Playing Hurt

Playing Hurt - By Holly Schindler




Acknowledgments

Thanks, as always, to the fantastic crew at Flux, particularly my editors, Brian Farrey and Sandy Sullivan.

And to Team Schindler—Mom (world’s best first reader and sounding board), and especially John, my brother, for unwavering support throughout a long journey and for always being at all my author events, camera in hand.

And to the incredible bloggers and readers I’ve met online—whose enthusiasm is priceless—you make each release an absolute blast.

Thank you, thank you, thank you …





Chelsea

end line





A camera winks at me from high in the bleachers like we’re sharing a secret. Fans in the home section of the Fair Grove High gym smile in envy as I hurry toward the bench, wishing some winking camera had ever, in their entire lives, shared a secret with them.

Other cameras follow suit, flashes popping at me from all over as I jog the last few steps to the huddle. Each step sends fiery sparks through my hips—sparks I’ve been trying to ignore during practice for the last week and a half.

I fight a grimace and tell myself I’m doing a good job covering up the pain. But when I glance up at the bleachers, I realize my little brother’s squinting at me from behind his thick glasses. He lowers his camcorder, wrinkles his face into a worried frown.

I try to turn my attention back toward Coach Tindell, but my eyes bounce from the dried-up apple-doll face of my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Williams, to my second-grade teacher (who’s wearing an absurdly large pair of papier-mâché basketball-shaped earrings), then to our mail carrier, to the boy who kissed me on the playground on the last day of the fourth grade, to two distant cousins, to Mack, owner of the Quick Mart down the block from my house (who constantly brags about patching the front tire on my cherry-red Camaro last spring the same way he might brag about patching up Brad Pitt’s ride). My Camaro is now parked in the Fair Grove High lot, slathered in well-wishes from my boyfriend, Gabe, who is as sweet as a box of Valentine’s Day candy hearts. Go Chelsea! he’s written with windshield markers. #23! And, Nitro! which is the only thing the rest of the team calls me anymore.

“Doesn’t look like a ball player,” I hear trickle from the crowd. The sentence has been following me everywhere, flopping around like an untied shoelace ever since I was profiled by USA WEEKEND Magazine, since I was pictured on the cover of their issue highlighting the best female high school athletes in the country. My airbrushed, ultra-flattering portrait revealed that I was toned but not body-builder enormous; that unlike the stereotypical female basketball player, I also have most-definitely girly addictions—to strawberry-tinted lip gloss, waterproof mascara, and my straightening iron.

Doesn’t look like a ball player. As that sentence floats, I get the urge to say something like, “Get real—women were playing basketball at Smith College in 1892,” or, “Wasn’t Title IX forty freaking years ago?” or, “I certainly hope we’re past making jokes about butch girl jocks.” Or, “How many more times, as women, are we going to have to prove that feminine and powerful can, in fact, be synonyms?”

“… thousand shots a day … set shots, lay-ups, free throws,” I hear drifting from the crowd. “Five-mile run, an hour at the weight bench.” They all know my daily workout routine. They all talk big about it, beam the way most people do when talking about their kids.

As I glance up at the bleachers, I see a couple of posterboard signs hovering above the heads of the crowd, the hand-painted messages screaming Chelsea Keyes—Pride of Fair Grove!

I wipe my sweaty forehead with my fingertips. The humidity in the gym hangs in the air like a soaking wet sheet on a clothesline. But the rest of the team is still smooth-skinned. Almost powdery. Not a single sweat-shine on any of their cheeks.

“Work ethic powered by nitroglycerin,” someone says from the front row of the bleachers. It should rev me, the way the Fair Grove fans are talking me up, thinking I’m like the active ingredient in dynamite. It should inspire me far more than Tindell’s quickie pep talk. Instead, the words sit heavy across my shoulders like a barbell. Like something I need to lift.

Our team breaks from the huddle; when I turn back toward the court, though, somebody’s got their hand around my wrist.

“Do you need to sit this out?” Brandon hisses. He’s standing up, right there in the front row of the bleachers, the entire town of Fair Grove watching him. I glance down at the camcorder, which he’s lowered but hasn’t turned off. The power light flashes as it records my every move.

I try to wrench my arm away, but he just grips me tighter. “You’re not hurt, are you?” he asks.

“Don’t be such a twerpy, jealous little sib,” I snap, far more nastily than I’d intended.

