Beautiful

Game

by

Kate Christie

2011

Copyright © 2011 by Kate Christie

Bella Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 10543

Tallahassee, FL 32302

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2011

Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

Cover Designer: Judy Fellows

ISBN 13:978-1-59493-245-8

Other Bella Books By Kate Christie

Leaving L.A

Solstice

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my parents for providing room and board while

I wrote this novel back in the day. Also, thanks once again to

Katherine V. Forrest for her invaluable editorial assistance and

her willingness to read revised scenes on the fly. And, finally,

thanks to Bella Books for giving this story—and the others—a

home.

To Alex, the first round draft pick for our home team

About The Author

Kate Christie was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

After studying history at Smith College, where she played

the beautiful game Division III-style, she earned a Master’s

in Creative Writing from Western Washington University.

Currently she lives near Seattle with her wife, their two loyal

mutts, and the newest addition to the family—a beautiful,

amazing, incredible baby girl, worthy of as many superlatives

as her entirely unbiased mothers can conjure. Beautiful Game is

Kate’s third novel.

Chapter One

At first I didn’t think I liked Jess, back when I still believed

that surface appearances could be reliable measures of character.

Even though the ’90s were just beginning, I think I saw the

world then through a sort of 1950s lens as one long series of

uninspired binaries: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, black vs.

white. At nineteen, I hadn’t experienced anything yet to make

me question my version of reality. My family was healthy, my

parents happily married, and I was in college in sunny Southern

California playing my way into adulthood.

Probably I believed in hard-and-fast boundaries because,

like Jess, I was a college athlete. Only instead of a tennis court

like her, my playing field of choice was a regulation hundred and

twenty yards long, sixty yards wide, anchored at either end by

goal posts that measured eight feet by twelve: a soccer field. But

Kate Christie

even soccer is subjective, as any fan will tell you. Referees oversee

every match, and with human ego in the picture, you might as

well kiss objectivity goodbye. As much as I genuinely love the

game of soccer, it’s still just that—a game. It took me most of

my college career to realize that sport can sometimes distract

you from what’s real. Almost four years to notice the gray in the

world all around me.

I miss that time, when soccer was all I could think about and

I woke each day knowing exactly why I was where I was, happy

to be doing what I was doing. Because once I noticed the gray

lurking at the edges of the people and places and things I loved,

the colors around me never seemed quite as vibrant again.

I met Jess in the spring of 1991, my sophomore year of

college, on seemingly just another night at the San Diego

University cafeteria. I never thought our food service was all that

bad. I appreciated the luxury of institutional food, liked having

my meal ready and waiting, guiltily enjoyed having other people

clean up after me. Ever since I could remember, my older brother

and I had been the reason our parents never owned a dishwasher.

Most evenings when I was growing up in Oregon, my family

sat down together around the oval oak dining table to a dinner

of vegetables, bread and meat, amiably wrangling over Reagan’s

mismanagement of the federal government, the Republican-

guided depletion of natural resources, the state of communism in

the Soviet Union. Every once in a while my father, a high school

special education teacher, would try to make something unusual

for dinner, like fried bananas or sushi. Those nights typically

ended with the four of us piling into the family station wagon

and heading for Balboa’s, our favorite Portland pizza joint.

At SDU, I was almost always late to dinner because of

practice. In the fall I played intercollegiate soccer. Over the

winter, I played intramural soccer. And in the spring, I worked

out with the middle distance runners on the track team. The

track coach had offered me a spot on the team, but I didn’t want

to be away at meets every weekend. Besides, I needed my Saturday

Beautiful Game

mornings clear for the occasional spring soccer scrimmage. My

attendance wasn’t optional—I was at SDU, a Division II state

school with just over eight thousand students, on a partial soccer

scholarship.

As usual, I was running late that Tuesday in March when I

parked my mountain bike in the rack outside the student center

and got in line behind Jess Maxwell, SDU’s very own tennis

phenom. Everyone on campus who followed sports knew Jess

was currently ranked number two nationally in singles and had

been voted NCAA Division II Rookie of the Year the previous

spring, our freshman year.

As I stood in line, I tugged on the bill of my worn navy

baseball cap and checked Jess out. Whenever I saw her around

campus or made it to a tennis match, I always noticed her legs.

Beautiful, long and lean, not as thick as you might expect for a

tennis player, and evenly tanned, except for the sock line that

sometimes peeked out from the top of her short socks. She

always wore Nike tennis socks and Nike cross trainers. There

was a rumor floating around campus that Nike had offered to

sponsor her.

Jess must have felt my eyes on her legs, somehow, because I

glanced up to find her looking over her shoulder at me. I lowered

my hand from my cap. Busted. Our eyes caught, hers a lighter

brown than I expected, almost copper-colored, and one of her

eyebrows lifted as if to say, What do you think? I smiled at the

quirky eyebrow. She smiled back, and we both looked at the food

up ahead beyond the plastic guard.

For my part, I gazed upon the cooked broccoli trying to

convince myself that yes, Jess Maxwell had indeed smiled at me.

This was momentous mainly because Jess was known around

campus for her chronic unfriendliness to anyone not on the

tennis team.

“You play soccer, don’t you?” she asked.

I looked up from my contemplation of the vegetable selection.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You play tennis, right?”

She nodded. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail that

swung with the movement of her head. A few curls had come

free and framed her oval face.

10 Kate Christie

The line moved forward a couple of steps.

“I like your shoes,” I said, offering a lame explanation of why

I had been looking at her legs. I wondered if she would shoot it

down. She had to know she had great legs.

But she said only, “Thanks.” Apparently she was willing to

participate in the cover-up.

As we moved forward again, I tried to think of something

else to say. The most obvious line, one I’d exchanged with

literally hundreds of fellow students since coming to San Diego,

was, Where are you from? But I’d seen her hometown, Bakersfield,

listed in the tennis program. Central Valley had the reputation

of being hot, dry, and ultra-conservative—not exactly the place

for self-professed homos like me.

At her turn, Jess picked mashed potatoes, turkey, and a side

salad. A glass of water. No dessert. We chose the exact same

meal, except I opted for different salad dressing. Ahead of me, she

handed her meal card to the cashier to run through the register.

As she walked away, she smiled at me again over her shoulder.

“See you around, Cam.”

Cam was short for Camille, a name only my professors ever

used, and usually only once.

“See you,” I said, waving a little as I handed over my own

meal card. Jess Maxwell knew my name? She had a nice smile, I

decided. I was used to the frown of concentration I’d seen on her

face whenever I watched her play tennis, the stony gaze she wore

like a mask around campus.

Orange plastic tray in hand, I surveyed the cavernous seating

area. A couple of guys I knew from the swim team were just

finishing up their meals, so I slid into a chair next to them.

“Hello, boys.”

“Yo,” Jake Kim said. His black hair was just growing back. He’d

shaved his entire body for nationals a couple of months before.

“Howdy, Cam,” Brad Peterson said. Slightly in love with

Andre Agassi, Brad liked to think of himself as a rebel. He defied

swimming convention by wearing his hair in a ponytail and had

still managed to set a D. II record in the butterfly in this, his

junior year. “Was that you we saw actually conversing with the

tennis goddess?” he added.

Beautiful Game 11

“Can you believe it?” I drowned my salad in dressing. “She

caught me checking out her legs and didn’t even freak.”

Jake winced at my liberal use of dressing. “You know you’re

exceeding your daily fat intake with that stuff,” he couldn’t resist

saying.

Brad and I rolled our eyes at each other. I dug into my mashed

potatoes. “You forget, Jake, I’m a soccer player. The bigger I am

the better.”

I had added ten pounds to my five-foot six-inch frame

since coming to SDU, but it was all muscle. Or mostly muscle,

anyway. The weight had helped. In the fall, I’d been named

all-conference first team and all-region second team—not bad

for a sophomore defender. My coach had told me if I kept up

my level of play and avoided injury, I might even make All-

American. The awards were political, I knew. Someone would

have to owe my coach a favor for me to make All-American.

Still, it would feel good. Hell, who was I kidding. It would feel

amazing.

“We know, you’re a brute,” Jake said. “So what did Maxwell

have to say?”

I shrugged and took a swallow of water. “Not much. Oh, she

knew I played soccer.”

Brad leaned forward. “That’s a good sign. It means she’s

noticed you.”

“There aren’t that many non-football playing athletes on

campus. I bet she knows you both swim, too.”

“She’s never said anything to either of us,” Brad said.

“Yeah, well, she probably knows you guys are a couple of

fairies.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jake lisped

exaggeratedly. “Just because a man is in touch with his feminine

side doesn’t mean he’s a fag.”

Brad threw his crumpled napkin across the table at Jake. “Of

course it does, sweetie.”

The conversation moved on. The campus Lesbian/Gay/

Bisexual Alliance was hosting a dance Saturday night, and one of

Jake’s friends was planning a pre-party in his graduate apartment

if I and some of my buds cared to attend.

12 Kate Christie

“Bring along that cute girl we saw you with at Zodiac last

weekend,” Brad added.

Zodiac was a gay bar in the city that held eighteen-and-up

nights once a week for the college crowd.

My smile turned sheepish. “I would, but she has to go up

to L.A. this weekend. She kind of has to break up with her

boyfriend.”

“Another straight girl?” Jake shook his head. “If you’re not

careful, you’re going to have a posse of dissed boyfriends after

you by the time we graduate.”

I was a little leery of that possibility myself. But I couldn’t

help it that somehow I always ended up with women on the verge

of coming out. I had going what my best friend from soccer,

Holly Bishop, called the twelve-year-old boy look: short dark

hair, delicate features, freckles, and small breasts that were just

substantial enough to assure you I was in fact a nearly twenty-

year-old woman. Straight women were always telling me how

cute I was. I just smiled and went along with it. I was young, in

college and playing the sport I loved. Even I knew enough to

appreciate these years while they lasted.

A couple of days later, I was walking toward the gym for

track practice when a red Cabriolet pulled up alongside me on

College Lane. A dark-haired woman in sunglasses and a black

sweatshirt leaned out the driver side window. Jess Maxwell.

“Want a ride?” she asked.

“Sure.” I walked around the car and hopped in, resting my

bag on my lap. “Thanks.”

“No problem. You are going to the gym, aren’t you?” she

added, smoothly shifting gears.

“I am.”

Unlike the cars of most college kids I knew, you could see the

floor in Jess’s. It even appeared to have been vacuumed recently.

Only the back was slightly cluttered, plastic containers of tennis

balls sharing the seat with a sports duffel, two jacketed tennis

racquets and a backpack.

Beautiful Game 13

“Where’s the bike I always see you on?” she asked.

“One of my suitemates snagged it this morning. I’m Cam,

by the way.”

She smiled a little, eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. “I

know. I’m Jess.”

“I know,” I echoed.

We drove across campus, past brick buildings and under

palm trees, the sun warm on our shoulders and bare arms. Back

at home in Oregon it was probably rainy and fifty degrees. Once

again I thanked my lucky stars I’d landed at SDU.

On the floor at my feet was a textbook, Art: Context and

Criticism.

“Are you an art major?” I asked, surprised for some reason

by the idea.

“Art History. What about you?”

“Education.”

My father was a teacher, as had been his mother before him

and her mother before her. My older brother, an extreme sports

junkie, couldn’t stand to be indoors for any significant length of

time, so it looked like I would be the one to take up the family

educator mantle. In my intended future career as a high school

history teacher, I was hoping to land a position at a school that

needed a girls’ soccer coach. But that future seemed a long way

off yet.

Jess downshifted to turn into the athletic building parking

lot. The gym was only three years old, an impressive modern

structure with a glass-walled atrium that spanned three floors.

“You have practice?” I asked unnecessarily as Jess parked

the car. Of course she had practice. Tennis was a two-season

sport, but spring was the “real” season—the most competitive

tournaments took place during the last two months of the school

year.“Yep. You work out with the track team, don’t you?”

“Just to keep in shape for soccer.”

Only five months now until preseason, that twelve days of

hellish double sessions that strained every leg muscle until it

hurt even to sit on the toilet. I couldn’t wait.

She reached into the backseat to grab her bag and a racket,

14 Kate Christie

her arm brushing mine. This close, I could smell her shampoo,

a delicate floral scent that somehow didn’t seem to match the

image she projected.

“Can you lock?” she asked as we both slid out.

“Sure.” I did, slamming the door a little harder than I meant

to, and thought I saw her wince behind her shades. We stood

facing each other for a moment on opposite sides of the car.

“Thanks for the ride.”

“No problem.”

Still we lingered near her car. The sun was out, hardly

unusual for Southern California, and a slight breeze rustled the

trees at the edge of the lot.

“How’s tennis going?” I asked. I knew the team was doing

well, mostly thanks to Jess. Everyone was saying she would get

All-American this year for sure.

“Not bad. We’ve got Big Eights up in San Francisco this

weekend. Shouldn’t be too tough.” She paused. “I heard you guys

did pretty well this season.”

“We made it to quarterfinals at nationals. And we hosted Big

Eights earlier in the fall and ended up beating Southern State in

the finals.”

“I know. I was at that game.”

“You were?”

I bit my lip, remembering how I’d nearly gotten red-carded

in the finals. A tall forward I was marking had actually punched

me when the referee wasn’t looking five minutes in, and the rest

of the game had been a thinly veiled battle between us. Her,

to mentally knock me off my game and score. Me, to stop her

from scoring and take her down legally without getting called.

I succeeded, mostly. She never did score. But I got a yellow card

midway through the second half for slide-tackling her from

behind at the half line. I could tell the ref thought about red. A

yellow card is a warning, while a red card gets you ejected and

makes your team play down a man for the rest of the game. I’d

gotten lucky that day.

Jess tilted her head slightly. “You kept picking on some girl

on the other team. I thought she was going to have to be carried

off on a stretcher.”

Beautiful Game 15

“She hit me first!” All at once, it seemed inordinately

important that Jess Maxwell not think I’d instigated the fight.

My rule in soccer was simple: Never start anything, but finish

everything. “Seriously. She kidney-punched me when the ref’s

back was turned. I almost had to be carried off on a stretcher.”

“Uh-huh.” She raised her eyebrows again, and I realized she

was just teasing me, pushing my buttons to get me riled up. If it

had been someone other than Jess Maxwell, I would have sworn

she was flirting.

“At least I never busted a racquet on the court after double

faulting a game away,” I said slyly.

At one of the matches I’d attended the previous year, Jess had

done just that despite the fact she was leading 6-2, 4-1.

She appeared to color slightly. “You saw that?”

“Your McEnroe impression? Uh-huh.”

“Guess we’re even, then.”

She took off her sunglasses and slipped them into her bag.

Then she smiled, and I noticed the coppery glint of her eyes

again.

I checked my watch. “I should probably head up. Thanks

again for the ride.”

“De nada. See you around, Cam.”

She turned away, and I did too a moment later, heading in

the opposite direction. As I walked toward the track, I pondered

the fact that her “de nada” had a Spanish lilt to it, which might

have to do with her slightly darker coloring. Maybe she wasn’t

as WASPy as the majority of the tennis players I had met in

Southern California.

Curiouser and curiouser. Not only did Jess Maxwell know

who I was, she seemed to want to get to know me better. I could

dig it, I thought, only just stopping myself from skipping all the

way to the stadium.

Chapter twO

Whenever I think of spring semester sophomore year, I

remember listening to Melissa Etheridge’s self-titled album on

Friday nights with Holly, my best friend from soccer, shouting

along with the songs while we drank Rolling Rock beer and got

ready to go out to a party or check out the scene at Zodiac.

Holly and I had been inseparable since the first day of preseason

freshman year. I wasn’t even sure why we’d latched on to each

other at first. We were about the same height and build and we

both had freckles, but there the similarities ended. I was dark-

haired, fair-skinned and comfortable in faded jeans and hiking

boots, while Holly was blonde, blue-eyed and nearly always dressed

fashionably in the latest J Crew ensemble. She hailed from an L.A.

suburb, her family as different from mine as possible. Her father

was a corporate lawyer, mother a stay-at-home mom despite the

Beautiful Game 17

fact there weren’t any kids left at home, older brother president

of a fraternity at UCLA. They were all blond and, far worse to

my mind, card-carrying Republicans.

But Holly and I had been tight ever since that first day when

we ran the timed two mile together and pushed each other to

make it in under twelve and a half minutes and then walked off

our cramps, barely speaking the entire time. She was the first

person at SDU I told I was gay, and she was cool with it. She even

said she thought she might be attracted to women herself. Now,

a year and a half later, Holly had canceled her assorted catalog

subscriptions, joined the SDU Democrats and was dating a

woman for the first time, a junior who lived in her dorm and

looked even straighter than she did.

I had dated a few different women since arriving at SDU—

Beth, an intellectual writer-to-be who lived one floor away my

first semester on campus; Sarah, a beautiful redhead who lived

off-campus and kept trying to get me stoned the previous spring;

and Tina, a rower for whom sport came first. Most recently I’d

hooked up with Elissa, the girl with the L.A. boyfriend, but she’d

gotten way too serious way too fast for me. I was soon single

again, and happy to be so.

Single or coupled, Holly and I reserved Friday nights for

each other. Usually I would get dressed up in jeans and a collared

shirt and swing by her dorm a couple of buildings away. There,

we would blast Melissa and drink beer and get ready to head

out. “Like the Way I Do” was our favorite song that year. As we

ritually bellowed the verses, rewound, and bellowed the words

again, I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. I was

having a good time casually dating, but I had yet to fall in love

with anyone in California. As my sophomore spring progressed,

though, the feeling of something missing was overtaken by the

sense of something about to happen. Maybe it was just the mood

of springtime, of new life everywhere, but I felt as if I were on

the verge of a kind of discovery.

In the weeks that followed that first car ride, I saw Jess

Maxwell around campus only a couple of times in passing. By

April, everyone at SDU seemed to have spring fever except me.

Summer for me meant returning to Oregon, going back to my

1 Kate Christie

job as a maintenance worker for Portland’s Parks Department,

spending ten hours a day in my spiffy green uniform mowing

lawns and trimming hedges. I didn’t mind the job really, and

by living at home I could save enough money to support myself

the coming school year. But sometimes I wished I didn’t have

to work quite so hard, especially when my friends didn’t have to

worry about their tuition payments.

My parents didn’t have a lot of extra money for school. My

mom had stayed home when my brother and I were little and

gone back to work the year I entered third grade. Her current

position in development at the local university, along with my

dad’s public school teaching career, didn’t exactly bring in big

bucks. My older brother Nate, who was up in Alaska putting

his obsession with the great outdoors to good use working for

a Fairbanks outfitter, had gone to college for free at the school

where our mom worked. Unlike him, I’d wanted to get out of

Portland after high school. My soccer scholarship covered partial

tuition but not room and board. That meant I could either hang

in San Diego for the summers and take out extra loans, or go

home to work. Kind of a no-brainer, I always thought.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to head back to Portland just yet.

The second week of April, I attended a home tennis match with

Holly and Laura Grant, another soccer player. The three of us

were always doing anything remotely athletic together. Laura,

unlike Holly and myself, was totally straight and slightly clueless,

even borderline homophobic at times. But the three of us had

bonded over soccer as freshmen, a connection that seemed to

transcend difference. Holly and I loved Laura, even if we wanted

to strangle her sometimes. Whenever we all hung out together,

there was an unspoken agreement that Laura wouldn’t talk about

boys—much—and Holly and I wouldn’t talk about girls. Our

conversations centered around our team, other sports teams,

our coach, other coaches and soccer. Especially the inaugural

Women’s World Cup we’d heard was slated to take place in

China that summer.

The day of the tennis match, the three of us climbed into

the stands during warm-up, picking seats near the court where

Jess, the number one seed, would be playing. It was a Saturday

Beautiful Game 1

morning, warm and sunny, only a slight breeze coming in

through the hills. I could smell coconut suntan lotion in the air,

a familiar scent at outdoor sporting events at SDU. I ran a hand

through my still-damp hair. I’d gotten up around eleven. It was

only a little before noon now.

“There’s Jess,” Laura said, adjusting her light brown hair

beneath her baseball cap.

While Holly and I both sported soccer shorts and Sambas,

Laura was wearing a tight white tank top and faded cut-off jeans

shorts, bordering on the Daisy Duke variety. I’d noticed a couple

of guys checking her out as we picked our seats, and thought

again that if I didn’t know Laura, I’d probably have the hots for

her myself. She was the consummate athlete, all muscle and

energy. On the soccer field, whatever individual skills she lacked

she made up for with determination. Laura liked to win.

“Didn’t you say you talked to Jess a couple of weeks ago?”

Holly asked me, raising a suggestive eyebrow that Laura

missed.

I ignored the look. “Yeah. She’s pretty cool. Seems kind of

shy, though.”

“Shy?” Laura echoed. Reserve was a foreign concept to her,

as was tact, most of her friends agreed. “What does she have to

be shy about? That girl can play tennis like no one I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know why she didn’t go D-one.”

I had wondered that myself. In college sports, playing at a

good Division II school wasn’t nearly as notable as playing for

even a mediocre Division I program. I was at SDU because they

were the only school that had offered me a decent chunk of

money. I couldn’t imagine the same was true for Jess.

“Some people are just naturally shy, Laura,” Holly said.

I could hear the slight annoyance in her voice and elbowed

her, glad I was sitting in the middle. Holly had a lower tolerance

for Laura than I did.

“I guess so,” Laura conceded, but it was obvious she didn’t

understand why anyone might be anything but bordering on

obnoxious.

“Great day for tennis,” I put in, changing the subject.

Holly rolled her eyes at me, and I knew what she was thinking:

20 Kate Christie

Cam the Peacemaker. She seemed to think the nickname was an

insult.

Directly below us, Jess was practicing her serves, but she

seemed distracted. She kept glancing toward the opposite corner

of the court. Curious, I followed her gaze and spotted an older

woman sporting a wide white hat, small sunglasses and a tan

suit. Her gold jewelry glinted in the sunlight. She was standing

just inside the passageway that connected the stadium’s handful

of courts, almost as if she were trying not to be seen.

“Do you think Jess’ll make All-American?” Holly asked,

watching her serve.

“I hope so,” I said. “She totally deserves it.”

Later, I thought we might have jinxed her. Jess was on a

twenty-two match winning streak, but she lost the first set 2-6.

The girl she was playing, a tanned brunette with short hair and

big quad muscles, wasn’t even that skilled. Jess double-faulted

two games away in the opening set. This time she didn’t throw

her racquet.

At the end of the first set, when the players took a break before

switching sides, Holly leaned into my shoulder and murmured,

“Dude, what’s her problem? She’s playing like crap.”

“No kidding.”

Sitting on a bench at the edge of the court during the

switchover, Jess looked exhausted. It had to be mental, I knew,

because she was in top physical condition. She just wasn’t her

usual zippy self. She wiped her face on a small towel, then

looked again toward the opposite corner. I followed her gaze.

The woman in the suit had disappeared. Jess sat motionless for

another minute, towel draped over her face. Then she flung it

aside and headed onto the court.

The second set was like an entirely different match. From

the first point, Jess was all over the place, rippling muscles and

extra effort and long-limbed reach. She finished the match 2-

6, 6-1, 6-2. Afterward, she shook hands with her vanquished

opponent and the umpire, exchanged a few words with Adrienne

Porter, the head coach, and almost ran off court to the field

house. I watched her leave, her head down, long legs eating up

the distance.

Beautiful Game 21

“She’s not shy,” Laura said, watching Jess leave. “She’s totally

got attitude. What a snob.”

“Shut up,” I said, and it was Holly’s turn to elbow me in the

ribs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Laura was staring at me. “Okay, I’m sorry. Take a chill.”

As we watched the top-seeded doubles match, I pondered

my outburst. Usually Laura’s comments rolled right off me. But

when she called Jess a snob, it pissed me off even though I’d once

thought nearly the same thing myself. Now that I’d met her, I

knew my initial assessment was off. There was something about

the way she held herself apart from other people that made me

want to defend her. Which was ridiculous, I told myself as I sat

in the tennis stadium that afternoon. Jess was probably the last

person on campus who needed defending.

As expected, SDU won the match easily. In women’s sports,

tennis was our strongest program. Then came soccer, volleyball,

and swimming. The rest were mostly club teams still, even after two

decades of Title IX. When the match ended, we headed back to the

gym lot where Laura had parked her brand-new Isuzu Trooper.

“I’m going to pee,” I said as we reached the car. “I’ll be right

back.”

“Can’t you even wait five minutes?” Holly complained.

“We’re starving here, man.”

“I’ve been holding it the whole time,” I said over my shoulder,

jogging toward the building. My small bladder was a source of

contention among my teammates and friends. I had peed in more

shrubbery in my life than I cared to remember.

I flashed my ID at the booth and took the stairs two at a time

up to the main floor. I burst through the women’s locker room

door and headed directly into the nearest stall, glimpsing out of

the corner of my eye someone at the sinks. Intent on peeing, I

closed the stall door and relieved myself. Whew.

When I emerged a moment later, I realized it was Jess

Maxwell at the sinks, her back to me as she splashed her face

with water. I recognized her socks first, her blue and aqua cross

trainers, those fabulous legs. Her hair was wet, dark strands

leaving streaks on the shoulders of her white T-shirt. She looked

up as I neared.

22 Kate Christie

“Nice job today,” I said, and started to wash my hands, trying

to ignore the fact that Jess Maxwell had just heard me pee.

“Thanks. I didn’t know you’d be there.” She seemed

embarrassed too and brushed the gym towel with its blue and

gold SDU logo across her face quickly.

“I came with a couple of soccer players, Holly Bishop and

Laura Grant. They’re our year, too.” I dried my hands on a

paper towel. “We all thought you were great in the last two

sets.”“The first one sucked, huh.”

I leaned against a sink and watched her brush her hair. “I

wouldn’t say sucked. You just seemed off balance. Was everything

okay?” I thought of the woman in the suit.

Her eyes darkened for a moment. Then she shrugged. “Just

a slow start, that’s all.”

“The rest of the team did really well, too. You guys are

awesome this year.”

She looked a little guilty as she tucked her brush and a pair

of dirty socks into her athletic bag. “Did you see if Julie Seaver

won her match?”

“I think so.”

“Good.”

I wanted to ask her why she’d been so nervous today, what

had made her fall off her game so dramatically, but it wasn’t really

any of my business. Besides, Holly and Laura were waiting.

Still, I didn’t move and neither did Jess. We stood in the

locker room facing each other, the scent of soap and shampoo

mixed with women’s sweat hanging in the air. For a moment, she

looked as if she might say something more. Then the outer door

opened and the rest of the tennis team began to pour in, muffled

words and laughter echoing off the metal lockers.

“Good luck with the rest of the season,” I said, backing

away.“Thanks, Cam.”

As I left the locker room, I couldn’t shake the sense that,

crazy as it seemed, maybe she’d wanted me to ask all the questions

knocking about my head.

Outside, Laura blasted the car horn when she saw me.

Beautiful Game 23

“Took you long enough,” she said as I slid into the backseat

of the Trooper.

“Sorry, dudes. Let’s roll.”

As Laura slammed the Trooper into reverse and caromed

out of the lot, Holly flicked the volume up on the stereo. Van

Morrison, Laura’s favorite. We headed off campus for a late lunch,

and I trailed my arm out the open window, watching people and

trees and buildings flash past. I forgot about Jess Maxwell as the

sun warmed my skin and Holly grinned at me over her shoulder

and we sped along the hilly streets of La Jolla, the seaside resort

community in northern San Diego where SDU was located.

In the back of Laura’s Trooper, I was acutely aware of the

passage of time, present receding into the recent past as I sang

along to the music and felt my words falling away to nothing. I

wanted to hold on to the moment, to the feeling of sun and car

and friends and possibilities, the immediate future stretching

comfortably, known, ahead, even as the moment slipped past and

got lost in a thousand others.

Chapter three

A few weeks later, the tennis team made it to nationals where

Jess performed like the stud she was and captured All-American

honors. But I didn’t see her again before I headed home to

Oregon for the summer.

Back in Portland, May soon blended into June and school

seemed a million miles away. Monday through Friday, I drove

my parents’ old Toyota Tercel from our bungalow just off

Hawthorne near Mt. Tabor to work in downtown Portland. I

was the only woman on the Parks crew. There was one black

man, John Bakough, a Nigerian who had come to the States for

university and never left. He and I figured we were the city’s

concession to affirmative action, since the rest of our co-workers

were whitey-whites, as John called us.

Every other week it was my job to groom the lawn bowling

Beautiful Game 25

field at Westmoreland Park, but most days I rode mowers, trimmed

bushes with weed whackers, and painted signs and fences at any

of a number of city parks. Occasionally we acted as security at

special events like arts and crafts fairs or outdoor concerts. Then

we would trade in our coveralls to wear walkie-talkies in the belt

loops of our dark green shorts and call each other things like “Big

John” and “Little Joe” and “Daddy Cam” over the airwaves.

This was my second summer at the Parks. The guys were

fun to work with, most of the time, but I never seemed to quite

fit in. Whether that was because I was a woman, a lesbian—

though the guys pretended not to know and I pretended not to

be flagrant—or a college student, I was never sure. Maybe all of

the above. I only got the job because my mother knew a woman

in the city Garden Club who was married to a high-up in the

Parks Department. Except for me and a couple of other seasonal

student workers, the other Parks employees were permanent and

owned homes on the outskirts of the city, the only place they

could afford. Several were married with kids.

Not my buddy Joe, though. Joe Bulanski, ninth of eleven

children in a Polish Catholic farm family from Wisconsin, was

my best friend at the Parks. A natural comedian, he never seemed

to run out of funny stories about his ten brothers and sisters. He

was also the only guy at work who acknowledged that my being a

lesbian was cool with him. I didn’t tell him, he just figured it out.

He had a sister who was gay, he told me the one time we talked

about it at the end of my first summer on the crew. He had lived

with her for a month in San Francisco when he first moved to

the West Coast.

That conversation was one of the few occasions I could

remember Joe being serious. The other instance took place the

summer after my sophomore year, on a July afternoon when the

air was hot and still. He and I were trimming the grass close to

the west fence of Forest Park, one of the largest urban forests

in the country, under the wire and around the posts where the

mower couldn’t reach. At afternoon break time, we left our weed

whackers to cool and sat in the shade on the tailgate of our green

Parks truck, drinking from our water bottles and gazing out

over the Willamette River.

26 Kate Christie

“Do you ever go to church?” Joe asked out of the blue.

“Sometimes. My mom likes the Unitarian church downtown,”

I said, looking over at him.

He had shaggy, dark brown hair bordering on a mullet and

wore a faded Emerson, Lake and Palmer T-shirt beneath his

uniform. I had never seen him in shorts. Even during special

events in the middle of the summer, he opted for the dark green

Parks pants. At the end of my first summer on the crew, I’d asked

him if he had some kind of scar or birthmark that disfigured his

legs. He’d laughed, lean frame shaking with the force. Then he

told me it was a farm habit he had never quite shaken; his legs

were merely ghostly white beneath the uniform. Men on farms

didn’t wear shorts, he explained, because you had to be careful

around the chemicals and the equipment and the crops. Flannel

and denim were a farmer’s favorites for good reason.

Now he squinted up at the sky and took a gulp of water.

“My parents are what you would call devout. They used to

drag all of us to the Catholic church in town every week in our

Sunday best. Me in my Peter Pan collars and this wide, goofy

tie with pink and blue stripes. And brown corduroy pants in the

winter, of course.”

I had no trouble picturing Joe in the outfit he described. He

had told me before that members of his family dressed as if they

were refugees from the ’70s.

“Wide-ribbed corduroy?” I teased.

“You know it.” He nodded, smiling.

His teeth were even, thanks to that great twentieth century

wonder, braces. He used to play a lot of baseball, so we had traded

ball-in-the-braces stories the first summer we worked together.

Now, leaning back on his hands, he looked out over the park,

dark blue eyes tracing the evergreen tree line against the clear,

sun-shot sky.

“But you know, kid”—he was ten years older, and liked to

call me kid—“I decided a long time ago that I didn’t believe in

their God. I couldn’t. Not when their God said that if you judged

your neighbors then He would turn around and judge you. It’s

so hypocritical. The church fathers interpret scripture the way

they want to, not necessarily the way they should.

Beautiful Game 27

“Once when I was seventeen or eighteen, I was in my canoe

on the creek way back in the woods, and this doe brought her

fawns down to the water to drink. I got closer and the little ones,

they just kept drinking, not more than ten feet away. The doe

and I stared at each other as I drifted past, and looking in her

eyes, I had this amazing feeling of peace. As I paddled away,

I remember thinking that God is something within every one

of us, every living being. Animals, people, trees. And this,” he

spread his arms wide open, encompassing the forested park, the

sky, the sun, “this is my place of worship. You know?”

I nodded. “Totally.”

