The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (27 page)

Padeen checked herself in the mirror again, turning this way and that. “Don't worry about it,” she said.

“I'm not worried,” I said.

Padeen turned from the mirror, hands on her hips. I watched her take in my short, matted hair and chapped lips, my dirty sweatshirt and jeans. “I know,” she laughed. “You don't have anything to worry about.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. I worried about not being like other girls, and about not wanting to be. My greatest hope was to grow into a man, or short of that, into some kind of woman I couldn't imagine. Someone very different from the mothers and wives and nuns we knew.

“You should worry about being in my room,” Padeen said. “Get out.” She pulled me off the chest and pushed me toward the door. “And don't you dare come in while I'm gone.” Over her shoulder, I caught sight of the Lip Smackers on the bedside table.

When Padeen was out of the house long enough, I stood at the landing vanity she shared with Diane and smeared on lip gloss. I looked at myself in the big pink mirror, tilting my head one way, then the other. I mostly looked the same, still pale, puffy, and uncombed, but with greasy lips. Nothing could transform me into Padeen, who would always be prettier, smarter, better, first.

 

But I followed Padeen the way a good defensive player does on the basketball court, eyes fixed at the heart of her, alert for signature moves and not letting her shake me.

One night that same winter, Chris took me along to a basketball game. We were supposedly going to see the Mustangs play, but I was there to watch Padeen, and Chris was there to meet up with Sue, the girl who would soon be his first wife. The roar in the gym was deafening, screaming fans stamping on wooden bleachers stacked from court to ceiling, the screech of refs' whistles and the bone-rattling buzz of shot clocks. At the epicenter of this delirious mayhem were cheerleaders, waving and smiling and egging it on. There was Padeen, thrusting pom-poms and raising her fist.

Chris tugged my hand to keep walking and leaned down to say something when I resisted. “What?” I shouted back.

He pointed to a section near the top, where Sue sat with some of her brothers and a group of other girls. Sue, straight hair, thin lips, and skinny body, made me nervous. I shook my head and pulled the other way, toward the court. Chris looked around, uncertain, then spotted a friend of Padeen's behind the Mustang bench, a blond boy who lived on Upper River Road, not far from us. Chris picked me up, babylike, and plunked me on the aisle next to Padeen's friend. Chris pointed to Padeen, then to me, and the boy smiled and gave Chris the thumbs-up.

“Don't move!” Chris shouted in my ear. “Dad's coming at halftime.” I wasn't listening. I was watching the line of look-alike girls, long hair and longer legs, and all their parts swaying together. Soon I was moving too. I took a short step into the aisle and started cheering along, raising my hands in the air, looking over one shoulder, pretending to flip my cropped hair, and poking out first one hip, then the other. Teenagers on all sides clapped and laughed. I wiggled my butt up where Chris sat with Sue, then spun around and wiggled it at the other side of the gym. The kids around me roared for more.

At the halftime buzzer, people started pushing down the aisle. I stepped back to my seat, where Padeen was already leaning through the bench of players to reach me. I flew into her arms. She dropped me hard to the wood floor and marched across the slick court, pulling me behind. She hit the spring-loaded metal bar on the big gym door without breaking stride, and I flinched to see my father waiting on the other side. Padeen pushed me into him, where I was stung by the sudden shift from heated gym to chill parking lot.

“How was it?” Dad said, turning me around and holding on.

“Take her,” Padeen said, shaking her blond, backlit hair so it shone like a halo around her face. Behind her was the silhouette of a bucking mustang above a sizable crucifix. “She's a brat.”

I stared at the wall, not looking at either of them. My chest hurt.

“How's that?” Dad said, big hands heavy on my shoulders.

Padeen glanced back at the mass of people swarming across the stands. “How she acts,” she said. “Just everything.”

“They clapped,” I said.

Padeen rolled her eyes. “They think you're a brat,” she said, her face even with mine so I'd get it.

“I was being like you,” I said.

She stood straight and took a cheerleader-like backward march into the gym. “You're not me,” she said. “You're . . .”

I waited, hopeful. What was I?

