on my lip. She starts bouncing her knee up and down.

We’re quiet for a few minutes, then she says she’d better get in.

“Okay.” We start walking again.

“I’ll wash your sweatshirt,” she says.

“Thanks. No hurry.”

We don’t go up her walk, but hang back in the shadows of the driveway, in the partial light from the porch. And her eyes look sort of scared, or maybe defiant, and her coarse red hair has an electric, shampooed sheen. I inch closer, and she turns her lips toward me, her mouth curling slightly at the corner in a sneer or a twitch or an invitation.

My voice cracks, but I find it, halting my approach for a second. Out comes my half-whispered plea: “Let’s see if you taste like puke.” And she doesn’t; only the hint of a Cert she must have slipped in there.

I back away, nodding and sputtering a good-night.

“ ’Night,” she says, watching me go. Finally I turn with a quick, jerky wave, then walk away in a hurry and don’t look back.

Her lips were moist and firm, surprisingly pleasant for someone with such a nervous stomach.

That was an okay evening.

But this is getting me nowhere.

Saturday is one of the rare nights when the whole family eats together, so Mom makes a big deal of it. She and Dad have wine with dinner, and we eat in the dining room instead of the kitchen.

We sit down for roast beef, and Dad asks Tommy if he got any letters today.

“Two,” he answers. “Bucknell and some little school in Maine.” Tommy has only wrestled two years, but he gets like ten letters a week from colleges trying to recruit him. Part of that comes from the program he’s in—Sturbridge has been nationally ranked the past two seasons. Two guys won state titles in back-to-back weight classes a couple of years ago, and that put us on the map, big-time.

“We’ll need to make some visits soon, to help you get an idea of what these schools are like,” says Mom. “A big school like Penn State or Rutgers is like a city in itself. You might be more at home on a smaller campus.”

My parents went to Lycoming College, out by Williamsport, and they’d like nothing better than for Tommy and me to go there, too. But Lycoming doesn’t offer athletic scholarships, and Tommy’s drive is big enough that he’s wanting to join a major program. I’m guessing it’ll be Penn State, because that’s where the two guys who won the states two years ago went. Everybody’s counting on Tommy to win it this year and next.

“What about you, Barry?” my father asks, turning to me. “Do anything good in practice today?”

“Usual stuff,” I say. “Ran a lot.”

My mother puts her hand on my shoulder. “That Donna Luther was running the register when I checked out at the supermarket this afternoon,” she says. “She’s a real cutie.”

“Is she?” I say, meaning I don’t think so. She’s cute only by a mother’s criteria, meaning attractive in a way that ensures that nothing physical might happen. This is my mother’s way of figuring out if I’m normal, though. Drop names of girls she thinks are safe and gauge my reaction.

Mom’s a loan officer at the bank. Dad sells insurance. Pretty boring jobs, but we’re better off than most of my friends. This is Mom’s town: she grew up here and knows everybody and was Miss Popular all through school. Dad grew up here, too, but he seems a step or two out of touch. He’s two years older, and they hardly knew each other before college.

My parents get to some of my soccer games and track meets. They get to all of the wrestling matches, and most of Tommy’s cross-country races even though he’s only like sixth man on the JV. But I ain’t jealous. I couldn’t hate my brother if I tried.

When I get up to leave my mother asks, “Going to Joey’s?” She never used to even ask. For about eight years it was understood that if I left the house I was going to Joey’s, and if he left his house he was coming over here. Now she figures she has to ask, because she’s beginning to sense that there’s more to my world than Joey’s house. She’s just not sure what.

I shrug and say maybe. But I haven’t been to Joey’s in weeks. I like being on Main Street, but I do miss just hanging in my room or Joey’s once in a while and listening to music or playing chess. Talking about life. About girls. About sex—not how to do it, but whether we’d do it, or when. Now he’s moving in that direction and I’m right where I’ve always been.

I walk up to Main Street. Herbie’s eating a hot dog from Turkey Hill, and Rico’s there, too, chewing gum. Rico’s only been hanging with us a few weeks. He moved here from Jersey City in the middle of our freshman year and hardly said a word to anybody until this season started.

“You’re late,” Herbie says, thrusting a finger at me. “We missed three prime candidates because of your tardiness.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Had to meet my weekly boredom quotient at home.”

“Inexcusable,” he says.

“They’ll be back,” I say. The count is sixty-three, and the pace hasn’t slowed much.

“So how’d the big date go?” Herbie asks. He and Rico are smirking, like they already know all about it.