We sat together in the hot, still afternoon, surrounded by

Oregon greens and blues. And I did know.

He looked away, finally, to glance at his watch. “Looks like

story time with Father Joseph is officially over. Come on. Best

get on with the fence trim from hell.”

And that was that. Back to the hot weed whackers and the

feel of shredded grass and twigs whipping against our legs, the

roar of the small motors and the smell of gasoline disturbing the

peaceful afternoon.

Two-person projects like that one were rare. Most jobs were

either solitary or called for four or five of us. In the afternoons,

I would take off alone on my favorite John Deere mower,

Walkman in one pocket of my coveralls, sleeves rolled up so that

my farmer tan wouldn’t be too bad, SDU hat worn backward to

protect my neck while I mowed. There was something satisfying

about trimming the lush summer growth, about making even

swaths across a green expanse.

Those days, kicked back on my mower in the summer sun,

Melissa Etheridge or Janis Joplin or the Indigo Girls blaring

in my ears over the sound of the motor, I almost liked being

away from my SDU life. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t quite

belong there, either. Most of my friends from school spent their

summers leisurely touring Europe or working as an intern in

one of their parents’ law offices or financial services firms.

Holly was currently working for a broker friend of her father’s

three days a week. The other four days she usually spent at the

beach, she told me when she called on my birthday at the end of

2 Kate Christie

June. SDU kids tended to be rich. And white. And Californian.

Have you heard the one about the Oregonian, Californian

and Texan who go camping together? The first night out, they’re

sitting around a campfire when the Texan pulls out a bottle of

tequila. After a couple of swallows, he tosses the bottle into the

air, pulls out a six-shooter and neatly shoots the bottle. When

the Californian points out that there was still some tequila left

in the bottle, the Texan replies, “That’s okay, we have plenty of

tequila where I come from.”

Not to be outdone, the Californian whips out a bottle of

White Zinfandel, drains it, tosses the bottle into the air and

shoots it with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. When the Oregonian

gives him an odd look, the Californian says, “That’s okay, we

have plenty of wine where I come from.”

So the Oregonian opens a pale ale from a Portland

microbrewery. He downs the entire bottle, throws it into the

air, shoots the Californian with a 12-gauge shotgun and deftly

catches the beer bottle. When the Texan stares at him, horrified,

the Oregonian says, “That’s okay, we have plenty of Californians

where I come from, but we always recycle.”

Pacific Northwesterners tend not to appreciate the perpetual

flow of Californians to the north. Our southern neighbors move

to Oregon and Washington in droves, driving up housing prices

and changing the local economies and communities. But I loved

Holly and Laura in spite of our regional differences. After all,

they couldn’t help that they’d been born in the land of greed and

honey.

The great thing about summer was that working so many

hours made the weeks pass quickly. On the weekends, I occupied

myself with my favorite things about being an Oregonian:

hiking in the Cascades with a group of friends from high school,

reunited for the summer months; camping out on the beach with

bonfires and local brew; catching local minor league baseball

and A-league soccer games; pub-hopping with our fake IDs.

Summer at home was usually a well-needed dose of normalcy

Beautiful Game 2

after the school year in Southern California with its tightly-

packed houses, abundant strip malls and unremitting sunshine.

I worked for the Parks that summer through the third week

of August. Then I took a week off, sleeping until ten and lying out

in my backyard, still working out nearly every night. I’d started

my preseason conditioning program in mid-July—running

distance, lifting at a nearby gym, practicing sprints on my old

high school track. Now I counted the days until preseason,

crossing them off one by one on the Far Side wall calendar in

my childhood bedroom. Waiting for real life, my soccer life, to

begin again.

At last it was time to go back to California. At the end of

the month, I packed the Toyota, said goodbye to my family and

friends and headed down the coast. My parents had decided I

should have a car on campus this year, and I wasn’t arguing. The

Tercel might not compare to the Saabs and BMWs and Troopers

at SDU, but it was small and red and in good condition. I loved

that car.

In Orange County, I stopped to pick up Holly. She’d crashed

two cars in high school, so her parents, Bill and Elizabeth, had

decided not to give her a car in college. Yet. They said if her

grades stayed high, she might get one senior year. Holly’s family

lived a block from the ocean in Newport Beach in a huge Mexican

villa with a red tile roof. Her parents remind me of the people in

that movie, L.A. Story, who sit around the dinner table talking

about vacation homes and stocks and plastic surgery, then kiss

the air near each other’s cheeks before taking their leave in a

swirl of lounge pants and low-cut blouses. But they were nice to

me because I was a friend of Holly’s, and even managed not to

look too askance at the sight of my eight-year-old Toyota in their

driveway. I doubted they had any clue I was gay.

Holly had told me once that they referred to me as her

outdoorsy friend from Oregon. “How is that friend of yours?”

her mother would ask. “She’s got the rosiest cheeks, that girl.

What is it she does in the summer again? Park ranger, wasn’t it?

And what is it her father does? Works with retarded children?”

Whenever Holly did her impression of her mother, I cracked

up. Then again, her family stories often left me snickering. Our

30 Kate Christie

families had met once after a game freshman year. We both

stood back and smothered our laughter as our mothers smiled

politely and our fathers shook hands and her frat boy, business-

major brother tried to find something to talk about with Nate,

my ski bum, outdoor recreation-major brother. I think everyone

was relieved when we went to dinner with the soccer team and

ended up at different tables.

The last Sunday of August, Holly and I loaded her things

into my car and drove away from her childhood home, waving

to her mother as we headed out. Her father, an attorney, was

golfing with colleagues. As we drove down the palm tree-lined

street, passing parked Mercedes, BMWs and Lexuses, Holly

rolled her window down, stuck her head out and shouted, “See

ya! Wouldn’t wanna be ya!”

Freed from our families once more, we headed toward SDU

for our junior season, and I felt again that sense of possibility.

Our college soccer careers were half over, but we still had so

much ahead of us, so many practices and games and tough wins

and hard losses. I couldn’t wait to begin again.

Chapter FOur

Sunday was moving-in day. Holly and I were in the same

dorms as the previous year, only a couple of buildings away from

each other. We pulled up in front of hers and started to unload

her things. Holly had more clothes than anyone I had ever met.

Whenever she got upset, she went shopping with her father’s

credit card. That was the one thing she had in common with her

mother, I used to tease her.

Athletes were the only students back on campus this early:

men’s and women’s soccer, field hockey, football, volleyball,

men’s and women’s cross country, and men’s and women’s

tennis. Lugging Holly’s trunk toward the elevator—we would

be running plenty of stairs in the stadium during preseason—we

passed a tennis player on the front steps. She smiled and nodded

at us and we managed mangled “Hi’s,” and I thought suddenly

32 Kate Christie

of Jess Maxwell. She should be back today too. I’d thought of

her occasionally over the summer, especially when I watched

coverage of the French Open or Wimbledon. Now I wondered

when I’d run into her, and, more importantly, if she would be as

friendly as she had been the previous spring.

Holly helped me with my room after we’d finished hers,

insisting on personally unpacking my posters and threatening to

put them up where she liked. I let her. The year before, my posters

had remained rolled up in a corner until after soccer season. I’d

had a heck of a time getting them to unroll and stay up. A couple

of boxes of clothes had remained in the same corner, unpacked

throughout the year, much to Holly’s consternation.

Unlike me, Holly had good decoration sense. When we’d

finished, my room actually looked nice, I had to admit. She had

hung my Indian print sheet across one wall, filling the room

with its warm colors. The other walls were nicely covered with

my favorite Matisse print, “The Casbah Gate, 1912, Museo

Pushkin,” a couple of Picasso prints, a map of the world, a Nike

running poster that featured a woman following a moss-strewn

path that I recognized as a trail in Oregon, and a poster of

Michael Jordan in silhouette with his arms extended. Jordan was

my favorite athlete of all time, even if he did insist on regularly

trouncing the Trailblazers. A bookshelf was tucked into a corner,

boxes of books just waiting to fill its empty spaces, while a beat-

up desk sat to one side of a pair of tall, narrow windows.

The last thing we did was haul my futon and frame up from

the basement where I’d stashed them in the spring, once again

praising the elevator as it carried us painlessly up to the sixth

floor. We pushed the frame up against the wall with the Indian

print and dragged the double-sized, extra-thick mattress into

place, collapsing together on top of it.

“I have a feeling we’re going to be spending a lot of time here

the next couple of weeks,” Holly said, staring at the ceiling.

“I have a feeling you’re right,” I agreed, and sneezed from

the dust floating around the room.

“Thanks a lot.” Holly wiped the arm closest to me. “That’s

disgusting.”

“Sorry,” I apologized, trying not to laugh. “It snuck up on me.”

Beautiful Game 33

“I think that deserves... a tickling!” She jumped on top of

me, attacking my underarms mercilessly.

“No! Stop!” I gasped, trying to throw her off. Finally I

managed to hook my leg around hers and tugged. We rolled

around on the bed, laughing, until we heard a polite, “A-hem,” at

the doorway. We both sat up, looking around quickly.

Jess Maxwell stood there, holding a box with my name and

the words “Soccer Stuff” scrawled across one side. She was

smiling slightly. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“No problem.” I scrambled up off the futon and headed

toward the door, mock-glaring at Holly over my shoulder.

“My friend here was just leaving, right, Holl? Don’t you have

that special someone waiting for a phone call?” I didn’t want

Jess Maxwell thinking that Holly and I were more than friends

rolling around on my futon together.

“Oh, yeah. Shit.” Holly jumped up. She was supposed to call

Becca, her girlfriend, as soon as she got in. Becca had stayed in

San Diego for the summer. They’d seen each other frequently,

but the constant commuting between San Diego and L.A. was

starting to strain their relationship. “I’ll be right back.”

“By the way, Holly, this is Jess Maxwell,” I added. “Jess,

Holly Bishop.”

“Hi,” Jess said with that shy look that always surprised me.

She pushed a strand of dark hair behind one ear. “I’ve seen you

around.”

“Same here,” Holly said. “Nice to officially meet you.” She

glanced back at me. “Don’t go anywhere without me, okay? I’ll

be back in a minute.” She punched me affectionately, smiled at

Jess again, and jogged off down the hallway.

“Gotta love jocks,” I said, rubbing my arm. Holly only

punched people she liked. Lucky us.

Jess was still standing in the hallway, still holding the box

with my name on it. My cleats, shin guards, turf shoes, athletic

bag, water bottles, ball and pump were all in there, the first box

I’d packed the day before and the last one I’d unloaded today.

“Let me take that,” I said, finally cluing in, and reached for

the box. “Where’d you find it, anyway?”

“Out on the front step.” She followed me into the room,

34 Kate Christie

glancing around curiously, and stopped in front of the Matisse

poster. “I’ve never seen this one. It’s beautiful.”

I set the box on the floor and wiped my hands on my dusty cut-

offs, moving to stand beside her. “That’s my favorite painting.”

“I see why.” She stared at the poster, seeming intent on the

muted blues and reds and greens swirled together.

It was good to see her. She looked healthy and strong in

a green tank top and white shorts, long limbs well-muscled. I

wondered what she had done over the summer to get such an

even tan. Probably hung out at the beach.

“Thanks for bringing up the box,” I said belatedly.

“Figured you’d probably be needing it.” She moved away,

checking out the other posters and the few books I had unpacked.

“I was helping Jenny Lewis move some of her stuff in, and

someone said they saw you on six.”

“Good thing you found it,” I said. “Would not be fun to

break in new cleats this week.” Not to mention drop the hundred

bucks that Copas, my shoe of choice, commanded.

“No kidding.” She turned from her vantage point at the

window overlooking the courtyard on the inside of the building.

“You’ve got a great room. I can’t believe you’re unpacked

already.”

“Wasn’t my idea,” I confessed, dropping onto the edge of the

futon. “Holly’s kind of compulsive. It seems she wasn’t happy

that I had a couple of boxes last year that I never unpacked, so

voila.” I waved my hand.

“Good thing you have Holly around, then.”

“Most of the time,” I said, noticing the way the sunlight

picked out golden highlights in her dark hair, pulled back in a

silver barrette. I admired the simple elegance of the style. When

I’d had long hair in high school, I’d never been able to figure out

any way to wear it other than a ponytail. Now I frequented a

barbershop in San Diego that specialized in clippered cuts. “Are

you ready for tennis?”

“I think so. It’ll be good to see everyone again. La Jolla is

really quiet in the summer.”

“You stayed in town this year?”

“I always stay.” She looked sideways, closing her eyes for

Beautiful Game 35

a moment in the sunlight streaming in the window. Then she

looked at me again. “When’s your first practice?”

The subject of summer break slipped away as we talked

about preseason and regular season schedules. They played on

Wednesdays and Saturdays. We played Tuesdays, Thursdays and

Saturdays. They were hosting fall Big Eights this year, always a

major event in the SDU sports world, the second weekend in

October.

“You should come check it out,” Jess said. Her words were

quick, her voice lighter now as we discussed our upcoming

seasons. She loved tennis as much as I loved soccer, I could tell.

“I’ll bring some soccer players to cheer you guys on,” I

promised. “Even if we have a Saturday game that weekend, we

should be around on Sunday.”

“Don’t you love Sundays? Whenever I’m in season, Sundays

are the best. You can sleep in, eat whatever you want whenever

you want, and no practice.” She sighed, smiling slightly, already

daydreaming about Sundays.

“I know what you mean.” We were both quiet for a minute.

Then I said, “Can I ask you something?”

Jess crossed her arms over the front of her T-shirt, still

leaning against the windowsill. Her dreamy smile vanished.

“Sure.”

Relax, I almost said. I longed to tell her she didn’t have to

defend herself against me, that I just wanted to be her friend.

Instead, I grinned at her disarmingly, the charming smile I

saved for straight girls who were convinced I was about to hit

on them.

“I was just wondering, what nationality are your parents?

You don’t look like a Maxwell.”

“My father’s mother was Spanish,” she said. “And my

mother’s family was Scandinavian. What about you? Wallace is

what, Scottish? Irish?”

“Both. My dad’s father came over from Scotland when he

was ten. But they lived in Ireland before that.”

I leaned back on my hands, trying to appear casual. She’d

referred to her parents in the past tense. Were they no longer

living? Was that why she stayed in La Jolla during the summers?

36 Kate Christie

Probably they were just acrimoniously divorced, I decided, like

the parents of half the kids at SDU.

“What about your mother?” she asked.

“Northern European mutt. Some French, a little English,

maybe some German and Italian. Basically every major country

in World War II except the Soviets.”

This elicited a small smile. She still seemed tense, though.

When we were talking about sports, she was fine. But now

that the conversation had drifted into the personal realm, she

was responding carefully, rationing out details about her past.

Definitely a story there. I wished I knew what it was.

As if she could read my nosy thoughts, Jess looked at her

watch and pushed away from the window. “I should probably get

going. We have a team meeting before dinner.”

“Us too.”

“Do you need a ride? Or are you riding your bike down?” she

asked, smiling a little. Teasing me.

“I have a car this year,” I bragged, waving at the Just Do It

keychain on the dresser.

“Let me guess. A Saab? No, too conservative. Let’s see.” She

looked me up and down, eyes narrowed consideringly. It was

probably my imagination, but her eyes seemed to linger on my

legs, freshly shaven and newly tanned from my week off. “You’d

drive a Beamer, wouldn’t you? Or your father’s old Mercedes.”

I nudged the soccer box toward the desk with the tip of my

sandal. “I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m one of those

people who probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for soccer.”

She stared at me blankly. Did she not get it?

“I drive a Tercel,” I elaborated. “And my parents drive

Mitsubishis. Sorry to disappoint you.” I picked at the tape on

a box of books on the middle bookshelf, catching a glimpse

of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own packed in next to a

Fundamentals of Literacy text.

“Oh.” Her voice wasn’t mocking now. “So you’re a regular

person, too.”

I looked up, caught by the warmth in her eyes. “Exactly.”

We smiled at each other. She had probably felt like an outsider

before, too, on this campus. That was the thing about sports. If

Beautiful Game 37

you were a good athlete, your sport could level the playing field

of social interaction to the point that no one else realized you

didn’t truly belong.

Off in the distance I heard Holly rambling down the hall

and humming a tune from our mutually favorite Indigo Girls

CD, Nomads Indians Saints, which we had listened to a couple of

times through on the way down this morning.

“Holly, however, is not,” I added. “Not regular, I mean, and

definitely not normal.”

“Did I hear my name, perchance?” Holly glided into the

room grinning, and I realized all over again what a cute girl

she was with her curly blonde hair pulled away from her face in

a style similar to Jess’s, her light blue eyes and the tiny freckles

that dotted her nose and cheeks year-round. She was hard to

resist when she was in a good mood.

“Perchance,” I said. “And maybe it was just those voices

again. I thought you said you took your meds.”

“Shut up, Cam.” She slugged me happily in the shoulder.

“I should go,” Jess said again, heading toward the door. She

stopped near the short, squat dresser just inside the door and

examined the framed picture lying on top. I hadn’t decided

where to put it yet, the Wallace clan photo taken right before

Nate headed up to Alaska the previous summer. “Is this your

family?”

“Yeah.” Nate was already working on his Grizzly Adams

beard, as my dad called it, but it was actually a pretty good

picture of me. I was tanned and smiling and dressed in my

favorite khaki shorts and a dark gray T-shirt. Gray was

my favorite color. Matched my eyes, Cara, my high school

girlfriend, used to say.

Holly looked over Jess’s shoulder. “Doesn’t Cam look like a

preppy boy in that picture?”

“Shut up, Holly,” I said, and punched her. Hard.

But Jess didn’t seem weirded out by the comment. She just

said, “I don’t think she looks like a boy at all. See you guys later.

Good luck with preseason.”

“You too. See you,” I added, following her to the door and

watching until she disappeared into the stairwell at the end of

3 Kate Christie

the hall. Then I turned back to Holly. “What were you trying to

do, out me or something?”

Holly sat down on the edge of my bed, wiggling her bare

toes in front of her. “You mean the preppy boy comment?”

“Duh. As far as I know, Jess is straight. No need to scare her

off.” I sat down next to her, then lay back and gazed up at the

white ceiling. Not that I wanted to hide who I was, either. I just

wanted to deal with the issue my own way in my own time.

“Come on, Cam.” Holly stared at me. “You wore a Silence

Equals Death T-shirt to the spring sports banquet freshman

year, remember? Do you honestly think Jess Maxwell doesn’t

know?”

I had forgotten about that banquet. That was the night Jess

had received the Rookie of the Year award. I remembered she

had walked up to the podium all cool and sophisticated in a black

sundress and a black jacket, her hair swept up in a twist. I’d looked

at her up there, beautiful and talented and smiling slightly as the

athletic director presented her with the engraved plaque, and for

just that moment, I’d wished I could be Jess Maxwell.

“Good point,” I admitted. Even without my choice of apparel,

everyone in the SDU sports world gossiped about everyone else.

I’d known Jake Kim and Brad Peterson, my buddies from the

swim team, were gay long before I met them. “I don’t know what

it is about her, Holl. There’s something, I don’t know, deeper

going on with her. Don’t you think?”

Still leaning on her side, Holly reached over and patted my

head. “What I think is that you’re into her. Not that I blame you.

She’s totally hot.”

“That’s not it. I mean, she is hot. But it’s not like I want to

sleep with her. I just want to get to know her better.”

Holly sat up, looking around. “Wait, where’s your calendar?

We have to mark down this day of infamy, this twenty-eighth

day of August 1991 when Camille Wallace claimed that she did

not want to get an attractive woman into bed.”

Laughing, I grabbed a pillow and whacked her on the head.

“Shut up, jackass.” It was impossible to stay serious around her

when she was in one of her moods.

She grabbed the other pillow and struck back. Eventually

Beautiful Game 3

we collapsed on our backs holding the pillows to our stomachs.

“We should chill,” she said, looking at her watch. “In

another, what, forty-five minutes we’ll be running the two mile.

For time.”

I groaned. “Don’t remind me! So how’s your girlfriend,

anyway? What’d you guys do, have phone sex or something?”

“No, we just talked.” She flopped over on her side. “But

guess what? She’s coming over tonight. She has to be at work

tomorrow morning at eight thirty and we have breakfast at eight,

so it works out perfectly. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Sure, if you like booty calls.” No wonder she was so excited.

She was going to get laid tonight. Which reminded me. “You

know what? I’ve been meaning to tell you this. I think I’m going

to be celibate this year.”

She burst out laughing. “Yeah, right. As if! You flirt with

every woman you meet.”

I moved up on the futon and leaned against the wall. “I’m

serious—at least during the season. I’m going to concentrate

on soccer and classes and nothing else. Next year is my student

teaching internship, and I won’t have as much time to think

about soccer.”

“You are serious,” she said, gazing at me. “You think you can

make All-American?”

“Maybe. Either way, I want to give it everything I have

right now. And I haven’t met anyone really, you know, special or

anything yet. I hate that word, special.”

“Me, too. Makes me think of short buses. No offense to

your dad’s students, of course. But I think you can make it. All-

American, I mean. If anyone on defense gets it, it’ll be you.”

“Thanks, man.” I was glad she was a striker—that meant we

never had to compete for playing time.

She slapped my leg. “You’re welcome. Now let’s get going.

I want to get to the gym early and check out the freshmen

recruits.”

We jumped off the bed and got going.

Chapter Five

More than one opponent compared our playing fields to

a golf course. Short grass, evenly spread over a flat, machine-

leveled surface, flushed daily with water by an automated

sprinkler and drainage system, mowed horizontally like World

Cup fields every three days in the cool evening hours so that

the freshly shorn grass wouldn’t burn in daylight sun. A hillside

provided ample spectator space and sheltered the field from the

strongest breezes. There were even enough fields for separate

men’s and women’s practice and game fields, a fact that never

ceased to amaze me after my high school experience—the girls’

team had played league games on the J.V. football team’s practice

field my freshman year in Portland.

Stepping onto the field each August was always the most

incredible experience—grass springy beneath my cleats, familiar

Beautiful Game 41

friendly (mostly) faces all around, sunlight warm on my bare

arms and legs, new Adidas soccer ball at my feet—regulation size

5, FIFA approved, SDU logo embossed on multiple pentagons

amidst the clean white leather hexagons. As the California breeze

brushed my face and my teammates’ chatter washed over me, I

would rest one foot on top of the ball and think how lucky I was

to be back for another season.

Preseason was a lifetime all its own. After the initial

excitement came the hard work, when we pushed our bodies

to do things they barely remembered, taught our muscles and

minds to work in unison all over again. Ball at our feet, sweat

soaking our hair and stinging our eyes, Coach yelling at us to,

“Think, athletes! Play smart!” Anyone who hadn’t followed the

workout schedule he sent out mid-summer to all prospective and

returning players knew even before that first practice they’d be

hurting. And in August, the anticipation of pain was almost as

sharp as the pain itself.

In the space of two hours that Sunday afternoon, the last

weekend of summer, during timed runs, overlap drills, shooting

practice, passing drills, each player invited to attend SDU’s

tryouts experienced frustration, satisfaction, self-loathing,

egotism, exhaustion. And that was only the first day—we still

had six and a half more days of preseason, which meant thirteen

more practice sessions to run our butts off and push our bodies

to their limits before Scrimmage Day.

Scrimmage Day fell on the Sunday before classes began.

While the non-athletes at SDU were moving trunks into dorm

rooms and unpacking, listening to CDs, sharing cigarettes

and beers with the friends they hadn’t seen in three months,

we were playing three one-hour scrimmages, all before two in

the afternoon, to determine who would stay on the team and

who would go back to being a normal SDU student destined

to look the other way anytime they ran into one of the rest of

us on campus. By the time we left the locker room at the end

of Scrimmage Day, Coach had posted the official team list on

the Intercollegiate Bulletin Board. I never knew if he told the

players he cut in person or left them to discover their names

missing from the list. As a scholarship recruit, I had never had

42 Kate Christie

to worry about being cut. I hoped he told them in person. Holly

always said that was the Oregonian in me talking. Probably she

was right.

At four thirty in the afternoon on Scrimmage Day, Coach

held the first official team meeting to hand out uniforms and

have the official team picture taken, to be added eventually to the

dozens of photos already adorning the Intercollegiate Wall on

the second floor of the gym. Then he gave his usual “Welcome,

athletes, these are my expectations” speech—which by now, year

three, I could almost recite with him—and released us to catch

a ride home, six people to a car, for an hour’s nap before dinner.

We had become well-versed in napping on the run, sleeping as

we had the past week wherever and for as long as we could.

The following day, Monday, classes were due to start and the

regular season practice schedule to begin. No more two-a-days

now. With the rest of campus coming alive again, we would be

settling into our dual student-athlete roles once more, preseason

a steadily fading memory. But for tonight, there was only the

deep untroubled sleep of the well-worked athlete, tryouts behind

us and a bright, unwritten season full of hope and potential still

ahead.

Chapter Six

I didn’t see Jess much those first few weeks back on campus.

Soccer opened with a 2-0 win on the road at Irvine. I scored one of

our goals on a penalty kick, which was good—Coach had told me

during preseason that if I wanted to make All-American I would

have to increase my offensive points. Meanwhile, tennis won

their opening two matches easily, blanking their first opponent

and nearly shutting out the next. Second week of September, the

national singles’ rankings came out. Jess, a preseason All-American

selection, was ranked number one in Division II.

The Monday the tennis rankings came out, I stayed late after

practice to talk to Coach about the defense. Our senior captains

were a forward and a midfielder, and half the time they appeared

to have no idea what was going on in the backfield. But Coach

seemed distracted by the mountain of paperwork on his desk.

44 Kate Christie

After a brief, unfulfilling conversation, I took the elevator down

from the coach’s office wing on the third floor to the lobby,

where I stepped out directly into the path of someone exiting

the nearby stairwell.

“Sorry,” I said automatically before I realized it was Jess.

Then, “Oh, hey! How’s it going?”

Tiny frown lines faded from her forehead as she focused on

me. “Cam! Hey.”

We stood smiling at each other in the gym lobby, both

dressed in practice gear, athletic bags slung over our shoulders.

It was good to see her. I felt a sudden surge of energy.

“Are you going to dinner? Want to head up together?”

I asked, picturing the two of us seated at a small table in the

noisy student center, talking about our sports over a huge dinner

befitting a couple of intercollegiate athletes.

“I can’t, actually,” she said, fiddling with the strap on her bag.

“I’m on a limited meal plan this fall, and I already ate breakfast

and lunch on campus today.”

“Do you live on campus or off?” I started toward the door,

aware that the ID booth attendant, a softball player whose

name I couldn’t remember, was openly eavesdropping on our

conversation.

“Off.” Jess reached the door first and held it open for me.

We emerged into the evening and rounded the corner of the

building, heading toward the parking lot.

“Where? If you don’t mind my asking,” I added, remembering

how private she was.

“I rent the third floor of a house on Cistern, just off Ocean

View.”

We’d reached my car. I stopped next to the driver’s door

and looked at Jess, trying to think of some way to extend our

conversation. The opportunity to hang out might not arise again

anytime soon. With classes and the season approaching full

swing, neither of us had much time to spend on extracurriculars

like a social life.

She stopped on the sidewalk beside my little Tercel, looking

off toward her Cabriolet a few spots away. Then she looked back

at me, a trace of shyness in her eyes.

Beautiful Game 45

“I was just thinking, if you wanted you could come have

dinner with me. It’s only pasta and salad, carbo loading for

Wednesday.”

I was nodding before she finished. “That’d be cool. You want

me to grab anything on the way? Soda or something?”

“That’s okay, you can just follow me.”

She toyed with the strap on her bag again. Was she about to

change her mind? I held my breath.

“Okay then.” She moved away.

I couldn’t believe it—Jess Maxwell had just invited me to

her apartment. Not at all what I had expected tonight. I slid into

my car and tossed my bag on the seat. It was starting to get

a little chilly. Not to mention, I smelled like dried sweat and

the outdoors. While Jess started her car, I pulled on a relatively

clean SDU soccer sweatshirt. Much better.

Jess waved as she backed out of her space, and I followed her

from the lot. As we left the university behind, I found myself

relaxing when I hadn’t even realized I was tense. Soccer and

school and team dynamics faded away, and all at once I was just a

regular person driving through La Jolla as the sun drifted nearer

the horizon.

On a tree-lined residential street a few minutes from campus,

Jess pulled up in front of an enormous yellow Victorian house that

looked like it belonged in San Francisco with its neat white trim

and polished front porch swing. I stared at it in utter admiration.

This was the kind of house I had always wanted to live in. The

Northwest bungalow I’d grown up in was sweet and more than

comfortable, of course. But this, this was my dream house.

I parked on the road behind Jess’s car and got out as she

walked toward me.

“You live here?” I asked.

“I know, I ask myself that almost daily. Come on,” she added,

touching my arm as she passed. “I’m starving.”

“Me, too.”

I followed her up the drive to a side door entrance. That was

the first time she had ever touched me voluntarily. Maybe she

was starting to feel more comfortable around me. I wondered

again if she knew I was gay. How could she not? All anyone had

46 Kate Christie

to do was look at me, I’d always thought. Adolescent boy, or

mostly grown woman? Must be a dyke.

Jess unlocked the side door and we headed up a long staircase

that doubled back in the middle. There was a door on that

landing too.

“That’s the second floor,” Jess said. “My landlords live on the

first two floors and rent out the top.”

“Cool.” I had to stop saying that. No need to sound like a

dumb jock.

I followed Jess through a locked door at the top of the stairs

into a narrow hallway. A mountain bike leaned against one wall

across from a closet with sliding wooden doors. Boots and worn

cross trainers sat in front of the closet, while a poster of Gabriela

Sabatini adorned the wall above the bike, a navy blue Trek.

“Nice wheels,” I said as Jess led me toward the rest of the

apartment.

“It’s the reason I’m on a limited meal plan this semester,” she

said over her shoulder.

The main room of the apartment ran the length of the house.

The front section served as a living room, complete with a brown

paisley couch, an old black La-Z-Boy recliner, a low wooden

coffee table, a small TV that perched in the middle of built-in

floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and windows that overlooked the

front porch and yard. The back half of the room was the kitchen

and dining area, with another pair of windows that overlooked

the backyard. The floors were warm wood, walls painted cream,

decorations worn but attractive. All of the posters, an eclectic

collection of Impressionist and modern art, were framed.

“Your apartment is beautiful,” I said.

Jess dropped her bag on the floor next to one of the

mismatched dining room table chairs. “Thanks. I just cleaned

yesterday. It’s not usually this neat.”

From the look of the place, messy to her probably meant a

couple of books on the coffee table, an unwashed glass in the sink,

maybe a jacket draped across a chair. Half the time I couldn’t

find the clothes I wanted because they were somewhere in the

pile on my closet floor. I doubted Jess ever had that problem.

I wandered into the living room, stopping by the window.

Beautiful Game 47

The blinds were up, and I could see my car parked behind hers

out on the street. Turning away, I walked from poster to poster

in silver, brass and polished wooden frames. There were five

total—four in here and one in the kitchen hanging over a small

circular table that was covered with an Indian print sheet similar

to the one in my dorm room. I recognized Monet’s Poplars,

brass frame and rose-colored matte bringing out the muted reds

and golds. The only other work I knew was the kitchen poster,

Picasso’s Dove, green and blue and red flowers entwined about

the bird’s bodies.

The other three pieces were more abstract. I looked closer and

realized they were paintings, not posters. I know nothing about

art, but even I could tell these were good. One in particular I

liked was a swirl of blues and grays and dots of white. It reminded

me of a storm blowing in off the ocean, twisted clouds obscuring

the lights that seemed to resemble stars and a misshapen crescent

moon.

I headed back into the kitchen where Jess had filled a pot of

water and set it to heat on the gas stove. She was washing her

hands.

“I should do that too,” I said, and moved in beside her. “Quite

an art collection you have.”

“Thanks.” She wiped her hands on a clean dish towel.

“I don’t recognize the paintings in there.” I nodded toward

the living room. “I really like the one of the storm.”

She was staring at me, an odd look on her face, and I added,

“It’s supposed to be a storm, right? I mean, that’s just what I

thought when I saw it.”

“No, you’re right. It’s supposed to be a storm.” She turned

away. “What kind of veggies do you want in your salad?”

The strange moment passed, and we set about fixing

ourselves food, Janis Joplin’s greatest hits playing on the living

room stereo as we chopped green and red peppers, tomatoes,

mushrooms and cucumbers to put in the tomato sauce and our

salads. Jess warmed a loaf of French bread in the oven, her favorite

bread from her favorite bakery in town, she said. Once a week

she tried to cook a big dinner. Last week it was grilled chicken.

For Thanksgiving, she was planning to cook a traditional turkey

4 Kate Christie

dinner downstairs for the couple she rented from, Sidney and

Claire, and their friends.

