Play With Me

too.
    Funny, the same
day, Ryan tried to call me. I didn’t answer the phone, but decided to block his
number so I wouldn’t be tempted to pick up should he try again. I couldn’t
sleep all night then, because I wondered if blocking him was the right decision
after all. Close to three in the morning, I cancelled the block. And hey, he’d
tried to reach me two more times. There also was a text message. PLEASE TALK TO
ME.
    Somehow, I
really wanted to reply to that text. I missed him. Hoped he would be honest
with me and could convince me he wasn’t an ass after all. But I was scared he
might do just that, and I’d be the idiot who believed him. So I sent one
message back. GO TO HELL. That text to him at three in the morning was enough
to render him silent. He didn’t try to contact me again after that.
    Fantastic. It
seemed I got just what I wanted. Only that I hated it.
    A few days
before school started again, Susan Miller called me. She wanted me to accompany
her at some shopping for our new classes. I let her talk me into it in a thirty-minute
phone call, and then only because I was curious how the soccer training was
going since I opted out. More, I wanted to find out how things were between
Ryan and Tony, and shopping with Susan was perfect.
    She picked me up
on Friday morning, and we decided to take a walk to town instead of driving her
father’s car. In fact, this was the first time in weeks I made it past the
borders of our garden and into civilization. It felt like I’d been gone from
this world for years. All the more I was surprised that nothing had changed.
    “I missed you at
training,” Susan confessed as we entered the paper shop. Then she made a
gagging face. “Hunter took Millicent Kerns from his Biology class onto the team
to replace you. I swear the girl is like an avalanche when she goes for the
goal. Buries everything underneath her.”
    I grinned at
that picture. One hundred sixty pound Millicent was just the girl to roll
across the field like a snow slide. While we rummaged through a box of pens and
picked several pads, I said in the most nonchalant way, “Yeah, I kind of miss
it, too. But after I hurt my leg the first time, I thought I’d better not do
this murderous sport for a profession.”
    Susan dropped a
pink pencil back into the box and slowly turned to stare at me, folding her
skinny arms over her nonexistent breasts. “Are you shitting me?”
    That grabbed my
attention. I opened my mouth to say something, but I just didn’t know what. So
I closed it and gaped at her with quirked brows.
    “Everyone knows
you quit playing because Hunter put the moves on you, and you didn’t like it.”
    I took a few
moments to think this over. “Is that so?” Who would tell this bullshit?
    “Yeah. Well…it’s
the truth, isn’t it?”
    If I kept taking
pauses between answering like I did, people might start to consider me a little
retarded. “Not exactly.”
    Her eyes
narrowed. Little Susie seemed slightly confused. “What do you mean, not
exactly? He didn’t hit on you?”
    “He did. I just
meant the ‘I didn’t like it’ part.”
    “Wow, so you
did?”
    Like it? “Yeah,
I think so.”
    Susan laughed as
if this was the most pleasing news she’d heard in weeks. She grabbed a few booklets
and dropped them into her shopping basket. Then she stopped dead and turned to
me, looking like she was about to explode. “Then why for Pete’s sake did you
leave the team?”
    I played with
the books and shrugged. “It’s a little complicated.” And not something I wanted
to talk about. I could feel her eyes boring into my head, so I spun around with
a sigh and spilled. “He kissed me, and I liked it, okay? Only, he didn’t do it
for the right reason. Not because he really liked me. More as a favor to
a friend.”
    “Are you
bananas, babe? Ryan Hunter is completely under your spell.”
    As she stressed
every syllable, my chin dropped to my chest. “What?”
    “Do you have any
idea how long it took him to convince Tony to bring you to one of his parties?”
    “You serious?”
    She nodded
vigorously. “And you were the only one who came onto the team without scoring a
goal at the tryouts. I would know, I had to score two to really prove myself.”
    “Wait, that’s
not true. I hit Frederickson straight in the chest.”
    Susan’s grin
irritated me. “Do I need to lay the rules of soccer out to you? A goal is not where you hit the goalie.”
    Damn, she was
right. “But Tony