Playing Hurt

Chelsea

technical foul





Brandon’s our finisher, the last runner in a relay who can sprint like nobody’s business. Without saying so out loud, we’ve planned it this way, letting Brandon be the last driver in our excruciatingly long car ride.

After all, a full day on a highway that snakes through three different states can turn even the most spacious SUV into the world’s tiniest jail. And Brandon’s sick of it, too, like we knew he would be. He forces our Explorer on faster, practically tilting the vehicle onto two wheels as he careens off an interstate and onto an exit ramp. The SUV bounces down a gravel road like a rubber ball.

“Brandon,” Mom scolds from the back, gripping the headrest on the passenger’s seat behind me.

“It’s under control,” Brandon moans.

“You’ll miss our turnoff to the resort,” she warns. But Brandon just reaches for the volume dial on the radio. Music sharpens him, gives him the kind of focus that will tune out everything but the land the headlights lick. He forces the Explorer on even faster.

Over my shoulder, I catch Dad staring out the window, calm washing his face. He trusts Brandon. Completely. But Mom looks ready to climb into the driver’s seat and grab the emergency brake herself. When I stop staring into the back seat long enough to look through the windshield, my hands fly forward and my nails dig deep into the dashboard, anchoring themselves like camping stakes. “Brand? The tree!”

Brandon swerves, sending our luggage sliding across the back of the Explorer. A stack of duffle bags falls, landing with a hard thump. His finger jabs the volume. “What was that?” he asks, suddenly worried. “Annie’s okay, isn’t she?”

“Annie?” I ask. “Annie’s here?”

Annie. The name he’d wailed last month, curled up in his bed. “Annie,” he’d grieved, mumbling her name as he moped, slumped into the couch in his pajamas until noon. “Annie,” he’d doodled in his notebooks at the kitchen table, instead of doing his homework. “Annie,” as though it was a girlfriend who’d dumped him, not the name he’d given his Fender bass, which had been taken in for a repair to the bridge. “Aaaaa-nnnn-ieeee,” he’d wailed, even though the repair ticket said she’d be back in two days tops.

“What do you think you’re going to do with a bass you can’t plug in?” I ask.

“I brought the Marshall, too,” he says.

“The Marshall?” I repeat. “That stupid bass amp’s heavier than the entire rack of free weights at the Y.”

“So?” He frowns, his braces catching the moonlight.

“So, you can’t go three lousy weeks without trying to smash our eardrums?”

“Oh, don’t get after him too much, Chelse,” Mom says, turning her wiry little body around in the seat so that she can examine our fallen piles of luggage. “You’ll make me feel guilty for bringing my Cuisinarts.”

“Your—you brought food processors and muffin trays?” I ask.

“Still got to tweak a few recipes,” Mom replies joyfully. “If I don’t keep at it, we’ll never get this year’s book done on time.”

“The book,” I mumble. The White Sugar annual cookbook—a simple, spiral-bound collection of holiday baking ideas that Mom prints up every fall, then stacks on the checkout counter shortly after Halloween. The book that always sells out before Thanksgiving.

“What’s the point of even going on vacation?” I snap. “We could still be home for this.”

“Now, now, now,” Mom says, her voice muffled as she pushes herself deeper toward the back of the SUV, arms flailing about, undoing zippers and checking on the contents of the bags in a kind of clumsy, too-fast way. The way she bangs against the car walls kind of reminds me of a hummingbird stuck in a garage.

Only she’s not stuck. I am. The kind of stuck that makes me start to instantly envy Scratches, who’s back home with Mrs. Williams, our neighbor, getting spoiled with tuna and long naps on the woman’s cushy lap.

Some graduation gift this is turning out to be. Me watching everybody else rub it in my face that they still have the thing they love the most. Seems pretty callused, if you ask me. Suddenly in need of someone to scream at (or at least text), I pull my cell from my shorts. I have no reception here, though, as I haven’t for almost an hour. (I hate my bare-bones cell, but it’s not like I had any room to complain about Mom not wanting to spend a wad of money on a phone. After all the money I blew this year, I should be grateful to have anything more high-tech than a smoke signal.) But I realize, as I run my thumb across the useless buttons, that I won’t even have Gabe on this vacation. I feel like tearing every last strand of my hair out.

“We’re almost there,” Mom says, finally settling herself back into her seat. “It’s been a long drive—”

“Still don’t know why we couldn’t have flown,” Brandon says, glancing into the rearview mirror.

“We have college to pay for,” Dad growls. “And medical bills.”

I feel myself hardening inside.

The Explorer finally slides into the resort parking lot, spraying white gravel everywhere. Brandon stomps the brake and we skid to a complete halt, directly in front of the main lodge. An enormous sign with a green, open-mouthed fish in the center announces we’ve officially arrived at Lake of the Woods fishing resort. Brandon slams the gearshift into park and pulls the keys from the ignition, completely killing the annoying strains of “Iron Man.”

“Bet nobody around here’s seen an entrance like that,” I mumble as he launches his skinny body out of the driver’s seat, then rushes to the back door of the SUV to check on his bass.

“Brandon, bud, we’re gonna need this car for deliveries when we get back,” Dad says gently. “It’s our business car, remember.”

Road-weary and worried about Annie, Brandon refuses to take the criticism well. He instantly starts shouting—“Did you want to get here tonight or not?”—and Mom chimes in with all that “We’re just tired and need something to eat” business.

I push my door open and step out. The bold block letters of the White Sugar logo shine in the moonlight, then disappear back into the darkness as I slam the door again.