“Wait.” I paused in de-seeding a pepper. “You’re staying here

for Thanksgiving too?”

“Yeah.” She concentrated on the tomato she was slicing. “I

actually live here year-round. I’ve had this apartment for a couple

of years already, since summer before freshman year.” Turning

away, she strode toward the refrigerator. “Anyway, what kind of

dressing do you like?”

“Whatever. I’m not picky.”

I watched her pull salad dressing from the fridge. No wonder

her place was so different from other student apartments I’d

visited. Those were usually cramped, a bunch of guys or girls

sharing a house or a multiple bedroom apartment with raggedy

furniture and cigarette-scorched rugs.

Then again, Jess was different herself from most other

students I knew. She seemed like an adult already, a real person

with a real life complete with walls to keep everyone out and a

past I was dying to know. Why was this apartment her home?

Where was her family? An image of the woman in the stands at

the match the previous year popped into my head, but I didn’t

want to scare Jess off this early in the evening by grilling her

about her family life. While we finished making dinner, I let her

guide the conversation toward classes and sports and people we

both knew. Safe subjects. Impersonal topics.

“I heard Cory Miller, the starting quarterback, is dating a

guy on the swim team,” Jess said as she pulled the bread from

the oven and poked it with a finger. “This is ready. I think we’re

good to go.”

“Awesome.” I helped carry the food to the table. I was even

more impressed now—the glasses and plates and silverware all

matched, and the glasses were painted with the same sunflowers

that adorned the heavy gray plates.

“Looks great,” I said as we sat down.

“Let’s hope it tastes that way,” she said, tucking an errant

strand of hair behind one ear.

She had disappeared into the room off the living room a

few minutes earlier and reemerged clad in a gray Champion

Beautiful Game 4

sweatshirt, dark hair freshly brushed and pulled back in a

ponytail. We probably looked alike in our sweatshirts, faces

flushed from practice still.

As she filled our plates, I asked casually, “Where did you

hear about Cory Miller?”

I knew the swimmer in question was Jake Kim. If word got

out, their relationship was destined to become the scandal of

the sports world this semester, not only because they were both

jocks but also because Cory was African-American and Jake

was Korean and neither was out to his parents. Added to their

familial issues was the fact that the university administration

didn’t typically look kindly upon gay boys who played football.

I felt lucky sometimes to be a lesbian—at least we were expected

to be high-performing athletes.

Jess handed me my plate, filled with mostaccioli noodles and

vegetable sauce. “I heard from a friend on the football team,

Chris Sanders. He actually said to keep it quiet.”

I was pretty sure Chris Sanders was one of the beautiful gay

boys I’d seen at dances and at Zodiac. What did it mean that

he and Jess were friends? She seemed so casual, chatting about

these gay folks. Interesting.

“I already knew, anyway,” I admitted, swallowing a bite of

pasta.

“I thought you would.”

“You did?”

She shrugged, her face unreadable. “Well, yeah. I figured all

the gay jocks would hear sooner or later.”

In a way, I was relieved Jess was letting me know she knew

I wasn’t straight. But at the same time, I hoped she hadn’t heard

the gossip that Holly loved to report linking me with a handful of

different women at a time. Flattering as the stories were, I hailed

from Oregon, not California. Sleeping around wasn’t really my

style, no matter what the campus rumor mill claimed.

A moment later Jess asked me about our schedule this week.

I told her we had two games, Wednesday and Saturday. It was

our first full week of play, so Coach had scheduled a Wednesday

game instead of the usual Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday lineup.

In order to ease us into the swing of competition.

50 Kate Christie

“Same with us. Maybe I’ll check out one of your games next

week.”

“You’re going to come to a soccer game?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. I always catch at least a couple.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You don’t really notice what’s going on off the field, do

you? I always feel like I’m totally alone out there once the match

starts. I don’t even hear the crowd.”

“That’s because you’re a tennis player. The crowd isn’t

allowed to make any noise,” I teased, “or we get kicked out of

the stands.”

“Zip it,” she said, and threw a mushroom at me.

I ducked, and the mushroom landed on the windowsill

behind me. “Nice shot. I thought tennis players were supposed

to have good hand-eye coordination.” I picked up a pasta shell

dripping with red sauce and raised it menacingly toward her.

“Cam!” She backed her chair away from the table.

I popped the shell into my mouth. Then I smiled at her,

hoping I didn’t have parsley stuck in my teeth.

“Don’t worry,” I said as she pulled her chair closer again.

“I wouldn’t trash your apartment. Otherwise you might never

invite me back.”

She smiled too, her eyes nearly golden in the sunlight

angling in through the back window. “Don’t worry. You’ll be

invited back.”

We looked at each other until I felt color rise in my cheeks

and glanced away. I was really here in Jess’s kitchen, eating a

dinner we had prepared together. How unexpected. I felt my life

shifting, spinning out of control at her smile, at the look in her

eyes. More than anything just then, I wanted to hold time, to stay

there with Jess in her warm apartment, Janis Joplin crooning in

the background. Then the CD ended, Jess got up to change the

music, and time speeded up again.

Geez, what was my problem? I could be such a freak.

“By the way, do you like football?” I asked.

“It’s okay. I haven’t been to many games here. I’d rather

watch NFL than college.”

“Me, too. Monday Night Football should be on.”

Beautiful Game 51

Her eyes lit up. “I love Monday Night Football.”

“The Bears and the Packers are playing. Do you want to

watch a little?”

“I really should do some homework,” she said, hesitating.

Then she shrugged. “But I guess I can always catch up later.”

We finished the meal and cleaned up together. She washed

the dishes while I dried, putting them away by trial and error

cupboard opening. She didn’t have that many dishes, I learned.

A couple of the shelves were empty, yellow contact paper dusty

with disuse.

Grabbing a couple of bottles of Dos Equis—what was football

without beer, we agreed—we headed into the living room. Jess

dialed up the game on her small television and we sat back on the

couch to watch. There was a local ad on for a car dealership on

El Camino Real, the road that ran north-south nearly the length

of the entire state of California.

I glanced sideways at Jess. “Do you speak Spanish?”

“I do.”

“Say something, then.”

“Like what?” She took a sip of beer.

“I don’t know. Your choice.”

Her eyes focused behind me for a moment on the painting of

the storm. Her voice was soft. “La luna brilla debajo del oceano.”

“What did you say?”

We were sitting close together in the darkening room, faces

lit by the flickering light from the television screen. She was

staring at the painting, her eyes dark with an emotion I couldn’t

quite read.

Then she looked back at me, and the haunted look I’d

glimpsed faded away. She smiled and knocked her bottle against

mine. “I said the moon shines beneath the ocean. Go Bears!”

The game was already half over when we turned it on, but

the score was only 7-3, Packers. As one might expect of an NFC

Central showdown, it was a defensive battle. We cheered the

players on rowdily, kicked back on the comfortable couch with

our feet up on the coffee table. Whenever someone scored or

made an impressive play, we slapped hands and Jess whistled

between her teeth. She tried to teach me how but to no avail.

52 Kate Christie

At the start of the fourth quarter, Jess glanced at her watch.

“You didn’t have anything planned tonight, did you? I mean, no

one’s expecting you?”

Was she asking if I had a girlfriend? “Not a one,” I said.

“What about you?”

“No way.” She laughed a little and looked back at the TV.

“Not me.”

Undercurrents in the conversation. Again, if it had been

anyone other than Jess Maxwell, I would have thought there was

something more going on. But for some reason, I didn’t want to

be into her, as Holly had put it. There was something untouchable

about Jess, something good and pure in the friendship growing

between us. I didn’t want to ruin it by making a pass at her.

Anyway, she was probably straight. I would have heard if she

wasn’t. Wouldn’t I?

It was after nine when the game finally ended. The Bears

scraped by with a victory, thanks to a field goal in overtime.

“Have you ever thought about trying to play soccer after

school?” Jess asked me. The postgame show had started, but

neither of us moved from our places on the couch.

“I wish. Unfortunately, I’m not that good,” I said, and

stretched, arching my back, arms over my head. “I’m pretty

sure I’d like to coach, though. That’s part of why I want to be

a teacher. That, and summers off would be pretty sweet. What

about you? Any plans to join the pro tour?”

She frowned a little, hugging a cream-colored pillow to her

chest. She even had throw pillows. “I don’t know. I haven’t really

thought about it.”

“Seriously? If anyone at SDU could go pro, it’s you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. Still

frowning.

But I didn’t notice. I was too caught up in the thought of Jess

playing the Acura Classic at nearby La Costa, the Sony Ericsson

WTA tour, the U.S. Open even, eventually.

“Why not? God, I’d kill for the chance to play pro. You have

so much talent, Jess.”

She shook her head again. “No, I don’t. I’m just lucky. It’s

not real.”

Beautiful Game 53

Was she serious? “It’s not luck. I’ve seen you play. You’re

really good. You’re the real thing.”

“No, I’m not. You don’t know. I was never this good before,

back in high school. It’s not real.” Her knuckles whitened as she

nearly mangled the pillow.

“What do you mean?” I kept my voice soft, hoping she wasn’t

about to shut down again. Talking to Jess felt a little like walking

into an unfamiliar body of water at night, aware that the bottom

might drop off at any moment.

“Nothing.” Staring at the painting of the storm again, she

relinquished her grip on the pillow. “Forget it. I just don’t want

to live my whole life like that. It’s okay for now. It’s college. But I

want a life someday. I want a normal life, you know?”

I nodded like I understood what she was talking about.

The theme song from M.A.S.H. blared out from the

television just then, breaking the relative quiet. I looked up to

see the credits roll over Alan Alda’s face.

“I used to be able to play this song on the piano,” I said

conversationally, hoping to break the odd tension between us.

“Yeah?” Jess said, eyes on the TV.

“Can you believe it’s called ‘Suicide is Painless,’” I added,

“not ‘The M.A.S.H. Theme’ or something else? Weird, huh?”

“That is weird.”

A little while later I got up and rinsed my beer bottle out,

even though she said I didn’t have to. Then she walked me out to

my car, though I said she didn’t have to. The night air was warm,

but I still felt chilled as a breeze blew down her street, mussing

our hair.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said, key in hand, watching her in

the streetlight. We were standing on the pavement next to my

car, looking at each other. Undercurrents, I thought again, and

wanted to reach out and. . And what? I wasn’t sure.

“Thanks for coming.” She hesitated, then touched the sleeve

of my sweatshirt, just for a moment. “Don’t worry, Cam. It’s

nothing.”

She really could read my mind. I glanced toward the house,

saw light shining at the edges of the third-floor windows, looked

back at her.

54 Kate Christie

“Okay.” I unlocked the door, climbed in and rolled down the

window. “I’ll see you soon, won’t I?”

She nodded and smiled, her fingertips trailing briefly across

my windowsill. “I hope so.”

Then she backed out of the lamplight and headed inside. I

watched her go, an unfamiliar twist in my chest as she walked

away, and waited until she had disappeared into her side door.

Then I drove into the California night, replaying the evening in

my mind. I couldn’t shake the image of the blue-gray painting

and the feeling that there was something there I should know,

something I needed to understand.

I fell asleep that night still pondering the mystery of Jess

Maxwell.

Chapter Seven

In the weeks that followed our impromptu dinner, I only

saw Jess from a distance. During practice, I sometimes tried to

catch a glimpse of her on the far-off tennis courts, certain I’d be

able to identify the way she moved, fluid and lithe and strong.

Whenever Holly caught me looking, she nailed me in the butt

with a ball or ran past whispering, “How’s your girlfriend?” At

which point I would try to smack her back with a stray ball.

Soccer made the fall semester skip past as it always did,

days slipping quickly into weeks. By the end of September, we

were 5-0. I scored again in the fourth game, another penalty

kick, and managed to add a couple of assists to my offensive

total. The first week of October we had a Tuesday away game,

Thursday home, and Saturday away. Tennis, I knew, was away

Wednesday and home Saturday this week. Typical—with our

56 Kate Christie

opposing schedules, I hadn’t attended even one tennis match

yet.But I didn’t have time to worry about other sports, not when I

was in-season myself. Our Thursday home game was against San

Diego College, our big local rivals. They weren’t that strong, but

for some reason we always played poorly against them while they

always played well against us, which made for some interesting

games. We were 2-2 against them since I’d been on the scene.

This time around, the stands on top of the hill were almost

full, even though the men’s soccer team was away. I checked the

tennis courts while Holly and I warmed up together, practicing

headers, volleys and passes, but the courts were empty. Maybe

their coach had taken them off-site to practice.

Before every soccer game, the starting lineup was announced

and the national anthem played. The day of the San Diego

College game, I stood in the middle of the field with the rest of

the team facing the American flag, humming under my breath.

My hands felt shaky. This was an important game. If we lost

this one, our national ranking, eighth in our division as of this

week, would sink below the top ten, jeopardizing our chances at

postseason play—only the top eight teams in the country went

to nationals in November each year. Division II had only had

a national tournament since 1988, and California teams had

dominated the score line so far. We, naturally, believed we could

take our place alongside the other Golden State teams who had

won a National championship.

After the anthem, we jogged in for a quick pregame pep talk

from Coach Eliot. Then we did our team cheer—“One-two-

three-together!”—and the starting lineup took the field. As we

jogged out to our places, Holly passed me, murmuring, “Are we

having fun yet?”

The four of us in back put our hands together and shouted

“Defense!” in unison while our keeper, a butch woman named

Mel—short for Melissa, which suited her about as much as

Camille suited me—executed her prewhistle ritual of pacing

the goalmouth once, twice, counting her steps. Then she moved

to the center of the six-yard goal box and spit into her gloves,

rubbing them together. She was ready. At the top of the penalty

Beautiful Game 57

box, eighteen yards from the goal line, I stretched in place and

tried not to feel like I had to pee. I had just gone to the bathroom

a half hour before, so I knew it was just pregame jitters pressing

on my bladder. Then the whistle blew.

We had kickoff. For the first few minutes we controlled

play, passing around the midfield and building an attack. Then

an SDC defender stole the ball and cleared it up the field to one

of their strikers for a quick counterattack. Jogging backward, I

watched the SDC player dribbling down the field. She was good.

She went right at our sophomore stopper, Jeni, who delayed,

waiting for the forward to make a move. Suddenly an SDC

midfielder burst forward, overlapping and leaving the player

marking her behind. Now it was four versus four. Jeni tried

to shut down the passing lane, but she was in a one-on-two

situation. The SDC players were going to do a give-and-go, I

could feel it, so I stepped up a bit, waiting, waiting, now! The

forward touched the ball to the midfielder and sprinted forward.

Jeni shifted over to take the midfielder who quickly laid off a

through pass. The pass was almost perfect, the forward was

almost there...

But so was I. I reached the ball first, faked left and dribbled

right. The forward fell for my fake and ran past me, scrambling,

unable to stop her momentum as I turned in the opposite direction.

Dimly, from a distance, I heard laughter in the crowd. Then the

overlapping midfielder was on me, all muscle and aggression and

speed. I saw Jeni just to the right and passed her the ball with

the outside of my foot. The midfielder slid me, trying to hit the

ball. But I jumped, easily avoiding her leg, and yelled, “Up!” As a

team, our defense pushed up to midfield, leaving the SDC strikers

behind. Jeni passed the ball to Sara, our center midfielder, and

we maintained possession for the next few minutes again. As the

SDC forwards caught back up to us at the center line, the striker

I had faked out brushed past me muttering, “Bitch.” I grinned

and felt adrenaline surging through my blood, sunshine on my

neck and arms, leg muscles tingling with energy. This was what

life was all about.

The game moved quickly, each team battling for possession.

Though we had a couple of near misses up front, the score was

5 Kate Christie

still 0-0 with five minutes left in the half. We’d had the ball in

their end most of the game, but their keeper saved shot after shot,

even shutting down our senior All-American forward, Jamie

Betz. I wasn’t a fan of Jamie’s, and the animosity was entirely

mutual. She thought I was dirty because I played physical soccer

while I thought she was mostly hype. We just never played any

teams with decent defenders, I always told Holly. Not that I was

complaining. If Jamie wanted to break the SDU scoring records,

during this, her final year of college, I was all for it.

Finally, with five minutes left, the other team got a break.

One of our freshman wing defenders gave up a corner kick, the

first of the game in our end. We lined up in the box, marking

players. My mark was the striker who had called me a bitch

earlier. She lined up on Mel, trying to obstruct her view.

“Hey, ref, can you watch her?” I demanded. Goalkeepers

enjoyed more protection than the rest of us. They were also a lot

more vulnerable than anyone else on the field, frequently diving

face-first into a swarm of kicking feet.

The ref nodded and blew his whistle. Play resumed.

The kick came in high and floating to the top of the six.

Just as I stepped up to head it, I felt an elbow sharp in my ribs

and faltered. The ball bounced once. Mel leapt on it screaming

“Keeper” just as my mark snaked her foot out. The SDC player

cracked Mel full in the side as I watched, still off balance, trying

to scramble forward. The whistle screeched as Mel rolled over

on her side, dropping the ball.

“You okay?” I knelt down next to her, touching her arm.

Her mouth was open, eyes squeezed tight in pain, both arms

clutched to her ribcage. Finally she managed a gasp, sucking

in breath. She’d had the wind knocked out of her. Our trainer

appeared next to me, a little out of breath from her sprint across

the field, and took over. On the sideline, our second-string

keeper was already warming up.

Where was that bitch? I stood up abruptly, looking around.

Adrenaline and rage bubbled in my veins. I was going to get her,

and good. But the ref reached her first, shook a warning finger in

her face and said a lot, quickly, in a low voice. The SDC forward

didn’t look even remotely contrite.

Beautiful Game 5

Then the ref reached for his pocket. Eject her, I thought, my

fists clenched. But you usually aren’t ejected until you’ve had a

yellow, or warning, card, except for fighting or blatantly vicious

fouls. This one was yellow card material because it had happened

during a scramble. It was possible—though not likely, I thought

darkly—that the collision had been an accident. The ref pulled

his yellow card out and held it high in the air. The SDC coach

pulled the forward off for the remainder of the half.

As the trainer and her student assistant helped Mel from the

field, I turned away. This was my fault. I should have cleared

the ball. If that striker hadn’t clobbered me in mid-leap, none

of this would have happened. We weren’t going to lose this one,

I decided at that moment. No way were we going to lose this

game.

At halftime, I made a beeline for Mel. She was sitting on the

bench, a bag of ice strapped to her side under her shirt with an

Ace bandage.

“How you doin’?” I asked, my hand on her shoulder.

She shrugged, eyes red from crying. Mel never cried. “Win

this one, Cam, will you?”

I nodded grimly and patted her head, feeling the softness of

her short hair against my palm. “You got it.”

More battling in the second half. Our offense couldn’t

seem to break through their defense and vice versa. Midway

through the second half, I intercepted a long ball and dribbled

forward. Anger and energy drove me. Jeni dropped back to cover

and I turned on the speed I usually reserved for chasing down

breakaways. The rest of the team got nervous when I dribbled up.

They were used to having me in back. But I was in the mid-third

of the field here. Even if I lost the ball, there probably wouldn’t

be that much damage.

SDC thought I was going to pass off. I dribbled around a

surprised forward, avoided the hacking feet of an off-guard

midfielder. I caught Jamie’s eye where she stood in the middle of

the field. We understood each other. I went straight at the center

back, who left Jamie to head me off. Just as the SDC defender

reached me, I sliced the ball off to Jamie, waiting at the top of

the eighteen-yard box. She juked the SDC player collapsing to

60 Kate Christie

her and shot from twelve yards out, a rocket that was still rising

when it hit the right upper corner of the net. Okay, so maybe she

wasn’t All-American for nothing.

The crowd cheered and screamed for us. The SDC keeper

dug the ball out of the net and punted it angrily toward the

midfield line. Holly and Laura both picked me up and twirled me

around, separately. We were all laughing. Jamie slapped hands

with the other forwards who mobbed her, but she was looking at

me. I waited for her to catch up. We slapped hands then, holding

on for a moment longer than necessary, eyes locked.

I nodded at her. “Sweet shot, Jamie.”

She nodded back. “Nice ball, Cam.”

We let go and jogged back toward our half for the post-score

kickoff. We didn’t like each other much, but on the field that

didn’t matter. This was a team, and we both understood what

that meant. We both wanted to win.

Just before the whistle blew for kickoff, I glanced over at the

bench and caught Mel’s eye. She gave me a thumbs-up.

SDC was down. We ran all over them the last twenty minutes,

pounding the goal with shot after shot. Their keeper kept them

in, again, making incredible saves all over the penalty box. They

only had a couple of shots on our net, desperation shots from

twenty and thirty yards out. Our backup keeper, Anna, a true

freshman, settled down and made the easy saves.

With five minutes left, one of SDC’s midfielders juked ours

and pounded down the left side of the field. I cheated over,

ready to step up if I needed to. Then the midfielder wound up

and chipped the ball down the far side of the field, kind of like

a Hail Mary pass, hoping one of her strikers would win the

foot race. I turned and ran back on an angle, ready to cover if

Jodie, our outside defender, faltered. It was between Jodie and

the striker who had taken Mel out. They were neck and neck,

thirty yards out from the goal, almost to the ball, when Jodie

stumbled. That was all it took. The forward sprinted past her

on a breakaway.

She cut toward the goal, slowing just enough to control the

ball. That gave me time to narrow the space. We were twenty

yards out when she saw me coming from the side. She wound up,

Beautiful Game 61

trying to get a quick shot off, but I slide-tackled her, hitting the

ball square on and knocking it away for the save.

Only the SDC striker didn’t avoid my tackle as I’d expected.

Instead she lunged, a moment too late, into the spot where the

ball had been. My follow-through carried all of my weight into

her left leg, and I heard a sickening crunch as my foot connected

fully with her ankle. We fell over each other in a heap.

At first I thought I’d broken my foot as hot pain shot up my

leg. Then I heard a scream, close to my ear, and rolled away from

the SDC player. She was sobbing and flopping around on the

ground, hysterical, clutching her left leg. Her foot was twisted

sickeningly, and I knew then that it was her bone cracking I had

heard, not my own.

Her players and my players were there in an instant. Laura

and Jeni helped me up as trainers from both schools sprinted

onto the field. One of the SDC players knelt beside the injured

striker, holding her hand and trying to calm her. Another player

came toward me, eyes blazing.

“I hope you’re satisfied, you fucking bitch,” she spat at

me.A little ways away I saw their captain yelling at the head

referee. He was shaking his head. Finally he said something to

her and walked toward me. Jamie, our captain, followed him

over, talking to him too. He ignored her.

“That was a fair tackle,” he said to me. “You didn’t mean to

hurt her, did you?”

I shook my head, looking over at the sobbing girl. “No. She

saw me coming. I know she did.”

He nodded and walked over to the trainers to check on the

SDC player.

Jamie touched my shoulder. “Nice hit,” she said.

I looked at her quickly—was that sarcasm? But she seemed to

mean it. I shook my head, turned to limp away. Jamie followed.

My foot was killing me. There were tears sliding down my

face, I noticed vaguely, though whether they were from pain or

something else, I wasn’t sure.

“She should have stopped,” I said to Jamie. “I don’t know

why she didn’t. You would have, right?”

62 Kate Christie

She patted my shoulder. “You didn’t mean it. I’m sure she

knows that.”

Holly caught up to me and slipped her arm around my neck.

“You’re limping. Are you hurt?”

“Yeah, I’m hurt.”

She gave me a squeeze as we neared the edge of the field.

“Take it easy. Don’t worry about it. Shake it off, okay?”

I didn’t answer. Head down, I made my way to the bench even

before Coach waved me off. My foot hurt, but not as much as the

other girl’s ankle must have. The trainers were still working on

her.I could feel people in the stands staring at me in silence as

I approached the bench. Then someone started to clap, and the

rest of our fans joined in. I passed a hand over my face, swiping at

the tears, and sat down at the far end of the bench. The clapping

died away. I looked out at the field. No, she was still down. The

clapping must have been for me. I wiped my face on my shirt

sleeve, ignored my teammates’ hesitant looks. She should have

seen the slide coming. She should have pulled up. Shouldn’t she?

But as the moments dropped away one after another, my certainty

began to ebb too, until I wasn’t sure I hadn’t hit her on purpose

after all. Maybe Jamie was right. Maybe I was a dirty player.

Mel sat down next to me, wincing as the ice pack shifted, and

slipped her arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t worry yourself, little one,” she said. “That was a clean

slide. Just bad luck is all.”

I shook my head and looked into Mel’s dark eyes. She looked

so mean, but she was really one of the kindest women I knew.

She liked to talk about how many kids she was going to have,

three or maybe four someday.

“I don’t know.” I sniffed. “She’s the one who took you out.

Maybe I meant it.”

“Not your style,” Mel said. “I appreciate the thought,

though.”

Coach Eliot approached, kneeling in front of me and looking

up into my face. “You okay, champ?”

I nodded. “Just bruised.” I looked at the clock. Four minutes

left. “I’m sitting the rest?”

Beautiful Game 63

“You’ve done your part today. More than your part.” He

stood up and caught the eye of a student trainer. “Steve, a bag of

ice for Cam here, please.” Then he walked back to the other end

of the bench to confer with his assistants.

They finally took the injured player off in an ambulance.

Play resumed with an SDC throw-in where I had knocked it out.

The final four minutes passed quickly. Our defense, guided by

Jeni and Anna, shut down the deflated SDC team easily. The

game ended 1-0.

My foot was bruised, the trainer agreed, so at the end of the

game I got to ride back to the gym in a golf cart, foot swathed in

ice. Before I took off, I limped over to the SDC bench, ignoring

the glares some of the players shot me. I walked up to the coach,

holding his gaze.

“I just wanted you to know I wasn’t trying to hurt her, okay?

Will you tell her that?”

He paused, eyeing me. Then he nodded once, sharply. “I’ll

tell her.”

I walked away, head high, and climbed into the golf cart.

Holly hopped in beside me. In the driver’s seat, Steve started

forward.

“I couldn’t let you take this fun ride all alone,” Holly said.

“Anyway, I have your bag. And your sweats. And your shoe.”

“Thanks.” Suddenly I could barely hold my head up. The

adrenaline was wearing off, and all that was left was a dull ache

in my foot and a sharper pang of guilt. I had ended the SDC

player’s season, maybe even her soccer career. I stared down at

my bare foot, where an Ace bandage held the ice in place against

my heel. The ice hurt more than the actual injury.

Holly pulled me against her side. “Rough game, huh,

Cam?”

“Yeah.” I sighed and leaned against her shoulder, avoiding

the curious looks of the spectators we passed leaving the field.

“Rough game.”

I was the last one to leave the gym that night. The trainer

made me visit with her for a little while, just to make sure my

foot was okay. Holly and Laura came into the training room to

hear the verdict: just a bruise. Even though they were finished

64 Kate Christie

showering, they offered to drive me and my car up to the student

center. They even insisted. But when I told them I just wanted

to be alone, that I would meet them at dinner, they reluctantly

left.Alone in the locker room, I took a long, leisurely shower,

then dressed in a pair of comfy Levi’s and an SDU soccer T-

shirt. I taped a piece of Dr. Shoal’s tough skin in a crescent shape

at the edge of my heel, as the trainer had directed, and pulled

my Sambas on, leaving the right shoe mostly unlaced. The four

Advil I had taken were kicking in. Now it just hurt to walk. I was

supposed to use a crutch, so I tried it out in the locker room. It

felt weird. I didn’t think I liked being injured.

When I hobbled out of the locker room, I found, to my

astonishment, Jess Maxwell curled up on a couch in the lounge

reading a textbook.

She glanced up. “Hey, Cam.”

“Hey.” I was too tired to feel more than a flicker of happiness

at seeing her. “What are you doing here?”

“I was at the game. Coach gave us practice off today.” She

closed her book, slid it into her athletic bag and stood up. “Are

you okay?”

I ran a hand through my still-damp hair. “It’s just a bruise.

But thanks.”

“Do you need a ride?”

I hesitated. I could always pick up my car tomorrow. “You

going to the student center?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then. Thanks, Jess.”

“De nada.”

In the elevator she took my bag from me. I started to protest

but thought better of it. My jock pride was misplaced now that

I was temporarily disabled. We walked out to the car in silence.

By the time I’d maneuvered into the car, my foot was throbbing

again.

“Good thing you saw this game,” I said. “The game where I

manage to hurt myself breaking someone else’s leg.”

“I thought you played really well.” She put the key in the

ignition but didn’t start the car. “You had the winning assist.

Beautiful Game 65

Everyone in the stands was saying how you guys could go all the

way this year with you in back and Jamie Betz up front. When

you and that woman collided at the end, mostly people were just

scared you weren’t going to get up.”

We were still sitting in the parking lot, U2 rolling from the

car stereo. Jess seemed so earnest. She was probably just being

nice.“We didn’t collide. I took her out. You got to see someone

carried off on a stretcher because of me, after all. Jamie’s right,

I am a dirty player. Not…” I stopped. I’d been about to say, Not

All-American material.

Jess frowned, her brow furrowing. “I don’t believe you,” she

said. “You wouldn’t do that.”

I shook my head again. “You don’t know.” The phrase

reminded me of the words she had tossed out a few weeks before

when I’d told her how talented she was. Did she remember, too?

She started the car. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her

hesitate before shifting into reverse and backing out of the

parking space. The sun was setting behind the hill, streaking the

sky pink. Sometimes I thought it was odd that we lived our lives

just out of sight of the Pacific. Sometimes I imagined I could hear

it late at night, breakers storming the beach. But you couldn’t see

the ocean from campus.

“What are you doing this Sunday?” Jess asked suddenly.

“I don’t know. Nothing. I think I have a paper due sometime

next week. Maybe I’ll get started.”

She turned in to the student center parking lot. “You’re

actually considering getting a paper done early?”

I had to smile. “Why, what are you doing Sunday?”

She shrugged and stopped the car near the door to the

student center, letting the engine idle. “I was thinking of going

down to Balboa Park for a bike ride.” She paused. “You interested

in coming along? Assuming your foot is okay by then.”

Jess Maxwell, inviting me on an outing to the park? “A bike

ride would probably be good for me.”

“Okay, then. We could meet at my place, say, eleven? If that’s

not too early.”

“Eleven is perfect.” And all at once I felt better, now that I had

66 Kate Christie

something to look forward to. Maybe I’d even manage to forget

about breaking that girl’s ankle. “Are you coming inside?”

She shook her head. “That’s Laura’s Trooper, right?” she

said, nodding at the Isuzu parked a few feet away. This late, the

student center lot was almost empty. Most people had finished

dinner long before now. Including, apparently, Jess.

“Yeah, but didn’t you say you were on your way here?”

“I just said that so you’d let me drive you.”

Was she flirting with me? She couldn’t be. And if she was, I

didn’t think I could handle it just then.

I grabbed my crutch and bag from the backseat. “Good luck

Saturday. Kick some butt.”

“Same to you. Just don’t kick any more legs, okay?”

“I don’t think I’ll be kicking much of anything until Monday,

at least.” I slid out of the car, pulling myself up with the crutch.

“Thanks for the ride.”

“No worries. See you Sunday.” She pulled the door closed

after me and drove off.

I hobbled toward the student center where the soccer team

always ate together after home games. Inside, Holly and Laura

saw me coming and jumped up to get the door. Holly took my

bag and they escorted me to the tables the team had pushed

together.

“Look who’s here, everyone,” Laura said, her voice rising

easily over the others. “Our very own gimp.”

They all started laughing and saying stuff. I tried not to

blush.

“Everyone’s afraid of you now, Cam,” Jamie Betz said.

The other players went quiet, watching the two of us. It was

no secret that she and I weren’t exactly friends.

I looked into her light blue eyes, trying to figure out what

hidden meaning lay beneath her words. But I couldn’t detect

even the slightest hostility there.

“Including my own body,” I said wryly.

“I see that.” She smiled, friendly in her sympathy.

Holly led me to an empty seat. “What do you want to eat?”

she asked. “I’ll grab it for you.”

I shrugged, feeling tired again as I sat down. “I don’t care.

Beautiful Game 67

Your choice. As long as it’s got the four food groups,” I added

as she walked away. Holly sometimes picked food by color

coordination rather than nutritional value. She just grinned over

her shoulder at me.

Later that night, Holly walked me up to my room and stayed

for a little while. We shared a bottle of Gatorade, one of the

weekly dozen I bought and stored in my mini fridge, and lay on

my bed talking.

“You know, this is the first time we’ve hung out like this in a

while,” Holly said, leaning against the Indian print wall, pillow

at her back.

“That’s ’cause you’re always with your girlfriend.”

I was tossing a tennis ball against the ceiling and catching it

as an experiment to see how long it would take Holly to A) get

annoyed or B) grab it for herself. She was a younger sister, like

me, and not very good at sharing.

