Ryan Hunter

as I fished for the list of names in my backpack. Running my forefinger from top to bottom, I looked for the name that I had jotted down below Elisabeth MacKenzie, because I was pretty sure that this girl had sat right next to her in the café. Yep, there it was. Miller . That was her.
    Sitting down beside her, I traded my shoes for my cleats. An airy thud next to my ear said she had finished her book. “How are you going on about this?”
    Making a knot with the loops of tied laces, I tilted my head and looked up at her. “What you mean?”
    “Well, there are way over fifty girls wanting on your team. How do you select between us?”
    I moved to my other shoe and started lacing it. “Dunno. Let you kick some goals and stuff. Watch you play.”
    “Tough job with so many girls,” she replied and put her book in one of the million backpacks. “Do you have a rating system?”
    No, I hadn’t. Because I thought there would be fifteen to choose between, maybe twenty. I didn’t reckon on half the high school. I quirked my brows at her, chewing on my bottom lip.
    “That means no, right?”
    “No. Right.”
    She laughed at that. “Maybe you should give points for certain tasks and just take those with the highest score?”
    That sounded like a brilliant idea. “You’re a smart one.” I stood and gave her one of those smiles that I usually saved for asking-a-girl-out moments. It was okay, because those moments had become rare, anyway. The only sheet I had with me, though, was full with names, and there was no room left for taking any sort of notes. “You wouldn’t by any chance have—”
    “A note pad?” she finished for me, giving me the same mocking tone I had used on her before. By her grin, it was apparent she had one, indeed. She handed the pad to me together with a pen.
    Yeah, that was perfect. I placed the book on a small table in front of the tribune and moved a second bench closer so that I could sit down for writing. The girl came over and gave me a hand with the bench. “Thanks,” I told her.
    She nodded and smiled then walked out to the field. It was rare that any girl managed to get into my good-zone so fast, but she was a nice one, smart and helpful. “Hey, Susan!” I shouted after her.
    As she stopped and turned around, there was this quirky look of surprise on her face. “Yes…Ryan?”
    Ah, it was the name then. I chuckled. I certainly wouldn’t forget it again. “Would you care to help me with the notes? I just think I should be more on the field instead of sitting here and writing things down.”
    Susan came back to me and looked me sternly in the eyes with her arms folded angrily over her flat chest. “You want me to be your secretary ?”
    “Ugh-ph…” I hadn’t meant to offend her, and to be fair, I had no idea what to reply to that.
    Luckily, her cute face scrunched with a smile then, and she swatted me on the shoulder. “Just kidding, Hunter. Of course, I’ll help you.”
    I laughed and rolled my eyes. Yeah. Definitely liked her.
    We discussed that she’d rasterize the sheet and in the end just add up the scores at the bottom. Her note pad turned out to be a little grab bag, because she ripped two pages with little square stickers on them from the very back and gave them to me. “You write down a number on each and have the girls sticking them on their asses or wherever. It’s easier to work it out this way.”
    She gave me another pencil and, like a real assistant, shooed me off to get started.
    The girls lined up, and one by one they took a sticker with a number from me, while I shouted the matching names over to Susan. Cloey was one of the first, and her friend, Brinna, of course grabbed the number that followed. When I had already given out over thirty stickers, the queue had only halved. It was amazing just how many girls at our school wanted to play soccer, and suddenly I wondered if that had anything to do with us guys. Maybe it wasn’t the sport, after all, that attracted them.
    “Forty-five, Higgins! Forty-six, Stevenson! Forty-seven…” I looked up who was next and found myself face to face with the girl who dominated ninety-nine percent of my thoughts. “Matthews.”

Chapter 4
     
    IT WAS NICE to see that Liza mirrored my smile with one of her own. She hadn’t done that before, ever. Not that I had smiled at her a lot so far, or that we’d had any eye-contact other than a passing look in the school corridor. Not wearing a cap seemed to have been a