“So it’s Bobby now?” Tina asked.
“Yes. And he’s not like that.” As I said it, I realized how much I wanted it to be true. Because if he was like that, what if the butts he picked didn’t include mine?
For all I or anyone knew, Coach McMann could have been some kind of hyperattractive psychopath. But even though he’d made me think some really unwholesome thoughts, the more I thought about him, the more I believed he was wholesome, like a sexy Mister Rogers.
“Oh God, Susan, you’re hot for a teacher,” Tina said.
“Like you’re not here for the same reason,” I said.
“Sure, it doesn’t hurt that he’s hot, but I really think it’ll be fun,” Tina said. “Especially since I knew you’d end up here, too, the way you were undressing him with your eyes.”
We were all so busy giving each other shit and sizing one another up that we almost didn’t notice Coach McMann had arrived. Without saying anything to us, he set his equipment bag down on a bench and began walking across the field. His face was set in a puzzled frown; he seemed to be surveying the park as if he might be able to flip it over and find it was better on the other side, like an old mattress.
“He’s so intense,” a younger girl I didn’t know said.
“Do you mean your panties are so intense?” her friend said.
Someone chuckled. But when Bobby broke into a jog down the length of the field, we all shut up and just watched him run. It was more mesmerizing than when the PBS nature show Nova filmed a lion chasing after an antelope in slow motion and you knew it would eventually snare the animal and tear part of its midsection away.
An involuntary, guttural half sigh, half purr came out of my mouth.
“Whoa,” someone else muttered.
“Wow,” a chorus of girls cooed.
“Holy shit.”
That was Candace, who slapped a hand over her mouth.
He ran back around, and absolutely no one was looking at his face. Finally he stopped, stood before us, and clapped his hands together. “Wow, this is quite a turnout!” he said, and I thought he looked at me. “I had no idea so many girls would come.”
“Happy to come . . . ,” someone behind me murmur-coughed.
“So, I’m Bobby McMann. Coach McMann to you, if you make the team. How many of you girls have played soccer before?”
No one raised her hand.
The day before, if you’d suggested we play soccer, we would have laughed our asses off. At our school, girls mostly participated in sports support: cheerleading, dance team, pep club to buck up the Powell Park Pirates. But sports just for girls had only really started a few years before. At my freshman orientation, the athletic director, Mr. Burke—after talking forever about how “very proud” he was of the tradition of excellence our school’s teams had—had stumbled his way through a paragraph he’d read right from a sheet of paper about how under Title IX, Powell Park was working “to offer females more equal opportunities to join teams.” He had been as enthused as he’d be reading instructions for a topical ointment.
I remembered the moment because at the time, Candace, sitting between me and Tina, had said, “I think I’d rather be permanently on my period than join a sports team.” Joining teams was something for other girls, like the handful of girls who played tennis or swam in the fall, or were on the softball or badminton teams in spring. Cynthia Weaver, who’d set school records for the 100-meter butterfly, was a real athlete, and we sometimes made mean jokes about her behind her big back. But it was fair to say most of us had ignored sports until now.
“Hmm.” That glorious frown came over his face again. “Okay, well, how many of you play sports?”
“Does roller-skating count?” someone said.
Bobby didn’t answer, just asked, “Anyone like to run?”
A few more people put up a hand. I did, too. I didn’t run as a sport, but technically I’d run before. I used to be the fastest kid on my block, when I was six or seven and boys and girls just did everything in a pack and our moms all cut our hair the same bowl-shaped way so you couldn’t even tell who was a boy and who was a girl.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Well, I played soccer at Southern Illinois University and it’s one of my passions. But what I really care about is getting the best out of my team. We’re the new guys on the block, though—” He stopped himself. “Girls on the block. I wanted a field for us at the school, but this one will have to do.” He gestured toward the spot where he’d just run and shrugged. “It slopes up a bit. Not great, but we can work with it.”
He dumped about a dozen soccer balls from his bag onto the ground in front of us. “I don’t have enough for everyone, so we’ll have to go in phases,” he said. “Looks like we have about sixty people. . . . Line up in twelve groups of five. Then let’s see you dribble one of these down the field and back.”
“Dribble like a basketball?” Marie asked, snapping her gum.
“Um, no, with your feet,” Bobby said, deftly touching a ball with the tip of his shoe and kicking it in little bursts, passing it from foot to foot as he moved it toward us.
It looked easy enough. I put myself at the front of a group that included Tina, Candace, and a couple of sophomores.
“And go!” Bobby blew his whistle, and the first twelve of us approached the balls on the ground with uncertainty, like they were rabbits that might hop away.
I nudged mine, but I must have done it too hard because it jumped five feet in front of me. I ran toward it and almost tripped over it. When I got my bearings, I started toeing the ball more gingerly, realizing I could make it down the field if I went slowly. I felt like an old woman but at least I was staying upright; a few girls around me had fallen on their asses. But how did people do this and still see where they were going?
Bobby blew his whistle. “Wait, wait! We’re going to start with something else!”
He ran toward us and stopped in front of me. He flipped my ball up from the ground with the top of his foot, catching it as he smiled at me. A special smile, I thought. “Starting slow like that’s okay, a good way to get used to finding the ball,” he said, just to me.
I felt dizzy with his attention. Tina poked me in the ribs when I returned to the line. “Need to catch your breath, Suzie Q?”
“Shh,” I said, because Bobby was looking at all of us apologetically.
“I shouldn’t have started you with dribbling. It’s tough if you haven’t played before,” he said, and I could tell that in his world, dribbling wasn’t tough. “We’ll get to ball handling”—someone giggled—“but why don’t we start out with some calisthenics instead? How about fifty jumping jacks?”
A chorus of incredulous voices answered back, “Fifty?”
“Did you say fifty or fifteen?” Candace asked.
“Fifty,” he said, grinning, his whistle balanced at the corner of his mouth. With his bottom lip, he lifted it and blew.
Jumping jacks were easy for me, and I guess for Tina, who didn’t even break a sweat. And Candace’s tape must have been working because she kept going, too. But after a few minutes, some girls gave up—they didn’t just stop jumping, they left the field. We were down to about fifty people now.