“You’re just jealous,” she said. “Remember, you’re the one

who said you wanted to be celibate. Although you couldn’t tell

tonight—accepting a ride from Jess Maxwell when you wouldn’t

take one from me and Laura.”

“It’s not like that and you know it.”

“Do I? Seriously, she waited for you all that time, Cam.”

“We’re just friends.” I hadn’t given Holly any details of my

dinner with Jess, mainly because I wasn’t sure how to talk about

it. Or even how to think about it. “I told you before I don’t have

the hots for her. It’s different with her. I don’t know how to

explain it.”

For once Holly didn’t make a crack. “Okay. So you guys are

friends.”

“Exactly. We’re friends.” I tossed the ball again. “Anyway,

how’re things with you and Becca?”

Holly squinted up at the ceiling light. “You know.”

I looked over at her. “Actually, I don’t. What’s up?”

She shrugged and grabbed the tennis ball from my hands,

tossing it toward the ceiling. Not even five minutes. Typical.

6 Kate Christie

“I don’t know, Cam. It’s like, one minute everything’s cool,

and the next, I don’t even know her. She gets jealous for no

reason. I don’t get it.”

Holly and I spoke the same lingo during soccer season. Each

fall, the only words we used with any frequency were “cool” and

“like” and “awesome.” Sometimes all in the same sentence. But

once soccer was over and we fell into the student habit again, our

vocabularies improved. Immensely.

“She still gets jealous of you and me?” I asked.

“Totally.” Holly shook her head. “Why does everyone you

date and everyone I date always think you and I are sleeping

together?”

“I have a theory on that one. Neither of us has ever dated a

soccer player, right?”

“Thank God. Although people were wondering about you

and Mel for a while.”

“Mel and I are just buds. Besides, she’s not my type and I’m

definitely not hers. Anyway, she calls me kid.”

“Everyone calls you kid,” Holly pointed out. “You look about

twelve.”

“Do you want to hear my theory or not?”

“Go ahead.” She tossed the ball.

“Anyway, so you and I are basically married to the team,

right? I mean, in season it’s all we think about, and off season,

let’s face it, soccer is pretty much all we talk about. So whoever

we date resents the part that the team plays in our lives. Only

sport is an inanimate, um, not object. .”

“Entity?” she suggested, examining the stitching on the

tennis ball.

“Exactly. Since soccer itself is an inanimate entity, our

respective others view our soccer friends as the threat. It’s easier

to believe they’ve been dissed for some one else than some thing

else.”“You know,” Holly said, screwing up her face in supposed

concentration, “I think that sports pysch class you took last year

might have made you a little crazy there, champ.”

I laughed. “Wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”

Leaning back on the bed, I folded my arms behind my head.

Beautiful Game 6

An image of Jess waiting for me in the lounge at the gym came

to mind, unbidden. I quickly banished it.

“I thought you and Becca were doing better.”

“So did I. Until I got home from dinner with the team last

night to find a message on my voice mail saying she looked for

me at the student center and where was I and she noticed you

weren’t there either.”

“She did not!”

I didn’t get Becca. She was this rich girl from San Francisco

who had three or four different stepfamilies and a plethora of half-

siblings. Her father was a famous surgeon who kept marrying

younger and younger nurses every few years. Becca couldn’t

stand him. To my face, she was always really nice, even fun to

hang out with. But there was always this tension just beneath the

surface, like she wasn’t pleased she had to share Holly with me.

I just ignored it and went merrily along my way, which probably

only made her more suspicious.

“I almost forwarded you the message,” Holly said.

“That would have gone over well.”

“That’s why I didn’t. Shit, Cam.” She sighed and slid down

on the bed next to me. “I don’t know about this relationship stuff.

It’s hard enough finding time for soccer and classes.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

Holly had likely already skipped more classes than she’d

attended this semester, which, for her, was par for the course.

“I’m serious, man.” She looked at me sideways, tennis ball

resting on her stomach. “I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I

honestly don’t need this. She gets annoyed when I won’t come

over the night before a game. What’s up with that?”

“Wow,” I said, not wanting to sway her one way or the other.

Trying to be the objective friend.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe celibacy is the way

to go.”

“Come on, Hol. If neither one of us is dating anyone, then

everyone will be convinced we’re together. As it is, they probably

already think I’m pining away, waiting for you to come back to

me. Slut.”

That got a smile. “Everyone thinks you’re the slut, Cam, not

70 Kate Christie

me. Haven’t you heard? You and Jess Maxwell are the hot new

subject of gossip in the SDU sports world.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Gotcha.”

As usual, our peaceful sojourn on my futon ended in a pillow

fight. Eventually Holly headed back to her dorm, promising to

call me when she got there. She always forgot, though. I didn’t

bother to wait. I limped down the hall to the bathroom and got

ready for bed. When I returned to my room, the message light

on my phone was blinking. Holly must have remembered for

once. I dialed voice mail.

But it wasn’t Holly. It was an off-campus call. I leaned back on my

bed as Jess’s voice sounded in my ear. She’d never called me before.

“Hi, Cam. Just called to see how you were feeling. Guess

you’re screening. Or maybe you’re not there,” she added quickly.

“Um, if you get this, you can call me back. I was just watching

the sports news and thought of you. I’ll, um, talk to you soon.”

And she left her number.

I replayed the message, picturing her curled up in sweats

on her couch, then hit save. I changed into the boxers and T-

shirt I usually wore to bed and turned off the overhead light,

leaving the bedside lamp on. The digital numbers on my clock

read 11:23. I should really get to sleep. I reached for the bedside

table, picked up the phone, dialed the number Jess had left.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hello?” Her voice was

soft and sleepy.

“Jess? It’s Cam.”

I could hear the smile in her voice. “You got my message.”

“I was just down the hall for a minute. I thought you were

Holly, actually. She was supposed to call me when she got home.

She always forgets.” I slid lower in the sheets, wincing as the

comforter pressed down on my sore foot. “What’s up?”

“Not much. How’s your foot?”

“Still sore. I don’t think I’ll be playing this weekend.”

The thought depressed and relieved me at the same time. It

wasn’t a big game. We always beat Dominguez Hills soundly.

Might actually be kind of nice to sit on the sidelines for a change,

cheering my team on.

Beautiful Game 71

Just then the call waiting beeped. One beep meant on-

campus.

“Sorry, Jess. My call waiting’s going. Can you hold on for a

sec?”“Sure.”

I clicked over. “Hello?”

“Who’re you talking to?” Holly said.

“Um. .” I didn’t want to tell her. “Jess Maxwell.” I was also a

lousy liar.

“Couldn’t wait to get rid of me, could you?”

“No, she called me,” I said. “She just wanted to see if my foot

was okay. You know.”

“I do. Well, just thought you might want to know I made it

home safely.”

“What, like twenty minutes ago?”

“At least I remembered. Tell your tennis babe I said hello.”

The line went dead.

I clicked back. “Jess?”

“Still here.”

“Sorry about that. Holly says hello.”

“She remembered to call?”

“Finally.” I settled into my bed again, reached out, and

turned the lamp off. I wasn’t going to click over if my call waiting

beeped again. My room was dark and cozy now, lit only by the

glowing red numbers on my digital clock.

“You were saying something about the weekend,” she said.

“Is it a big game?”

“Not really.”

While we chatted, I closed my eyes and pictured her as I

had seen her last in her low-slung Levi’s, white T-shirt and the

inevitable cross trainers. I was beginning to think she didn’t own

any regular shoes. Not that I had that many pairs of non-athletic

shoes myself.

We talked about nothing for a long time. She told me what

was on TV, which classes she had in the morning, what the

score was in her last match. I told her what I’d had for dinner,

which classes I had in the morning, what I was going to have for

breakfast.

72 Kate Christie

Then she asked, “Are you still upset about the game?”

I thought about it. “Not as much. Holly always knows how

to make me laugh.”

“Good quality in a friend.”

“Seriously.” I paused, hearing again the crack of bone

splintering. I didn’t think I’d ever forget that sound. “I never

question what I’m doing out there, you know? I’m a soccer player.

It’s who I am. But tonight I actually wondered if it’s worth it. I

was sure she’d get out of the way. She just wanted to score so

badly and I couldn’t let her. It seems almost silly now.”

Jess was quiet for a minute. “What did you decide? Is it worth

it?” “It has to be,” I said. “At least for now. Without soccer, I

probably wouldn’t be at SDU.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

In the dark, the sounds of other students audible through the

thin dormitory walls, I knew she did.

A little while later, Jess said it was late, that she should go. I

opened my eyes, surprised that the clock now read after midnight.

As I set the receiver on the hook, I imagined her turning off

her television and heading to bed. She wasn’t far away, I knew,

picturing her apartment from the street, light visible at the

edge of the third-floor windows. For some reason, the image

comforted me as I lay in bed alone listening to the faint thrum

of my heart beating in time to the throbbing in my foot.

Chapter eight

On Sunday morning, fall was in the air as much as it ever

was in southern California, evident in cooler temperatures and

a breeze off the ocean. I woke up at eight thirty and, still in

bed, reached over and tugged on the window shade. It snapped

up with a crack to reveal the perfect morning dawning in

the courtyard. Yawning, I stretched my arms above my head,

tightening all the muscles in my body and then releasing them.

For once, waking up on a Sunday morning, I wasn’t sore.

The day before at Dominguez Hills I had sat the bench in

street clothes. Coach made us dress up for away games. For

me, that meant khakis, collared shirt and Sambas. During the

game, I sat as far from Coach Eliot as possible and listened

to the talk on the bench. Coach had a habit of playing the

same eleven starters throughout the entire game with very few

74 Kate Christie

substitutions, which left seven players on the bench watching

game after game.

Turned out the younger kids I had never paid much attention

to, the players I’d thought were quiet and retiring, were funny

as hell. We were winning, and they kept the jokes and cracks

flying, making fun of the referee and the other team and even

our teammates. Each time Jamie Betz got the ball, a sophomore

forward named Toni would begin a mock sportscaster’s

voiceover, holding a water cup up to her mouth as a microphone,

speaking just quietly enough that Coach Eliot, Jamie’s biggest

fan, wouldn’t hear.

“And it’s SDU’s star forward, All-American Jamie Betz, with

the ball. She fakes left, she fakes right, she fakes the defense

right out of their sports bras. What do you think, Bert? Will it

be another sparkling performance out of the SDU senior, All-

American and Big Eight record holder? Or will she choke?”

A freshman whose last name was Whittaker and whose first

name I thought might be Lisa leaned in with her own cup. “Well,

John, it’s hard to say. My vote is, she chokes.”

Then they would look out on the field, follow the play, and

finish, “And you’re absolutely right, Bert. She choked. But we

can rest easy. Teammate Sara Alexander, All Region midfielder

and team assist leader—all to Betz, I might add—doesn’t seem to

realize there are nine other teammates out there! Betz should get

the ball back for yet another attempt any moment now.”

“And speak of the devil,” Whittaker would chime in, “there

she goes!”

The first time they did this, about ten minutes into the

game, I pulled my baseball cap low over my eyes and slouched

in my seat. What did they say about me? Probably called me

SDU’s vicious center back who liked to literally bulldoze the

other team’s offense.

Anna, the freshman backup keeper, was sitting next to me.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “They think you’re cool because you

don’t kiss Jamie’s ass.”

Good to know.

Watching the game from the bench, I felt tension and

pressure easing from my shoulders. It was just a game, after all,

Beautiful Game 75

and no one at our level was infallible. Even Mel, who had been

all-conference for two years, let in an easy goal every once in a

while. Jamie only converted one out of every ten shots. But when

you were on defense and you messed up, the other team scored.

If you were on offense and you made a mistake, the other team

just got the ball back.

As the game progressed, I laughed at the bench players’ jokes

and cheered with them when we scored, which we did four times

that day. And I enjoyed myself. I remembered why I loved the

game as I watched our team outplay their team, the sound of the

whistle and the slap of leather on leather echoing across the wide

field, mid-afternoon sunlight warming the air.

Coach put the second-string in with fifteen minutes left.

They all made sarcastic comments about being excited as they

shed their warm-ups, but I could tell they wanted to play. They

loved soccer as much as the starters did. Otherwise, they wouldn’t

ride the bench every game and still show up on time to every

practice and put in the same amount of work the rest of us did.

Personally, I couldn’t imagine it. I might be low-key in the

rest of my life, but not on the soccer field. I had played on only

one team where the coach hadn’t started me, a spring select team

in the high school off-season. The coach, a college guy named

Tom, had never coached girls before. I was sixteen years old,

burnt out from playing soccer ten months a year for ten years.

My timing was lousy, my clears worse, and Tom benched me.

One night after practice in the middle of the season, I stayed

late intending to ask him how I could improve my game and

regain my starting position. To our mutual chagrin, I burst into

tears and demanded to know why I wasn’t playing, why I was

sitting the bench, why he thought I wasn’t good enough. He

reassured me as best he could, promising that I would see more

playing time in the near future. Then we both practically ran to

our cars. From that day on, I started and played the majority of

every game at midfielder, where I couldn’t do much harm. My

level of play was still lousy, but Tom didn’t bench me again.

At the end of the season my mother suggested I take a break

from soccer. I resisted, so she packed me off to my aunt’s ranch

in Colorado for six weeks, timing the trip so that I would miss

76 Kate Christie

tryouts and half the summer travel team season. At the time I

hated her. Now I knew she’d been right. The next time I took

the field, that August just before high school preseason, I was

back. My skills and my timing and, most importantly, my love of

the game were all stronger than before. Plus I had met a girl in

Colorado who worked with my aunt’s horses, and fallen in love

for the first time. Not a bad summer, really, even if the girl in

question had ditched me for someone else shortly after I went

home to Oregon.

Now, once again, I was taking a well-needed break from

soccer, from the pressure and stress of the whole thing. Today,

Sunday, I intended to relax and have fun hanging out with Jess

Maxwell. I wasn’t going to think about soccer at all.

Which almost happened.

At eleven fifteen I pulled up in front of Jess’s house. Birds

were singing and I could hear children screaming in play

somewhere nearby as I walked up the driveway. The side door

was open slightly, so I pushed it open and walked up the stairs,

careful not to put pressure on my heel. The bruise was healing,

but it still hurt to put all my weight on it. At the top of the stairs,

I knocked on Jess’s door.

She opened it immediately. Like me, she was wearing a T-

shirt and cut-offs, her hair trapped in its usual ponytail.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. “What’s up?”

“Not much. You ready to hit the park?”

“Definitely. Let me grab my bag.”

Down on the street, we strapped our bikes to her bike rack.

No need to take two cars, we’d agreed. I snagged my backpack

from my car and slid into her front seat. Sunglasses masking our

eyes, we drove off.

“No crutch?” Jess asked.

“I only used it one day. My foot’s a lot better.”

“That’s good. You barely look like you’re limping. How was

the game?”

We talked about our Saturday matchups and listened to the

Beautiful Game 77

Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack as we headed down I-5 south

to the city. The album was one of my favorites, I had confessed

to Jess when I saw it in her glove compartment.

“Me, too,” she’d said. “Put it in.”

We drove down the freeway, singing along with The

Furniture ( You must be out of your brilliant mind). It was Sunday,

our day of rest. I munched on the bagel with cream cheese I’d

picked up on my way over, and offered Jess a sip of sports drink.

But she had her own beverage, a bottle of iced tea. This was the

life, I decided as we sped along the packed freeway.

The San Diego skyline appeared around a curve that passed

between two hills. The airport lay at the western edge of town

on a mass of land that bordered the bay. Huge jets, gliding beside

the handful of skyscrapers that made up the San Diego skyline,

hung momentarily suspended over the bay before touching

down. They crossed over the city every ten or fifteen minutes.

Slightly disconcerting, I always thought.

We took the Balboa Park exit north of downtown and parked

on Sixth Avenue, just up the hill from the park entrance. To

the north lay University Avenue and the queer-friendly district,

chock full of progressive bars and bookstores and theatres that

occasionally showed queer films. In the off-season, I made it into

the city a couple of times a month. San Diego couldn’t compare

to San Francisco or L.A., but with the local LGBT community,

made up of mostly college students, ex-hippies and recent post-

college adults, the city had a friendly feel despite the conservative

bent to the broader community.

On Sixth, we lifted the bikes down from the rack, tightened

the straps on our backpacks and pedaled into the park. Paved

paths led under trees and along the edge of a wooded cliff that

dropped onto the highway far below. Mounted on our matching

Treks, we circled the zoo, then stopped near the San Diego

Lawn Bowling Association field where a group of elderly women,

all dressed in white, were in the middle of a game. I explained

the rules to Jess, who had never witnessed anything like it. We

watched for a few minutes and then rode on. A little while later,

Jess waved at an open green near Cabrillo Bridge.

“You want to lay out for a while?”

7 Kate Christie

I nodded. “Sure.”

We dropped our bikes on the grass and spread out an old

sheet Jess had brought along. Warm from the sun and exertion,

I pulled my sweatshirt off and made it into a pillow. Kicking

my running shoes off, I lay down on the sheet and watched Jess

take her own sweatshirt off. Her shirt crawled up, momentarily

revealing her back and a purple sports bra. I tried not to stare

too obviously at her impressive tennis player muscles. She was

ripped.

I pushed my short sleeves up, tucking the extra cloth under

the strap of my own sports bra. Time to get rid of that farmer’s

tan. My legs were the worst—shin guards kept the front of both

legs completely covered and left the back exposed, except where

the strap circled the calf just below the knee. You could always

tell a soccer player by her tan lines.

We lay on the sheet talking idly as the early autumn sun

tracked across the sky. Jess kept sitting up to watch dogs and

their owners playing on the green. A couple of times a dog came

over to visit. Then I would sit up too and watch Jess play with the

animal, scratching its head and rubbing its tummy and talking

to it in a low, sweet voice. Eventually the owner would whistle

and the dog would take off, with one last kiss for Jess and barely

a sneeze in my direction. “You’re a real animal person,” I said at

one point as a boxer she had been visiting with scampered off

across the green.

“I love dogs,” she said, smiling as the boxer nearly tripped

over the tennis ball its owner had thrown. “Sidney and Claire

have a chocolate Lab named Duncan. I take him running every

day in the summer, early in the morning before anyone else is

up. They said I could have a dog upstairs, but I don’t have time.

Once I graduate, maybe then.” She glanced over at me. “What

about you? Do you like animals?”

“I do, but my mom is allergic to anything with fur. My

brother and I always wanted a dog, but it wasn’t meant to be.” I

shrugged and lay back down.

“Too bad.” Jess plucked a strand of grass to chew on and

watched me. “Wasn’t meant to be—does that mean you believe

in fate?”

Beautiful Game 7

A question like that usually precipitated the kind of deep

conversation I liked to engage in with my dorm friends in

the off-season, late at night over coffee and an occasional

cigarette. I couldn’t remember ever talking like that with a

jock before, though, not even with Holly. Maybe especially

not with Holly.

I faced Jess, cradling my head on one hand. “I guess. I think

there’s luck, too, like the kind of family you’re born into. But

the choices you make on a daily basis are what lead you to a

particular fate.”

She tilted her head sideways. “It almost sounds like you

believe we’re responsible for everything bad that happens to

us.”Did I? I frowned. “No, I’m just saying there are certain

decisions we make that lead to specific outcomes. Like getting

in a car wreck. You make so many small decisions—the time

you left, how fast you drove, the route you picked. If you get

in a wreck, it’s lousy luck, but it’s a fate you’ve sort of made for

yourself.”

“Got it. I think. So are you religious?”

“Not really. My parents are both Unitarians and believe in

Christ as a historical figure, not as the literal Son of God. But

I guess I’m more of an agnostic myself. My brother too. What

about you?”

“Organized religion is at the root of so much evil in the world,

it isn’t something I’m interested in participating in. Besides, I

don’t believe in God.” She said it firmly, as if there were no doubt

in her mind.

An atheist, then—I wasn’t sure I had ever met one, though

I knew I must have. Maybe atheists were like gays and lesbians,

closeted for fear of how other people would react to the truth.

We talked religion for a while, oblivious to the people around

us—soul versus the body, mind versus spirit, heaven versus hell.

Zen Buddhism and the practice of meditation. Hindu beliefs

about gods and bovines. It turned out we shared a lot of the same

views, not to mention a lot of the same unanswered questions

about life and death.

“I kind of believe in reincarnation,” she said at one point,

0 Kate Christie

watching me out of the corner of her eye. “I think there are

old and young souls. The old souls are the ones who have been

a bunch of different animals and people. Like, they were a

centipede and then they were a person who lived to be a hundred

and then they were a cat.”

“Hmm,” I offered. “Interesting.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say. I had spent time thinking about

such matters, of course, but not enough apparently to formulate

my own hypothesis on the nature of souls.

Jess didn’t seem to hold this against me. “This friend of

mine,” she continued, “used to say she thought the ultimate state

of being was a tree.” She paused. “That probably sounds bizarre.

You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

We were so close I could see myself reflected in her sunglasses,

light a halo behind me. “I kinda thought you were crazy already,

Maxwell.”

“Nice.” She plucked a handful of grass and threw it at me.

I almost told her to stop killing all those souls, but decided I

didn’t know her well enough yet to be truly obnoxious.

“Seriously,” I said, “I love hearing what other people think

about this stuff. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who lays

awake at night trying to figure it all out.”

“You’re definitely not the only one.” She fell silent, resting

her cheek on her sweatshirt.

“So what about you?” I asked. “What religion did you grow

up in?”

I held my breath, waiting to see how she would react to my

probing into her past.

“Lutheran,” she said, unsmiling. “Until high school.”

“In Bakersfield?”

“Yeah. And back in Chicago.”

I watched the shadow of a small cloud creeping toward us

across the green. “I didn’t know you lived in Chicago.”

“I was born there. My mom and I moved out here when I was

seven so we could be close to her family.” Her voice was so low

I almost didn’t hear the question: “You’re wondering about my

father, right?”

“Um.” I was starting to get that floundering sensation I’d

Beautiful Game 1

had that night at her apartment when we were talking about

tennis and her future. “Yes,” I hazarded, unsure what the correct

answer was.

“He killed himself.” Her voice was tight like the muscle I

could see pulsing in her jaw. “He hung himself in our basement

when I was in first grade. He was a musician, a jazz pianist, and I

guess his career wasn’t going well. I don’t remember much about

him. My mom and I were visiting her parents here at the time,

so we just stayed.”

“God, Jess. I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”

How traumatic for a little kid. A piece of the puzzle slipped

into place. Now I could begin to understand the distancing, the

walls, the shyness. Almost.

The cloud enveloped us. Jess gazed up at the sky. “The thing

is, for the longest time I thought he was killed in a car wreck. My

mom didn’t tell me the truth until I was a senior in high school.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. She never said.”

We were both quiet. I was trying to imagine Jess’s father, a

Spaniard with wavy dark hair and golden eyes. Her mother, the

Scandinavian, I pictured as a cool, patrician blonde with remote

blue eyes. I really was beginning to understand. And with that

inkling of comprehension, I wanted to reach out and smooth the

frown lines from her forehead.

The cloud inched away, leaving the sun exposed again. Jess

plucked at thick shoots of grass.

“I don’t know why I told you all of that,” she said. “You’re the

first person I’ve told in a while.”

“I am?” Not that that should surprise me. “That’s cool. I’m

glad you did.”

“I don’t know what it is about you. It just feels—I don’t know.”

She stopped and shook her head, looking back at her hands. “Just

don’t tell anyone, okay? The last thing I need is the student paper

breathing down my neck, trying to get a feature. ‘Local Athlete

Triumphs Over Personal Tragedy.’”

I smiled a little. “Don’t worry.” I wanted to say, What is it

about me? But I didn’t. Instead I reached out and squeezed her

shoulder. “You can trust me.”

2 Kate Christie

She flashed me a speculative look. “Yeah? To hear it told,

you’re not exactly the most trustworthy woman on campus.”

I pulled my hand back quickly. “I don’t know what you’re

talking about.”

“I think you do.” She was openly grinning now, enjoying my

discomfiture. “Wait, are you speechless? I thought you always

had the perfect comeback.”

I turned over on my stomach. About time I worked on the

tan lines on the backs of my legs.

“You’re just jealous. You wish you could be me.”

“That’s totally it,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her

voice.

A little while later, we walked our bikes across the bridge

toward the Plaza de Panama where a beautiful ceramic-tiled

fountain drew local visitors and tourists alike. This section of

the park contained the zoo, several museums and an arts and

crafts village. We locked up our bikes near the Art Institute

and went for a stroll, making our way eventually to the Spanish

Village Art Center where working artists kept their studios open

to visitors. Jess seemed excited as we wandered the old-fashioned

village watching metalsmiths, basket makers and sculptors at

work. She lingered longest at a demonstration of paint-mixing

using a variety of plants and roots harvested from the wild.

“Some day I’m going to try this,” she murmured almost to

herself, watching the Village Paint Master dip a crushed root into

a small container of water to produce a rich brown watercolor.

“You paint?” I looked at her with interest. I knew she

was taking a studio art class this semester, but I’d gotten the

impression that her interest in art was mainly academic.

She smiled her shy smile. “A little. Come on. Let’s go check

out the pottery demo.”

Hooking her arm through mine, she pulled me along gently,

mindful of my sore foot. Somehow the world seemed right and

SDU very far away as we wandered the art center together. We

kept smiling at each other, exclaiming at the smallest things,

enjoying everything we saw. When we’d had our arts and crafts

fill, we left the village and crossed a cement bridge that led over

a four-laned, divided street to a cactus garden. To the right was

Beautiful Game 3

a sprawling maze-like gazebo, vines growing in and around the

wooden structure. We headed for the center, where a fat cactus

grew beside a bench.

I dropped onto the bench, slipped my shoe off and rubbed

the sole of my right foot. I hoped the bruise would heal soon. I

wanted to be able to play in Tuesday’s game.

“Are you doing okay?” Jess asked, touching my foot hesitantly.

“Fine,” I said, continuing to massage my foot. “Just a little

sore.”

“Do you want to head back soon?”

I checked my watch, a Timex Ironman my parents had given

me for my eighteenth birthday. Best sports watch on the market,

they had said proudly.

“It’s four thirty. Do you want to go?”

She shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

An idea occurred to me. “Why don’t we eat at that café near

the gate? Then we can head back to the car and maybe check out

University Ave.”

“Perfect,” Jess said.

We walked back to the café and ordered sandwiches that we

carried to a covered veranda at a wrought iron table. A comfortable

silence reigned as we dug into our sandwiches and chips, trying

to satisfy our sports-trained appetites. Sparrows fluttered around

the sidewalk just beyond the eating area, cleaning up stray

crumbs. Jess tore tiny pieces from her crust and started to feed

the hungry birds. She tossed the bread closer and closer to her

chair, until eventually the bravest sparrows were eating from her

hand. I watched, thinking that she could have crushed any one

of the little brown birds in her racket hand. But she just held the

food out to them, her eyes glowing with pleasure.

The scene reminded me of what she’d said earlier about

reincarnation and old souls.

“So which are you, Maxwell? An old soul or a young one?”

She tossed a final crumb. “Old.” She sounded very sure.

I brushed my napkin across my mouth, hearing the sparrows

cheeping at our feet. “What do you think I am?”

She tilted her head. “Middle-aged, I’d say. Not very young

but not terribly old, either. What do you think?”

4 Kate Christie

“You’re probably right. Although my body feels pretty old

right now,” I added lightly. “Guess that’s what fifteen years of

playing a contact sport will do.”

Later, as we rode our bikes back to the car, I wondered what

she thought made her an old soul. She enjoyed life, you could tell

by the way she leaned forward over her handlebars and rode into

the wind, ponytail flying behind her. Then there was the way she

played tennis, fierce and barely contained and driven, almost.

But sometimes, when her eyes darkened and her jaw tightened

and her walls sprang up, fully formed, setting her apart from

everyone and everything, she looked as if she had never been

happy. As if she never would be.

A half hour later we were perched on stools at a coffee shop

on University, watching people pass on the street. I had ordered

my cappuccino in typical L.A. fashion to amuse Jess: “Single tall

half caf half decaf cap with skim milk, chocolate,and cinnamon.

For here, please.” Meanwhile, she’d ordered a pot of raspberry

herbal tea because, she said, she was trying to limit her caffeine

intake. This reminded me of Jake Kim and his obsessive dietary

constraints. Plenty of SDU students had eating disorders.

The cult of beauty seemed particularly powerful in Southern

California, where conservative politics combined with a long

swimsuit season to afflict even the most secure of women—and

some men—with pangs of self-doubt. During my sophomore

year, a freshman on the volleyball team had died suddenly.

The autopsy had determined that her heart had been severely

damaged by starvation. After that there was a flurry of eating

disorder workshops and support groups, but now, a year later,

the issue had faded to the back burner of campus politics.

“Everyone has dogs,” Jess said, interrupting my depressing

reverie.

I focused on the Jeep Wrangler stopped at the light just

outside the café window, cute woman driving, cuter pit bull

hanging out in the passenger seat watching pedestrians walk by.

There had been an inordinate number of attractive women in

Beautiful Game 5

cool cars with animals at their sides today. Maybe I would have

to move to the city once I graduated.

“That’ll be you in a couple of years,” I said, sliding a glance

at Jess. She wasn’t looking too bad herself, hair tucked under her

white Nike cap, eyes bright from our bike ride.

“I’d have to get a bigger car if I want a dog like that.”

Dangerous territory, but I couldn’t resist asking, “Do you

think you’ll stay in the area after graduation? Or are you going

to take off for grad school or something?”

Frowning a little, she looked down into the swirling red of

her tea. “I don’t know. I like the area, I like Sidney and Claire.

This is perfect for now. I’m just not sure about later.”

“Sometimes I get scared, thinking about The Future. You

know, after we graduate and they send us packing.”

“You get scared?” she repeated. “I thought you had it all

worked out.”

I shrugged. “I’ve always thought I would like to be a teacher,

like my dad. But sometimes I wonder if there might not be

something else, something better. There’s just so much to choose

from. It would be easy to get lost.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “My mother used to say

that when she was growing up she was told she could be a teacher,

a nurse or a housewife. She always said how lucky I was to have

so many options. But for us, we don’t know what it was like to

live in such a narrow time, and we still have to figure out what to

do when college ends.”

I sipped my cappuccino. This was the first time I had heard

Jess voluntarily mention her mother. An image of the woman in

the white hat who had shown up at the tennis match the previous

spring flashed into my mind.

“Your mother must be pretty proud of you now, with the

rankings and everything.”

Jess shrugged. “I don’t actually know.”

“You aren’t close to her, are you?” I pressed, making my voice

casual, pretending to watch people pass by beyond the coffee

shop window.

“No. I’m not.” Her words were clipped. “My mom and I got in a

fight my senior year. I moved out. I haven’t spoken to her since.”

6 Kate Christie

More pieces to the puzzle. “Must have been a pretty major

fight.”

Her fists were clenched, her breathing quick, twin spots of

color tingeing her cheekbones. As I watched, she unfurled her

fists and took a deep breath. “It was.” When she looked at me,

her eyes were almost black.

I reached out and touched her hand. I didn’t know what to

say, so I didn’t say anything. We just looked at each other over

our warm beverages there in the coffee shop, emotions passing

unspoken between us. I remembered again what she’d said about

souls. Had we known each other in another life, another time?

But that was ridiculous, I thought, catching myself. I didn’t

believe in that past lives stuff. This was the only life I knew.

“What kind of dog would you get?” I asked finally, looking

out at the sidewalk and taking a sip of my cooling cappuccino.

“You know, hypothetically speaking.”

“Probably a mutt,” she said, voice calm again, “from the

pound. They put so many animals to sleep every year, it seems

crazy not to take one.”

We talked about dogs some more while we finished our

drinks. Then we strolled back to the car, stopping at a couple

of bookstores along the way. Neither shop we browsed through

was strictly gay, but they both had decent LGBT sections. In

the second store, Jess lingered in the art section while I thumbed

through psychology books. Psych was my minor. I’d first started

taking it because I thought it might help to understand the

workings of the human mind if I was going to be a teacher. The

more psych classes I took, though, the more I interested I got.

“Find any good twelve-step guides?” Jess asked, looking over

my shoulder at the book I was leafing through.

I started. I hadn’t heard her approach. Trying not to blush,

I showed her the cover— The Psychology of Homosexuality. “Not

exactly.”

“Oh. Oops.” She smiled at me, seemingly not embarrassed

in the least.

The sun was setting as we headed back to the car. The days

were getting shorter. Soon we would have to set the clocks back.

Glancing over at Jess, I watched her walking beside me. Her eyes

Beautiful Game 7

were light again, her brow unfurrowed, the corners of her mouth

turned up as if she were going to smile at any moment. I had to

know suddenly.

“So what’s your story, anyway, Maxwell? Are you, like,

straight but not narrow or what?” I held my breath waiting for

her answer.

