Playing Hurt

Chelsea

out of bounds





Hey!” Brandon shouts, banging his hardshell guitar case against an empty table. “Where’s the band?” His face twists with utter disappointment.

“Not sure it’s really that much of a band.” The voice bellows out from behind an ancient teller’s booth, now equipped with a modern cash register. The man who steps out from behind it is Clint plus thirty years—black hair, dark tan, broad shoulders, rugged features.

“Brought a new musician, Pop,” Clint says, pointing at Brandon.

“Greg and Todd’ll be ready to play in a minute,” Clint’s dad tells Brandon. “Why don’t you just sit down and enjoy yourself for a minute? Any appetizer you want, on the house.”

As if Brandon could be bothered with food. He beelines for the small stage area, pointing to the space behind the microphones. “Right here,” he shouts. “My amp’ll fit right here.” He whacks into a Zildjian cymbal, which brings a protective drum-set owner—a pretty beefy guy in a fraying Corona ball cap—out of the shadows, shouting, “Who goes there?”

“This pretty lady his agent?” Clint’s dad jokes, while Brandon introduces himself to the drummer.

“Chelsea Keyes. The basketball player I told you about last night.”

“Gene Morgan. The father I’m sure he hasn’t said a single word about,” Clint’s dad says with a quick wink.

Morgan, I think, sneaking a glance at Clint. Clint Morgan. It even sounds like the character in a romance novel. Or a soap opera. Clint Morgan, the rugged hero. Clint Morgan, the love-interest in the great cinematic American love story. Not that I’m interested. Gabe Gabe Gabe Gabe …

“You kids better snare a table while you can,” Gene says. “Filling up fast tonight.”

Just beyond Gene’s shoulder, another guy joins Brandon and the drummer. The drummer seems to be interested in whatever Brandon’s saying—or maybe he’s just mesmerized by his enthusiasm. But this second guy slips his slender body onto a stool that sits in front of a mic and watches me and Clint with a stare so intense, I’m not sure he even knows Brandon’s here to infiltrate his band.

“Greg and Todd?” I ask, nodding once at the stage.

“Yep,” Clint answers. “Todd’s in the hat.”

The slender guy—Greg—raises one hand to wave.

Clint pushes me toward the kitchen, where a woman with a long brown braid pinches the receiver of a phone between her ear and shoulder as she jots down a carry-out order. When she hangs up, she slaps Clint’s hand, which has dipped into a plate of sizzling onion rings. “Get your dirty fingers out of that. I’ve just made them for table seven.”

“They’re clean, Mom,” he protests.

“Clean as a fish, maybe,” she says good-naturedly. The whole scene just reminds me so much of home. God—the mom in the back, the dad working the cash register. It’s so familiar, in fact, that an actual giggle starts to trickle out of my mouth.

Clint’s mom turns to me for the first time, her eyes running over me, digging so deep for details that it’s almost like I’ve got newspaper glued to my arms and legs and she’s searching my skin for the weather report.

“Chelsea Keyes, fisherwoman extraordinaire,” Clint says, piling some hush puppies on a plate.

“Chelsea? The Chelsea?” A pleased grin tries to tug the corners of her mouth, the way Scratches sometimes paws and tugs on my foot, trying to get me to play. “Cecilia Morgan,” she says, pointing to her chest. “Fry cook extraordinaire.” She bites her top lip.

When she doesn’t think I’m looking, she gives Clint one of those all-knowing mother gazes. Pats his shoulder. “Didn’t expect you two to be out in the evening,” she says. “Didn’t expect to see the two of you together in the restaurant at all, actually.”

Clint frowns, and does such a rough, violent job of shaking his head at her that it practically gives me a rug burn just watching it.

“I’m just saying …” Cecilia’s voice takes on a defensive tone.

“No, you were probing,” Clint says. “We wanted to celebrate a good day on the lake for Chelsea. And her brother’s a musician. Period. Don’t get all private eye about it.”

I suddenly get an all-over weird feeling, watching the beginning of a family fight unfold. Especially since I don’t even know Clint, and especially since it looks like I’m going to be the source of the argument.

“I—I have a boyfriend,” I blurt, stupidly. “Gabe. My—boyfriend.”