I jog back toward the center of the court, my hips firing bullets with each step.

“I don’t know why you torture yourself,” Brandon says. I jump, slam my finger down on the remote’s pause button. What should have been the first game of my last season as a Fair Grove High Lady Eagle freezes on my TV screen. Should have been. Things just didn’t work out that way, though.

I relax my shoulders inside my worn-out Mizzou Tigers T-shirt, trying to act completely blasé as Brandon leans against my doorjamb in his rumpled pajama bottoms.

“It’s not torture,” I insist, flashing a smile. Brandon doesn’t buy it; he tosses a disgusted look at me, his braces gleaming in the TV glow.

I try to look away, but my eyes land on the old trophies that pose triumphantly on my bookshelves, all those tiny little brass sculptures of athletes dunking their metallic balls or going for victorious lay-ups. But they don’t really make me feel good anymore. Not proud. Just … furious at myself. I smile at Brandon, pretend this isn’t the case. “I’m just watching it,” I tell him. “Like some old movie on cable, you know?”

“Sure,” Brandon grumbles, rolling his eyes behind the lenses of his glasses, which shine, tonight, like two circles of moonlight on his face. “And that’s exactly why you only watch it in the dead of night, alone in your room. If it was all that innocent, you wouldn’t have to hide.”

I narrow my eyes, cross my arms over my shirt. Raise my eyebrow in a way that shows him I don’t intend to put the remote down. Or turn my TV off.

“I’m right next door, Chelse,” he informs me. “I can hear what you’re doing in here. Watching your last game over and over. Do you even sleep anymore?” He clings to the doorway, waiting for an answer.

Attempting to ignore his very existence, I push play. The court at Fair Grove High bursts back onto the screen. Our state-of-the-art glossy floor shines under the gym lights like skin coated with baby oil. The regulation markings—black paint indicating the half-court and free throw areas—are still as familiar to me as the lines on my face.

I lean forward on the edge of my bed and squint at the screen, at the former me, marveling at the way my player’s concentration has sharpened my senses; I’m just like a real eagle swooping in to tear the flesh from its unsuspecting kill. Which is exactly what I’d planned to do to the Aurora Lady Houn’ Dawgs, who’d come to my home court. Tear the juicy flesh from their vulnerable little puppy bones.

The cheerleaders along the sidelines are screaming their ridiculous fight song. The rhyme sounds awkward to me even now, watching it all unfold again for what must be the five-hundredth time.

Eagles, Eagles, we’re so regal. Rule the court like queens!

The camera lens swivels away from the court, zooms in on a pair of tan thighs bouncing beneath the violet hem of a pleated skirt. My entire TV screen fills with tight muscle.

“Brand,” Gabe moans from somewhere off-camera. “The game. Shoot the game.”

The screen blurs as Brandon swivels again, clears as the view settles on Gabe’s beautiful face.

“Come on,” Gabe moans. “Help me out here.” He shakes his head, a few blond curls tumbling down toward eyes so green you’d think for sure, at first, they’re dabs of paint. Or contacts. They’re yeah, right green—only, it’s the kind of yeah, right that really does turn out to be true after all, the same way the rolling landscapes of the Emerald Isle turn out to be reality, not just something Photoshopped by an advertising exec for the tourism industry.

Gabe purses his full lips in distaste. “You could be a little proud of your sister, you know.”

The screen jiggles as Brandon turns back to the cheerleaders, three of whom are staring not at the camera, but just to the side of it. At my Gabe. Three of them wave with their fingertips. Giggle and shove their chests out, displaying their figures the way models on The Price is Right point out items up for bid.

“I just don’t get you,” Brandon says. “When you could have that …”

Gabe chuckles while the camera zeroes in on his left earlobe, then pulls back in a jerky motion. “Your sister’s more interesting,” he says. “’Cause I had to convince her.”

Gabe’s words pick me up like a Wilson game ball, toss me back into my junior year when the King of the Ladies-Pay-All Dance kept popping up at my locker door, winking at me in the hallways. Texting me during bus rides to away games. I can still hear the team razzing me like Gabe had cooties, their elbows in my ribs, because jealousy behaves that way sometimes. You don’t want that, do you, people say, pointing at the chocolate chip cookie you’ve got your hand on, wrinkling their nose, because the minute you agree, No, I really don’t, they can swoop in and pop the entire cookie into their mouth, making their cheeks bulge out like Dizzy Gillespie.