Squinting a little, she shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think

of it in terms of labels.”

In other words, a fence-sitter, as Mel liked to put it. I had

nothing against fence-sitters. Holly was one. I just wished they’d

be upfront about their uncertainty.

Then she said, looking at me with her shy look, “If you called

me anything, you’d probably call me asexual. I haven’t dated in

a while.”

“Define a while.”

“Well, the last person I dated was this guy Sean in high

school, junior year. We were really good friends. He ran track

and taught me how to lift when I was a freshman and he was a

sophomore.”

I tried to ignore a pang of what felt like—but couldn’t be—

jealousy. “What happened?”

“We dated for a few months, nothing all that serious. My

mom was so happy that I was finally dating someone, anyone,

she didn’t make a big deal about him being black. Which is

surprising for her,” she added, voice slightly bitter. “Then he left

for college and that was pretty much it. He was a really good

guy. Good to me, anyway.”

“Got it.” So while I was dating Cara, a female basketball

player, Jess had been dating Sean, a male track star. Kind of

funny. I wondered if they’d slept together. That, I wasn’t about

to ask.

We took I-5 back toward La Jolla, both of us quiet, listening

to the stereo. The sun was a ball of orange hovering over the

ocean in the distance. At the exit before SDU, Jess glanced over

at me.

“Want to hit Seal Beach?” she asked.

“Totally.”

Seal Beach was an enclosed cove where seals slept almost

Kate Christie

every night. No one knew when the tradition had started, but

most nights there were a couple dozen seals sleeping piled

together on the sand, ignoring the curious humans who came

to observe them.

Jess parked a few blocks off Prospect Street, the Rodeo

Drive of La Jolla, which, in turn, was the Beverly Hills of San

Diego. We walked a block down to the ocean, around a small

white public beach house and down a flight of stone steps to

a walkway that led out along the top of a concrete wall. The

wall jutted out thirty or forty yards into the ocean, parallel to

shore. The surf pounded against it, the spray dousing unwary

passersby. We were careful not to get drenched as we watched

the final moments of the sunset. Then we turned our backs to

the horizon and watched as the seals began their nightly sojourn

in the dying light of early evening.

“They’re so cute,” Jess said, watching as the seals flopped

their way onto shore, dragging their plump bodies out of the

water with difficulty.

Their fins were too small to be of any use. Not the most

graceful of creatures out of water, just like I was a nightmare to

behold in the water.

“They are cute,” I agreed, laughing as one dragged itself over

the unmoving body of another.

“That would be you on the bottom,” Jess said, “not even

concerned as your buddy climbs over you.”

I leaned against the iron rail. “You trying to say I’m fat? Or

just lazy?”

“I wouldn’t say lazy, exactly,” she teased, leaning against the

rail next to me, our arms nearly touching.

“What’re you trying to do, wreck my body image?” I held

my hand across my heart, mock wounded.

“Puh-lease.” She rolled her eyes. “You know you think you’re

hot.”The question was, did she? I turned back to the beach,

watching as a couple of more seals crawled up on shore.

“Want to go down there?” I asked.

“Sure.”

We retraced our steps along the top of the wall and climbed

Beautiful Game

down a steep sand bank onto the beach. There were other people

down here, a family with two young children, a couple holding

hands, three guys who looked our age. As we approached, they

checked Jess out and even gave me a passing onceover. We ignored

them and walked closer to the seals, stopping just behind a thin

rope people weren’t supposed to go beyond.

Jess crouched down, looking intently at a couple of seals

only a few feet away. They stared back, brown eyes wide and

thoughtful, almost.

“Whenever I feel down, I come here and hang out with

these guys,” she said, smiling at the nearest one. It wiggled its

whiskers.

“Yeah?” I knelt beside her and took up a handful of sand,

letting the grains slip through my open fingers.

“There’s something so peaceful about them. They’re so

trusting,” she explained, still watching the same seal. “I mean,

they come here every night, right up on shore, no matter how

many people are on the beach waiting for them. They could be

attacked so easily, killed by anyone at any time during the night.

People still kill seals for their fur, you know? But they come back

every night and nothing happens to them. I don’t know. It’s just

cool.”

I nodded. “It’s almost like they trust we won’t hurt them, so

we don’t. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Spoken like a true psych major.”

“Minor,” I corrected her, slightly embarrassed.

Holly would have made fun of me for lapsing into psych

language too. Decent of Jess to pick up the slack.

We stayed on the beach as the sky darkened and the wind

picked up. When it got too cold, we climbed up the bank to

the concrete stairway. As we neared the top, I glanced back for

one more look at the ocean and noticed that the three guys had

followed us.

“Hey!” one of them called, jogging up next to us.

Jess and I stopped, watching them. All three were tall and

dressed like we were in shorts, sweatshirts and baseball caps.

“What’s up?” I asked. Jess, I noted, hung back behind me.

The same guy spoke again. He was clean-cut and good-

0 Kate Christie

looking, his eyes friendly. “We were just wondering if you wanted

to grab a drink with us. We’re about to head up to Hard Rock

on Prospect.”

I was always amazed when guys thought I was straight. For

some reason, I thought they should just know. Often they did

figure it out pretty quickly, more often than women, anyway.

“Hey, thanks,” I said, flashing my social smile, “but we took

the whole day off. I really have to get back and hit the books.”

Jess still didn’t say anything. Out of the corner of my eye, I

could tell she wasn’t smiling.

“Come on,” a second guy said, blond hair poking out from

under his navy blue Adidas cap. “Just one drink. Then you can

do your homework.”

Keeping my smile firmly in place, I shook my head. “Sorry.

Maybe some other time.”

The third guy spoke up then, his eyes on Jess. “I thought you

looked familiar. You play tennis, right? I’m Dave Seaver, Julie’s

brother,” he added when she stared at him blankly.

“Oh, Dave.” The ice in her eyes thawed a bit. “How’re you

doing?”

“Great. Julie tells me you’re not doing too bad yourself. This

is Jess Maxwell, guys,” he added. “She’s ranked number one in

Division II singles. Pretty awesome.”

His friends made impressed noises. There were introductions

all around. I shook hands with the guys and thought they seemed

cool. The first one, Chet, and I chatted about how we’d spent

the day. They’d gone roller-blading along Mission Bay before

heading in to La Jolla for dinner. We all agreed that Sundays

were divinely intended for play.

“We should really get going,” Jess said as a short lull fell over

the conversation.

I looked at her, surprised, and remembered suddenly that

everyone on campus thought she was something of a bitch. Just

chill, I thought, flashing her a quizzical look.

She ignored the look. “It was good seeing you again, Dave.

I’ll tell Julie you said hi.”

The guys waved and headed toward Prospect Street while

Jess and I walked in silence back to where we’d left the car.

Beautiful Game 1

Before she could start the engine, I put my hand over hers.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She hesitated, looking at my hand covering hers.

Her shoulders relaxed slightly. “I guess it just made me nervous

when they came up behind us.”

I laughed a little, trying to get her to relax. “I don’t think

they had any clue how it would seem to us. Typical guys.”

“I know. They don’t get it. If three girls came up to them in

the middle of a dark street, they’d be psyched.”

“Seriously. Thanks for suggesting this,” I added, purposely

changing the subject. “I never think to come down here. The

seals are so cute.”

It worked. Her head lifted a little. “Aren’t they?”

She started the engine and guided the car inland, back toward

campus. I watched the houses speed past, window shades still

open to the early evening. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the

sheer number of people living along the coastline of Southern

California. Oregon was much more sparsely populated. There,

you could go for a walk on a beach and not run into anyone.

But here, there were people everywhere, houses built nearly one

on top of another in the hills overlooking the ocean. So many

people, so much money, so much ceaseless sunshine. Life didn’t

seem real here sometimes.

Soon Jess was pulling up behind my Tercel. Downstairs,

through the front window of her house, I could see a woman

playing a baby grand piano, her back to us.

“That’s Claire,” Jess said, following my gaze. “She’s a music

professor at SDU. She likes to practice on Sunday evenings.”

I nodded and looked over at Jess. “So.”

“So.” She paused. “Want to come up? Claire made zucchini

bread yesterday.”

“That’d be cool. I’m starting to get hungry again.”

“Me, too!”

We laughed at our in-season bottomless pit stomachs as

we took our bikes from the rack. I removed the front wheel

from mine and locked everything in my car trunk. Then Jess

shouldered her bike and led the way inside.

Soon we were settled on the living room couch munching

2 Kate Christie

zucchini bread, the room warm with lamplight. Jess had opened

the front window so that we could hear the sounds of Claire’s

music floating up.

“She’s really good,” I said, pausing in my hunger to appreciate

the classical music. I closed my eyes, intent on the music. “That’s

Haydn, I think. I love Haydn.”

When I opened my eyes, Jess was watching me.

She looked away. “That’s right. You said you used to play

piano, right?”

“Until I was fifteen. I was pretty good,” I said matter-of-

factly.

“Why’d you stop?”

I shrugged. “I thought I had to pick between soccer and music.

I didn’t have enough time for all the practices and performances

and lessons and games. Something had to give.”

“You might have been able to do both. It just would have

taken some serious scheduling.”

“That’s what my parents said. I’m not sure they ever forgave

me for picking soccer over music.”

“But they have to be proud of you,” she said, echoing what

I had said about her mother earlier. “You’re here on a soccer

scholarship. You’re a wonderful player.”

I rubbed my neck, self-conscious at her praise. “I’m good, or

I wouldn’t be here. But my mom at least would have been happier

if I had stuck with music and gone to school closer to home, like

my brother. I think my dad is proud of me, though he did grow

up in eastern Oregon, so he’s more of a baseball-football guy.

Speaking of which,” I added, checking my watch, “Sunday night

football should be on. Want to see who’s playing?”

She chewed her lip. “I really do need to study.”

“Study while you watch,” I said persuasively, flashing her the

same smile I’d bestowed on our beach stalkers.

“Well, okay.” She rolled her eyes. “Like I’m really going to

study.” She grabbed the remote and switched the TV on. “Want

a beer?”

“Sure.” I watched her cross the room and disappear

momentarily behind the refrigerator door. I really should get

some studying done too. I had a ten-page paper due in my

Beautiful Game 3

abnormal psych class on Thursday morning. But knowing me,

I probably wouldn’t start it until Wednesday night around, oh,

eleven or so. If I left now, I would only sit around my room

listening to music and wondering what Jess was doing.

She returned, handing me a bottle of Dos Equis. “You

staying?” she asked.

Our hands brushed as I took the beer. “Is that okay? Don’t

let me talk you into doing anything you don’t want to do.”

“Don’t worry,” she said with a slow smile that warmed her

eyes. “I wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?”

“Watch the game.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We watched the game.

Chapter nine

Jess and I got to be a pretty good team in the kitchen that fall.

Most Mondays after practice I would head over to her place for

dinner and Monday Night Football. Since we were both in season,

our conversations revolved around our coaches and teammates as

we ranted to each other and made one another laugh. Whenever

I could manage it, I attended tennis matches, always dragging

soccer players with me. In return, Jess made it to the soccer

games she could, bringing along her teammates too.

In mid-October, on the Monday after tennis hosted and won

Big Eights, I finally met Sidney and Claire. When I pulled up in

the driveway, Jess was sitting on the front steps, athletic bag at

her feet. She waved when I pulled up, but otherwise stayed where

she was. Behind her, I noted, her landlords were sitting on their

front porch swing, one partially hidden behind a newspaper.

Beautiful Game 5

I grabbed my bag out of the backseat and headed up the front

walk. Claire I recognized from the night I’d seen her through

the window playing piano. As I drew closer, the person beside

her on the swing lowered the newspaper, and I got my first look

at Sidney. Turned out he was a she. Sidney and Claire were a

middle-aged lesbian couple.

Trying to hide my surprise, I came forward to shake hands

with Jess’s landlords. Claire was thin, her forearms muscular,

long brown hair peppered with gray. Sidney’s short hair was

graying too, her smile brisk, handshake firm. We chatted for a

few minutes. They asked about my team and my studies while I

complimented them on their house and garden. And wondered

why exactly it felt like I was meeting Jess’s family.

As we headed upstairs a few minutes later, I said, “They

really look out for you, don’t they?”

Jess shot me a questioning look as we reached the third floor.

“What do you mean?”

I dropped my bag next to hers in the hall and followed her

into the kitchen. “Dude, they acted like they were your parents

determining my suitability as your friend. I’m not actually sure

I passed.”

“Don’t be paranoid. They were just being friendly. Want a

soda?”

“Sure.” I waited until she’d handed me a can of Sprite. “Why

didn’t you tell me they were both women? They are together,

aren’t they?”

“Yes, they’re together.” She hesitated. “I guess I just wanted

to get to know you before I introduced you. That’s all.”

“You think you know me, then?” I grinned crookedly.

“Maybe.” She smiled back. “Now, come on. Let’s get dinner

going. I’m—”

“I know, you’re starving. What’s on the menu?” And we set

to work dividing up tasks.

Later, after dinner, I asked Jess if I could borrow a pair of

sweats. She was reading a novel for an English class and barely

looked up. “There’s a pair in the bottom drawer of the dresser.”

She waved toward her bedroom.

“Sure I’m allowed in there?” I asked, only half joking.

6 Kate Christie

“You’re allowed.”

I pushed the door open, blinked at the darkness, and felt for

the switch. As light flooded the room, I looked around curiously.

The ceiling was peaked, and a window lay directly ahead on the

far wall. Jess had pushed her double bed up beneath it, pillows

just fitting under the sill. A real mattress and box springs and

everything, I noticed enviously. She’d told me the place came

fully furnished. Lucky duck. The dresser was just inside the door.

I opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a pair of sweats, then

flicked off the light and shut the door.

“Nice room,” I said.

“Thanks.” She watched me pull her sweats on over my shorts.

“You look cute in my clothes.”

My heart speeded up a little. I wasn’t sure what to say to this,

though, so I pretended I hadn’t heard and went back to reading

my calculus textbook. Jess thought I was cute, and Sidney and

Claire were lesbos.

Life, I thought, was good.

Not so much on the field, though. Late in the season, tensions

began to run high on the soccer team. Most people believed that

this was our year to go further than we’d ever gone before. It was

generally accepted that we might even have a shot at a national

championship—if we could only play to our full potential. As

a result, the pressure mounted throughout the season. By late

October, with only two regular season games and the conference

tournament left, we were ranked seventh in the country and first

in our conference. All we had to do was keep our ranking and we

would go to the opening round of nationals, the finals of which

were set this year to be played in Seattle.

As the pressure intensified, certain personalities on the team

clashed. Specifically, mine and Jamie’s. Our conflict splintered

the team off the field—her buddies Sara Alexander and Kate

Bzrezewicz, nicknamed Breezeway because no one could

pronounce her last name, and the other four seniors except Mel

took her side against me, while Holly and Laura and most of the

Beautiful Game 7

underclasswomen took my side. I could see the divide widening

between the two factions, but I couldn’t seem to figure out a way

to stop it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Jamie Betz. It was that she

didn’t like me.

The Monday before our next-to-last game, a rematch

against SDC set for Tuesday afternoon, Coach ended practice

with a hard scrimmage, starting defense against starting offense.

He matched individual players against each other. My mark

was Jamie. I liked marking her. She was always a bit more of a

challenge than anyone else, even Holly, who was a finesse player

and easily muscled off the ball. Jamie combined speed, skill and,

most importantly, strength.

Coach ordered us to play hard—we wouldn’t be helping

our teammates prepare if we didn’t play all out. So I did. At one

point, Jamie was on a near breakaway. I slide-tackled her, careful

not to hit her very hard, and sent the ball out of bounds. I even

let her land on top of me, cushioning her fall. She sprang back

up immediately.

“What the fuck, Cam?” she said, face red as she loomed over

me. I was still picking myself up. “Are you trying to break my

fucking ankle too?”

I felt my own face grow hot. “Jesus, Jamie. Take a chill.”

And I started to turn away. But she grabbed me by the arm and

whipped me around. Fortunately, Coach jogged up just then and

stepped smoothly between us.

“Take it easy, Betz,” he said. “Cam’s just playing hard. You

both were. That’s the level of emotion I like to see, but save it for

the game.” And he walked her away, trying to calm her down.

“Wallace, mark Holly.” He winked at me, but I was the only one

who saw it.

Holly jogged over and tugged on my smelly blue pinny to

annoy me. Somehow defense always ended up with the pinnies

that hadn’t been washed in years and could practically run

around on their own.

“Nice All-American temper,” she commented.

“No shit.” I was still off-balance. “Was it me, or was she

totally out of line?”

“Completely,” Holly agreed.

Kate Christie

Then Coach punted the ball into the middle of the field—a

free-for-all. Holly pushed off me and headed for the ball.

It was already past six. We scrimmaged for another ten

minutes, and then Coach gave us a quick pep talk, reminding us

to save our intensity for the other team. Practice over, I pulled

off the pinny and headed for the field house where we kept our

bags, keeping an eye out for Jess. But the tennis courts were

already empty.

I was almost to the field house when Jamie brushed against

my shoulder from behind, hard, growling in a low voice,

“Sometimes I’d like to kick your ass, Wallace.”

Momentarily speechless, I watched her walk away. Then I

half-laughed. “I’d like to see you try.”

She turned and faced me, and our eyes locked, hers burning

and angry, mine defiant.

“After the season,” she said. “After nationals.”

“Anytime, Betz.” I watched her walk away, then glanced

over my shoulder as Holly drew near. “Did you hear any of

that?”

“Any of what?”

I filled her in.

Holly whistled. “You’re shitting me. Doesn’t she know not

to mess with you?”

“Guess she missed that part of my personal history.”

Even my mother didn’t know about the self-defense lessons

her younger brother had given me whenever we visited him in

Seattle. Uncle Alex was cool. A former Air Force engineer, he

lived on Lake Washington in a sun-filled condo and worked

at Microsoft. When I was a teenager, he’d taught me how to

fight because, he said, a girl like me should know how to defend

herself. I’d only recently realized that he actually meant a big ole

dyke like me. Being a military engineer had helped him develop

advanced gaydar, I liked to joke.

In reality, I didn’t want to fight Jamie. I wanted everyone to

like me. Whenever someone didn’t, I tried to figure out what it

was about me that irked them. To no avail, usually.

“Don’t worry about it,” Holly said, slinging her arm over my

shoulder. “She probably just wants you. Kidding! She’s an ass,

Beautiful Game

that’s all. Come on. You don’t want to be late to your girlfriend’s,

do you?”

I shoved her away. “Watch it, or it’ll be your ass I kick.”

“Ooh, I’m shaking.” But she danced out of my reach, just in

case.It was Jess who trotted out the psychoanalysis over dinner

that night and told me that Jamie didn’t hate me, per se. She was

under a lot of pressure to score goals and was taking it out on me

because I was handy.

“I’m under pressure too,” I said, frowning at Jess across the

kitchen table.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “but it’s not in your nature to take it out

on the people around you. Anyway, you said yourself that Jamie

stuck up for you during the game against SDC. Doesn’t sound

like she hates you.”

“She even joked around with me that night.”

“See? It isn’t you. Maybe she just gets annoyed when you trip

her. Can’t blame her, really.”

“It’s called a slide tackle,” I corrected her. “A trip is illegal.”

“You know what I mean.” She took a sip of Gatorade. “Just

don’t take it personally, okay? She’s frustrated and acting out,

and you happen to be a pretty good target. It’s not like you’d

react. What’d you do, laugh at her?”

I bit my lip. “Not exactly. I might have said I’d fight her

whenever she wanted, something like that.” At her raised

eyebrows, I added, “What? It’s not like I could just back down.”

“No, of course not. That would be the mature thing to do.”

Her eyes darkened, and she looked away.

I hated it when she got like that, cold and supercilious like the

Jess everyone else thought was the real her. I tried to change the

mood. “Not like it’ll ever happen. Can you see it, me and Jamie

throwing down? She’s such a closet case. That’s why she’s pissed

at me, because I’m out and people still treat me the same.”

“You think? Everyone knows she’s seeing that basketball

player. What’s her name?” Jess asked, spearing a tomato with

her fork.

“Joy Lassiter, who is totally cute, by the way. What she sees

in Jamie I’ll never know.”

100 Kate Christie

“Sounds like someone’s jealous.”

“Hardly.” Not when I was here with—I cut off the thought.

Dangerous territory. “Who’s playing on MNF tonight,

anyway?”

On to more immediate matters.

Despite the drama leading up to our last conference match

of the season, we ended up winning 2-0 in fairly straightforward

fashion on the road at SDC, thereby securing top seed in the

upcoming conference tournament. Holly scored both goals on

assists from Laura and Kate, and we carried her from the field

on our shoulders when the final whistle blew. I was psyched

someone other than Jamie was getting recognition. Didn’t hurt

that it was my best friend.

We celebrated briefly with friends and family on the

sidelines, but we weren’t on our home field so the win was a bit

anticlimactic. Coach said a few words, and then we headed back

to the SDC gym where the bus was parked.

The girl whose ankle I had broken had been on the sidelines

during the game in street clothes, a cast poking out from under

the cuff of her pants. As we walked back to the gym, I saw her

maneuvering on her crutches ahead of me and jogged to catch up.

“Hey,” I said as I drew near.

She glanced back, and her face grew serious. She recognized

me. “Yeah?”

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about…” I waved at the cast.

“Breaking my ankle?” she challenged.

“Well, yeah. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.” I squirmed under

her hard gaze.

After a minute, she relented. “I know. I’ve gone over it in my

head a million times. You thought I’d pull up, right?”

“Totally,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in so

hard.”

She nodded, and we looked at each other. Then she leaned

on one crutch and held a hand out. “Consider yourself forgiven,”

she said, and even smiled a little. “I’m Kelly, by the way.”

Beautiful Game 101

“Cam.” I shook her hand. I was pretty sure she was gay. Not

bad looking either.

We ended up walking back to the gym together talking

about soccer and our college experiences. Members of both

teams passed us, eyeing us strangely. No one expected to see the

two of us making friends. But that was sport. If our positions

had been reversed, if she had injured me and I believed it was

unintentional, I would have accepted her apology too. Maybe

not right away, but it had been five weeks. In fact, Kelly said, she

was getting her cast off soon. Which was good because her foot

itched like crazy.

At the gym, we stopped and slapped hands.

“Good luck with rehab and everything,” I said.

“Thanks. Good luck with nationals. I hope you guys kick

butt. It’ll make us look good,” she added, smiling.

“We’ll do our best. See you next year?” She was a junior, like

me.“Definitely.”

I jogged away, feeling like a weight had been lifted. One

fewer person who hated me, I thought, rolling my eyes at my

own insecurity. I could be such a dork sometimes. But just then,

I was a happy dork.

Two days later, we won our last regular season game, finishing

up with an overall record of nineteen wins and two losses, the

latter both to teams ranked in the top twenty nationally. The

conference tournament started that weekend. We took a charter

bus up to San Francisco on Friday night, rolled over CSU-

Pomona in the semifinals Saturday, and met Fullerton State in

the finals on Sunday for the second year in a row. To cement our

nationals bid, we needed a win. We got it in emphatic fashion,

3-0.That night, when we got back to SDU, Coach called a team

meeting in the downstairs lounge at the athletic building. He

stood with Terry and Mark, his two grad assistants, up near the

chalkboard while the team, still clad in dress clothes, sprawled on

102 Kate Christie

the couches and chairs strewn about the lounge. Coach was a tall

man, in his mid-forties, with a wife who had once been a beach

volleyball star and two cute, tow-headed little kids who came to

most of our home games. As he stood before us in shirt sleeves

and a loose tie, I could sense the tension in the room. While the

rest of us had been eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant near

L.A. a couple of hours earlier, he’d been on the phone with his

NCAA committee contact.

“Athletes,” he began, his face and voice unreadable, “I

learned earlier tonight that the NCAA Division II coaches’ poll

was announced this afternoon.” He paused, and we all looked at

each other, wondering what the news would be.

“It came as no surprise to us,” he said, waving toward his

assistants, “that we’re currently ranked number six in the nation.

On Thursday we play Texas State College here at home in the

regional finals. If we win, we go to nationals in Seattle next

weekend. Congratulations, athletes! You should be proud of

yourselves tonight. I know I am.”

We erupted into cheers, hugging each other and exchanging

high fives. It was what we had expected, of course, but there

was always room for politics and favoritism when it came to the

coaches’ poll. The teams who deserved home field advantage in

regionals didn’t always get it. That was just part of the game.

Coach held up his hand. “Hold on, there’s more.” We quieted

down. “The All-Regional team was also announced today.

We have three members: Congratulations to Jamie Betz, Sara

Alexander and Cam Wallace, all first team.”

More applause sounded. Cool, I thought, grinning.

Holly elbowed me in the ribs. “Way to go, dude,” she said in

my ear. We were sitting together on one of the couches.

Coach held his hand up again. “One more thing. The national

committee also voted on All-American honors today. We have

among us two All-Americans.” He paused, and my smile faded

a little. No doubt he had plugged Jamie and Sara, his favorites.

“Let’s give it up for second time All-American Jamie Betz, first

team, and our own first timer, Cam Wallace, second team All-

American!” And he smiled broadly at me.

Coach had come through, after all. I couldn’t believe it.

Beautiful Game 103

Judging from Sara’s forced smile, she couldn’t either. She was a

senior; this season had been her last shot at All-American. But

I didn’t have time to feel sorry for her. I grinned and slapped

hands with my teammates and coaches, only too happy to accept

their congratulations. I had done it—I was an All-American.

And as a junior, no less. Now all we had to do was win nationals

and life would be downright perfect. I couldn’t wait to call my

parents in the morning, and Nate up in the wilds of Alaska. Even

my mom, the non-sports fan, would be impressed by the honor

conveyed in the award.

The meeting wound down after Coach announced he

was giving us the next day’s practice off. We lingered a little

after the coaches took off, all of us reluctant to leave the air of

achievement permeating the lounge. There’s a reason people

like to win. It feels awesome. But it was already after ten on a

Sunday night, and several people on the team had early classes

in the morning.

At last we filed out of the athletic building and piled into our

cars. I dropped off a trio of freshmen who all insisted on giving

me hugs, even a particularly straight girl who sometimes seemed

leery of me in the locker room. As if, I’d always wanted to tell

her—it wasn’t like she was all that and a bag of chips, to tell the

truth.

Drop-offs complete, I parked in a nearly full student lot, and

Holly and I headed toward our dorms. She threw an arm across

my shoulders as we walked.

“Congrats, buddy. I totally knew you could do it.”

“Thanks, Holl.” For a moment I wondered if I caught a

glimpse of envy in her eyes. “But you know it’s all political.”

She punched me. “Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. I’ll see

you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay. Goodnight, Holl.”

“G’night, Cam.”

Goodnight, John Boy, I thought, trying to gauge how many

times Holly had been the last person I talked to at night, the first

person I talked to in the morning. And here I was getting all of

these honors while she had to play in the shadow of Jamie Betz,

senior all-star and queen bitch. Next year, I thought, everyone

104 Kate Christie

would see that Jamie wasn’t the only quality striker in the SDU

program.

Twenty minutes later I lay under my sheets, smiling away and

trying to sleep. I was so happy I was almost scared. Something

had to give, right? No one could have it this good. I closed my

eyes, but I wasn’t sleepy in the least. I was physically exhausted

but my mind was executing cartwheels. I glanced at the clock:

eleven p.m. I reached for the phone, dialed in the dark, hoped I

had hit the right buttons.

Jess picked up on the second ring. I could hear the sound of

the TV in the background.

“What’re you doing?” I sat up and leaned against the wall.

“Just trying to write a paper for tomorrow.”

“Is that why the TV’s on?”

She laughed. “I was taking a break to see if the local news

had anything about you guys. How’d it go? Did you win?”

“Yep.” I grinned in the darkness, remembering the winner’s

ceremony that afternoon when we’d been presented with the Big

Eight trophy for the third year in a row. “We beat Fullerton 3-0.

It was awesome.”

“Congratulations! You guys rock.”

“There’s more,” I added, trying not to brag. But I couldn’t

keep the pride out of my voice as I told her about the coaches’ poll

and our upcoming home match against Texas State College.

“That’s great, Cam! Way to go!”

“But wait, there’s more.” I heard her laugh and continued.

“Jamie and Sara and I got All-Region first team. And Jamie got

All-American first team and I got All-American second team!

Can you believe it?”

“Of course I can.” Her voice was warm. “That is so great.

Congrats, girl. I wish I was there to give you a hug.”

“Me, too.” I smiled into the phone. “I’m glad you’re still

awake. I couldn’t wait to tell you.”

“I’m glad too.”

We talked a little while longer. I told her about the two

games, and that Holly, Sara, Jamie and I had also gotten all-

conference. Holly was the second leading scorer in Big Eights

behind Jamie. Next year, I said, she was going to kick some

Beautiful Game 105

butt. When I finally piped down, Jess rehashed her match from

the day before, the last in the fall season. Nationals in tennis

weren’t until spring. Jess had lost a match earlier in October

against the top seed from a Division I team. Her new winning

streak finished at ten.

“It’s strange the season’s already over,” she said, “but in tennis

the season’s never really over. I’m ready for a break, though.”

“I know what you mean.”

Time was doing what it does, inexorably dragging us forward

into the recent future. In a week, my junior season would be over,

one way or another. Then I would only have one more season left

in my college soccer career.

We wound down, finally. Since neither of us had practice

the next day, we agreed to meet early for dinner, at my place for

once. Then we could figure out where to go from there.

After I hung up, I lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling.

Thoughts skipped through my mind, fragments of ideas and

emotions and memories chasing each other in circles. I’d made

All-American. Did it feel like I’d expected? I thought about the

coming days when I would walk across campus, this new title

appended behind my name for all my professors, fellow students

and student-athletes to see. Yes, I decided, grinning in the dark.

It felt pretty damn amazing.

Was this how Jess always felt? For some reason, I doubted the

recognition she’d received for her tennis abilities meant as much

to her as this meant to me. Maybe that proved I was shallow.

Narcissistic, even. If so, there were worse things to be, I told

myself, planning the phone calls I would make to relatives and

friends in the morning.

Chapter ten

For national quarterfinals, regional finals, at home on

Thursday, a huge crowd took over the hillside. Jess was there, I

knew, along with half the school it seemed. Starting lineups were

announced, the national anthem blared over the loudspeaker,

both teams took the field. We were playing Texas State College,

who we’d beaten my sophomore year 2-0 on a road trip through

the Lone Star State. We were confident as we kicked off—in

ninety minutes, we would surely be Seattle-bound.

But perhaps too confident, too certain of ourselves and our

destiny. TSC was the underdog; they had nothing to lose, while

we were already thinking of Seattle. I was looking forward to

playing in front of my parents, my aunt and uncle and younger

cousins, friends from high school. Looking beyond the game we

would have to win to punch our ticket to the Emerald City.

Beautiful Game 107

Ten minutes in, TSC stole the ball in the midfield and

caught us napping. They popped it over the top to their right

wing, who dribbled past Jodie, one of our outside defenders. I

shifted over to cover, but the TSC striker unexpectedly took a

quick shot from twenty-five yards out. It was a lucky shot—lucky

for TSC, anyway. The ball curved upward, heading unerringly

for the far upper corner of the goal. Mel, caught off her line,

backpedaled furiously. At the last moment she dove into the air

and tipped the ball up and over the crossbar. Whew—a save.

But we weren’t out of danger yet: a corner kick for TSC. Both

teams lined up, eighteen players within the eighteen-yard box.

The kick, a scramble inside the six, a shot, and a hand snaked

out to make another save. Only it wasn’t Mel’s hand this time. It

was Jeni’s, ungloved, uniform sleeve pushed up her forearm, Jeni

who had knocked away a certain goal. Screech of the whistle,

moment of silence, moment of stillness.

Then time speeded up again. The referee pulled a red

card from his pocket and motioned Jeni toward the sideline—

rightfully so, we knew, even as Jamie, our captain, argued with

him. An intentional handball in the box is an automatic red

card. Jeni knew this too, and stumbled from the field crying.

Meanwhile, a penalty kick had been awarded to TSC, a free shot

from twelve yards out with only the keeper to beat. Coach Eliot

stepped onto the field, shouting at the ref. Coach Eliot was shown

a yellow card. Coach Eliot was pulled back to the bench by one

of his assistants while the rest of us gathered helplessly at the

edge of the penalty box, hoping, praying for a miss, a rebound,

a save. The whistle blew again, the TSC center midfielder took

the penalty kick—and scored.

Fifteen minutes into the game and we were down both a goal

and a player—because of Jeni’s red card, we would have to play ten

versus eleven the rest of the game. Under pressure, our nationals

trip suddenly at risk, we floundered. Our passes missed their

targets, our runs were ill-timed, our confidence nonexistent. We

couldn’t seem to trap or head a ball to save our lives. The crowd

on the hill was eerily quiet, our stunned spectators as unsure as

we were how to react.