“If you can't act like a big girl, you can't go places,” Dad said, steering my shoulders away from the gym and toward the dark parking lot.

I pulled back, facing Padeen. “I was acting like a big girl,” I said, “just like you.”

“See what I mean?” Padeen said to Dad, then grabbed the door bar and yanked the door closed between us.

 

After her freshman year, Padeen left Central, where homework was placed in a little basket at each class door like donations tossed anonymously into a collection plate. When she did not tithe adequately in algebra, Dad said he'd be damned to pay for Cs from someone as smart as Padeen, and she was sent to public school.

Charles M. Russell High was all the way across town, a well-lit, modern building on a sprawling campus with an indoor pool, big theater, and manicured track. It opened just a few years before Padeen started there. Where Central had the fading head of Christ painted above the front doors (so like my brothers and their friends: gentle young features obscured by facial hair), CMR had a six-foot stone bison skull out front, with cowboy artist Charlie Russell's signature etched across it. Russell was our town's secular saint, a painter whose work captured the last days of the real frontier like an illustrated gospel of how God intended things to be.

CMR had nearly 1,500 students—a town by Montana standards—and a hard-driving reputation for excellence. A girl used to smaller and less might have struggled there, but not Padeen. She left cheerleading and made varsity swimming. She wrote for
The Stampede
and won awards for her columns and editorials across four states. She made editor, which got her the Silver Key of Journalism, given annually to a single Montana student. She was one of four CMR girls invited to the leadership conference at Girls' State. She was vice president of her class, Key Club Sweetheart, Thespian of the Year. One cold season, I sat in the CMR theater with my parents watching Padeen play Miep in
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Miep was the young woman who risked everything to do what her heart told her. She saved the diary but not the Franks, which didn't impress me much.

“I don't get it,” I said when the lights went up.

My mother put her red hair next to mine and said quietly, “Anne died.” She pulled a wadded Kleenex from under her cuff and wiped her nose. Dad was already gone. He'd fought in the war, lost two brothers in Europe, and once Padeen was offstage he'd cleared out.

“If I was Miep,” I said, “I would've saved Anne.”

“Sometimes that's just not possible,” my mother said, taking my hand. I let her pull me past empty plush seats and up the wide center stairs, but I couldn't believe she was right.

 

Padeen was a snowball princess at the winter formal, where her prince was Rory Bosch. They were soon inseparable. Rory quarterbacked for the Rustlers in the fall and was on varsity track in the spring. His family had come from Croatia a generation or so back, and with his curly dark hair, a deep cleft in his strong chin, and an athlete's easy grace, Rory breathed a fragrant air of Mediterranean glamour onto our dry plains.

Padeen was taking me to swim practice one chill spring day after school, and we swung by CMR first to get something from her locker. She left me hunched in my mud-stained ski jacket by the track, watching Rory practice the pole vault. Frost laced the ground, but the sun was warm on my face. Nearby, a meadowlark trilled endlessly for an answering mate.

Rory was all elbows and knees and shuddering horizontal pole as he sprinted down the straightaway, like a warrior on an antique vase. When he shoved the pole toward the track all forward momentum stopped, then he was floating upward, a graceful comma interrupting endless blue before falling back to earth again. Rory sprang from the mat, smiling, and waved my way. I grinned back and started to raise my hand when I realized he was waving at Padeen, who'd come up behind me. I yanked it down, hoping they hadn't noticed.

Rory leaped from the mat and bounded toward us. He grabbed my jacket sleeve and pulled me against him, hugging hard, sweat and chlorine puffing up between us, then tugged Padeen, cherry and vanilla and herbal shampoo, into our huddle. “You are the luckiest girls I know,” he said.

“Because we have you?” Padeen laughed, but looked like she might believe it.

“Naw,” he said, hopping foot to foot in his shorts and singlet, cleats crunching on the frosted grass. “Because you've got each other.”