But even when I said it about Gabe—No, you’re right, he’s so not my type—he wouldn’t give up. Wouldn’t let himself be swooped up by anyone else. Not one of my teammates or the cheerleaders or the tennis girls in their short skirts or the debate captain or the salutatorian. He kept chasing me, telling me he just wanted to spend a little time bathed in the glow of my star. Nobody’d ever talked to me like that. And when I finally agreed to go out with him, the entire female population of FGH stomped their feet on the tile floor of the hallways. I swear, it felt like the Big Quake—the one that seismologists have long predicted for Missouri’s New Madrid Fault—had finally hit.

“I wish I’d never brought the stupid camcorder to that game,” Brandon says from my doorway.

“You didn’t bring the camcorder, Gabe did,” I remind him. “You were just shooting while Gabe took notes for the paper.” Because, in addition to recapping the Eagles’ wins and losses for The Eagle Eye, our school-wide Monday-morning newscast, Gabe Ross’s mug shot showed up every week at the top of his sports column for the Fair Grove High Bulletin.

“I know what you’re doing,” Brandon tells me. He slathers me with such a disapproving look that I almost think, for a minute, we’ve traded our ages like baseball cards. Like suddenly I’m the one who’s two years younger. “You’re watching that last game to figure out where your big mistake was, right? FYI—there’s no mistake here, Chelse. It was an accident. And there’s no way to redo it, either. It happened.”

I stare at the edge of the bench, visible at the bottom of the TV screen, wishing like hell I’d been sitting on it. Just a game or two, I catch myself thinking. If I’d just sat a couple of games out …

“I’m serious, Chelse. Watching this crap is self-imposed torture. All it’s going to get you is hurt all over again,” Brandon warns. “I know it—just like I knew you were hurt that day at the game.”

“I’d been hurt a million times before,” I remind him in a near-shout. “Jammed fingers and pulled hamstrings and sprained ankles. Every athlete gets hurt. The best players just suck it up and push through it.” But my hip was different. I knew that—I should have known to sit it out. I start kicking myself internally all over again.

“Getting loud in there,” Dad says, with the same warmth as a corrections officer. He steps into view in my doorway, beside Brandon, a glass of water in his hand. The moonlight bleeds through my venetian blinds, casting horizontal shadows on Dad’s face the way the crossbars of a cell might.

I hit stop, so that my final game disappears and the screen fills with a late-night infomercial for a juicer.

Scratches, the gray tomcat Dad brought home for my eighth birthday, mews from my bedroom doorway and swirls his body between Dad’s legs. He slithers across the floor, then launches himself up onto my antique iron bed.

I’d bet that, for Scratches, the distance between the carpet and the top of my fluffy white comforter is practically the same as the distance between the gym floor and the rim once was for me. And Scratches is ten—a senior cat—but he can still make the leap. Here I am, young enough that an entire career in college basketball should be spread out before me. But I’m done. It’s over. Time has run out. Basketball is an hourglass with a whole pyramid of sand on the bottom.

Scratches climbs into my lap, then instantly starts purring and working his paws against my stomach. Okay, it’s not like I’ve completely let myself go. So my stomach’s still flat. But now that it’s not rock hard, it just seems—doughy to me. Especially when Scratches starts kneading like this.

“You’ve got finals tomorrow,” Dad barks at me. “Last finals of your senior year. Got those grades to think about.”

Right, I think. Grades are especially important now that I’ve blown my chances at an athletic scholarship. Grades are all Dad thinks about. But I don’t know what kind of an academic scholarship he thinks I’ll get at this point. It's May already, and graduation is looming so close that my cap and gown are hanging on the closet door.

“We were just watching TV,” Brandon says.

When Dad turns toward him, his face softens. “Just keep it down a little, ’kay, bud? Don’t wake your mom.”

Brandon nods.

“Bud,” I sneer when Dad disappears. “Of course.”

“Chelse, he just doesn’t—”

I push play again.

“You don’t exactly make it easy on him, you know,” Brandon insists.

“Gimme a break.”

As we stare each other down, I notice the cowlick that frays out from the crooked part in Brandon’s unruly hair. He tries to gel it into something like order during the day, but by evening, it’s always worked its way loose. Reminds me of the times when he was little, when it always stuck out in about three hundred directions; Mom could never get it to lie down. I think for a minute that if I could just stare long enough, Brandon’s cowlick might actually make him look seven years old again. Which would make me nine—a girl who’d only just begun to peel back her talent. A girl at the beginning of her story.