The whistle at halftime came as a relief. Maybe now we

10 Kate Christie

could take a breath and regroup, I thought, heading with the

rest of the team for the goal nearest the home bench for our

traditional team talk. But our captains seemed to have a different

objective in mind. Midway down the field, Jamie and Sara caught

up to Jeni.

“What were you thinking?” Jamie demanded. “Were you

trying to lose this game? You just fucked it up for the entire

team!”

She and Sara were seniors. If we lost this game, their soccer

careers would be over.

Coach Eliot was deep in conference with his assistants and

didn’t appear to notice the captains’ sneak attack on Jeni, who

was rubbing the back of her hand against her nose, head down.

Somebody clearly needed to do something. I dropped my water

bottle and headed for the threesome.

“Hey,” I said as I approached. Ten yards away, the rest of the

team was looking now, all except for our clueless coaches. Or

maybe they just didn’t want to see. “Leave her alone,” I said. “It’s

not her fault we’re sucking it up.” And I smiled reassuringly at

Jeni, my little sophomore defender. She nodded at me gratefully

through her tears.

“Stay out of this, Cam,” Jamie said, glaring at me. “It’s your

fucking defense that got us in this mess to begin with.”

My eyes narrowed slightly. I was aware of the team only ten

yards away, of the sun pounding on the back of my neck, of the

ground solid and green beneath my feet. I swallowed my anger.

“Grow up, Jamie,” I said, taking Jeni by the arm and pulling

her toward the rest of the team. “I don’t see you working any

miracles out there.” I turned away.

But Jamie grabbed me and spun me around as she had done

once before the day she threatened to kick my ass. “Fuck you,

Cam.” Tension and possibly fear pounding in her blood, Jamie

forgot the crowd, shook Sara off and actually threw a punch at

my face.

Fortunately I too was in soccer mode, adrenaline flooding my

system. I dodged her swing easily and trapped her arm against

my side. In a low voice I said, “We’re on the same team, jackass.

Get your fucking head together.”

Beautiful Game 10

Sara grabbed Jamie and dragged her aside, whispering

angrily. I took Jeni’s arm again and made her sit near me in the

goalmouth, while Jamie and Sara took up positions as far away

from us as possible during Coach’s halftime talk. But I knew

the rest of the team had seen the exchange. Dread pooled in my

stomach as the minutes ticked by. We were crumbling, no bones

about it. We were on the verge of self-destruction.

In the second half, TSC came out strong, pounding up and

down the field tirelessly. With an extra player, they dominated,

while we continued to fade. Our passes were still off, our runs

entirely without purpose. My legs felt heavy, as if I were running

through mud, and I could tell I wasn’t the only one afflicted by

this malaise. TSC had chance after chance while we were lucky

to get it across the half line.

Then, with twenty minutes left in the game, Jamie crossed a

beautiful pass in front of the goal just out of reach of the keeper.

But no one was there. No one made the run. Jamie screamed,

words carrying on the wind: “What the fuck? Am I alone out

here?”

And suddenly, I understood what the phrase seeing red meant.

“Shut up!” I shouted at Jamie as TSC got ready for a goal

kick. Everyone looked around at me in shock, including Jamie.

“Just shut up, Betz, and play the fucking game!”

Apparently that was one too many curses—the whistle blew

and the referee gave Jamie and me each a warning. Swearing

isn’t generally permitted on the field, though male soccer players

curse themselves and each other up one side and down the other

with little objection from the officials. But we weren’t male.

“One more outburst like that,” the gray-haired referee

lectured us, “and you’ll both be looking at yellow cards.”

As he glared at us, I wondered if he knew that we were both

lesbians, if he was looking at us thinking, Fucking militant dykes. I

nodded sullenly and paced away, wishing I had maintained better

control. Jamie and I had embarrassed ourselves and our team.

What was more, we had behaved in a distinctly un-All-American

fashion. No one would quite look at me as I shifted back into

position for the goal kick. Not even Laura, who disliked Jamie

as much as I did.

110 Kate Christie

The seconds continued to tick down while we flailed about

on our home field, unable to believe that this was how our best-

ever season could end. When the final whistle blew, the TSC

players screamed and jumped around the field, our field, as we

watched in silence. Our seniors started to cry as they headed for

the bench. We shook hands mechanically, quietly, grabbed our

gear and headed for the gym in twos and threes, heads down,

stunned, ashamed. Our loyal fans stayed where they were on the

hill, watching us trail away across the field.

Holly, Laura and I walked toward the gym together. We were

shell-shocked. This was not supposed to happen. We weren’t

supposed to lose at home to a team we had easily dispatched

the year before. We were supposed to go to Seattle. We were

supposed to have a shot at winning the whole thing.

Inside, Coach Eliot met us in the classroom near the women’s

locker room. In a clipped voice entirely different from Sunday

night, he told us we would have a team meeting the following

day, Friday, at four. Instead of practice, he didn’t have to say. We

already knew all about the end-of-season meeting to turn in our

gear and figure out a date and location for our team banquet.

None of us had expected to have such a meeting so soon.

In the same voice, Coach directed us not to be too hard

on ourselves. This was just the way of sport, of soccer, as we

all knew—any given team could beat any other team on any

given day. Unfortunately, someone always had to lose. A 19-3

record was nothing to be ashamed of, and he hoped we could

be as proud of ourselves as he was. True, we didn’t fulfill our

potential, but that was his fault more than it was ours. We should

just be proud that we’d made it this far. He was. And with that

final pronouncement, he nodded at us and left the room, silent

assistants in tow.

This was usually the moment when the captains held the

floor and declared that just because the season was over didn’t

mean we weren’t still a team, what with intramurals to look

forward to and important off-the-field bonding the rest of the

year. Instead, Jamie stalked out, slamming the classroom door

behind her. Sara, her co-captain, touched her hair nervously.

Everyone was looking to her now.

Beautiful Game 111

“Um, we’ll talk tomorrow after the meeting, okay?” she said.

“Don’t worry about it, you guys. We’ll talk tomorrow.” And she

slipped out the door too.

In the locker room, no one showered. We stripped off our

uniforms one last time as the rookies hefted the laundry bags,

not bothering to grumble as they usually did. Everyone was

deathly quiet until Mel, whose eyes were red from crying for the

second time this season, sighed dramatically and said, “Well, I

don’t know about the rest of you, but I intend to get completely

wasted this weekend. Like, puking my guts out wasted. Anyone

else up for that?”

Tension broken, everyone laughed, the younger kids looking

at the juniors and seniors cautiously.

“Count me in,” Laura said, and slapped Mel’s upraised hand.

We rode to the student center packed five and six to a

car, and pushed our usual tables together in a corner of the

cafeteria—everyone but Jamie and Sara. Silence forgotten, we

talked about the game, then the season, then, finally, our non-

soccer lives. Our daily bond had broken, and suddenly we were

just a group of friends whose reason for getting together every

day had unexpectedly ended. We lingered over dinner, reluctant

to let go. After tomorrow, we would have to make an effort to

see each other.

Eventually the team dwindled, soccer players leaving to ice

sore joints, study at the library, write papers and lab reports,

sleep, until only Holly, Mel, Laura, Jeni and I remained. We

sat close about a cafeteria table laughing and slapping hands,

growing quiet again whenever anyone mentioned the game. It

was after eight when we finally rose from our seats, embraced

one another, and left the cafeteria as teammates one last time.

Back at Laura’s dorm, Holly and Laura and I sat out on

her balcony drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking

until one in the morning. As far as soccer was concerned, we

were seniors now. Only one season left to strive for that elusive

championship title. None of us could quite believe it, and no

one said what we were probably all thinking: This year was it.

Without Jamie and Sara, we probably wouldn’t ever come this

close to a national championship again.

112 Kate Christie

Later, back at my dorm, I found a message on my voice mail

from Jess. She had been at the game and wanted to tell me how

sorry she was about everything and to make sure I was okay.

Wanted me to call her when I got in. I listened to the message

twice, but I didn’t call her. I couldn’t talk to her, knowing she

had seen the game. Had seen me and Jamie take the team down

in our personal war.

Room spinning slightly around me, I lay down on my bed

and waited. Sleep, I knew, would be long in coming.

Chapter eleven

I almost didn’t recognize Jess when she stopped next to my

table the next day at lunch—beneath her baseball cap, her hair

was down.

“Hey,” she said, tray in hand. “Anyone sitting here?”

I waved at the chair in question. “All yours.”

As she sat down across from me, I noticed that she looked

cute as usual in her low-slung jeans and a white shirt, gray Nike

hat pulled low on her forehead, dark hair curling around her

shoulders. Meanwhile I was feeling slightly hungover. Not to

mention depressed.

“Sorry I didn’t call you last night,” I said. “I didn’t get in

until late.”

“That’s okay. I figured you might not be in the mood to talk.

Tough game, huh?”

114 Kate Christie

“You could say that.” I hadn’t been able to think about

anything else. I’d skipped both of my morning classes, which

was not good. The dread and shame were still twisting in my

stomach. I almost wished Jess hadn’t been there. “Did you see

the whole thing?”

“I did. That poor girl, Jeni. Everyone in the stands felt bad

for her, especially when Jamie lit into her.” She took a bite of her

sandwich, looking at me consideringly.

“You saw that?”

She nodded and touched my hand. “Did Jamie really try

to hit you? Because that’s what it looked like from where I was

sitting.”

I looked down at my plate, embarrassed. “Yeah,” I said, my

voice low. “I was hoping no one on the hill saw that.”

“I don’t think most people did,” she assured me. “But what

happened?”

“Jamie totally lost it. She was reaming Jeni so I stepped

between them and she got all pissed off and told me it was my

fault we were losing. I told her to grow up and started to walk

away, and the next thing I know she’s taking a swing at me.”

“That’s crazy.” She paused. “What was up with the referee

in the second half? When he stopped the game, I mean. We

couldn’t tell what was going on from the hill.”

Picking at the remnants of my potato salad, I explained

my exchange with Jamie and the warning the ref had given us.

“Basically we both freaked out and took the team down with us.

Jamie and I fucked up. That’s all there is to it.”

“You don’t blame yourself for losing, do you?”

“I don’t know.” I sighed. “I guess I do. If I’d been more alert,

they never would have gotten that first shot off, or the corner

kick, and then Jeni wouldn’t have had to save the goal herself.”

“No one else thinks it’s your fault.” She shook her head,

smiling a little. “You weren’t the only one on that field yesterday,

Cam. There were eleven other players out there with you.”

“Actually, only ten.”

“You know what I mean.” She threw a grape at me.

I caught the grape. “Thanks for the pep talk, but I still feel like

shit. This is the second year in a row we’ve lost at regionals.”

Beautiful Game 115

“I’m sorry. That really sucks.” She paused. “Want to come

over and have dinner with me and Sidney and Claire this

weekend? You know, take your mind off soccer?”

“That would be good. Saturday night or something?” I

stopped. We would probably have a soccer party this weekend—

get together and get good and drunk and try not to feel too sorry

for ourselves.

“Can we make it Sunday?” she asked. “We’re having a tennis

party on Saturday.”

Jess was one of the captains of the tennis team. She never

let them party at her apartment, though, she’d told me, mainly

because she knew they’d trash the place. Rich girls weren’t good

with other people’s property.

“We’ll probably have a soccer party that night, too. You

know what?” I added. “We should all hang out together. Soccer

could drink your team under the table.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? Even with a game of

Chandeliers?”

Chandeliers was a particularly nasty drinking game involving

quarters and shot glasses. I nodded boldly. “Totally. We’d kick

your butt.”

“No pun intended?”

“Good one. How about it? You guys want to take us on?”

“I’ll talk to the team and get back to you, but I can’t see them

saying no.” She stuck her hand across the table. “Looks like I

might be seeing you Saturday night after all.”

I took her hand and smiled across the narrow cafeteria table

as college students passed us on all sides. I could already feel my

soccer-induced depression receding. Had nothing to do with the

fact that I liked the feel of Jess’s palm against mine.

That weekend, Mel let the soccer team invade the on-

campus apartment she shared with two other seniors. Laura,

Holly and I were the first to arrive. We opened a case of Rolling

Rock and stocked the refrigerator, then sprawled on the couch,

chatting as we watched Mel finish her last-minute cleaning. The

116 Kate Christie

apartment complex belonged to the university. Each apartment

was its own two-floor building with a kitchen and living/dining

room downstairs, bedrooms and bathroom upstairs. Mel said it

would probably be the nicest apartment she would live in this

millennium.

Soon after we got there, the doorbell rang again. Sara, Kate

and Jamie came in and stood in the entryway, hands deep in

their jeans pockets, all three in the navy blue team jackets we’d

bought the year before.

After a minute, I cleared my throat. “Beer’s in the fridge.”

The tension in the room eased a bit. Jamie and Mel put their

heads together at the stereo in the corner of the living room,

lining up CDs for the evening, while Kate and Sara left the

beer they’d brought in the kitchen and grabbed bottles from the

fridge. The doorbell rang again and a whole mess of freshmen

and sophomores wandered in, almost unfamiliar to me in street

clothes. We got everyone beer, except for a couple of freshmen

who’d brought wine coolers. They didn’t like beer.

Jamie grinned malevolently. “We’ll have to take care of that,

won’t we, Mel?”

Mel nodded, unsmiling, playing the mean butch. “We

certainly will.”

The two freshmen exchanged a wide-eyed look and cradled

their wine coolers closer to their chests. They were probably

afraid of Mel. Then again, even I had been intimidated when

I first met her. Mel caught my eye and turned away, hiding a

smile.

It might seem strange, but I always felt like I really got to

know my teammates during the off-season. At this point in

the semester, we’d spent countless hours together on buses, at

practice and in locker rooms, but we were basically a group of

strangers still. We knew who could chest trap the ball well and

who was good at crosses or volleys, who was on scholarship and

who was a walk-on, who had bad ankles and how long most of us

had played soccer. But beyond the neat rectangle of the soccer

field, we didn’t know each other that well.

At off-season parties, I finally got to know the teammates I

hadn’t talked to much at practice. The cliques were still obvious,

Beautiful Game 117

but as soon as everyone gathered around the table for a game of

quarters, the barriers dropped and laughter bonded everyone.

Seniors learned the names of freshmen. Juniors and sophomores

cemented friendships. And freshmen forgot to be shy as they

tried to catch their teammates with a quarter in a shot glass.

When the doorbell rang half an hour after the last soccer

player had arrived, Mel and I exchanged a look. I went to open

the door and discovered Jess and a dozen or so of her teammates

waiting outside. Judging from their bright eyes and the tall plastic

cups they nearly all carried, they had pre-partied somewhere

along the way. My bet was on a frat party.

“Hey,” Jess said, smiling at me.

“Come on in,” I said, holding the door wide. This was going

to be interesting.

At first the tennis players were more reserved than we were,

accustomed as they were to a sport in which any display of emotion

resulted in point penalties. The drunker they got, though, the

rowdier they were and the more fun everyone seemed to have. As

I’d predicted, the soccer team drank the tennis team under the

table. But it took a while, and most of the beer in the apartment

was gone before the tennis team finally folded.

Unlike the rest of her team, Jess didn’t drink much. She

had to drive home, she said. Mel told her she was welcome to

stay in one of the rooms upstairs—her fourth roommate had

dropped out of school, and friends were always staying over in

the empty room. At this suggestion, though, Jess just shook

her head and got all quiet. Then she excused herself and went

upstairs to the bathroom, and I got caught up in my turn in the

drinking game. By the time I noticed she was back a little later,

everything seemed normal again. Well on my way to getting

drunk, I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined the odd look in her

eyes at Mel’s suggestion.

The party was more fun than I’d expected. The music was

good, and people from disparate social strata actually got along.

The one bummer was that Holly left early. She’d promised Becca

she would meet her for a drink at midnight— booty call, we all

razzed her as she pulled on her team jacket and resolutely headed

for the door. The party raged on for another hour before soccer

11 Kate Christie

players and tennis players began to stagger off toward central

campus in twos and threes.

Finally it was only Mel, Jeni, Anna, Jess and me left. Jess and

I were sitting on the orange couch in the living room talking

about nothing. The other three were at the dining table doing

the same. The stereo was crooning the Eagles’ Greatest Hits.

“Awesome party,” Jess said. “Even if you did kick our butts.”

“Told you so.”

I wasn’t quite drunk, more like happily buzzed. The buzz was

beginning to wear off, though, and I was starting to get sleepy. I

leaned my head against the back of the couch and squinted down

at our feet. We were sitting close together in the middle of the

wide couch, our jeaned legs barely touching, sneakered feet up

on the wooden coffee table.

Jess was watching me. “You’re so cute,” she murmured, and

reached out to touch my cheek, her fingers gliding gently over

my alcohol-flushed skin.

That woke me up. I looked over at her quickly. “Jess,” I

said, my voice low. Then I stopped. My hand caught hers, our

fingers interlacing almost of their own accord. Our eyes held, an

unspoken undercurrent passing between us.

Then, blinking, she looked away, glanced at her watch. “It’s

late. I should go.” She released my hand with a quick squeeze and

leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

I sat where I was, wondering what had just happened. Had

she really touched my cheek and called me cute and looked at

me with that rare wide open look? I stared at her back, muscles

visible beneath her long-sleeved shirt, and had to resist an urge

to slip my arms around her from behind. I drained the last of

my beer and closed my eyes. Maybe I was drunk after all. Or

maybe I had just been celibate for too long. Five months felt like

a lifetime.

Beside me, Jess started humming along to “I Can’t Tell You

Why,” one of my all-time favorite Eagles songs. Her voice was

good, I could tell. I felt her lean back next to me again, our thighs

touching. I was afraid that if I opened my eyes, she would move

away.When the song was over, she touched my leg briefly, her

Beautiful Game 11

hand warm through the denim of my jeans. “Hey, champ. You

awake?”

Reluctantly I opened my eyes and blinked in the lamplight.

Jeni and Anna were standing up now, looking over at us and

laughing at something Mel had said. Jess was watching me, her

eyes shuttered again.

“Unfortunately,” I said.

The party was over. We walked out together—Anna, Jeni,

Jess and me. Jess’s car was parked on a nearby street, so I walked

her to it while Anna and Jeni waited for me under a streetlamp.

At the Volkswagen, Jess turned to me and held up her hand. I

slapped it automatically even though I would rather have given

her a hug. Jess wasn’t the hugging type.

“You know,” I said, “you could stay at my place tonight if you

don’t want to drive.”

As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. I hadn’t

intended to say that.

She looked down at the keys in her hand and shook her head.

“Thanks anyway, but I should go.”

I cleared my throat quickly. “That’s cool.” Why had I said

anything? All at once I felt like a lecherous lesbian, though I

hadn’t meant anything by the invitation. At least I didn’t think I

had. I stepped back. “Okay, well, drive safely.”

“I will.” She watched me backing away. I spun on my heel

and headed toward my teammates. Behind me, I heard Jess get

into her car and start the engine. I didn’t look back as she drove

away.Anna, Jeni and I walked quickly through the cooling

California night, chatting and gossiping about the party. Jeni

kept talking about Mel. I would have to remember to tell Mel

that, I thought. Jeni didn’t look gay. With Anna, though, it

was obvious. Her hair was cropped short except in front where

it was bleached blonde. She wore a black triangle earring in

her left ear and walked with this cocky, jock-dyke walk. She

actually reminded me of myself back in my radical days, as

Holly liked to call them. I sighed a little and looked up at the

faint stars, nearly blotted out by the San Diego lights. I must

be getting old. The thought of dating practically any attractive

120 Kate Christie

woman who showed interest, as I’d done my first two years of

college, no longer appealed to me in the least.

“What’s up with you and that tennis player, Cam?” Anna

asked as we neared central campus.

Bold little baby dyke. I could almost respect that. “What’s it

to you?”

She smiled disarmingly at me. “I was just going to say you

guys look good together.”

“Right.” I recognized that smile too. “We’re just friends. But

as long as we’re on the topic of dating girls, I’m going to give you

two a few tips passed along to me by another soccer player my

first year at SDU. Number one, never date anyone on your team.

At least, not anyone who will be on your team next season,” I

amended, catching Jeni’s frown out of the corner of my eye.

“Number two, try to date people who are about your size. That

way you can share clothes.” They giggled. “Number three, never

date anyone who lives on your hall. If you break up, bathroom

scenes can get pretty ugly. And last, don’t date straight girls. It

only gets you into trouble.” A tip I would do well to remember,

apparently.

“Cool,” Anna said, and held out her hand for a fist bump.

I complied. We’d reached my dorm, and I fished in my jeans

pocket for my keys. “Be safe, you two. Watch out for scary frat

boys.”

A couple of gay guys had been beaten up the month before

walking home from a party, not to mention the usual date-

rapes and random rapes that plagued a university this size. The

administration had installed extra security lights and phones,

but you still had to be careful.

Jeni and Anna waved and strode off down the sidewalk,

bellowing a song so out of tune I didn’t recognize it.

On my hall, I stopped in the bathroom to get ready for bed. I

lived in a women-only dorm so there weren’t any football players

puking in the stalls, fortunately, not like in Laura’s dorm. Even

the bathrooms on Laura’s floor were co-ed. I wasn’t sure she’d

ever mentioned this fact to her parents, conservative Republican

types from Orange County.

As I brushed my teeth, I stared at my mirrored reflection. No

Beautiful Game 121

wonder Jess had opted to go home alone. I looked terrible—my

face was flushed, hair a mess, T-shirt disheveled. I raked a hand

through my hair. No use. I still looked like shit.

Scowling, I filled a plastic cup with water and took it down

the hall to bed with me. In my room I stripped down to my

underwear, leaving my clothes where they fell. Then I flicked the

light off and crawled into bed. In the dark, I made myself drink

all of the water in the cup before I rolled over and burrowed into

the sheets. My mouth was still dry when I fell asleep.

I didn’t sleep well that night. By five a.m. I was lying in bed

noting the varied symptoms of my hangover. For the second

time in three days, I stared at the ceiling through bleary eyes and

tried to quiet the rumbling acid in my unhappy stomach. I’d been

awake for less than a minute when the scene with Jess reasserted

itself. Groaning, I rolled over on my side and buried my face in

a pillow. My only hope was that she hadn’t thought I was hitting

on her. But why would she? As far as she was concerned, we were

buddies, the same as Holly and me. And buds didn’t hit on each

other.

Once my stomach had calmed somewhat, I met Holly and

Becca at the cafeteria for brunch. They were happier together

than I’d seen in a while, and kept exchanging sugary smiles and

furtive hand squeezes they thought no one would notice. Like,

duh. Anyone who knew there were lesbians thriving on the SDU

campus knew that Holly and Becca were together.

Despite my best intentions, their bliss irritated me. When

Becca got up to top off her coffee, casting a last secretive smile back

at Holly, I had to bite back a sarcastic comment. Instead I went for

mildly supportive: “Looks like you guys are doing better.”

Holly smiled, watching her girlfriend walk away. “Have I

mentioned she’s really good in bed?”

“Dude,” I said, making a face. “I totally don’t need to hear

that.”

Holly focused fully on me for the first time. “What’s up with

you? Didn’t you have a good time last night? You and Jess were

looking pretty tight when I left.”

“Shows how much you know,” I said, and told her about my

inadvertent semi-proposition the night before.

122 Kate Christie

Holly seemed surprised. “You got dissed? That’s gotta be a

first.”

I stared at her across the table. “I told you, I wasn’t hitting

on her. And anyway, you know none of that gossip is true. Jesus,

Holly.”

She held up a placating hand. “Take it easy. Calm down,

Cam.”

“Why should I?” I stopped. I rarely called Holly on anything

she did that annoyed me. I rarely called anyone on anything.

Except Jamie Betz, maybe. I stood up as Becca returned to the

table. “I gotta go. I’ll see you guys later.”

“Fine,” Holly said shortly, her scowl matching mine.

Outside the student center, I pulled on my fleece, hopped

on my bike and took off. When I got to my dorm, though, I

didn’t stop. Instead, I veered onto a road that led off-campus.

I needed to get away. Thoughts of soccer and Holly and Jamie

and Jess were all swirling through my mind, one unresolved

problem after another. I wasn’t used to this. Usually I just let

things happen as they might and didn’t worry about the end

result. But nothing was working out the way it should. I was

sick about soccer, uninterested in most of my classes, worried

about the whole Jamie Betz thing, and now I wasn’t sure if the

friendship I had going with Jess was really what I wanted. I’d

thought it could be enough, but after the previous night, I wasn’t

so sure anymore.

I ended up at Seal Beach, standing on the wall at the end of

the walkway letting the surf crash at my feet and splash me with

spray. The ocean soothed me, its wildness something tangible

I could taste in the salty dampness of my skin. It was a windy

day, the waves high, gray clouds moving quickly overhead and

blocking the sun. It probably wouldn’t rain, though. Southern

California was in the grip of a drought that felt permanent. Not

like lush Oregon. Or rainy Seattle.

Seattle. I checked my watch. National finals would be

underway right now. At this moment, I should have been heading

a cross out of the air, or tracking down a breakaway. I should have

been saving a certain goal in front of a crowd that included my

family and friends. Instead I was standing on a concrete walkway

Beautiful Game 123

staring out at the dark, gray Pacific, pondering my plethora of

recent failures.

My life really was amazingly good, I knew. I was healthy

and playing my way through school, my future wide open and

waiting for me to discover it. I loved my family and they loved

me. They had even accepted my sexual orientation as natural

and somewhat unavoidable, probably because I’d always been

a tomboy and good at sports—the stereotypical lesbian. I was

lucky, I knew. I just didn’t feel like it right now.

I made my way down to the beach and lay in the sand near the

rocky cliff wall, watching the low-flying clouds pass overhead.

I emptied my mind of everything but the worry eating me up

inside and let it have its way. After a little while, the anxiety began

to turn on itself and the world didn’t seem so gray anymore. I

started to notice colors again—dark green seaweed, red and blue

plastic remains of a child’s toy strewn across the rocks at the

bottom of the cliff, brown vines that snaked up the cliff, blue sky

just visible through the racing clouds.

Gradually my tension eased. The puzzle pieces in my mind

felt like they were falling back into place. Holly was still my best

friend; it was only natural that we would get sick of each other

every once in a while. And I hadn’t lost the game for my team.

If anyone felt guilty for our loss on Thursday, it had to be Jeni.

As head of defense, I would have to remember to call and check

in on her. As for Jamie, not everyone I met would like me. That

was just a fact I would have to deal with, preferably in a mature

fashion rather than a junior high brawl.

The only thought that still made my head hurt had to do

with Jess. For one thing, I wasn’t sure why I had asked her to stay

over after the party. Holly and I had spent the night in the same

bed before, and it had always been completely innocent. Nothing

but friendship had ever occurred to either of us. But with Jess, I

wasn’t so sure of my motivation. I kept seeing her look down and

shake her head as we stood beside her car outside Mel’s. That was

reality, I told myself—Jess turning away, rejecting me. But what

about earlier when she touched my cheek and told me I was cute

in a voice that sounded more than friendly? What did those two

separate incidents, linked together, mean?

124 Kate Christie

When I was tired of thinking, I walked my bike back to the

road and headed out to Mission Bay. Not many people were out.

Wimps, I thought, turning my bike into the wind and pedaling

hard into the salty breeze along the bay.

I must have ridden twenty miles that day, pushing my body

until the adrenaline flooded my system and drove out the anxiety

and self-pity and doubt. When I finally returned to my dorm

late in the afternoon, my mind and body had been cleansed by

exertion. Whatever reality was waiting for me, I would deal.

Back in my room, I checked my phone and found my voice

mail full—a couple of old messages I hadn’t deleted plus five new

ones. I flopped on my bed, flushed and sweaty, my face wind-

burned from the ride, and listened to the messages. One was

from Mel, who wanted to know what I was doing, to take her

mind off the finals, to ask me about something. Jeni, I thought,

smiling a little, and deleted the message. The next was from my

parents, who were just calling to say hi and that they hoped I

wasn’t feeling too badly today, what with the tournament and

all. Sweet, I thought, and hit delete. The next message was Holly,

who was going to study in the library but just wanted to say

she was sorry if she’d upset me and that today sucked and that I

should call her later. Another delete.

The last two messages were from Jess. In the first, she was

calling to see if I had a hangover and if I was still coming over

for dinner. In the second, she wondered where I was, anyway,

and why I hadn’t called yet. She sounded completely normal, as

if nothing untoward had happened. Apparently the angst wasn’t

mutual. Maybe she had forgotten that she’d touched my face and

called me cute. Or maybe it just hadn’t meant to her what it had

to me.

She picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.” My heart rate picked up at the sound of her

voice. Traitor.

“What’s up? Where’ve you been all day?”

“I went for a bike ride.” So far she didn’t sound any different.

“I was feeling restless so I headed over to Mission Bay.”

“You must not have a hangover, then,” she said.

“I drank a lot of water before bed and slept in.”

Beautiful Game 125

“Good thinking. So are you still up for dinner tonight?” she

asked. “I told Sidney and Claire we would make them pasta.”

I hesitated. “Do you still want me to come over?”

“Of course.” She sounded puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“I’m just not in a very good mood,” I hedged.

Now was my chance to put distance between Jess and me,

to protect myself from an inevitable future rejection that would

hurt significantly more than last night’s had. But I could picture

Jess in her upstairs apartment in Claire and Sidney’s house, her

eyes warm and open. She trusted me. Jess didn’t trust many

people.

“We’ll cheer you up,” she promised. “It’ll be good for you to

get away from campus. I mean, if you still want to come over.”

“Of course I do.” And it was true. I couldn’t wait to see her,

which was what worried me.

We hung up a moment later. I shed my clothes, pulled on

my bathrobe and stepped into my soccer sandals. Jess was acting

as if she had never looked at me in that particular way and I

had never invited her to come home with me. Everything was

apparently fine—as long as I didn’t examine my feelings for

her too closely. Totally fine, I told myself as I padded down the

hall to the showers. Now if I could just catch up in my classes

and forget about the way soccer season had ended, life would be

perfect again. Or almost perfect, anyway.

I turned the shower on and stepped in, closing my eyes as the

warm water washed away the afternoon chill.

Chapter twelve

The week before Thanksgiving break, the soccer team had

our formal end-of-season banquet. There, Jamie offered an olive

branch of sorts, pulling me aside and saying she hoped I had

never taken her too seriously, that sometimes she just liked to

blow off steam, that she knew I cared about SDU soccer as much

as she did. I paused, then smiled at her and said, no, I’d never

taken her seriously; I knew soccer was her world the same as it

was mine. We shook hands, the rest of the team looking on. She

even half-hugged me.

After the meal, Holly and I were voted co-captains for the

following year. Laura said she didn’t mind not being picked, but

her eyes seemed over-bright after Coach announced the results.

Jackie, the only other junior, was second-string, but Laura was a

starter. After the banquet, she took off by herself, claiming she

Beautiful Game 127

had to study. Meanwhile, Holly and Mel and I went for a drink at

a gay-friendly bar in the city, Holly and I flashing our fake IDs as

usual. Mine was my older cousin from Colorado’s “lost” license.

She’d sent it to me right after she turned legal, suggesting I might

have greater need of it than she did. I’d assured her I would put

it to good use.

We sat at a booth in the back, pint glasses on the table before

us. We even shared a few cigarettes. Mel, it seemed, was falling

for Jeni and wanted to ask us what we thought she should do.

Holly and I told her to go for it. Jeni, we informed her, was

totally crushing on her.

“Really?” Mel asked hopefully, cigarette in one hand, beer

bottle in the other.

“Really.” Holly and I both nodded.

You would never have known we were scholarship athletes, I

thought, with our cigarettes and beer bottles, the practiced way

we inhaled the smoke and drank the alcohol. At least we could

be sure Coach Eliot would never stumble across us at a gay bar.

Anyway, our season was officially over now, which meant the

usual in-season team rules—limited alcohol intake, no smoking,

and self-enforced curfews the night before each game—no

longer applied.

“Enough about me. What’s up with you and Jess Maxwell?”

Mel asked suddenly, pinning me down with her hawkish gaze.

I shrugged, frowning down at the heavily battered table

that had probably seen thousands of patrons in its many years

of service.

“She claims they’re just friends,” Holly announced.

“Huh. Looked to me like something was brewing at the

party last weekend,” Mel said. “Jess and I had a pretty interesting

conversation in my kitchen before you left.”

I looked up quickly. “You did? What about?”

“She asked me if you were dating anyone. I said not that

I knew of. Then she asked if all those rumors about you were

really true, and I told her of course they were.”

I gasped out loud. “You did not!”

Holly snickered, taking a pull on her beer and looking from

me to Mel and back again.

