Stupid seed of doubt and black cloud.
I take my break on the opposite side of the field, and Coach Pennington jogs over, slapping my shoulder with approval and a smile. “Looking good, Owens. Keep this up, I think there’s more in your tank,” he says, reenergizing my tired body and wiping my slate clean of clouds for a few brief seconds. The storm comes again, though, when I feel the scowls of the three girls standing by the cooler next to me.
“Owens. You played for Tech,” the girl closest to me says. Her hair is jet black, long, and pulled into a ponytail. She looks strong—fast, too. And she’s the only one of the three who doesn’t look like she resents me being here.
“I did,” I say, my guard still up, albeit a little less.
“Right. My cousin’s Tab Snyder. I thought I recognized you,” she says. Tabitha Snyder was our goalie in high school—she ended up playing for UCLA, where I would have played if I stayed on the path I was on before my diagnosis.
“How is Tab?” I ask, excited to be starting a conversation with one of the girls. There’s almost a sense of relief, but it’s quickly extinguished when she doesn’t answer my question, and instead pretends not to have heard me at all. She tosses her paper cup into the trash and eyes me one last time over her shoulder while she slithers back up with her friends.
The whistle could not have come at a more perfect moment.
I was done.
Life is a series of choices. My mom is always talking about free will, and how we are like marbles, rolling around through life, our paths constantly shifting based on whatever choices we make. Funny, though—no matter how many times I choose to leave my old life behind, it still manages to find me.
I shouldn’t be listening. I should just walk out of the locker room, slamming the door behind me to let them know how close they were to getting caught. But my weaker side forces me to hold my breath, not to zip my bag closed completely, and to lift my feet from the bench and make myself small so I can capture every single cruel word coming from their lips.
“I heard she slept with her coach,” one of the girls says, her whisper not really much of a whisper at all.
“No, it wasn’t her coach,” another girl says. It sounds like the girl I spoke to, Tabitha’s cousin. “It was a teacher. She’s a total homewrecker. The guy was married.”
“Oh my god, do you think that’s why she’s out here now? Would coach really put her on the team just because she slept with him?” the first girl says.
“Probably. I mean, Coach P. is lonely,” Tabitha’s cousin says, and the sound of her locker shutting follows, blended with arrogance and laughter.
My vision is clouding, but it isn’t from the MS—it’s from the sting of tears I’m fighting desperately to keep from falling. It’s been months since I’ve heard the whispers. My father made sure that the whispering back home stopped. It’s amazing what a well-written letter from one of California’s top law firms can do to gossip. But that letter seems only to have power back home—there are new rules here.
“What a bitch! I mean who does that, sleeps with someone’s husband? That’s low. She must have no self-respect,” the voice says.
Of everything said, this is the one statement that hits the hardest. Yes, there are times when I have had no self-respect. But I have a shitload now. And if you’re going to shame me, sum me up with a few rumored whispers swapped in a steamy locker room, then you might as well get the chance to say it to my face.
I zip my bag and stand on the bench on the other side of the lockers, making enough noise to make the other girls nervous. They can see the top of my head as I walk along the bench. I jump from the seat with enough force to cause my shoes to slap the concrete hard, the sound echoing. By the time I round the corner to face them, my chest is full of swagger.
“Oh, hi, ladies. I didn’t know you were still here,” I say, my smile caught somewhere between the words fuck off and bitches. “Since you are, I thought I’d take this time to maybe clear a few things up.”
Their eyes are wide and their hands are limp at their sides—even the beautiful, confident one who started all this in the first place. This vision is priceless, and it makes the pulsating sick feeling in my stomach completely worth it.
“Yes,” I say, my lips falling into a comfortable smile, my mouth closed tightly while I wait for one of them to take my bait. The skinny blonde on the end does me the favor.
“Yes, what?” she says, flipping her hair over her shoulder while her eyes roam up and down my body as if she can size me up—everything about me—with this one look.