I just stand there, absorbing it all: the midnight blue sky, the fringy black silhouettes of pine trees, the white full moon. The longer I stare, the more the trees look like a black lace formal, the moon like an opal pendant. When the breeze hits the pines, the black lace sways, as though the sky-woman’s dancing to the yodel of the distant loons.

Behind the loons—on the opposite side of the darkness, it seems—water crashes. There can’t be a tide here, but maybe it’s rapids running over rock? Hush, that rushing pulse urges. Hushsshhh …

I close my eyes and listen, no longer thinking about the hourglass that basketball has become, all the sand piled into a pyramid on the bottom. For the first time in months, my mind empties completely. I feel—calm. Of all things.

“Chelse!” Brandon shouts. “Come on. Before you grow roots.”

He and Mom are standing in the entrance of the lodge staring at me. Light skips across the tips of Brandon’s crazy hair and washes across their impatient frowns.

“Sorry,” I mumble, hurrying to follow them inside. As I cross the threshold, though, my phone goes off. Shocked, I scramble to fish it from the pocket of my shorts, the unripe-tomato glow of my screen washing out into the black of night.

The text is from Gabe: miss u already.

I start to go all caramel-goo inside. miss u crazy, I text right back, afraid the phone will quit working again if I take a single step forward or even lean in the wrong direction.

As soon as I send it, Gabe texts back, carlyle 23 days. It makes me feel a little scared—the same way I felt just before having to get up in front of my old speech class.

That’s a girl thing, I try to tell myself, Every girl feels self-conscious about losing her virginity.

“Enough of the drama, Keyes,” I scold myself.

When I step inside, my eyes rest on a pay phone attached to the wall of the lobby. At least there’s still one solid link to civilization, I catch myself thinking. I take a few steps forward to join my family, who have already clustered around the check-in counter.

A man who’s definitely playing the part of the stereotypical outdoorsman—khaki fishing vest, hat decorated with lures galore—shouts, “Earl here, owner of Lake of the Woods fishing resort. Welcome!”

Dad starts shaking the guy’s hand, saying, “Keyes.”

Earl’s eyes light. “Keyes!” he repeats. “Chelsea Keyes.”

My brain starts spinning. The egotistical part of me starts to wonder how it could be possible for Earl to have heard about my basketball legacy so far from my home. Maybe, I actually catch myself thinking, he remembers USA WEEKEND.

“You’re in luck—Clint’s still here,” Earl announces, darting out from behind the counter and slipping into what looks like a dimly lit dining room, full of rustic bentwood chairs and tables.

Clint? I wonder, squinting into the candlelight. It’s not about basketball at all. My legacy’s not even so much as a footnote. The reality stings. Again.

“Here he is,” Earl announces.

The man he ushers into the lobby? Good God.

Okay—here’s the deal. I am not a romance-novel kind of girl. I’m not a giggler. Or a flirt. I’ve never doodled a boyfriend’s name in any of my notebooks, not even Gabe’s. I don’t twirl my hair around my finger and bat my eyelashes. Sure, Gabe can turn my insides into hot caramel, but that started only after we’d been dating awhile. I’m not the sort of girl who has ever, in her entire life, gone all mushy-mushy at the mere sight of anything male.

But this guy? Hair as shiny and black as the feathers of a raven. Skin licked by the sun. And a body sculpted by sheer strength. The width of his chest, the curve of his biceps beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt, the smooth tapering of his hips … he smiles at me, and I recoil. Not from him, but from the way my entire body is responding to him.

What is wrong with you? I ask myself. In response, I instantly start to make excuses: Everybody notices the opposite sex, no matter how involved they are with someone else. Human nature.

My stomach lurches a little when I notice that his T-shirt has Lake of the Woods embroidered above the pocket. But I tell myself he’s probably just somebody who helps with luggage. And then we’ll go on our separate ways. Never to see each other again. Thank God.

“Nice to meet you, Chelsea,” he says, the pitch of his voice deliciously low—like the dark filling of a chocolate truffle candy. He smiles at me with this look … like we’re only at the beginning. Like the game clock has only just kicked into gear and four full quarters of action lie ahead.

“Clint’s going to work with you over vacation,” Dad says.

“What do you mean, work?” I ask.

“He runs a boot camp here at the resort,” Dad says. “I set it up for you yesterday. Your own personal trainer.”

I actually start to feel a warmth break out under my rib cage. And just as I begin to realize that the warmth is actually hope—hope that Dad might actually be doing something thoughtful, that he might be giving me something I’d enjoy, like we were still the old friends we used to be before the accident—he says, “We spent a lot of money on this graduation gift of yours. I didn’t want you to have to waste it sitting on a cabin porch.”

As if I’m the kind of person who always wastes the opportunities that come my way. Like I’m someone who has good things land in my lap all the time, and I’m not gentle enough or thoughtful enough or careful enough to protect those things. He says it as if I squandered basketball, even. The warmth of hope instantly turns to the burn of anger.

Dad accepts the keys that Earl jingles. “Cabin number four,” he mumbles, staring at the key chain.

It’s my fault. I get it—I wasted everything. I screwed up college, even. Destroyed any hope for a full-ride scholarship. And it’s obvious that Dad’s never going to forgive me. In that moment, my hip is an open wound he’s just emptied an entire salt shaker into.

Clint smiles at me, saying, “You’d never know you got hurt.”

That just goes to prove, right there, how little this guy really knows.