But not as uncomfortable as I feel slinging my arm around a stranger’s back.
We are a tightly formed cluster of three rows of women, hands clutching shirts, shoulders into shoulders, and hips into hips. Quinn says that in a minute our eight people are going to shove against their eight people, and then the ball will get rolled down the middle and … something. She briefed me on a lot of these rules on the way over, but when she said I’d be tackling people, she failed to mention the largeness of the people I’m meant to tackle.
Behind me, another player puts her head down and jams her shoulders into the two second-row players I’m flanking. She grasps a fistful of my T-shirt with one hand.
“All set?” Quinn asks.
“Um, no?”
She gives me a sunny smile. “You’ll figure it out.” She starts jogging backward to the sidelines, where she grabs a ball. “All right, let’s do this thing!”
Seconds later she’s rolling it between the two halves of the scrum, and my whole side of the formation is lurching forward. I have to scramble to hold on to Gwen as the grass tries to slip out from beneath my shoes. There’s grunting and shoving, another rapid forward lurch, and someone shouts, “Ball’s out.” The whole thing kind of collapses and dissolves at the same time, and I just stand there, dazed, as everyone else on the field runs away.
“It’s your ball, Caroline!” Quinn shouts. “Follow it!”
I spend the next half hour feeling like a very dumb kid sister, trailing after the older girls and shouting, Hey, wait up!
Since I have two older sisters, this is, at least, a role I’m familiar with.
Whenever I get the ball, I get rid of it as fast as possible. I am, it turns out, deeply terrified of the idea of getting tackled. Tackling also scares me. One time the opposing team’s ball carrier runs right at me, and I tell myself I’m going to take her down, but then when the moment comes, I just grab ineffectually at her shirt. Because I suck.
Still, it’s kind of fun. Right up until the parking lot beside the playing field begins to fill with cars and a van that says Carson College on the side.
Carson is a school about twenty-five miles from Putnam.
The van is full of college women in black rugby jerseys and matching shorts.
It occurs to me that perhaps Quinn made me wear a blue shirt for a reason.
And that Quinn is, in fact, a lying liar who lies, and she’s manipulated me into a rugby game, not a practice.
The Carson girls who pile out of the van are so much bigger than our girls. Sooooo much bigger.
Also, they have a coach—a real, honest-to-goodness, grown-up faculty-member coach. Putnam Women’s Rugby doesn’t even have proper shirts. It’s just a club whose membership seems to consist mostly of Quinn’s friends, many of whom were complaining a few minutes ago of being hungover.
Whereas the members of the Carson team look like they ate rare beefsteak for breakfast. The coach has a male assistant, who appears to be our age but has a whistle and a clipboard and therefore looks far more official.
I am in way over my head. I start trying to think of a good reason to beg off.
I have to study.
Lame.
I sprained an ankle.
When?
I need to do … things. Elsewhere.
Right.
I lace my fingers behind my head and look at the sky, searching for inspiration.
But I find something else there instead.
I find that it’s a perfect November day in Iowa.
The sky is so blue, it hurts.
The wind feels good on my face. The Carson players are chattering with our players, Quinn’s talking to their coach, and everyone seems so happy.
I have nowhere else I’m supposed to be today, and I realize suddenly that there’s nowhere else I want to be.
I like this.
I try to remember the last time I did something completely new and scary—something I liked—and I think of West at the bakery, his backward black hat and his white apron.
I’d like to send him a text that says, I’m playing rugby with Quinn, but instead I turn around and jog toward her so I can ask her to give me a better idea of what on earth it is I’m supposed to be doing.
Shit is about to get real.
Half an hour later, Quinn is muddy and smiling, and she yells, “Isn’t this great?” from across the field. We are getting our asses kicked by the Carson team. I have no idea what I’m doing at least 80 percent of the time.
“It’s awesome!” I yell back.
Because it is. It is awesome. I’m high on how awesome it is—how good it feels to run, how solid the ball is when I catch it, how firm beneath my arm.
It is awesome until the instant I get hit by a truck.
Okay, fine, the truck is a person. But she feels like a truck, and she knocks all the air out of my lungs. I lie on my back, blinking at the sky, trying to breathe with these air bags that completely refuse to work. I bend my knees and lift my hips up for reasons that are unclear to me. Probably I look like I’m trying to mate with the sky, but it doesn’t matter, because down at the other end of the field something exciting happens, and no one’s paying attention to my death.
A dark shape blocks my view of the sky. A male voice says, “You got the wind knocked out of you.”
I’m not dying. This is excellent news.
I’m so grateful, I could kiss him.
I still can’t breathe, though.
“Turn over on your side,” he tells me, and his hands urge my hip toward him. I turn, because he has a soothing voice, and I like his whistle. I stare at his hairy calves and his black socks and his shoes that look like they might actually be specifically for rugby, with cleats on them and everything.
I experiment with breathing again. Nothing happens. My eyes are starting to feel like they might pop.
“Don’t panic. Your diaphragm is having a spasm, but it’ll relax soon. Just take it easy. Close your eyes.”
