“You are?” Andrea’s voice came back into focus. “That’s terrific.”
As they got farther from the high school, the sounds of the football practice receded. After a few minutes Lizzie asked, “Would it be just the starters, or all the seniors on the team? Which, d’you think?”
“I think it makes more sense to do the starters, don’t you?”
“Yeah, maybe so. Easier to keep track of, anyhow.”
“I think we should do them in alphabetical order.”
“Last name or first name?”
“Actually, I was thinking more in order of their positions.”
“Missionary, et cetera?”
“Be serious, Lizzie, this will be the defining act of our lives. If we did it alphabetically, who would we start with?”
“The center—and nobody pays much attention to the center, so he’ll be easy to convince, although they’ll all be easy to convince. After all, we’re offering them sex with no commitment and no guilt. It’s all on us.”
“Too true,” Andrea agreed. “You’re right; it shouldn’t be too hard at all.”
Lizzie might have made another jokey comment (“Oh, they’ll all be hard enough, I bet” or “I certainly hope they will”), but she was still thinking about the center, whose name she didn’t then know. (It was Thad Cornish, and he was pathetically grateful to Lizzie for the rest of his life.)
“‘The center cannot hold.’ That’s from a poem by Yeats.”
“Don’t show off. This isn’t the time for poetry. We need to get this settled really soon. We only have a couple months until the season ends, and twenty-two guys to go, eleven each.”
“Twenty-three if we include the kicker, which you’d know if you’d ever been to a game. I guess we can flip a coin to see whose team he’s on, yours or mine.”
“Yeah, good idea. Twenty-three it is.” Andrea laughed. “Eleven, possibly twelve boys, eleven, possibly twelve weeks. It definitely sounds like something exciting to look forward to.”
“Yeah,” Lizzie agreed, “and think of how much fun we’ll have.”
They arrived at Lizzie’s house. “I’ll call you if I have any more brilliant ideas,” Andrea said.
“It’ll be hard to top the Great Game, for sure,” Lizzie said as she started up the stairs to her front door.
The next day Lizzie took her tray to the farthest corner of the lunchroom so that there was no possibility of being overheard. She waved Andrea over and waited impatiently for her to sit down before she began. “So I thought about it a lot last night and this is how I think it should go: let’s divide the team up so that one of us takes the defense and the other the offense. You should take the offense, because of Maverick.” She stopped for a moment. “Or maybe it should be the other way around, and I should take the offense? Never mind, we can figure that out later. Anyway, if we each take half the team, we can help each other out if we have to deal with clingers, although I suspect they’ll all be clingers, don’t you?”
While Lizzie stopped to take a breath, Andrea started to respond but didn’t get a chance, as Lizzie began talking faster and faster. “I was thinking that we’d take, like, a week with each guy. Two days flirting, two days fooling around, and then a sex-filled Friday night with whoever’s turn it is. We could call it like the Three-F tactical approach. If my math is correct, that should take us into December, and gives us some wiggle room in case something comes up.” She grinned. “And I’m about ninety-nine-point-nine-percent sure that something will come up, every week.”
She took some books out of her backpack. “Look at what I got from the library last night: everything they had in on football, both coaching and strategy. I put all the others on hold, so hopefully we’ll get them before we start.”
Andrea looked puzzled. “Why’d you check out those books?”
“Because I figured we needed to know more about football. Well, you need to. I already know enough to get by. We’re going to have to talk to those guys too, in addition to everything else we’re doing with them. We don’t want to seem dumb, like we’re just after them for sex, even if we are.”
“But, Lizzie, listen, we don’t need those books.” Andrea’s face had unease written all over it. “That was just a joke, my idea, the Great Game and all that. It was just to sort of preemptively punish Jon. But he called last night, and I’m not so worried. Besides, my mother said that I could go down to Durham sometime this fall to see him. And he’ll be back here for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“A joke? Really?” Lizzie was incredulous. “Yesterday you sounded awfully serious for it to be a joke. And why shouldn’t we go ahead and do it, even if you’re feeling better about Jon? Maybe tomorrow you’ll start feeling insecure again.”
“You can do what you want, Lizzie, but I’m not going to do it.”
“But you thought of it.”
“It was a joke,” Andrea repeated. “I changed my mind. I’m not going to do it. And you shouldn’t either.”
“But, Andrea,” Lizzie sputtered. “It’s such a good idea. Why won’t you do it?”
“I just can’t,” Andrea said doggedly. “I don’t think it is.”
“Well, you did think it was. You came up with the whole plan.”
“Yeah, well, I was joking.”
“Don’t rewrite what happened yesterday. You weren’t joking. You weren’t. You loved the idea.”
“No. Maybe. But now I don’t love it. It’s an awful idea. It’s nuts. It’s wrong.”
“Like a sin, you mean?” Lizzie knew that Andrea’s family belonged to a Conservative synagogue. (She herself had never set foot inside it. When Andrea had her bat mitzvah, Lydia had forbidden Lizzie to attend the services. “Religion,” she’d admonished thirteen-year-old Lizzie, “is not the opiate of the masses, as Marx thought, but rather an excuse to kill others in its name. You need to learn that. History tells us that more people have been killed in the name of religion than any other justification for murder.” There and then Lizzie crossed history off her list of interesting subjects to pursue.)
“Not a sin, not exactly a sin. Just wrong.”
“Did your mother find out about it already? Did you tell her?”
“God, no, of course not. You know she suspects that Jon and I slept together last year, but she really isn’t sure. I don’t tell her anything. You know that.”
Lizzie did know, but still couldn’t figure out why Andrea had changed her mind. It was Andrea’s overactive conscience, she decided. Andrea’s conscience was evidently in overdrive.
Andrea interrupted her thoughts. “I . . . I don’t know, I started thinking about me and Jon, and how I’d feel if he had sex with someone he didn’t care about, how I’d hate that. And this would just be fucking; it wouldn’t mean anything at all. That’s not me.”