“Cleats. You’ll need them if you make the team.” He looked right at me. “And I’ll work you so hard, you’ll need all the foot rubs you can get.” He sort of saluted us and grinned, with teeth. They were perfect, even this close up. Not stained or crooked or too little for his face. His dark eyes were deep set and ever so slightly hooded beneath his eyelids, which did have the long lashes Candace imagined. His chiseled jaw was balanced by full, almost pretty lips, and his nose was just a bit crooked with the slightest bump in its bridge—it suggested Han Solo danger and adventure, even if I knew he might have broken it just walking into a wall. United, his features told me he was thoughtful and that he knew how to do important things, like read a thick book, change a tire, or kiss prolongedly. He was the first real-life guy who had no visible flaws to disqualify his positive attributes, which didn’t stop when he turned around. As he walked off, his shorts hugged his butt like it was a package wrapped by an overachieving Christmas elf.
“Susan’s wriggling in her shorts,” Tina said, making me even redder in the face. I picked up one of my greasy cafeteria fries and ate it, trying to look thoughtful about something else besides Mr. McMann’s sex walk through the cafeteria. “You should have asked him if you could try out right now. You’re dressed for it.”
“Oh my God, she is!” Candace said. “It’s like you’re soul mates!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked them, even though the phrase “soul mate” fizzed in my chest. If Bobby and I were soul mates, that meant we could also have sex, right?
“Your shorts,” Candace said. “Aren’t those sort of what soccer players wear?”
I looked down at my bare legs. It was the Tuesday after Labor Day, but in Chicago, you clung to summer, which meant wearing as little as possible for as long as possible. My shorts were the same elastic-band nylon shorts that I’d worn every other day since the eighth grade. Not the same exact pair; I had three pairs from Sportmart—one red, one blue, one green—each with white piping around the legs. I didn’t wear them because I played sports. I first bought them because they were cheap and I could pull them on over my swimsuit to ride to the Powell Park pool.
Then, this summer, I realized maybe the shorts meant something bigger. Like that I was a feminist. Not one who didn’t shave her armpits, but a sexy one. In this other book my mom gave me, Fear of Flying, the main character talks about a “zipless fuck.” (I didn’t read the whole book, and I wondered if my mom had before she gave it to me.) It was supposed to be a sexual encounter with no strings attached. It sounded simple compared to how Candace was always upset about a guy who ditched her, or how Tina pined for her long-distance boyfriend. Simple, like the shorts. Not that I’d know what to do if some guy suggested we try some no-strings sex, but it was easier for me to imagine the sex part of being with a boy than the part where you felt some kind of deep soul connection, or whatever happened when people talked about falling in love.
(Also, not for nothing, but early this summer, I was wheeling my bike down our alley ’cause the chain had fallen off, and I heard Jeff Sipowitz, who has the best hair in the eleventh grade but terrible acne, say to my neighbor Dave Kazlov, “Boing!” I didn’t know what he meant, but later Dave told me that Jeff thought I had a nice ass and “boing!” was what I did to his dick. And I sort of liked hearing that, even if Jeff is gross. So, okay, feminism is more complicated than my elastic-band shorts.)
But after three years at a high school where every boy—even the ones who seemed worth a crush for a minute—proved to be a letdown, maybe I could allow myself a crush on Bobby McMann, teacher or not. I’d have to allow it, since my mind was already picturing us grabbing one another by our matching waistbands. More realistically, I wondered when and how I’d see Bobby again.
And that’s how this whole thing started.
Two
I’d read a horror story once in some weird magazine one of my older sister’s boyfriends had left at our house about this town where a mysterious orb showed up and all the women became bold and sex-crazed. I think about that story a lot because it seemed to be saying that all my fantasies were weird somehow, like they needed to be connected to some demonic orb. But I didn’t care—Bobby McMann was my orb.
But, within a few hours, I realized he was having the same effect on every girl at Powell Park. The last time there’d been this much commotion over a guy was freshman year, when someone brought in an issue of Cosmo from, like, five years before in which Burt Reynolds was lying completely naked on a bearskin rug, with his arm casually draped between his legs, over his fulcrum. But Bobby wasn’t a photo, available to anyone who got their hands on that issue of Cosmo. He was Powell Park’s own resident hunk, like a gift specially for the girls at our school, maybe to make up for all the things we didn’t have, like attractive guys, flattering restroom lighting, and gym uniforms that didn’t give you a rash. Even the maxi pad dispensers in the bathroom still sold the ancient “sanitary napkins” that you had to wear with a belt.
We were in last-period Kitchen Arts, which was like extra home ec for people who wanted to focus on eating cake batter. Our teacher was Miss Cuddleton, a sweet-faced round lady with a squeaky cartoonish voice. We called her Miss Cuddle and abused her very limited authority so we could gossip in class.
We were supposed to be making lemon pie. We only had to make the curd filling. Because it was the start of the school year and we were still kitchen losers, not artists, Miss Cuddle had made all the crusts. “If you really love the people you’re feeding, you don’t buy store-bought crust,” Miss Cuddle had said. Candace had nodded the same way she did when a priest said, “And Christ died for your sins.”
I was standing at one of the Formica counters next to a pile of lemons Miss Cuddle had made into a neat pyramid. Dana Miller and I were doing a sloppy job grating lemon peel while Candace waited to add it to the curd mixture she had on the stove. Tina was measuring out sugar.
Dana was this kiss-up sophomore who said she wanted to be a school principal even though no one started out actually wanting to be a principal. She worked as a student aide to Assistant Principal Lawler, who she sometimes called by her first name, Theresa. Dana’s family and mine intersected. My uncle’s brother-in-law was her uncle, and even though this meant nothing—it wasn’t like she showed up at my family functions or vice versa—she always acted like it did. Thus, she’d immediately paired up with me in Kitchen Arts. At least today it was turning out to be useful. She’d dug through a few files and found out that Mr. McMann had graduated from Southern Illinois University, where he’d been a soccer player, and that he would be teaching freshman algebra.
“I heard one of the office managers call him a ‘Title IX hire’—you know, that legal thing where they have to have sports teams for girls—and I bet he’s only coaching girls’ soccer because he couldn’t get a boys’ sport,” Dana was saying, loud enough that people a few stations over could hear her. She was on the tall side, but she always bent forward at the waist when she talked to people, like she wanted to be shorter. Meanwhile, I was short and always had to draw myself up taller when I talked. Maybe the only way to be happy with how you looked was to never look at anyone else.