I do as I’m told. After a few seconds, the constriction in my chest eases and I’m able to inhale.
“Good.”
I breathe. I open my eyes. The grass is blurry. I blink at it, but it doesn’t come into focus.
“I can’t see.”
He hunkers down and squints at my face. “Do you wear contacts?”
Oh. “Yes.”
I blink again, and now I recognize this. This is what the world looks like with one contact in.
The guy is kind of blurry, too, but in a nice way. He has really short brown hair in tight curls and a dimple in his chin.
“You think one got knocked out?”
“I do. Was that woman made of bricks?”
He smiles. Dimples there, too. Dimples all over the place. “She probably outweighs you by a hundred pounds. That was pretty hard-core. You want a hand getting up?”
I take his hand, thinking, I got hit so hard I lost a contact.
“I’m Scott,” he says.
I’m so distracted, I barely hear him. I’m too busy thinking, Oh my God, I got tackled and I’m not dead. I’m totally hard-core.
“Caroline,” I say, but I guess I must have mumbled, because he spends the next five minutes calling me Carrie while he fetches me some water from the Carson Athletic Department cooler and insists I use his folding chair.
I watch the game and try to figure out more of the rules. I ask Scott to explain the tricky bits. He does, and when he dimples at me, I go ahead and smile back at him.
What can it hurt? He doesn’t know my name.
The whistle goes off a few minutes later. Quinn looks at me with that eyebrow up. I nod my head and jog back onto the field.
Afterward, I learn that all rugby games end at a bar. This is, it seems, nonnegotiable. The Carson team’s coach shakes Quinn’s hand and drives away, and the rest of us form one huge mass of muddy, bruised womanhood—plus Scott—and walk along the railroad tracks that bisect Putnam’s campus. We pass the science center and the phallic sculpture that reminds me of West’s rubber chicken. One of the Carson girls tries to climb it.
By the time we burst through the door of the bar, most of the players are singing a song so filthy it makes me blush. Scott is beside me, somehow, at this exact most inopportune moment. “Not going to sing?” he asks.
“I don’t know the words.”
He smiles. “You really are new at this, aren’t you?”
“I never touched a rugby ball before today.”
My vision’s a little blurry with just one contact in, but I can still see all his dimples deepen. There are two in his left cheek, one in his right, plus the one in his chin. Quadruple dimples. When he steps up to the bar with one of the women on his team to order the first pitchers in an endless stream of beer, I close one eye so I can appreciate how broad his shoulders are, the chiseled shape of his calf muscles.
The Putnam players start shoving tables together in the main part of the bar. It’s only two o’clock, so we rugby women have the place to ourselves. I grab a seat and am gratified, a few minutes later, when Scott sits by me and not by any of the Carson College players.
When he throws an arm over the back of my chair, I’m threaded through with excitement and wariness in a combination I’m not sure what to do with.
He’s flirting with you. He likes you.
He looks nice, but how nice is anybody, really? What does he look at when he jerks off?
Maybe he’s seen my pictures, and that’s why he’s being so friendly. He thinks I’m an easy mark. He’s imagining my mouth on him. Calling me a slut inside his head.
“So, Carrie.” He’s half smiling, his body loose, everything about him relaxed and easy. “What brings you to the game of rugby today?”
I remind myself that just because my pictures are online doesn’t mean every man alive has seen them. I’d never even heard of these gross porn picture sites before August, and while I know guys look at a lot more porn than girls do, I don’t think that means they’re all scouring the Internet for crotch shots in every second of their free time.
It’s possible that Scott is just a guy who thinks my name is Carrie and wants to get to know me better.
More than possible. Likely.
So I take a deep breath. I smell yeasty beer and dirt and perspiration. I look around the table and think, I’m safe here. These women have got my back. And if they trust Scott—if they like him, which they obviously do—then it’s okay for me to trust him, too. At least a little bit.
“Quinn strong-armed me into it.”
“Really?” His eyes kind of flick over me, but not in a perverted way. Just in the normal way that a guy looks at a girl when he’s about to say, “You don’t strike me as someone who’s easily strong-armed.”
“Well, I was kind of drunk at the time.”
“Ah. I know how that goes.”
One of the Carson girls is standing on a chair, pint glass in the air. Everyone is shouting and happy, and I can’t concentrate on more than snatches of conversation.
“Blow jobs.” “Six tries.” “The best rucker in the universe.” “World Cup.”
Quinn grinning her widest grin, wiggling her fingers, saying, “Some of us don’t need a cock to get off.”
Gwen pours and pushes a glass in my direction. “Drink!”
When she turns away, I tell Scott, “Just so you know, I’m not drinking this whole thing. I have a quiz tomorrow.”
“That’s fine. I’m not drinking, either.” I look at his glass and see that he’s got water instead of beer. I hadn’t noticed. “I’m the designated driver.”
“Is this, like, your job?” I ask.
“No, I get paid to assist the coach during the games, but now I’m just here because a bunch of these girls are my friends, and I don’t want them to get themselves killed on the way home.”