Then Julie came flying up behind, putting on speed. She closed on the pack. Her hair was in two ponytails sticking out from her helmet, and they were flying behind her like pennants.
It happened suddenly—one of the Kittens went down. I think she caught her skate on another girl’s, and she wiped out on the hard floor of the gym. She spun for what was probably a fraction of a second but felt like forever, all of us in slow motion now.
Julie was maybe four feet away when the girl fell. She couldn’t turn. She couldn’t stop.
Julie—
—jumped, right up in the air, and she kind of hugged her knees to her chest, literally five feet off the ground, and then she touched down on the other side and just kept skating.
The girl on the floor did a thumbs-up to show she was okay, and the skaters slowed so that she could get up. A medic-type guy went over, but she shook her head and went back onto the track.
“Holy cow!” said the guy on the loudspeaker, when they were all skating again. “We see stride jumps in this competition but a full jump—wow! Mega Joules back in play here, and she’s gaining and—”
I don’t even know what he said after that, because there were Bees supporters around us and they were going pretty much crazy. The noise was getting louder and louder. Actually the other team’s supporters were going wild too. It was hard not to get swept up in it, even if at the back of my mind I was counting down time for another reason, glancing over at you again and again, thinking about later. About how we would be alone together when you drove me home.
I wondered what might happen when we got out of the pickup. When we stood in the warm night air, outside the house.
Then you caught me looking, and I turned away embarrassed.
I looked up at the board.
Two minutes to go. Still 75–75.
“What happens if they tie?” I asked.
“I don’t know actually,” you said.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said the announcer. “We haven’t had a tie in the Eastern league before, but it might just happen tonight. If so, we’ll go into extra time. Oh, oh! Patricia Pornwell almost past there, but edged out by a human chain of Bees. Still a tie, everyone!”
“There you go,” you said. “Extra time.”
“Sport sucks,” I said. It was too tense for me. “Couldn’t they just have a tie and everyone be friends?”
“Shut up,” said Paris.
It may have been two minutes, but it felt like more. It was intense. Both of the jammers were pushing and pushing, trying to get past the group. But they couldn’t. The Bees did this thing where four of them linked arms and made like a diamond, trapping the Kittens’ jammer inside. It didn’t seem fair to me, but you said it was legal.
It didn’t help though. Julie couldn’t get past the Kittens either—she was trying, but every time there’d be a girl in a red uniform there, blocking her with a hip, or dropping onto the track just in front of her, preventing her from overtaking.
On the scoreboard, the time was ticking down.
Sixty seconds.
Thirty seconds.
The diamond was still in place, and the Kittens’ jammer was powerless. But it was no good because their blockers were in a chain and there was no way for Julie to dodge past them.
Fifteen seconds.
The pack was skating down the hall on the far side from us, toward the turn after the straight, and there was still no way past, and there was still no way past, and—
Eight seconds.
And—
Five seconds.
And then they came to the turn, the pack right on the inside of it, and Julie was there, suddenly, going faster than I had seen before, really powering up behind the blockers and then she leaned into the corner, leaned much too far into the corner and she kind of dived and I thought she was going to fall—
No.
She jumped, again, only this time with one leg and then the other, so that she kind of leaped past the blockers by cutting across the sharpest part of the turn in the air—without her skates ever touching down outside the track—and came down again just past them, just past the most acute angle of the turn, and we were on our feet before I even really knew what was happening.
“The Bees WIN!” the announcer screamed. “Mega Joules jumps the apex and wins the final for the Bees! 76–75! Unbelievable!”
After the end of play it was actually kind of anticlimactic. The crowd—at least the Bees’ supporters anyway—kept cheering for a while, and that was fun, being caught up in that.
In the middle of the gym the announcer got both teams together. He had the mike in one hand and a framed certificate in the other. “The Oakwood Miss-Spelling Bees!” he said. “Winners of the New Jersey Eastern League!”
Applause.
He handed over the certificate to Julie. She smiled.
And that’s when Paris slung her bag over her shoulder and vaulted over the bench in front of us, her bag knocking the head of a girl with red hair who turned and said, “Hey!”