But the scruff on his chin and the silver hoops in his ears, which he wears even when he sleeps, won’t let me play make-believe. Won’t let me fantasize that I’m not a has-been who gets her only exercise at the Springfield YMCA pool, swimming laps in a lane marked by ropes and floaters while the white-haired AARP geezers do water aerobics nearby. That I’m not the girl those geezers bestow their wrinkly smiles upon while they wave, flapping their floppy triceps, like I’m one of them. Part of their fragile group.

Which I am. Which is why I haven’t stepped onto a basketball court in more than six months. Which is why I’m reduced to watching old footage of myself like a washed-up, middle-aged used-to-be with zero prospects.

“Forget it,” Brandon says finally, turning away. “You’re hopeless.”

I turn the volume up just to spite both Brandon and Dad. “Shut the door on your way out,” I call.

On the TV, Gabe scribbles something in his notebook just as a chant erupts. Hearing it, Gabe flashes that killer smile of his; on cue, my belly turns into a wobbly wad of strawberry preserves.

Gabe drops his pen onto the notebook on his lap and starts clapping, his angelic tenor providing harmony to the deep baritone just one row behind. The camera swivels until Brandon zooms in on Dad, whose face is flushed with excitement and happiness and even … the idea is as distant as my first day of kindergarten, but there it is just the same: pride.

“Take it to the key,” Dad and Gabe and Brandon start to repeat in unison, like they’re singing the chorus of their favorite song. “Take it to the key.” I swear, Dad’s so worked up that the fringe of his pepper-gray hair is even sweaty.

“She decide on Tennessee or UConn yet?” the father of my elementary school best friend shouts, tapping Dad on the shoulder.

And Dad—maybe not exactly an All-American himself, but a former ball player who used to put his daughter on his enormous ex-jock shoulders so she could dunk her first basket, who let her stand up in his lap so she could see the court when he took her to watch her first college game, who bought her that first pair of high-tops—turns toward him and grins. “Neither, yet. I’m voting for Tennessee, though. Closer to home.”

Take it to the key.

Everyone’s chanting it. Everyone sitting in the home section, anyway. “Take it to the key.” Only that’s not really what they’re saying. They’re not really talking about the tongue formed by the boundaries of the foul lane, the free throw line, the end line. They’re talking about me. Chelsea Keyes. A clever pun.

“Come on, Chel-sea!” Dad shouts, just before he sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles.

Take it to the Keyes. It’s like I’m still in that gym, the way those words knock on my eardrums. And I swear, I can still feel the beat of frenzied, stomping feet pouring off the bleachers, straight into my chest. Take it to the Keyes.

“… the hometown crowd goes wild for the number twenty-three shooting guard, Chelsea Keyes, a dominating force for the Fair Grove Lady Eagles,” Fred Richards, sportscaster for the local KY3 news team, is saying. “Keyes averaged an astounding twenty-four points per game her junior year, and it looks like she’s on track to keep or better her average this season.”

Richards’s booming announcer-voice is just as recognizable (to anyone living within a hundred miles of his station) as, say, the color orange. Gabe always snagged a seat behind Richards and his cameraman, allowing Fred’s voice to narrate the footage he shot for The Eagle Eye.

“… a rebound by Keyes,” Fred continues as I snag the ball, then launch into a lay-up. “Shoots and … scores for Fair Grove, giving the Lady Eagles a solid ten-point lead.”

On the screen, I jog away from the basket, chasing the ball with the rest of the team toward the far end of the court. Sweat soaks my jersey and the roots of my hair—not from physical exertion but from searing pain. Every time I watch this footage, I relive it all. And I know that at this point in the game, with less than five minutes to go in the third quarter, the me on TV is in such anguish that I’ve resorted to marking time like some fatty on a treadmill ten minutes into her New Year’s resolution.

The ref blows his whistle, waving his arms as he calls a foul on my team. Boos ooze from the crowd like thick black tar.

When Beth Hardy, number sixteen, point guard for the Aurora Lady Houns, steps up to take her free throw, the me on TV closes my eyes. No one knows it, but I’m visualizing that two Lady Houns are causing the pain radiating from my very core. I’m trying to picture them standing on either side of me, taking turns tugging on a dual-handled, old-fashioned lumberjack saw that’s slicing through me. In an attempt to turn my pain into anger at the enemy, at the opposition, I try to imagine they’re cutting me in half.