Everyone knew about Rory's older brother, Kerry, who'd also played football for CMR until he crashed in a Camaro at 18. The other three boys in the car died on impact, but Kerry lingered in a coma for nearly two years before his heartbroken parents removed life support, 28 days before his 20th birthday.
Twenty-eight days before he turned 20
. I heard that so many times later, I just wanted people to stop saying it.

“And you have us,” Padeen said, touching Rory's shoulder where his singlet met skin.

“Hey,” Rory said, “hang out and I'll come with you.” Rory lived on the other side of us, farther down Route 2 South outside of town.

“We can't,” Padeen said, “she'll be late for swimming.”

“Don't you want to wait for me?” Rory said, holding his hand palm-up for me to slap.

“Yes,” I said, giving it a hard whack.

Padeen hooked her hand under my armpit. “I'll be right back,” she told Rory.

“I'll freeze by then.”

“Put on a jacket.”

“Don't have one,” Rory said, hugging his shoulders for effect.

“Then run,” my sister said.

Rory nodded seriously, then took off doing high knees across the grass. He glanced over his shoulder to see if we were looking, and we were. “You're coming back?” he shouted.

“Maybe,” she yelled, smiling to herself even as we walked away.

Padeen had started teaching Brendhan and me Spanish when we were in the car. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco,” she began, as we pulled out of the high school parking lot.

She was fired up about Spanish because the previous month she'd gotten a bicycle trip for her birthday. Come summer, she was supposed to go with other Catholic kids to France, where they'd pick up bikes and ride a medieval pilgrimage road south, then over the Pyrenees and due west on to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Padeen was actually on the waiting list, but the tour company said
Assume she's in
, since no one had ever missed going. She got her passport, bike shorts, and panniers before the letter came saying there wouldn't be room. Missing out on Spain would prove the opening blow, after so many charmed years.

Padeen rolled down her window and waved to Rory, who stood midtrack, watching us drive away. “Hasta pronto!” she trilled with Latin vigor, then rolled up the window against the cold.

“Are you going to marry Rory?” I said.

“Cuántos años tienes?” she said.

I counted in my head in Spanish. “Ocho?”

“Muy bien!”

“Are you?”

“Cómo?”

“Stop it.”

“You can love someone,” Padeen said slowly, “and not marry them right away.” She raked her hair away from her face, and her broad forehead was clenched, serious. “You can wait.”

“Chris and Sue didn't wait,” I said. The previous summer I'd worn a purple halter dress and a shoulder-to-fingertip cast on my right arm when Chris and Sue got married in our big backyard. Our neighbors who owned the dairy, the Mitchells, came to the wedding, but that very morning my mother had stood at the window watching the manure spreader inch along our perimeter fence. “You'd think it could wait just this one day,” she said, to no one in particular. She sighed, not deeply, and went back to the kitchen. None of us expected the world to adjust itself on our account.

“What are you waiting for?” I said, because I really didn't know.

“You sound like Rory,” Padeen said, clicking on the radio and turning it up.

 

Padeen's senior year, Rory waged a campaign to keep her in Great Falls. He wrote letters, poems, songs for her, all variations on the theme of her staying.

He knew what it meant to lose someone, and he didn't want to lose her. He issued no ultimatums, no threats, but he hoped she'd choose the good reality of him over a vague dream of college. Padeen compromised. With her grades and awards she might have gone anywhere, but she chose the University of Montana, just three hours—two and a half if you gunned it—from Great Falls.

In late September 1975, John drove Padeen to Missoula with her stuff rolling around the back of his pickup in a couple of black garbage bags. At the corner of Arthur and Daly, he slammed to a stop and cranked the emergency brake. He left the driver-side door hanging open, engine running, and jumped out to haul her bags onto the sidewalk. Padeen stepped into the street, zipped up her jacket, and took a long look at the big buildings receding toward the mountains. It was starting to snow. She walked slowly around the back of the truck. “Where do I go?” she said.

“Hell if I know,” John said, grinning. “It's your school.” He pointed toward the cluster of buildings across the street. “Over there somewhere,” he said, then jumped into his truck and took off. Padeen hauled her own bags across the street and onto the big gray paths of campus, pioneering two broad drag marks behind her in the fresh snow.