Who is this man?
I downed the rest of my Yoo-hoo in one slug, not knowingly this time. I definitely knew nothing.
“Wow,” said Tina. Next to her, Candace said, “Wow,” too, but no sound came out of her mouth.
“Who is that?” I watched him stride past tables of girls now agog. Our eyes had to be bugging out of our heads like in a cartoon, because McMann’s shorts pressed along the hard line of his inner thigh, leading my gaze—and everyone else’s—up, up, up to this hypnotic . . . instrument at his fulcrum. With every other step he took, you could see the whole shape of it, even if you were nearsighted and your glasses were broken. I crossed my legs, tight.
“I don’t know,” Franchesa Rotini choked out over a forkful of the, yes, rotini her mom put in her Thermos every Tuesday.
“Maybe a hands-on sex education teacher?” Arlene Swann suggested, a little on the loud side. “If we’re lucky.”
Walking behind him was the school principal, Mr. Dollard. Compared to the man we were all ogling—whose physique finally helped me understand what “sinew” was, as the tautening of his mesmerized me—Mr. Dollard appeared to be composed of parts this other fellow had cast off for being too average.
But it was Mr. Dollard who stood in the center of the rows of tables and waved his hands so we would all settle down. “Good afternoon, students,” he said, and stiffly pointed to the statuesque figure next to him. “This is Robert McMann. He’ll be taking on coaching duties for our brand-new girls’ soccer team.”
Robert McMann nodded and smiled at Mr. Dollard, then at all of us. It wasn’t only the girls who were watching him—guys were staring, too, but in a different way, like he was a lesson in something they’d never understand.
“I’ll keep this brief,” he said.
A female voice said, “I’d love to see your briefs,” and a nervous titter of laughter vibrated across the gym.
“I love soccer,” he continued. “I love coaching. And I’m looking forward to putting together a team to make the school proud as we join the Powell Park High athletic legacy.” When he said “legacy,” I couldn’t help but glance at the gym ceiling. It was lined with banners for all the boys’ sports teams, announcing the last year any of them had had any real glory. Not one of the dates was after 1970.
“Also, you can call me Bobby, or Coach McMann.” Bobby, I thought, as his name sighed over the length of my body.
“Soccer sucks,” a guy cough-muttered.
Once again, if Bobby heard it, it didn’t faze him; his mouth ticked up in a half smile that only made him hotter. “We’re going to have tryouts tomorrow for any interested young women, and I’ll post a sign-up sheet here in the cafeteria. If you show up, I’ll have much more to share.” He gave a little wave and headed down the rest of the aisle toward the bulletin board.
“Sign. Me. UP,” Tina hissed to me and Candace, and we nodded.
“He’s a dreamboat,” Candace said as Bobby tacked his sign-up sheet between flyers for the Future Business Leaders Club and the Home Economics Bake-Off. “I wonder how long his eyelashes are up close.” Leave it to Candace to think about how long his eyelashes were when the whole cafeteria had seen that he was plenty endowed elsewhere.
I’ve known Candace since kindergarten. Since seventh grade, she’s been on some kind of diet, and even if she could lose the ten extra pounds she wants to, I think she looks better with them. She hates how she looks in Jordaches (or the copies of Jordaches we can actually afford), but when she wears her older brother Frank’s work pants, I think her ass looks really good and I tell her so. She is also totally stacked. Each of her boobs is the size of a softball and has about the same feel as one of those after a few games: firm but with a little give. (Yes, I’ve felt them. When you’ve known someone since you were five and one day you notice that, out of nowhere, her backpack straps are framing what can only be called jugs, you ask her if you can touch one.)
“I bet he loves to eat,” Candace said, still looking at Bobby McMann, with the same expression she’d give a Nutter Butter after she’d promised herself she’d stop eating them.
“Jesus, Candace, you want to cook for him? I can think of four hundred better ideas.”
That was Tina. She transferred to our district from a suburb outside Milwaukee at the end of junior high, not long after her mom remarried. We became friends when we got paired up to dissect a frog in freshman-year bio. She told me later I was the first person she’d met at Powell who didn’t kiss her ass or treat her like garbage, which was the most common Powell Park High reaction to someone whose nicer clothes set them apart as having more money than the rest of us. She also told me that she thought I’d be a weirdo because of my red corduroy pants, because Tina can be a snob. (The pants were fine, by the way.) Clothing aside, it turned out that we had a lot in common. We bonded over the ways we’d found to navigate parental divorce, our shared disdain for Happy Days, and the fact that she—unlike Candace—agreed with me that most of the boys at our school had a good three years to go before one could even consider them dating material. (Of course, Tina had a long-distance boyfriend in Milwaukee to unfavorably compare them all to, and I had Han Solo.)
“What are the four hundred better ideas?” I asked her, because I loved when Tina got into list-making mode. She’d tick things off on her fingers, all businesslike, and shut you down with a look if you didn’t agree with her.
“Drop my books on the ground and wait for him to pick them up. Make him pose like Michelangelo’s David. Watch him mow the lawn. What do you got, Susan?” Tina raised an eyebrow and flicked my empty Yoo-hoo bottle closer to me with one of her shiny fuchsia nails. (Her nails are always done, because her mom owns a salon, and she says Tina’s impeccably neat appearance is like free advertising.)
I probably had four thousand ideas, but I was saving them for my poor Holly Hobbie sheets, which had witnessed some very un-Holly-like activity over the years. “Well, after Candace cooks him a nice lasagna—”
“Shut up, men love food!” Candace said.
“—I’d put on a record. Maybe Earth, Wind and Fire, or Peaches and Herb.”
“Peter Frampton,” Candace said.
Tina shushed her. “He ate your lasagna. This is Susan’s turn! She gets to pick the music.”
“And then I’d say, ‘Do you want to take off your shoes . . . ?’” In my head, I came up with some good stuff, but out loud, my fantasies emerged gangly and awkward. Sort of like how I’d made out extensively with fantasy Eddie Van Halen, but in real life, I’d kissed exactly two boys and both times had been disasters. One of them had moved away the next day, and I’d been relieved.
“What are soccer shoes called, anyway?” Candace asked.
“Who cares? Susan was about to get to the sensual foot rub,” Tina said.
“They’re cleats.”
Without turning around, I knew it was Mr. McMann.
He was standing right behind me. And had probably heard about the foot rub.
“Whuu . . . why? Hi! Hello.”
I’m sad to report those were my first words to Bobby. Every girl at the lunch table looked up at him like he was Jesus at the Last Supper, complete with the fact that we were going to be eating him.