Clint tosses a frown at me, his look of disbelief and annoyance so intense that my blush doesn’t just slowly spread across my cheeks—it splashes across my face all at once.

“Looks like Clint’s already fixed you a plate,” Cecilia says, rolling her eyes as Clint heaps on servings of everything she’s just taken from the fryer or has bubbling on a burner. “One of his Clint Specials. Hope you like barbecue with your fried fish. If you want something else, just knock him over the head.”

I’m grateful for her casual words—they hit the air like a shrug of the shoulders that says the past few seconds were no big deal at all. But when the phone rings and she mumbles, “Busy tonight,” I get all knotted inside, knowing I’m about to be left alone with Clint—and I’ve just offended him horribly.

But it’s not even like I really thought he was going to try to make some kind of move on me. It’s just that I was trying to help him. I mean, he didn’t look like he wanted to encourage his mother in thinking we were going to have some sort of summer romance. You’d think he’d be grateful.

“Come on,” Clint growls as he scoops up our dinner plates.

I follow him out of the kitchen into the dining room. It’s pretty clear that Clint’s something of a local celebrity himself, the way eyes don’t just brighten but illuminate when he passes. Only makes sense, with his parents owning what’s probably the coolest restaurant in Baudette, I think.

Kenzie’s sitting at a table near the small platform that serves as a stage. Brandon’s obviously convinced Clint’s friends to let him play, and he and Greg wrestle with the amp, which fills the platform almost like a pro football player would fill a kindergartner’s chair. Todd’s left his drums for the moment and is leaning close to Kenzie as he talks, working overtime to get her attention. Kenzie’s head swivels as she watches Clint snake his way between tables; Clint’s oblivious, though.

The red brick walls we walk by are photo albums, filled with black-and-white framed images of turn-of-the-century life at the Baudette bank: women in buns, with skirts long enough to trail the floor, tellers with their faces hidden by those old-fashioned visors. But near the emergency exit, the bank portraits give way to hockey pictures. Indoor arenas with stands full of fans. Pond games with pines lining the shore, their top limbs looking like celebratory fists that pump the air.

The frame closest to the back door holds a close-up of a boy’s face, a sweaty black fringe of hair dangling toward his eyes, his white-toothed smile shining. Pads on his shoulders, a rink in the background. It’s Clint, obviously. As I stare, I remember the hand-painted signs that had hovered over the crowd during my last game. I glance at Clint, thinking maybe that’s the kind of celebrity he is. Clint Morgan, Pride of Baudette.

Even with his hands full, Clint manages to open the metal door and we step onto a cracked slab of concrete. Some sort of old patio, probably where the wait staff takes their smoke breaks. A couple of wrought-iron chairs and some overgrown weeds line the area; early summer fireflies are beginning to dance above the spindly green stalks of weeds like lonesome boys looking for something beautiful and shiny to flash back at them. Lovers looking for someone to love.

Clint puts the two plates down on an old table—the kind of thing that belongs on somebody’s back deck—and reaches for one of the rusty chairs. I take a step toward the table, but stop short when I realize I’m being watched by someone extraordinarily tall—

Make that something extraordinarily tall, looming on the far side of the cracked patio—a wooden pole, an orange metal hoop, a dirty white backboard. The ratty, soiled remnants of a rotten net dangle from the rim. My heart starts to pound inside my ears, making the same sound as a basketball whacking a concrete floor.

“What’s this?” I ask, putting a hand on my hip, right above the metal plate.

“Been so long you don’t recognize it?” Clint asks. While I stand there stuttering, he dips back inside.

I’m left there alone, blinking up at the towering monstrosity that slices through the warm glow of twilight to cast a cold shadow across my face. I shut my eyes, squeezing my lids the same way I might during some extra-gory scene in a blood bath on late-night cable.

Only when I open my eyes, the hoop is still looming, frighteningly. The terrifying scene has yet to end.

Inside, the band kicks into gear. Brandon’s bass lines thunder through the brick, into the warmth of early evening. And that hoop is still casting the shadow of everything I’ve lost across my skin.

I’m ravenous, suddenly—not hungry for dinner, but for escape. For an envelope in the world where I don’t have to feel the weight of my own past.