12 Kate Christie

Mel’s tough look crumpled when she smiled. “Don’t get your

panties in a bunch, Wallace. I told her people just like to gossip,

that’s all. I said they even had you and me together at one point,

but you usually go for girlier women than me and vice versa.”

Jess had been asking about my love life? That cast our

interaction at the party in a different light, didn’t it? But frankly,

I hadn’t gotten laid in so long that my judgment when it came to

attractive women was most definitely suspect.

I glanced sideways at Mel. “You’re saying I’m not girly

enough for you but Jeni is?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Did I tell you guys that Becca thinks I’m kind of butch?”

Holly put in.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No, seriously.”

Mel took a swallow of beer. “You tell that girl there’s a big

difference between athletic and butch. You aren’t a true butch

until you get called ‘sir’ to your face more than a handful of

times.”

Holly and I had been with Mel on several such occasions. It

always amazed us that people could overlook her rather ample

chest. She got a kick out of correcting them, though, she said.

Otherwise she would have grown out her hair.

Late that night Holly and I walked back to our dorms

together. When our paths diverged, we slapped hands and then

hugged.

“I’m glad we’re captains,” she said, “for our last season.”

“That sounds so crazy.”

“Tell me about it. I can’t believe we’ll be seniors next time

we take the field.”

“It seems way too soon for that.”

We stood staring at each other beneath the warm sky, clothes

and hair smelling like the bar. Then Holly moved away.

“See you at lunch tomorrow,” she said over her shoulder.

“Goodnight, Holly.”

“Goodnight, Cam.”

Goodnight, John Boy.

Beautiful Game 12

After Thanksgiving, there were only two and a half weeks

to get ready for exams. I’d gone home with Holly as usual, while

Jess had stayed and celebrated with Claire and Sidney. Now we

were back and racing to finish papers and projects and cram for

the dreaded blue book exams. Surprisingly, I usually did better

grade-wise during first semester, probably because playing

soccer forced me to budget my time. I had to keep a 2.75 average

for scholarship and eligibility purposes, so I didn’t have much

choice—I needed to do well in my classes if I wanted to stay on

the team.

This semester didn’t seem any different. As I handed in my

last blue book for a 400-level literacy class, I was pretty sure I’d

done okay on my tests. At least one part of my SDU life was under

control. I wasn’t sorry to see the end of this semester. Despite

being named All-American, I was leaving campus feeling more

unsettled than I usually did, and not only because of the way

soccer season had ended.

Jess gave me a ride to the airport to catch my flight to Portland.

I’d left my car parked outside her house where she could keep an

eye on it. My parents didn’t want me driving home alone in the

winter. The mountain passes on the California-Oregon border

could get testy.

At the terminal, we hugged each other beside the car, briefly,

awkwardly. This was the most intimate we’d been since the night

of the party. I was careful not to hold on too long.

“Give me a call if you want,” she said as I pulled my suitcase

from the backseat. “I’ll be around.”

Her high school art teacher from Bakersfield, an old friend

of Sidney and Claire’s, was coming up to La Jolla for a few days.

Jess hadn’t mentioned plans to see her mother during either

holiday.

“You, too,” I said, backpack slung over one shoulder, suitcase

at my feet. “I gave you my number, right?”

“You did.” She was watching me. “You know, I’m going to

miss you. Kind of got used to having you around.”

“I’ll miss you too.”

130 Kate Christie

I reached out and hugged her again, whether she wanted me

to or not. We’d exchanged gifts at her apartment earlier. I was

wearing the silver chain she’d given me with a small sunshine

pendant, and she was wearing the moon earrings I’d given her.

Kind of funny, I’d thought but hadn’t pointed out—we’d given

each other the sun and the moon. Doh…

She pulled away just enough to kiss my cheek, her lips soft

against my skin. “Have a happy new year, okay?”

I backed away. Just a friendly kiss, I told myself, like people

exchanged all the time in France and other foreign locales. “You

too. I’ll probably be hanging out with a bunch of guys from high

school, getting drunk and playing video games. You know, the

usual.” I was rambling, which was ridiculous. It hadn’t even been

a real kiss.

She lifted an eyebrow. “You hang out with guys in

Portland?”

“Sure,” I said. “They’re more fun.”

“Depends on what kind of fun you’re talking about.” She

turned away to close the car door. “Anyway.”

“Anyway,” I echoed, willing the blush I could feel building

not to spread past my neck. If I wasn’t mistaken, Jess had just

alluded to lesbian sex. First the kiss, now this—was she trying to

tell me something? “See you next month.”

“The sixth, right?” She had offered to meet me at the airport

when I got back in January.

“Right.”

“Okay. Well, talk to you later.”

“Right,” I repeated.

She finally stopped staring at me and slid back into her car. I

watched her pull away and check over her shoulder before easing

the Cabriolet into the nearest lane. She waved at me and I waved

back, fingering the pendant at my neck. I would see her in three

weeks, I reminded myself as I headed into the airport, trying

to ignore the ache in my chest that had started as I watched her

little red car pull away from the curb.

Beautiful Game 131

Back at home, I settled into my usual winter break routine:

staying up late at night reading science fiction novels and

watching Letterman, sleeping until noon, gorging on junk food,

and generally bumming around. A few days in, I told my mom

that one of my friends didn’t have any family to spend Christmas

with, so she helped me wrap a few gifts to send to Jess—a couple

of ornaments, a small wreath of cedar boughs from a tree in

our backyard, a mix of music I knew she liked, a Wallace family

Christmas card and one of the wool sweaters my father’s family

was always bringing back from trips to Scotland. La Jolla never

got that cold, but maybe she would need it someday.

Jess called on Christmas Day to thank me for the box. Her

grandmother and her aunt had sent packages too, she said, but

none of her friends at school had ever done anything like that.

She sounded really happy. We talked for a long time before she

said she had to go downstairs to help Sidney and Claire and

Barbara, her art teacher, with dinner.

My father officially had Christmas vacation too. But he still

had to meet with his students’ parents and plan for the coming

semester, so he was busy as usual. This was the second Christmas

in a row without my brother—winter was nearly as busy a season

as summer for his guide company up in Fairbanks, and Nate

couldn’t get enough time off to make traveling down to Portland

worth it. Without him around to distract me with day trips to

snow fields and sci-fi marathons late into the night, I mostly

passed the time with the same group of friends I hung around

with in the summers, five guys I’d known since elementary

school. Home for the holidays from various West and East Coast

colleges, we had a long-standing tradition of spending New Year’s

Eve together down by the river watching the city fireworks and

drinking beer. They all knew I was gay, but we rarely talked

about it. In the summer we were usually too busy hiking and

camping out to dwell on such matters, while at winter break we

filled the time playing video games and watching more than our

share of football.

But we were getting older now, and a couple of the guys in

our group were overseas on junior year abroad programs. The

rest of us didn’t hang out as much as we normally did, which left

132 Kate Christie

me on my own much of the time. As usual, I was ready to go back

to school—back to my real life—after only a couple of weeks of

break. Decompression, Holly called the post-finals, pre-January

term period. A necessary evil, but sometimes it lasted longer

than I needed or wanted.

At the end of the third week, my parents took me to the

airport. At the departure gate, we sat together in molded plastic

airport chairs, the two of them flanking my bags and me.

“Well, Cam,” my dad said, “I suppose you’re ready to get

back to your friends.”

He and I shared the same auburn hair and hazel eyes, the same

interest in teaching and education. Still, despite our similarities,

his favorite sport was baseball. How he could stand watching the

most boring game ever invented, I would never understand.

“I guess so,” I said, feeling a little guilty. “I’ll miss you guys,

but it’ll be nice to be back at school.”

My mother smiled and squeezed my hand. “I remember what

it was like getting back after a vacation. You can’t wait to see

your friends.”

My parents had met in college in Eugene. When I’d told

them I was going to SDU, I think they were both disappointed I

was going so far away. But they just congratulated me on Coach

Eliot’s scholarship offer and said they would support whatever

decision I made. They were amazing that way. When I told

them my senior year of high school that I was dating Cara, they

thanked me for trusting them enough to share the truth. Of

all my friends, I had the easiest coming out story of the bunch.

Then again, I was also the only one whose parents had lived

together in Eugene in the sixties before they were married.

I left them to guard my suitcase while I bought a bottle of

soda at a nearby newsstand. They were a funny couple, I thought

as I stood in line watching them: my mild-mannered father with

his receding hairline and a penchant for flannel shirts leftover

from his childhood in eastern Oregon, my mother with her brisk

manner and immaculate business suits. She was the driving force

in their relationship, the one who did the taxes and paid the bills

while my father focused on ways to help his students’ families

adapt to life with a mentally or physically impaired child. My

Beautiful Game 133

mom and dad were so different, yet I couldn’t imagine one

without the other.

I also couldn’t imagine never speaking to them again because

of a single fight, like Jess and her mother. I had argued with my

parents, of course, like any kid, especially during junior high

and early on in high school. But my brother had broken them

in—he’d always been a wild child, breaking curfew and coming

home drunk and crashing multiple cars in his legendary pursuit

of speed. After him, I’d probably seemed easy despite the gay

thing.

Besides, no one in our family was particularly confrontational.

Wallaces preferred to pretend a problem didn’t exist rather than

cause a disagreement or hurt someone’s feelings. Eventually

the issue either took care of itself or we all forgot about it. Not

exactly the healthiest way of resolving conflict, I realized when I

took my first psychology class at SDU. But at least we didn’t fight

that often. I couldn’t imagine the level of disagreement it would

take for me to cut my parents out of my life. What unforgivable

act had Jess’s mother committed? Or was Jess the responsible

party?

I paid for a bottle of Diet Coke with a twenty my dad had

slipped me on the way out of the house, and headed back to the

gate. My mother frowned when she saw the bottle.

“You’re not on a diet, honey, are you?”

“No, I just like the taste better than regular.”

As a soccer player, I’d always burned enough calories that I

didn’t have to watch my weight. The only diets I believed in were

ones that improved muscle tone and overall health.

“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “I was reading an article

recently in the Chronicle about college athletes and eating

disorders. Apparently many more women athletes suffer from

these disorders than you might think.”

My mother was always quoting articles from the Chronicle

of Higher Education, her all-time favorite print publication. A

university administrator, she loved academia. In a way, I would

be following in her footsteps too when I became a teacher.

A few minutes later, my flight started to board.

“Gotta go,” I said, fumbling with my boarding pass. In only

134 Kate Christie

a few hours, I would see Jess. Classes didn’t start for a couple of

weeks, so we should have some time to hang around together.

Maybe I would check out an indoor tennis tournament or two.

“Take care, Cammie,” my father said, hugging me. “Don’t

eat any snozzcumbers.”

This was a reference to The BFG, one of my favorite

childhood storybooks. I’d always thought my father accustomed

as he was to the limited mental capacity of his students, I’d

always thought my father liked Nate and me best when we were

still young enough to laugh at words like “snozzcumber” and

“whizzpopper.” Whenever we said our goodbyes now, he still

trotted out this old line.

“I won’t.” I hugged him back. We were almost the same

height. Was I still growing or was he shrinking? “Bye, Dad.

Good luck with school.” I kissed his cheek, his stubble scratchy

against my chin.

“You too, sweetheart,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I turned to my mom. “I’ll call when I get

there,” I promised before she could say anything, hugging her

in turn.

She held me tightly, her arms surprisingly strong. Neither of

my parents worked out, but they tried to walk a couple of miles

together around the neighborhood every night after dinner.

“Have a safe trip, honey,” she said, and kissed my cheek.

“Love you. Give Holly and your friend Jess our love.”

The way she said it, I could tell my mom thought Jess was my

girlfriend. It would have taken time and effort to correct her, so I

just nodded and shouldered my bags and headed for the jetway.

As I passed through the doorway, I glanced back at my

parents, noticing all at once that they didn’t look nearly as young

as they used to. They had both turned fifty the previous year.

When they’d told me they were old enough for AARP, it had

freaked me out. Now I waved and they waved back, standing

close together, arms around each other. I turned again and

strode down the jetway.

Back to life, back to reality, I thought as I waited in line near

the entrance to the plane. Only which was my real life, which

my reality? Oregon and the family I’d lived with for eighteen

Beautiful Game 135

years? Or Southern California and the friends I’d made there?

It was hard to say. That was the thing about school. All of this

leaving, friends graduating, new people taking their place, all in

preparation for your own eventual leave-taking. Commencement,

they called it, but I always thought it was more like an end to life

as you knew it. You couldn’t really go back to who you were

before college, and you couldn’t just hang out in your college

town after you graduated. After commencement you had to be a

responsible person with a job and an apartment and plants, even.

No more afternoon naps, no more food waiting for you beneath

the plastic bubble in the cafeteria, no more aimless hanging out.

Suddenly you were expected to have a purpose in life.

Holly called it the plants-to-children progression. First you

had to get some greenery, see if you could remember to water it

and give it the proper amount of sunlight. If your plants survived

more than a year, then you could get a dog or a cat. Pets, of

course, were a little more complicated, but also easier in a way.

While pets had to be fed, watered, exercised and played with, if

you forgot to do any of these things animals didn’t sit quietly on

the windowsill wilting, dying a slow, silent death. Wisely, a pet

would piddle on the floor or crap in your shoe or chew a hole

through the cupboard door where you kept the biscuits.

If your pet survived for more than a year, then, assuming

you were in a long-term committed relationship of some kind

(though nowadays that part wasn’t necessary), you could procure

a child by whatever technology was appropriate—that is, if you

had a job, insurance and a roof over your head.

Which brings us back to a purpose and a direction in life.

If you had that, the rest would fall into place. Or so I had been

told.“Welcome aboard,” a flight attendant said, smiling brightly

at me as I reached the plane.

I nodded at her and went to find my seat.

Chapter thirteen

Without a daily soccer commitment around which to

schedule my time, second semester always seemed less orderly

than first. Classes started the second week of January, and I

settled in and managed not to skip very many right off the bat.

I even bought all the books I was supposed to buy, possibly

a first for me. This semester I was taking a teaching history

methods class, a seminar on American involvement in World

War II, Philosophy and Women with Holly—very cool—and

Macroeconomics. Laura, a business major, had convinced me

that macro might come in handy someday. I bet Holly over

lunch our first week back that since I was taking Macro on a

pass/ fail basis, I could successfully complete the class without

ever opening the textbook, relying solely on lecture notes. She

accepted the wager, crowing almost giddily as Laura stalked

Beautiful Game 137

out of the student center muttering about the juvenile nature of

education majors.

Outside of class, Holly and I settled into our off-season

workout routine: running or biking most days, lifting three

times a week to keep our muscles sleek and strong. Intramural

soccer had us playing six on six throughout January and February.

After that we would meet weekly for pickup games, sometimes

scrimmaging with the men’s team, sometimes competing against

other eligible opponents. As the upcoming season’s captains,

Holly and I were expected to organize these sessions. Seniors

weren’t required to participate, which was fine with me. Despite

our truce, the less I saw of Jamie Betz, the better.

Jess and I resumed our Monday night dinners the first week

of classes, even though the pro football season was winding

down. We were good enough friends by now that we didn’t need

an excuse to hang out. I never brought up the night of Mel’s

party, and she didn’t either. I attended all of her home indoor

tennis tournaments and the ones within driving distance from

La Jolla, accompanied by Holly and Laura. We watched in

something akin to awe as Jess pulverized her opponents. She was

on a definite roll, playing better, if that was possible, from match

to match. Not that I was biased.

At the end of January, I convinced Jess to host a Super Bowl

party at her apartment. The Washington Redskins were taking

on the Buffalo Bills, neither of whom we particularly cared

about. But it was the Super Bowl, so Jess agreed and I invited

Holly, Becca, Laura and a handful of other soccer players while

Jess invited a couple of friends from the tennis team. Only Becca

declined the invite—she wasn’t into “ritualized male violence,”

Holly told me privately, trying loyally not to laugh.

The day of the Super Bowl, I swung by Jess’s early to see

if I could help. She had left her downstairs door unlocked, so

I jogged up the stairs and knocked on the third-floor door. No

answer. I could hear Melissa Etheridge echoing through the

apartment. I tried the door and found it, too, unlocked. Usually

she was so careful.

I pushed the door open and called, “Jess!”

No answer. I could hear her singing along to the music,

13 Kate Christie

or shouting, anyway. I tracked her voice to the kitchen, where

I found her cleaning the sink, yellow gloves pulled up to her

elbows, stereo blasting on the kitchen table.

“Jess,” I tried again, reaching out to turn the music down.

She spun around suddenly, eyes wide, rubber gloves dripping

soap on the floor. “Cam! What the fuck?”

“Sorry.” I froze where I was. “I just came by to see if I could

help.”

She stared at me, brow furrowed. “Did I leave my door

unlocked?”

“Yeah. I knocked, but I don’t think you could hear anything

over Melissa.”

She turned back to the sink. “Sidney and Claire are away for

the weekend, so I turned it up.”

“Gotcha.”

I stood where I was a moment longer, watching her lean both

hands against the sink edge, her chin lowered. I could almost

sense her heart pounding from across the room. I wanted to go to

her, rub her shoulders, smooth the lines from her forehead. But

touching her, I was pretty sure, would only exacerbate matters.

I forced my voice to sound cheerful. “So. Can I help?”

“You could vacuum if you wanted,” she said, her back to me,

voice as tight as her shoulders.

It was like I wasn’t even there—or, more accurately, like

she was no longer there. She’d done this before, withdrawn

into some private place where no one else could follow. From

experience, I knew if I left her alone she’d reemerge at some

point. I was only hoping it’d be before our friends invaded her

personal space.

I vacuumed while she finished up the kitchen and tackled

the seemingly spotless bathroom. Everything looked pristine to

me, as usual. Jess had told me that she enjoyed cleaning, which

I had no trouble believing—the apartment nearly always looked

freshly scrubbed, even when she was in season.

By the time I put the vacuum away, Jess was making eye

contact again and even smiling a little at my lame jokes. We

made a quick trip to the convenience store to stock up on chips,

dip, cheese, crackers and beverages. We forked over more money

Beautiful Game 13

than either of us could really afford, but after all, this was the

first—and only, she insisted—party Jess had ever hosted at her

apartment.

On our way back in, we stopped downstairs to let Duncan,

Sidney and Claire’s chocolate Lab, pee in the backyard. Then we

headed back upstairs, Duncan trailing happily after us.

Mel, Jeni and Anna arrived first in Mel’s father’s old Mercedes,

followed by Jess’s tennis pals Taylor and Julie in a brand-new

BMW. Laura and Holly showed up last.

“Where do you want these?” Holly asked as she came

through the door. She and Laura were each carrying two large

pizza boxes.

“Over here.” I motioned them to the kitchen table. “Good

call, you guys.”

“It isn’t the Super Bowl without pizza,” Laura declared.

“You got some without meat, didn’t you?” I asked. I’d recently

decided to embrace vegetarianism.

“Of course,” Laura said, rolling her eyes.

Everyone grabbed a piece of pizza and settled into the living

room for the Super Bowl, keeping an eye on the pregame show

to see which new commercials would make television history

this Super Bowl Sunday. Duncan sat on the floor glancing

eagerly from one to the other of us, waiting for dropped chips

or pizza crust, his tail thumping the furniture whenever anyone

laughed.

As the game got going, beverages flowed freely, food was

munched continuously, and conversation—about sports, campus

politics, food, families—frequently drowned out the sounds

from the TV as Jess’s friends and mine mingled easily. I liked

seeing the apartment full of people chatting amiably. I thought

she might too. The game wasn’t very close—Buffalo managed to

lose their second Super Bowl in a row in embarrassing fashion—

but the creative advertisements provoked the usual giggles and

groans. All in all, a fun time appeared to be had by everyone.

Shortly after the game ended, Taylor and Julie announced

that they had to get some studying done. Mel, Jeni and Anna

left with them. Jess and I had been a little surprised that the

two tennis players, both of whom had boyfriends, had bonded so

140 Kate Christie

easily with Mel and Jeni, officially a couple now, and Anna the

bold baby dyke.

“Guess they’re straight but not narrow,” Jess said to me in

the kitchen with a slight smile, reminding me of the previous fall

when I’d asked her what her deal was.

Holly and Laura stayed to help pick up. There had only been

one accident, a beer knocked over on the rug under the coffee

table. We’d cleaned it up immediately. Fortunately, the threads

of the Persian rug were dark maroon and navy blue, so the stain

didn’t show. The rug was old anyway, Jess had said, mopping up

the amber liquid with a dish towel.

Holly and I had just finished the dishes when Jess’s phone

rang. She grabbed it and walked into the living room.

“You sticking around?” Holly asked me, wiggling her

eyebrows suggestively.

Laura caught the look and glanced from me to Jess, who was

frowning into the phone on the other side of the room. “Wait.

You don’t mean.. ”

I patted Laura’s arm. “No, she doesn’t. She’s just messing

with you.”

“That was a perfectly innocent question,” Holly protested.

“Tell Jess thanks for the party,” Laura said, dragging Holly

toward the hall. “Later, Cam.”

“Later.”

I locked the door behind them and wandered back down the

hall. Jess was still talking on the portable phone, looking out the

window in the living room, one hand on her hip. Trying not to

eavesdrop, I started to put the dishes away, but the apartment

wasn’t exactly huge.

“I know,” she was saying. “I know you mean well, Nana, but

you and Aunt Sara don’t know the whole story.” She was quiet

for a long time, listening to the voice at the other end. “Good,

I’m glad. But it doesn’t change anything… No, it’s not like that.

You should ask her… I appreciate that, but it’s something she and

I have to figure out, okay? Okay, Nana? I have to go. There are

people here… I know. I love you too. Give Sara and the boys my

love. I’ll come see you soon. Bye.” She turned off the phone and

stayed where she was, still staring out the front window.

Beautiful Game 141

I lifted a glass from the white plastic dish drainer on the

counter, then paused. Was that a sniffle I’d heard coming from

the living room? Duncan was leaning against Jess’s leg, and as I

hesitated, he gave a low whine.

“Jess?” I asked.

She swiped at her face but didn’t turn around. “Did Holly

and Laura leave?”

“Yeah. They said thanks for the party.” I wiped my hands on

a dish towel. “Are you okay?”

Abruptly she pulled the wooden blinds down, shutting out

the night. She turned and I could see faint traces of the tears she’d

wiped from her cheeks. “I’m fine,” she said, not quite looking at

me as she crossed the apartment. “I have to take Duncan for a

walk. You coming?”

“Um, okay,” I said, uncertain if I’d actually been invited

along or not. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Her voice was firm, her eyes dark even in the warm, bright

kitchen. Brushing past me, she headed down the hall and grabbed

her SDU Tennis jacket from the closet, Duncan’s leash and her

house key from the hook beside the door. I followed, tugging my

navy blue fleece over my head.

Jess ran down the steep stairs at full speed. “Come on,” she

said over her shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or

the dog. We both hurried after her.

She led the way quickly through the residential neighborhood,

her face in shadows most of the time. Duncan and I trailed her.

He stopped to pee frequently. Marking his territory, Jess had

told me the first time we’d borrowed Duncan for an after-dinner

walk the previous fall. That was what male dogs did. Typical, I

had said, and we’d both laughed.

But she wasn’t laughing now. I could feel her tension, see it

in her clenched jaw, the set of her shoulders. I walked quietly,

letting her work it out on her own. I knew her well enough to

understand that Jess didn’t like to talk through her feelings. She

preferred to pin them down and crush them before they could

get loose. I didn’t know why she maintained such rigid control

over her emotions. I wondered if anyone else did. Maybe her

142 Kate Christie

mother. Probably not her grandmother, judging from what I’d

heard of their phone conversation.

We walked a few blocks to a small overgrown lot where

Jess let Duncan off-leash. Then we stood silent, watching as

he bounded happily into the bushes, a dark blot moving among

darker shadows. I could hear him snuffling and clambering about

through the brush. Soon he careened out again, tongue lolling

in a pant of satisfaction, and stumbled to a halt at our feet. Jess

pulled a dog biscuit from her jacket pocket and tossed it to him.

“Good boy,” she said, her voice low. She hooked the leash to

his collar and we turned back toward the house.

The silence was beginning to unnerve me. Finally I couldn’t

stand it any longer.

“Look, Jess, what’s up?” I asked, taking the plunge I usually

avoided. “You’re obviously upset about something. Why don’t

you talk about it? Might make you feel better.”

She laughed, only it came out short, bitter. “You’re hardly

the queen of communication, Cam.”

Frowning, I caught a glimpse of her face as we passed under

a streetlamp. There was that haunted look I remembered seeing

the first night I’d been to her apartment.

“I never said I was,” I pointed out. “But we’re not talking

about me. What’s up?”

She was quiet for a long time, so long that I thought she didn’t

intend to answer. We passed spacious houses with well-tended

lawns and neat fences that Duncan stopped to pee on. We paced

the narrow sidewalk lit by streetlamps and porch lights, side by

side but not touching. We were on the walkway to Sidney and

Claire’s front door before she stopped abruptly, surprising both

me and Duncan.

“Look,” she said in the same low voice. With her face in

shadows, I couldn’t make out her features. “There are some

things you just can’t talk about. Some things that if you even

think about them, they suck you in and it’s like a whirlpool, and

you might never get free. Do you know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded, a little scared of the intensity in her

voice. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

She made a fist with one hand. “Talking doesn’t fix anything.

Beautiful Game 143

It doesn’t help. Nothing does, except maybe time. And even then,

even when you’re sure you’ve got everything under control, it

comes back. It always comes back, and then you just try to get

through it. That’s all. You just get through it because really, it’s

not like there’s any other choice.” She shook her head, took a

few paces away from me, unfurled her fist and flexed her fingers.

“Come on. It’s getting late.”

I waited outside while she let herself into Sidney and Claire’s

part of the house to turn off lights and close curtains. Then we

returned upstairs in silence, Duncan trailing at our heels. She

slipped her keys onto the hook near the door and hung her jacket

back in the closet. When she headed into the kitchen, Duncan

and I both followed. I wasn’t sure what came next.

“I’m making tea,” she said, filling the kettle. “Want some?”

I hesitated. I should really head home and try to get a little

reading done before I hit the sack, but I didn’t want to leave yet,

not like this. I wouldn’t be able to sleep thinking about her all

alone in this big house.

“Decaf?”

“Raspberry patch.”

“Okay.”

I pulled off my fleece and hung it over a chair. Duncan lay

down on the cool tile floor with a deep dog sigh. I watched as

Jess moved deliberately about the kitchen, pulling two cups

with mismatched saucers from the cupboard, two teabags from

a metal tea box, two spoons from the squeaky old silverware

drawer. When the kettle whistled, she poured boiling water into

the cups and carried them over to the table. She set a mug in

front of me.

“Did this come with the place, too?” I asked, gesturing at the

mug. A picture of Garfield in tennis gear adorned one side.

She almost smiled. “No, it was willed to me by a senior on

the team last year. Beth Jackson. Do you remember her?”

An image of a petite blonde woman with the inevitable tennis

tan flashed into my mind. “Vaguely.”

“She was pretty cool. She kind of looked out for me when

I was a freshman.” Jess blew on her tea, steam rising about her

face.

144 Kate Christie

“Are Sidney and Claire coming home tomorrow?”

She nodded, cupping her hands about her mug, decorated

with a picture of the San Diego bay at sunset.

I tried again. “I can’t believe football season is over.”

“I know.”

“Only a month until March Madness.”

“Yep.”

Obviously, she wasn’t in the mood to talk. I set my teabag on

my saucer and picked up my cup, blowing on the surface. I wanted

to shake her. I wanted to hug her. Let’s face it, I thought, staring

into the crimson tea, I wanted to kiss her. I sighed noisily.

Jess glanced up. “You okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, letting some of my frustration into my

voice. “You shut everyone out. It’s hard sometimes, you know?”

She toyed with the wet teabag on her saucer. “I’m fine.

Honestly.”

“Great. Awesome.”

It wasn’t, though. I wanted her to need me. I even thought I

might need her to need me.

We drank our tea in silence, listening to the CD that was

playing in the living room—Peter Gabriel. When “In Your

Eyes” came on, I gazed into my tea. All Jess would have to do

was look at me and she would know I cared about her more than

any mere friend had a right to.

The tea made me sleepy. When I’d finished my cup, I looked

across the table at her. “I think I’m too tired to drive. Mind if I

crash on your couch?”

She glanced from me to her living room. “Of course not.”

Was that relief in her eyes? Apparently she didn’t want to

think of herself alone in this big old house tonight, either.

We got ready for bed as soon as we’d rinsed out our tea

mugs, even though it wasn’t quite eleven, still early by college

student standards. She loaned me a T-shirt and boxers, a spare

contact case. I used the bathroom before she did, washing my

face and brushing my teeth with a toothpaste-smeared finger.

I also opened the mirrored medicine chest and examined its

contents. Advil, dental floss, contact solution, moisturizer,

a box of Tampax, zit cream and Band-Aids. Feeling slightly

Beautiful Game 145

guilty, I closed the mirror, wincing as the hinges squealed. No

medications, no questionable drugs and no condoms. Or dental

dams, for that matter.

In the living room, Jess had set out a pillow and some

bedding.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay out here?” she asked, watching

me tuck the sheet and blanket under an end cushion.

“I’ll be fine. It’s not like I haven’t fallen asleep out here

before,” I assured her.

We had each dozed off more than once watching football,

especially back in October when we’d been in-season and

exhausted all the time.

“Well, if you need anything,” she waved at her room, “just

let me know.”

“I will.” I stood looking at her in the lamplit living room. Her

hair hung loose about her shoulders, and she was dressed like me

in boxers and a T-shirt. She looked beautiful. And nervous. But

why?

“Thanks for letting me stay,” I said.

Her eyes rested on mine. “Thanks for staying.”

“De nada.” I smiled and turned away. “Wake me up when you

get up, okay?” We both had a ten o’clock class in the morning.

“I will.”

She left the bathroom light on so that I could find my way if I

needed to, her door partially open. I lay on the couch listening to

her move around her room. Pretty soon she turned off the light

and settled into bed. Duncan gave me a kiss and headed into

the bedroom, where I heard the springs squeak as he jumped

up on the bed. Jess’s voice sounded through the wall soft and

affectionate, and for just a minute, I envied Sidney and Claire’s

dog.The grumbling of the old house kept me awake for a little

while. Wood shifting, floorboards creaking, window panes

rattling. And then those same noises grew familiar and lulled me,

put me at ease. Until finally, there on the lumpy brown couch in

Jess Maxwell’s third-floor apartment, I slept.

Chapter FOurteen

Freshman year at SDU, I took a sociology class that required

us to spend a day asking strangers their opinion on the meaning

of life. “To be happy” was the most common answer I heard

the afternoon I wandered La Jolla trying to get up my nerve to

approach perfect strangers. When I would ask for an explanation

of “happiness,” most people’s eyes glazed over and they would

shrug, get defensive, walk away.

Only an older woman I met in a park feeding pigeons gave

me more than a pat answer. I sat down beside her, told her I was

a college student conducting sociological research, and popped

the question: “What do you believe is the meaning of life?”

She looked over at me, brown eyes watery with age, and said,

“That’s easy: love. When we can love everyone and everything

around us equally, then we’ve achieved a life of value.”

Beautiful Game 147

“Everything?” I repeated, wondering if she was about to get

all Christian on me as she scattered bread crumbs for the softly

mewling birds.

She nodded. “Everyone needs to be loved.”

As I rode my bike back to campus at the end of the experiment,

I wondered if I would ever achieve such a state of unconditional

love. It was hard to love strangers when so many claimed to

hate me. Men in passing cars had yelled profanities at me more

than once as I walked down a city sidewalk hand-in-hand with

another woman. Male students from other schools routinely

called me “dyke” from the soccer sidelines because they thought

their yelled slurs would throw me off my game. Sophomore year

a woman on another team had even called me a “fucking dyke”

to my face when we were jostling for a ball deep in the corner

of the field. I cleared the ball toward the half, then glared at her,

momentarily speechless. After the game she’d tracked me down

to apologize, but I’d ignored her and turned away. I wasn’t sure

how to handle these strangers who hated me because I wasn’t like

them. I certainly didn’t think I would ever love any of them.

When you’re gay, sometimes you wonder not only why you

love a particular person, but why you love a person of a particular

gender. Why her and not him? But it’s not like it’s a choice, no

matter what Fox News and the Catholic Church—both such

reliable sources of information about the modern world and

human nature—say.

There’s a Bonnie Raitt song I like, “You,” that asks if it isn’t

love that we’re sent here for. In “Mystery,” the Indigo Girls

wonder whether love is dictated or chosen. And in “Circle,” Sarah

McLachlan ponders the value of a love that keeps her hanging

on despite the fact it isn’t good for her. All good questions. Ones,

in fact, that I found myself coming back to again and again in

the weeks that followed Jess’s Super Bowl party.

