Phoebe winces as Hamburger slides clumsily on his last few steps toward her, slipping on the new braided throw rug her mother bought for the foyer, and he knocks into her like a canine bowling ball.
Hamburger couldn’t give a shit. After a few happy sniffs, he greedily licks Phoebe’s ankles, her skin salty from sweat. “Hammy, quit it,” she says. “I feel nasty enough.” She gently nudges his soft head away as she steps on the back of her sneakers to remove them, then peels her socks off with her feet. Phoebe would crouch down to give him a good petting if she weren’t so sore. Instead she scratches her watermelon-pink fingernails along the span of fur between his ears.
This is how they’d spent the weeks immediately after her surgery, when Phoebe was immobile. She’d lain prone on the couch with Hamburger splayed on the floor beside her, his head lifted high enough to meet her hand, both of them still except for the scratching. Shells of their former selves.
Hamburger lumbers off, his coat rubbing against the Wildcat paw print flag that will be imminently unfurled and slid into the socket mounted outside the Holts’ front door. Phoebe brushes away the fur he leaves behind on it, hopefully the last of Hamburger’s summer shed. She pushes away thoughts of next summer, when Hamburger likely won’t be around anymore, and focuses instead on this dumb-ass rug that has to go.
Phoebe uses her stick blade to lift it up off the floor and carries it toward the kitchen. “Hey, Mom! We need to talk about this rug!” She thinks not just of her dog. God forbid Phoebe were the one to slip and reinjure her knee. She would have no choice but to murder her own mother.
A few steps deeper inside and Phoebe smells something strange. It’s plasticky. Strong. As if someone mistakenly blew up a new pool float inside.
Following her nose, Phoebe finds her mother standing in the kitchen directly under the skylight. Mrs. Holt’s hair is the same color as the fur on Hamburger’s belly, more white than blond. She’s in tan chino shorts and a pink polo shirt, housed inside a clear plastic rectangular tent only slightly larger than her body, almost like the packaging of the middle-aged mother of Barbie.
Mrs. Holt waves and shouts, “Go Wildcats!” A fuzzy circle fogs the plastic in front of her mouth.
“Mom, what the hell is that?”
“A personal spectator tent! Isn’t it clever? They’ll go right over top of our chairs. Now your dad and I can stay warm and dry on the sidelines all season. And check this out!” She unzips the front plastic panel and presses her hands against a layer of otherwise-invisible netting. Her voice louder now, she announces, “Voilà! A mosquito-free zone!”
Since freshman year, Phoebe’s mother and father have made nearly every single one of her games, rain or shine or snow, home or away. Other parents or friends fill the bleachers when they can, casually watching the game as they chitchat, glancing at the action whenever they hear cheers. The Holts choose a spot several feet away from the other spectators, sit side by side in camp chairs—Wildcat navy, of course, his and hers, with MR. H and MRS. H monogrammed in white on the carrying sleeves—their eyes trained on the game.
There’s an open cardboard shipping box on the counter. Phoebe peeks inside and sees the packing slip. “You spent two hundred bucks on these.”
“Each.” Furrowing her brow, Mrs. Holt carefully and deliberately twists the tent in on itself, collapsing it into a surprisingly small disk not much larger than a Frisbee, which she flicks toward the counter. It lands impressively inside the box. She nods pertly, pleased, and then turns to face her daughter. “So, what’s the latest with your knee? Any soreness?”
“Nope. No soreness.” Phoebe’s mother either doesn’t hear her or isn’t listening. Whichever, Mrs. Holt sets to filling a plastic ziplock bag with ice from the dispenser on the door of the fridge. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I made the team?”
Her mother freezes, eyes wide. “Did you make the team?”
“No, I’ve been cut,” Phoebe says wryly, and hops up onto the kitchen island. “So I hope you can return those tent thingies.”
“Very funny.” Her mother wraps the bag of ice in a fresh dish towel and presents it to her daughter.
Phoebe folds her arms. “Mom! I just told you! My knee feels great.”
“Like I don’t know how hard Coach makes you girls work today.”
“It was brutal,” Phoebe concedes. “Borderline sadistic, actually.” She can’t hide her pride when adding, “And I totally killed it.”
As grueling as Coach’s workouts are on the last day of tryouts, Phoebe has always, weirdly, looked forward to them. The other girls tend to think of this final day as something they need to survive in order to make varsity. For Phoebe, it’s a chance to show off her very best qualities as a player. When it comes to strength and endurance, Phoebe is peerless on the Wildcats.
In her very first season, she and Mel were newbies and completely blindsided the first time the older players dropped their sticks and started Coach’s warm-up loop over again. Phoebe had eaten a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast that morning, a mistake, and by the beginning of their fourth mile run she was overcome by the urge to puke. Phoebe didn’t stop running, didn’t even slow down. She kept pace at the front of the pack with the older girls and just turned her head, arching her neck and projecting as best as she could toward the sideline.
The Wildcats talked about that move for the entire rest of the season. Phoebe was an instant legend.
And so, from the minute her eyes fluttered open after her ACL surgery, Phoebe vowed that, by today, she would return to the field in better shape than ever before. It is what pushed her in rehab to do another set of reps, pedal another mile on the stationary bike. It transformed her despair into determination.
She still has work to do. Her timing is stubbornly off, Phoebe knows. And even if she pretends otherwise, Mel knows it too. But that was part of why performing well today was so important to Phoebe. She could show her team and Coach how committed she was to coming back 100 percent. To prove that she would never stop working until she got there.
“I’m sure you did kill it, Phoebs.” Her mother shakes her head and sighs. “Just like I’m sure that, if your knee was hurting you, you wouldn’t tell me.” With that, her mother places the ice on Phoebe’s leg, holding it there while the cubes shift and slide inside the bag, forming a steady cradle of cold around her knee. “And that’s what worries me more than anything.”
Phoebe rolls her eyes. Of course she gets why her parents act like this. They’ve spent the past nine months in limbo, simultaneously in awe and unnerved by their daughter’s determination. Torn between cheering Phoebe on and urging her to take it easy. If only they’d quit torturing themselves and accept what they all know to be true. Even if her parents asked her, begged her, to slow down, Phoebe wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The pain of not being a Wildcat is worse than anything Phoebe ever feels in her knee.
“You’ll see at tomorrow’s scrimmage that you don’t have to worry,” Phoebe says.
“Remember that word, okay? ‘Scrimmage.’ Meaning the outcome doesn’t matter.”
Phoebe recoils. “Mom. We’re playing Oak Knolls.”