Something cold and damp hits the back of my arm. When I turn, Clint’s face blocks out not only the back wall of Pike’s, but the entirety of the Minnesota landscape. He’s so close I can almost smell the day’s sun on his skin. So close his lips are practically an inch from mine. If I were to just lean forward, they’d actually touch. If I were even to pretend to stumble, I’d be able to taste his mouth—

“Here,” he says, pulling me away from my thoughts as he nudges me again with one of the two frosted mugs in his hands.

I give my head a little shake. What is wrong with you, Chelsea? Why would you ever think about another guy’s lips with Gabe at home? You’ve never had thoughts like this about another guy. Not once.

I should probably just sit down, but something keeps me rooted here, standing close enough to Clint to see the shadows his eyelashes cast on his face.

“Dad’s brew?” I ask, searching for anything to say as I glance down into the white foam.

Clint puts a finger to his lips, shhh-ing me. “He’d have my ass if he knew I took these,” he admits. When I accept, he raises his own mug.

“What’re we toasting?”

“Your catch, of course. First place is always cause for celebration.”

I clink my mug against his, take a sip. A slight raspberry flavor lingers on my tongue like new love—full of sweet excitement, laced with sour doubts.

My eyes drag down Clint’s muscle-bound arms, the bulging calves beneath his shorts. “You’re an athlete,” I say.

Clint’s face turns as black as defeat. “No.”

“Sure you are. ‘First place is always cause for celebration’? And what’re all those pictures inside? The hockey stuff.”

“No,” Clint says, the way people get after their dogs. No which actually means, Shut-up. Obey this command.

I can’t say I much like being ordered around. But there’s another note behind Clint’s words—a sad, minor tone that does make me back away.

Silence settles around us like a block of ice. But I want to look at Clint straight on, not through the thick chunk of brutal cold between us. So I start to babble, tossing out questions like a blindfolded pitcher tossing spit-balls.

“Did you happen to catch any of his great moves while you were inside? Brandon’s?” I ask. My brother doesn’t just jiggle a little when he plays; he literally throws himself around, thrashing, splaying his legs to the side wildly like he’s possessed by the ghost of every long-gone punk musician ever to wear a studded guitar strap.

“He gets into it, doesn’t he?” Clint agrees.

“Of course,” I add, “his performance is probably a bit tamer tonight, since he’s also singing.”

Finally, Clint smiles. “If that’s tamer …” His voice trails off as he shakes his head. “Seriously, though, he really did surprise me. He can play. And he’s got a decent voice.”

“For such a geeky-looking kid,” I finish before stopping to think, my voice all big-sister protective. Instantly, the block of ice between us turns into a freaking iceberg.

The whole scene’s got this weird undercurrent to it. Forget mere ice—there’s something festering between us, already. Something … to forgive, almost. And it doesn’t really make any sense. We’ve only just met.

“That’s not what I meant—he’s not—” Clint tries to apologize.

“I know.” I wave him off and sit at the weather-beaten table. “Never mind. Maybe we should just eat.”

The Clint Special, his mom called his dinner. I doubt any other person on the planet could have come up with such a wild assortment of food: onion rings, fried shrimp, barbecued ribs, baked beans, slaw, fresh bread. And pickles. Pickles fill every last available wedge of space, turning the plate into a green polka-dotted display. I put a piece of popcorn shrimp in my mouth, but it kind of turns my stomach. It’s not that Cecilia’s a bad cook—just the opposite. But nerves always steal my appetite. And being here with Clint has practically set my hair on fire. I didn’t get this worked up about taking the ACTs.

It doesn’t help, either, that Pike’s is close to some sort of swamp or marsh. I can’t see what, exactly, because the patio butts right up against an overgrown wooded area, the same kind of woods that line the highways back home. But somewhere not far from our rough chairs and the trees, there has to be some sort of river or muddy stream, or one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes for all I know. Point is, I can smell it—that funky summer scent of a sweaty body of water. And every deep breath I suck in, trying to calm my nerves, mixes with the bite in my mouth, making whatever I’m eating as bitter as a forgotten birthday.

