“Totally.” I nodded.
“—but David wants to go to school in New York, and Ben thinks we should focus on Portland, so we’ll see.”
“What about you?”
She sighed. “Stanford.” She said it so boredly, and definitively, like she was already in.
“Oh. Wow. Are you…did you…”
“I’m pretty sure. My parents went there, and they donated, like…a building,” she explained. “Part of a building? I don’t remember.”
“Oh sure,” I said, like I had also donated several buildings myself. “My friend Ronni is going there too,” I added proudly, a little jealously.
“Soccer?”
I nodded. “I heard you got a perfect SAT.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You heard that? From who?”
“Alexis,” I said.
“That bitch knows everything,” she said admiringly.
“I know.”
So it was true. Ruby was rich and beautiful and brilliant. And straight. What was I doing here again?
“You don’t seem very excited,” I said. “You know Stanford is kind of a good school, right?”
She smirked. “Yeah, I think I’ve heard that. No, I mean. It’ll be fine. I would have preferred to go to school in LA, but my parents pretty much told me I’d ruin their lives if I didn’t go to Stanford, so, whatever. It’s four years.”
“And it’s Stanford.”
“You think I’m a brat.”
“No,” I said. “A little.”
I looked over to make sure she wasn’t mad at me, once and then again. I could get used to her sitting there, I thought. I could survive off the intermittent eye contact alone.
“Fine,” she said. “Where do you want to go, then?”
“The University of North Carolina,” I said—definitively, though I still hadn’t heard anything more from their recruiter, and had not yet gotten around to actually applying. But I would, and I had to.
Ruby’s eyebrow lifted disdainfully. “What’s…there?”
“Uh, the best women’s soccer program in the country.” I knew I sounded defensive, but I didn’t want her to think UNC was some shitty country-kid school just because it wasn’t an Ivy League, or in a big city. It wasn’t easy to get into, either. Unlike Ruby, I did not have perfect test scores, or even close. Everything I had to show for my academic capability was average. If I didn’t have soccer, I knew, there was no way I’d get in.
Ruby’s face softened. “Oh right, soccer. Okay. That makes more sense.”
“Do you know who Tobin Heath is?”
She stared blankly.
“Crystal Dunn? Ashlyn Harris? Mia Hamm?”
“I’m gonna guess…soccer players?”
“Soccer stars.”
“My mistake.”
“Anyway. They all went to UNC, was my point.”
“You want to play professionally?”
I nodded. I’d wanted to play for the U.S. women’s national soccer team since I was five. I “tried out” for my first team the next year, not that you could really be cut from a team when you were in kindergarten. My dad drove me to the park where the tryouts were held, having purchased a high-tech collapsible lawn chair with its own canopy just for the occasion. (That way, he explained, he could watch me from the sidelines without having to sit on a hot metal bleacher, or talk to the other parents.) After every drill we ran that first day, I’d look to him for reassurance, and every time I glanced over he’d moved a little closer to the sideline. Eventually he stood up. And then it was clear, by the look on his face: all of a sudden, I was special, in a way I hadn’t been the day before.
When my parents got divorced, my dad moved to Durham for a job, and he started the hard sell on UNC. Not that I needed much convincing, especially once I got a little older and started following college soccer. UNC was my favorite team to watch, and often the actual best, and playing for them would mean my dad could come to all my games.
Ruby frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to a soccer game. Can that be right?”
“You should come to one of mine,” I said. I glanced over, and when she looked at me I grinned. “You kind of owe me now.”
Oh my God, that was flirty, I thought. Right? Hopefully she could tell, unless it didn’t work, in which case I hoped she couldn’t.
“Oh, I do?”
(She could tell. It worked.)
“Yeah, pretty sure you do.”
We grinned at each other like twin idiots.
“Okay, maybe I will,” said Ruby. “A high school sporting event. How quaint.”
My cheeks burned a little. “Okay, I mean, you don’t have to come.”
“No, I want to. You can’t stop me.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. My head felt like it was filling up with sparkles. I turned onto Ruby’s street and realized I hadn’t paid any real, conscious attention to the road since I left the Triple Moon parking lot. Somehow we were already there, far too soon. I parked in front of her house and blurted out, “What are you doing now?” Ruby looked at me, seeming surprised, or something. “Just wondering,” I hurriedly added. “I’ve got plans with my friend Jamie?”
No such plan existed, though now I wished it did.
“I thought she was your girlfriend,” said Ruby.
Even though Jamie and I had been very much out as a couple at school, this stunned me. I’d assumed there was a rung on the social ladder above which nobody knew or cared what my relationship status was, and Ruby hovered in the stratosphere above it. But maybe not.
“She, uh—she was,” I stammered. “We broke up.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re friends.”
Ruby gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Yeah, I know how that goes.”
“No, it’s—not like that. At all,” I said. Suddenly it was crucial that she know that Jamie and I weren’t like her and Mikey. I didn’t want her to think I was anything but available, and I couldn’t afford to let myself think like that either. “We might not even do anything. We haven’t texted about it,” I added, but I knew it was too late to reverse course.