Take it to the Keyes. My heart starts to go haywire as Hardy misses and I turn and charge down the court. Theresa, our point guard, has snagged the rebound and dribbles down the court behind me, her long yellow French braid bouncing against her shoulder blades as fiercely as the ball against the floor.

Take it to the Keyes.

Like they always do at this point in the game, my eyes dart away from myself, away from the ball, and land on two boys arguing—front row, far corner of the bleachers, just feet from the hoop. Pushing. Shoving. Not angrily, not like they’re really having a horrible disagreement, more like two brothers toying with each other. Which is exactly what they are—the Highful twins, Levi and Tucker, elbowing each other, eyes hidden by their filthy ball caps. Even though Brandon’s camera angle only shows their profiles, their stupid grins still leap out like name tags. Dopes, both of them. Morons in Fair Grove FFA T-shirts.

Elbow, elbow, nudge, push.

Levi’s holding an enormous soda. And every time Tucker nudges him, Levi spills a little more on the knee of his jeans. Stop, Levi mouths, and Tucker throws his head back. His shoulders ripple with laughter. Levi punches him in the arm.

But the Chelsea playing basketball doesn’t notice their horseplay. Now that her feet have landed inside the key, right beneath the basket, she pins her eyes on the ball as Theresa passes it. She opens her hands; when the ball hits her palms, I can feel it—the me sitting on the edge of my bed, I mean. Months after the game, I can still feel the skin of the ball, rough and bumpy as a hedge-apple. It smacks my palms so hard, my skin burns.

Shaking pom-poms, stomping feet on the bleachers. A frenzy explodes, our small town gymnasium transforming into an enormous outdoor arena the moment before some legendary, world-renowned band bursts onto the stage.

“… a pass to Keyes …” Fred announces, his voice high-pitched, the sound of pure adrenaline.

Nitro, Nitro, Nitro … the crowd chants.

But powered by explosives is the last thing in the world I feel. The Chelsea on the TV screen is being pulverized by spinning metal teeth in a blender. Her hips are being twisted and cracked. And Beth Hardy is no puppy—she’s a rabid dog, out to attack. Her defense is so mean, it has claws and blood-stained canine teeth.

As the crowd screams, chants, stomps, I turn my crackling, fire-consumed body away from Hardy and I launch myself into a jump hook. But I know, even before I release the ball, that the shot’s all whopper-jawed. I’ve jumped too high to get the most power, and my body’s rotated all wrong.

“… Keyes shoots and …” Fred Richards narrates happily. But I wonder, as I always do at this point, how he ever could have thought my air ball, soaring wildly, would have landed anywhere near the hoop. How he ever could have expected to end his sentence with “… scores! ”

In the bleachers, Tucker mouths an ow and reels his arm back to punch his twin. Levi tries to lean out of Tucker’s reach; as he twists to the side, Tucker’s hand makes contact with the plastic soda cup, knocking it out of Levi’s fingers. The cup flies toward the court, hits the floor near the end line, tumbles. The soda spills beneath the basket. The brown, bubbly shadow creeps across the glossy gym floor, spreading across the key.

I hit pause on the remote while Chelsea is still in the air. At this moment, I have yet to come down from my crazy, desperate jump. My feet have yet to hit the puddle of Levi’s spilled drink. I have yet to lose my balance and slide through the sloppy soda. My legs have yet to shoot out in opposite directions like a Fair Grove cheerleader doing the splits. My body has yet to slam against the brick-hard surface of the court.

The me on TV has yet to be rushed to the emergency room, where a doctor will let his eyebrows crash together as he points to my X-rays, at the fracture that slices through my hip bone and makes me look like a cracked teacup. That doctor has yet to shake his head when I finally come clean about the pelvic ache, saying, Your hip was surely already weakened by a stress fracture, Chelsea. Overuse. You should have told someone you were hurting. I have yet to be sent for hip surgery, yet to be termed out of commission. I have yet to see my dreams of college ball ripped to the kind of violent, life-altering shreds that usually fill a trailer park after a tornado.

I stare at myself, wishing I could have paused my life here. Wishing I could have dangled in the air forever, and never had to endure the excruciating pain that followed.