Our silence pulls itself tight enough to feel dangerous. The awkward tension between us is a string on Brandon’s bass, getting stretched by a tuning peg. One more turn of the peg and everything we’re trying to accomplish with our strained celebration will snap in two.

Clint must feel it, too, because he abandons his dinner, saying, “Come on.”

I don’t know where we’re going, but anything would be better than this. So I eagerly follow.

Clint sticks his hands into a bouquet of tall grass. I’m horrified—literally, horrified—when he plucks a large orange ball from the overgrown patch.

“What are you doing?” I snap as he dribbles the scuffed ball a couple of times. In slow motion, Clint passes me the ball. It hits the concrete once, then bounces up toward me.

Instinct kicks in—I hold my hands out, and I catch. Good God, I catch it; the ball hits my palms, its skin like a hedge-apple. It’s the first time I’ve even touched a basketball since my final hook shot. Without thinking, I raise the ball to my nose and smell it. Earthy. Alive. Like always.

“Show me what you’ve got,” Clint says, casually swinging his arms and clapping his hands once in front of his hips.

Doesn’t the moron know that just touching the ball has caused the worst kind of ache to thunder through me? That it’s like touching the warm skin of a man I love while he shakes his head, telling me no? That’s what it’s like for me to hold this basketball. It’s like looking into the eyes of the man I love, who suddenly refuses to love me back. You can’t have me.

I pass the ball back to him and plunk myself back into my chair.

“What’re you doing?” he asks. “Come on—simple game of Horse.”

Fire eats the inside of my stomach. “I have reasons. I can’t jump, okay? The doctors told me no high impact—”

“You don’t have to jump, you know.”

“It’s not the same.”

“What was it you said to me outside, before?” Clint asks. “That you love how history sticks around?”

I shrug, shake my head, not sure what he’s getting at.

“Basketball’s your history, right? Why don’t you love it anymore?”

I glare at him. “You don’t know anything about what I love. And that’s not fair, twisting my words against me. I wasn’t … basketball’s different.”

“How?” Clint presses.

I glance up at the moon, which hangs so close to the backboard it actually looks like a ball about to slide through the hoop. It’s crazy, but I find myself even resenting the moon.

“Today on the boat?” Clint says. “I timed you. A full minute and ten seconds passed from the moment you realized you’d hooked that walleye to the time you started reeling. A minute and ten seconds. It’s a wonder that fish didn’t break your line and swim away.”

“So what?”

“So what’re you going to do now, sit in that chair like one of those old men who hang around outside bait and tackle shops? Just sit and watch the world go by?”

“Who are you to make any judgments about me, ten minutes after you meet me?” I screech, and even as I’m trying to bury my anger, to shove it deep down inside of me, to stay cool in front of Clint, rage keeps popping up like that crazy Whac-A-Mole arcade game. No matter how hard I try to smack it down, it just keeps rearing its ridiculous head.

“What do you do, Chelsea?”

“I don’t even understand what that question is supposed to mean.”

“What do you love? What do you do with all that passion inside, now that the thing you loved the most is gone?”

I hate the way he’s trying to corner me, and there’s no replacing basketball … there just isn’t. I want him to feel just as uncomfortable as I do. I want to attack—want to hurt him back—but I don’t know how. I don’t know anything about his soft spots.

But then again, I think, as the muffled band launches into a slow song, there is that face he made when I said I had a boyfriend …

So I pull myself up from the chair and saunter across the patio, slowly. Knock the basketball out of his hand, let it bounce into the weeds. I raise both hands, place them on his sides. Stare him straight in the eye as the warmth of his skin bleeds through his T-shirt.

“I dance,” I say, like a challenge.

Clint backs up, his face twisting into the kind of heartbreak I felt when he’d tossed me the basketball.

“I don’t,” he says.

I’m unable to hide my smile of victory. Squirm on, jerk. “Then I guess we’re at an impasse,” I say.

“Yeah,” he agrees softly. “I guess so.” As he slumps back into his own chair, he looks like I’ve just launched the ball straight into his stomach. He stares off toward the musky swamp somewhere in the distance while Brandon’s bass thumps out into the night. The orange basketball has rolled into the grass; it glows like a roadside construction cone, warning of impending dangers ahead.