That semester, alone at night in my white-walled dorm room,

I lay awake for hours, illicit candles flickering on the bedside

table, red power light glowing on my stereo. I should have been

studying but instead I was listening to sappy, romantic music and

trying to figure out what to do about Jess. I knew I loved her. I

knew it when I woke up on her couch in the middle of the night

14 Kate Christie

after the Super Bowl party and listened for her breathing on the

other side of the wall. It was a truth I could no longer ignore.

Once I acknowledged that truth, though, I was in a quandary.

What to do? Should I tell her and risk driving her away? Should

I pretend nothing had changed, that I was still happy just being

friends? Alone in my room on Valentine’s Day, I wrote down a

list of pros and cons for either action. For telling her, of course,

there were more cons than pros. She might never talk to me

again, which would ruin everything because I felt happiest when

I was with her. Or thinking about her. Or talking about her.

None of which I could do happily if she were no longer speaking

to me. The pros side of the list was measly: Resolution. And who

really wanted resolution if it turned out to be the opposite of

what you wanted most in life?

The cons had it, I decided that night. I would say nothing

and seek solace in the notion that the feeling of love alone was

enough. Jess didn’t have to return my sentiment or even know

that I felt it. Love was good, wasn’t it? And this love would

remain pure.

I soon learned that I wasn’t the only one suffering from

unrequited love at SDU. A couple of weeks after Valentine’s Day,

Alicia Ramirez sat down next to me in Philosophy and Women.

I’d noticed her before. I noticed all of the attractive women in

my classes, more out of habit than anything else.

“Hi,” Alicia said as she slid into the empty seat beside me.

Holly was skipping class that morning. I’d promised to take

copious notes, as was our arrangement.

“Hi,” I returned, waking up more fully as I noticed Alicia’s

smile, her long dark hair, her warm brown eyes. Superficially,

she reminded me of Jess. But the fleeting impression passed as

she regarded me with a forthright smile. Jess’s smiles usually had

a sideways quality, as if she’d rather not look at you straight on.

“You’re on the soccer team, aren’t you?” Alicia asked.

I refrained from glancing down at the “SDU Soccer” emblem

on my T-shirt. “I am.”

“I was just wondering, do you have a partner for the essay

yet?”Our professor had assigned a collaborative essay—very

Beautiful Game 14

Women’s Studies of her, Holly and I had agreed—due just before

spring break. The idea was that each pair of students would

choose one of the philosophers we’d been studying to write a

paper about. While one student researched the philosopher’s

life, the other would analyze the subject’s body of work. Then

together the students would take what they’d found and shape it

into a cohesive essay. Or at least, that was the theory.

“I’m actually paired up already,” I admitted.

Holly would kill me if I dumped her for a cute girl. Besides,

while Alicia was indeed attractive, I wasn’t looking. That was

one of the cons of being in love with Jess—I couldn’t seem to

generate an interest in other women. Not for lack of trying,

either.

“I thought you probably would be.” Alicia paused as our

professor strode into the classroom juggling a leather bag

and travel mug. “Well, do you maybe want to go for coffee

sometime?”

I looked down at her hand lying on top of her notebook. A

silver ring with a women’s symbol adorned one of her fingers.

“Um,” I hedged.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not hitting on you.”

And why exactly was that? But even going out for coffee with

someone who announced up front they weren’t interested in me

was preferable to moping around by myself yet another night

listening to songs about lost love.

“Coffee sounds like fun. I’m Cam,” I added, extending my

hand.

“Alicia,” she said, her ring cool against my palm.

The very next night we walked off-campus to a coffee shop

on Main for cappuccinos and dessert. It didn’t take long for Alicia

to get to the point: “Are you friends with Anna Sampson?”

Anna, the bold baby dyke backup goalkeeper? This was

definitely a first. “Yeah, I know Anna. She’s the reason you asked

me to hang out?”

“Maybe,” Alicia said, ducking her head over her mug.

“You know she’s dating someone, don’t you?”

“She is?” Her face fell almost comically.

“She’s been seeing this girl on her floor for a couple of weeks

150 Kate Christie

now.” Which was completely against my rules of same-sex dating,

I only just refrained from pointing out.

“On her floor?” Alicia repeated. “But that’s just stupid. What

was she thinking?”

“I know, right?”

Alicia, I decided that night, was pretty cool in spite of

her questionable taste in women. We lingered over coffee,

procrastinating from the homework that beckoned us both,

talking about race and gender and class, philosophy and

education and sociology, her major. We described our families

and our histories and what we hoped would be our futures, and

I watched her smile and laugh at the things I said, noticed how

easily she answered even when I asked her a personal question,

and all at once I wished that I could put Jess out of my mind and

fall instead for someone like Alicia. Someone who didn’t flinch

away whenever I got too close.

And yet…

And yet, I also found myself remembering the first time I’d

gotten coffee with Jess in the fall. I found myself missing her

as I sat with Alicia drinking coffee at the small ceramic table,

chatting about our older siblings. And that night, back in my

dorm room, I lay in bed alone thinking of Jess, who was probably

at that moment on a bus home from a match up in Fresno. The

next morning, Jess was still the first thing I thought of when I

woke up, even before I tugged on the window shade to see what

kind of day waited.

The worst thing was knowing I was hopelessly in love for

the first time as a reasonably mature adult but unable to admit

that love to anyone. Literally the love that dare not speak its

name, damn it. And yet, it was also the best thing to wake in the

morning thinking of her, to feel my heart literally, physically leap

at the sight of her across the cafeteria or the tennis courts. The

best thing of all to watch Sunday afternoon NBA double-headers

with Jess and Holly at Jess’s apartment, the three of us sprawled

across the couch, our books stacked on the coffee table.

A few days after our coffee date, I ran into Alicia outside the

cafeteria. No heart leap, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless.

“Hola,” she said, smiling. “Want to grab lunch?”

Beautiful Game 151

“Sure,” I said, surreptitiously checking the vicinity as I

followed her inside. Jess usually ate lunch on campus on Fridays

after her ten o’clock studio art class, and I was hoping to run into

her. We had been playing phone tag all week, and the tennis team

was due to leave that afternoon for a weekend tournament in San

Francisco. They wouldn’t be back on campus until Sunday night.

Alicia and I took our food out onto the patio. Almost March,

the day was warm enough for shorts.

“What a perfect soccer day,” Alicia said, sighing wistfully.

Was she thinking about Anna? “Do you play?”

“A little. My high school didn’t have a girls’ varsity team until

I was a junior, though, and anyway, my parents didn’t exactly

encourage me to play sports. Not the thing in our culture.”

Her parents had immigrated to the United States from

Mexico in the seventies, Alicia had told me during our coffee

date. They were progressive in a lot of ways, but old school in

others. She wasn’t out to them, wasn’t sure if or when she would

be. Definitely not until after college—she’d had friends whose

parents had withdrawn financial support when they found out

their kids were queer.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “But you’re a fan of the beautiful

game?”

“I love soccer. My brothers all grew up playing, and my

entire family always gets together to watch the World Cup on

the Mexican TV stations.”

“No way! Mine, too.”

“You get Mexican TV up in Oregon?”

“Dude, everyone gets Mexican TV.”

“We are everywhere, kind of like the gays. Though

admittedly less reproductively challenged.”

I didn’t think I knew her well enough yet to rip on the Catholic

drive for procreation, considered among the Protestant Wallaces

to be a blatant, cynical attempt to spread their religion.

We chatted some more about families and school and

collaborative essays. Then she said, “So I have a question. Are

you seeing anyone right now?”

I paused. Seeing someone in my head probably didn’t count.

“Nope. Totally single.”

152 Kate Christie

“Really? I heard you were dating some tennis chick.”

“I wish.” It just slipped out, and I stared at Alicia. “I mean,

no, I’m not dating her.”

“But you want to,” she said, eyes narrowed.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you kind of did.”

I sighed and tugged my baseball cap lower. “Don’t tell anyone,

okay? You and Holly are the only ones who know. I’d kind of like

to keep it that way.”

“You do have a reputation to protect,” she said. “But I’d say

we’re even in the secret crush department. What’s the deal? Do

you have a crush on this girl, or are you, like, actually in love?”

Squinting across the lawn, I watched a couple of long-haired,

shirtless guys tossing a Frisbee. “I’ve had crushes before, but

this is different.” I looked back at her. “Honestly, I think she’s

probably straight and I’m wasting my time waiting around for

her to magically feel the same way.”

Alicia nodded slowly. “I did that scene for a while. Gets

pretty old.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

We both bit into our sandwiches and chewed in silence. Then

she took a sip of juice and said, “You’re cooler than I thought you

would be. You seem like you have a clue, Cam.”

“Thanks, I think. You’re not so bad yourself.”

“Now, if you could just convince Anna of that fact…” But she

smiled like she knew her crush was doomed to remain forever

unconsummated.

Later, as we carried our trays back inside, I looked around the

cafeteria again. Still no Jess. Maybe I’d catch her at the gym.

Outside, Alicia and I stopped near the bike rack.

“Give me a call sometime,” I said as I unlocked my bike, “and

we’ll hang out.”

“Do you mean that? Or is it some insincere jock line?”

“No line.” I paused. “Actually, a bunch of us are going to a

party before the LGBA dance tomorrow night. Anna won’t be

around but some other fun people will. Think you could handle

hanging with a bunch of jocks?” I held out my hand.

She took it and held onto it, smiling at me flirtatiously.

Beautiful Game 153

“Maybe for a little while.” Her eyes focused over my shoulder for

a moment, and her voice dropped. “Okay, are you sure you’re not

seeing anyone? Because there’s this woman behind you—don’t

look, idiot—glaring at us. Anyway, call me about the dance,

okay?”

I nodded, wondering who was watching us. Some random

freshman with a crush? I’d gotten my fair share of crank calls

as well as the inevitable anonymous Valentine in my campus

mailbox.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, releasing her hand.

“Hasta luego, Cam.” She waved and strode off, confident in

her faded jeans and Doc Martens, her dark hair flowing from

beneath a purple Lakers cap.

I glanced casually over my shoulder toward the entrance of

the student center, but all I saw was a straight couple on the

steps. No single women shooting daggers in my direction.

I didn’t see Jess before she left for the weekend. I left a message

on her machine but she never called back. By the time I made it

down to the gym that afternoon, the bus had already left for San

Fran. Disappointed, I jogged out to the track and warmed up.

Jess was always going away and I was always missing her. Then

again, I missed her even when we were together sometimes. I

concentrated on running, feeling my muscles loosen and my

mind clear as I pushed my body around the track. Sometimes I

wondered what I would do without endorphins, to which I was

most certainly, happily addicted.

On Saturday, without Jess and the tennis team around to

distract me, I studied all day. I even kind of enjoyed it, especially

the analysis of the feminist philosopher Holly and I had selected

for our Philosophy and Women project—Angela Davis, author of

Women, Culture and Politics. I know, a couple of privileged whitey-

whites (as my Portland Parks friend John would call us) trying to

engage with the writings of a black, Communist champion of the

working class. But she was a ton more interesting than Catherine

Mackinnon or Andrea Dworkin, I thought, and her work was

154 Kate Christie

infinitely more thought-provoking than my other classes. I still

hadn’t cracked my Macro textbook. Midterms were coming up,

so I’d know soon enough if I would have to end my economics

experiment to keep my soccer eligibility.

After a day of studying, Alicia came over and we headed out

with Holly and Becca to an off-campus house for a party before

the big LGBA dance. Alicia got along well with Holly and Becca,

which was a relief. We’d talked about coming from middle class

families and being surrounded by rich, mostly straight, L.A.

college students—like my best friend and her girlfriend. For

Alicia, being Hispanic and a woman and a lesbian, those three

strikes often made her wish she would have picked a less white

school, she’d said. And what school would that have been, I’d

asked her. Fortunately, she’d laughed at the joke.

I warned her ahead of time that Holly and Becca were both

from Orange County and semi-closeted to boot. But she said that

if they were friends of mine then she would reserve judgment.

Holly and Becca, meanwhile, weren’t completely clueless.

Though they had both grown up with Mexican housekeepers,

they treated Alicia as they would any new person I introduced to

our circle of friends.

Scary that I was even worried about it, but it was Southern

California, after all. SoCal, where there were random car-

checks, kind of like truck weigh stations where if the lights were

blinking, you had to stop. Signs near those road stops that said

“Caution” in English, with a picture of a man, woman and child

with obviously Mexican features fleeing. Other signs with the

same picture that bore the Spanish word “Prohibido.” Immigration

was a regional hot-button issue, and even supposedly liberal

Californians sometimes espoused blatantly racist views, I had

found.

At the party, several people did double-takes when Alicia and

I walked in together. No doubt it would be around campus by

the end of the weekend that she and I were a couple, I thought,

rolling my eyes at Holly as people watched us walk by. We hung

out with Jeni, Mel and Mel’s roommates, a couple of field hockey

players. One of the roommates liked Alicia, I noted right off the

bat as we grabbed a couple of beers from the keg in the kitchen.

Beautiful Game 155

Jake, Brad and Cory, the football player, stopped to chat.

Alicia and Cory seemed to know each other already, so while

they talked, Jake and Brad worked on me.

“Who’s the girl?” Jake asked.

“Subtle,” I said. “She’s just a friend. You know I’d tell you

otherwise.”

“So you say.” Brad lifted an eyebrow. “You never told us about

Jess Maxwell. We had to hear about her through the grapevine.”

“I definitely would have told you if anything was up there.

Anyway, I’ve taken a vow of chastity this year.”

“Like one of those lesbian nuns,” Jake said. “Only we all

know you’re not in it for religious reasons.”

Cory moved closer. “What are you guys talking about? Or

should I ask?”

Jake smiled at him from under his eyelashes. “Just hassling

Cam.”

“Not that I can’t take it,” I said, and punched him in the

bicep. He was looking good in tight jeans and a leather vest.

Being in love with the star quarterback suited him.

“Brute. Let’s get out of here before she hurts me. You going

to the dance later?” he added, glancing back at me.

“Wouldn’t miss it. We’ll see you there.”

They wandered away, and back came the field hockey

roommate. The three of us hung out for a little while. Definite

flirting going on there—Alicia appeared to have clued in to

the other woman’s attraction and was casually encouraging it.

Nothing major though, her look told me. Mel’s roommate would

strike out tonight. I tried not to feel self-righteous, but it was

good to know I wouldn’t be the only one going home alone.

Once we were suitably tipsy, Holly, Becca, Alicia and I

headed out to the LGBA dance at the student center. There, in

a darkened ballroom with music pulsing from giant speakers, I

managed to forget about Jess, at least for a little while. Mostly

the music was fast, and I danced in a group with Holly, Becca,

Alicia and some of Alicia’s friends. A couple were exes, she told

me as we danced. Her friends eyed me curiously. Judging from

the looks being cast our way, they didn’t realize Alicia and I were

both harboring feelings for other people.

156 Kate Christie

As we danced to the fast songs under the twirling lights,

surrounded by beautiful young queer people, I scoped openly,

happy to be in a safe, all-gay environment. Being out in the

straight world could be frightening at times. It was nice to be

able to let down my defenses for an evening.

The slow songs, though—I couldn’t pretend to myself then

that I didn’t miss Jess. The DJ played the usual crooner classics,

Madonna and Sinead and Prince. I sat the first few out while

Alicia danced with a group of her friends, laughing and touching

each other flirtatiously. When one last slow song came on as the

dance was winding down, “Damn Wish I was Your Lover,” she

drifted over and caught my hand.

“Want to?” she asked, her palm soft against mine.

“Um.” What could it hurt? “Sure.”

At first we moved awkwardly together. Then we laughed,

relaxed, and our bodies flowed more smoothly, breasts lightly

touching, my hand on her hip, hers on mine as we moved slowly

around the room in time to the music. Our cheeks brushed, and

I could smell her perfume. I closed my eyes, letting my cheek

rest against her sleek hair. But she didn’t smell delicate or floral.

I opened my eyes and pulled away a little. She wasn’t Jess.

She smiled a little sheepishly and I knew she’d been doing the

same pretending. Still, it felt nice to be close to someone I was

starting to think of as a friend, and I moved in again, shutting

my eyes and enjoying the moment. If I couldn’t be with Jess, at

least I could be out among people who knew and accepted me

for me.

Later, as we walked back across campus, Alicia slipped her

arm through mine. Holly and Becca walked just ahead of us,

careful not to touch as we passed frat houses blasting rock music

and overflowing with Greek boys and girls.

“I wish we’d met each other first,” Alicia said.

“I know. Me, too.”

“Why are the people who don’t want us so much more

attractive than the people who could?”

“Human nature?” I suggested. “Or maybe it’s internalized

homophobia. You know, we don’t really think we’re worth real

love so we fall for unattainable women.” As she looked at me

Beautiful Game 157

sideways, one eyebrow raised skeptically, I added, “Or maybe it’s

just bad timing.”

“Think I’ll go with bad timing,” she said as we reached her

dorm. She leaned in and kissed my cheek, her lips brushing my

skin tantalizingly. “Thanks for a fun night, Cam. Give me a call,

okay?”

“You got it,” I said, and turned away.

As Alicia entered her building, I jogged after Holly and

Becca. Holly glanced at me, eyebrows raised as I fell into step

beside them.

“You’re sticking to this celibacy thing better than I expected,”

she said.

“Too bad no one else believes it,” I said, shoving my hands in

my jeans pockets. “By this time tomorrow it’ll be around campus

that Alicia and I are sleeping together.”

“But you know you’re not,” Holly said, sliding an arm across

my shoulder, “and that’s what counts.”

They walked me home, holding hands once the houses on

Fraternity Row were safely out of sight.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Holly promised with a look that

meant we’d talk more when Becca wasn’t around. I’d made her

swear not to tell anyone I was in love with Jess, not even Becca.

As far as I knew, she’d kept her word.

“Cool.” I waved at them and tried not to feel envious as

they strolled away, an established couple by now, well past the

honeymoon and into that comfortably symbiotic stage where

you shared clothes and everyone around you began confusing

your names even when you looked nothing alike.

In my room, I lay in bed in the dark, thinking about the

evening. Dancing with Alicia had reminded me how much I

enjoyed being close to another woman. I wanted to have that

closeness again. I wanted to have sex, damn it. After dating fairly

consistently the past few years, it still felt strange not to have

someone to spend the night with. But then I thought of Jess

sharing a hotel room with one of her teammates, and suddenly

I was glad I was alone in my bed. Hooking up with someone

else now would only complicate matters. Still, resolution was

looming increasingly importantly in my world view, threatening

15 Kate Christie

to overtake the cons list I’d drawn up on Valentine’s Day.

Sometime soon, I told myself, I would have to move on from

this ridiculous state of limbo. One way or the other.

Chapter FiFteen

On Sunday night after dinner I met Holly at the library,

supposedly to work on our paper. As usual, though, we ended

up chatting and generally annoying the people around us.

Particularly one woman with thick glasses and a broad center

part—Holly called it the butthead look—who kept leaning

around the edge of her carrel to glare at us and whisper, “Shhhhh,”

which only succeeded in bringing us to near hysterical laughter.

We could be such dumb jocks without even trying.

Eventually we left the library to wander campus aimlessly.

We ended up on the steps to the new science center, a multi-

million dollar project with a sophisticated astronomy deck built

into the roof. Holly pulled out a pack of cigarettes and we shared

a couple. We had convinced ourselves that if we only smoked a

160 Kate Christie

couple of cigarettes at a time, and only occasionally, our health

wouldn’t be harmed.

She listened to me trying to figure out my love life as the

stars flickered and grew brighter in the evening sky. When I

grew tired of rehashing significant moments with Jess, Holly

blew a cloud of smoke into the air and said, “I think you should

just tell her. That way, if it works out, then great. But if not, you

can just get the hell on with your life.”

I frowned a little, looking up at the wide night sky. She

had a point. If Jess wasn’t interested, shouldn’t I know now and

get over her? I just wasn’t sure I could. This was something I

didn’t want to let go of. Then again, a one-sided relationship

could never be healthy, no matter how much one person loved

the other.

“Maybe you’re right,” I admitted.

Holly lifted her head. “Seriously?”

“Well, yeah. Makes sense.”

“I haven’t said that before because I didn’t want to seem like

a flake.”

“Yeah, but I already know you’re a flake.”

“Hey!” She crushed her cigarette out and shoved me onto

the lush grass beneath the steps. “You’ll pay for that, Wallace!”

“You wish!”

We rolled around on the lawn, tickling and tackling each

other, ignoring the bemused looks of passersby. Eventually she

pushed away from me and we lay on our backs, gazing up at the

night sky.

“You know,” she said, “Becca thinks we wrestle all the time

because secretly we want to sleep together.”

I was silent for a moment. Then I looked at Holly and she

looked at me and we both busted out laughing.

“No offense,” I said when I caught my breath. “But—yuck!”

“I agree,” she said, still snickering. “You’re totally not my

type, dude.”

“Yeah, well, you’re too butch for me.” I ducked the inevitable

punch my crassness elicited.

We watched the moon rise, lying together on the lawn in

companionable silence. Then we headed back to our dorms.

Beautiful Game 161

“Are you really going to tell her?” Holly asked just before we

parted ways.

I nodded. “I think so. I can’t hold out like this anymore. I’m

too young not to have a girlfriend.”

“And too cute,” Holly added. “I’m telling you, you’ve got to

take advantage of this little boy look while you can. Eventually

you’re going to get old and fat like everyone else.” She ruffled

my hair.

I swatted her hand. “Zip it.”

“You doing the deed tonight?”

My smile faded. “Nah. Tennis isn’t supposed to get home

until late, and I want to tell her in person. Why don’t you cancel

Thursday so it’s just her and me?”

Holly, Jess and I had gotten into the habit of eating dinner

and watching the NBA on Thursday nights at Jess’s. Sometimes

Becca even came along, and on those nights it felt like such a

comfortable, fun double date that I almost couldn’t stand it.

“Will do.” Holly held out her hand.

I slapped it. “Thanks, man.”

“What have you got to lose, right?”

Everything, I thought. But I didn’t say it. Holly would only

accuse me—rightly—of melodrama.

At my dorm, I succumbed to a fit of laziness and rode the

elevator to my floor. I was almost to my room when I saw Taylor

Lewis from the tennis team leaning in the doorway of one of my

neighbors, Grace Chang. Taylor noticed me and turned with a

smile.

“Hey, Cam. What’s up?”

“Not much.” I stopped in the hallway, glancing into the

room to wave at Grace lying on her bed in sweats, a thick book

open before her. “Hi Grace.”

“Cam.” She returned the wave.

I liked Grace. She played volleyball and, like me, sometimes

trained with the track team. She was a senior, though, so she was

taking it easy her last semester. No sports commitments.

“How’d you guys do this weekend?” I asked Taylor, hoping I

didn’t sound too eager.

“Great.” Her eyes lit up. She was dressed still in her SDU

162 Kate Christie

Tennis sweats, sneakers and a baseball cap. They must have just

gotten back from San Francisco. “I was telling Grace we won the

tournament. We’re number one in Big Eights and number five

nationally.”

“That’s awesome. Did Jess win?” I asked, trying to keep

my voice casual. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grace

watching the exchange.

“Actually, she had a rough day yesterday and dropped a couple

of sets. But today she kicked major butt. She’s still number one in

Division II. Can you believe it?”

I shook my head. “Amazing.”

A few minutes later Taylor left and I lingered, chatting with

Grace. She was studying for her organic chemistry midterm later

in the week. I told her I’d heard track had come in third at SDC

the day before. She said she thought they would have been better

this year. Then she sat up a little, pushing her shoulder-length

black hair behind an ear.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she said, “but I was wondering. What’s

this I’ve been hearing about you and Jess Maxwell?”

I glanced down the hall. Empty. “It’s nothing,” I said. “You

know how gossip is.”

Grace was straight and had been with the same guy for two

years. She and I usually stayed away from the subject of romantic

relationships. Or at least the subject of who I was dating.

She nodded. “It’s not really any of my business. I was just

going to tell you to be careful with her. She’s not as tough as

everyone thinks.”

Frowning, I moved a step further into the room. “What do

you mean?”

“Well…” She hesitated. “Shut the door, will you?” When

I’d complied, she added, “I don’t want this getting around.

You’re obviously close with her so I trust you won’t repeat this.

Agreed?”

“Sure, agreed.” Now I was curious. I sat down on the chair

at her desk and waited.

“Do you remember that storm we had last year in

January?”

I nodded. Thunderstorms were rare in the San Diego area,

Beautiful Game 163

and often led to flooding and mudslides. “I was at home but I saw

it on the news.”

“I was here and it was pretty bad. The power went out in the

gym. I was in the locker room at the time, and so was Jess. She

looked pretty nervous even though she said she wasn’t. But when

the lights went out, she went totally quiet. Then I could hear her

breathing and it sounded almost like she was hyperventilating.

In the flashes of lightning I could see her face. She was crying.

She was just sitting there on a bench, shaking. So I went over and

sat with her. She kept repeating something about the rain and

the lightning and the ocean. It didn’t make any sense to me.

“After the wind died down, the lights came back on. Jess

seemed dazed at first, like she didn’t know where she was. Then

she apologized for scaring me. She asked me not to tell anyone.

I said I wouldn’t and asked if she wanted to talk about anything,

but she just pulled away and shut off again. Ever since then she’s

always acted like it never happened. Sometimes I think she

doesn’t remember.”

None of what Grace said really surprised me. I’d known

there was more to Jess than what she showed. But it still shook

me, knowing that there was this pain so deep inside her that no

one could touch it. Not even me.

“Something must have happened to her,” I said. “I always

thought there had to be something.”

Grace nodded. “The storm seemed to trigger her reaction.

Maybe I should have told her coach but she seemed fine after

that, like it was an anomaly. I told myself she was probably just

afraid of the storm. But there’s something more, isn’t there?”

I nodded. “I think so. I’m just not sure what.”

Back in my room a little while later, I checked voice mail.

A couple of new messages, one from Alicia and one from Mel.

Nothing from Jess. I glanced at the clock. Almost eleven. Maybe

she was still getting settled in at home.

I called Mel and shot the shit with her, ever alert for the call

waiting beep. Then I tried to study. I had a ten-page teaching

methods paper due on Thursday in lieu of a midterm, among

other things. Personally I preferred exams, with quantifiable data

you could understand and memorize. Papers were too subjective.

164 Kate Christie

Jess never did call. By eleven thirty I’d picked up the phone

several times to dial her number, but each time I realized she

might be wiped out from the trip and in bed already. It would

have to wait until tomorrow, I finally decided. I wasn’t tired

though, so instead of calling Jess, I dialed a different number.

Alicia picked up on the first ring.

“Told you I’d call,” I said, reclining on my bed. I could hear

music playing in the background at her end. “It’s Cam, by the

way.”“I know. What are you doing?”

“Trying to work on that collaboration paper. Unsuccessfully,

I might add.”

“Me too,” she said. “It’s putting me to sleep.”

We talked for a while about our classes and midterms.

Friday was the last day of classes before spring break. Then, a

glorious week of freedom. Alicia was off to Mexico to visit her

maternal grandmother; the tennis team was leaving for Tucson

Friday afternoon for eight days; Becca was going to Aruba with

her father and his third wife; and I was going home with Holly

to L.A., from whence we planned to launch day and overnight

trips to Las Vegas and San Francisco and anywhere else I could

almost afford to go.

Finally Alicia ended our innocuous chatter with a not-so-

subtle hint. “You know, Cam, the better I get to know you the

less you seem like a chicken. Why don’t you just tell the girl

already?”

I opened my eyes and looked up at the familiar brush strokes

in the ceiling paint. I had spent so many hours on the phone

staring up at this ceiling and talking to Holly and Jess and Mel.

And now Alicia.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Totally different situation. Anna doesn’t even know I exist,

but you and Jess, you’re already friends.”

She was right and we both knew it.

“Holly thinks I should tell her too,” I admitted. “You know,

either get together with her or get on with my life.”

“Sounds like good advice, my friend.”

We hung up a little while later. The universe was starting

Beautiful Game 165

to align, I thought. Clearly it was time for me to overcome my

fears and leap.

Unfortunately, Jess seemed unaware of the motion of the

universe. I got a message from her on Monday when she knew

I’d be in class, telling me that they’d won and that she was really

busy with midterms and Thursday night wasn’t going to work

for her. Holly told me later that she’d received basically the same

message. So much for my Thursday night confession plan.

I called Jess back and left a message, but Tuesday came and

went without a peep from her. I was starting to think something

was wrong. Before the tournament in San Francisco, we’d talked

on the phone every night even on days we found time to see

each other. Now, suddenly, it had been five days since I’d seen

or talked to her. Maybe she really was just busy with tennis and

midterms, I told myself. I was somewhat occupied as well.

Midterms meant cramming and staying late in the computer

lab and trying not to fall asleep in the library. Drinking coffee

and smoking more than I should. Working with Holly on our

paper. Studying. I didn’t have enough time to do well in my

classes and worry about Jess, so I pushed her odd silence out of

my mind and concentrated on transition sentences and the laws

of supply and demand and the presence of U.S. troops in Italy a

full year before D-Day. I tried to call Jess a couple more times,

but her machine always picked up. She never called me back,

either.

On Friday morning I had my Macro exam, which I thought

went okay, considering. Afterward, I looked for Jess at the

cafeteria to no avail. It was increasingly clear that she intended

to leave for spring break without talking to me. The question

was, why? Had Alicia let my secret slip to someone else? Had

Jess discovered my true feelings for her and was now avoiding

me?Tennis was leaving for Tucson at three, Taylor had informed

me when I ran into her that morning. At two forty I stationed

myself in the main lounge of the gym, stretching in my running

166 Kate Christie

gear. The team would have to pass through here before they

boarded the bus.

At a quarter to three, Jess entered the lounge. She stopped

when she saw me. “Cam,” she said, scanning the area. But we

were the only ones there.

I tried not to notice how good she looked in her navy SDU

sweats. Her hair was pulled back in its usual ponytail, a few wisps

curling about her face. I hadn’t seen her in a week, and I’d sort

of been hoping my crush would have waned with the lack of

contact.

“What’re you doing here?” I asked, pretending I hadn’t in

fact set a trap for her.

“We’re leaving for Arizona in a few minutes.” She was still

standing where she’d stopped, about ten feet away. “What are

you doing?”

“Just working out before Holly and I take off.” A blatant lie,

but she didn’t have to know that.

“That’s right, you guys are going to L.A.” She paused.

“Anyone else going with you?”

Frowning, I looked up at her. “No, it’s just the two of us. You

knew that.”

She shrugged, glancing over her shoulder as a couple of

tennis players walked through the lounge. They said hi, she said

hi, and then she looked back at me, her eyes unreadable. “I gotta

go. Have a good break, Cam.” And she turned away.

I jumped up. “Jess, wait.”

She stopped and watched me cross the distance separating

us, the darkness of her eyes revealing her mood.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Last week everything seemed

fine and then you go to San Francisco and now it’s like we’re not

even speaking.”

More tennis players passed by, watching us curiously.

“Nothing’s going on,” Jess said, fiddling with the shoulder

strap on her duffel. “I just had midterms.”

“Usually we study together,” I pointed out. “Come on, you’re

clearly avoiding me. This is weird even for you,” I added, trying

to tease her a little, get her to loosen up.

She stared at me, her eyes even darker. “I have to go.”

Beautiful Game 167

I caught her arm as she started to turn away again. “Wait.

Please.”

But she jerked her arm out of my grasp. “Don’t touch me,”

she said, her voice low. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

Her bitter tone caught me off-guard. “What are you talking

about? What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” She lifted her chin. “I just don’t think

we should hang out anymore, that’s all.”

She didn’t think… I took a step back. “Oh.” I blinked rapidly.

My heart felt like it was being pulverized. My stomach too.

Suddenly I wished I hadn’t eaten that huge burrito at lunch.

“Cam.” Her voice softened and she reached out for a moment as

if she might touch me. But then more voices, more of her teammates.

Her hand dropped. “Look, we’ll talk when I get back, okay?”

“Whatever.” I turned away. I could feel my throat closing,

tears beginning to prick my eyes. I wasn’t going to cry in front

of her, damn it.

“Cam,” she said again.

But I didn’t answer. I hurried out of the lounge, leaving her

standing there. I wasn’t going to be her punching bag, I told

myself, trying to swallow my tears. One of these days she was

going to have to deal with her shit. She couldn’t pull this on-

again, off-again bullshit and expect people to stick around.

I headed outside for an impromptu run, passing the team bus

idling in the gym parking lot. I didn’t care, I told myself, feet

pounding against pavement as I tried to outrun the memory of

what Jess had said. Anger and hurt carried me up Prospect Street

in the middle of the day, along the beach, back through town in

a wide loop. When I got back to the gym the bus was gone. I

wouldn’t see Jess for at least a week.

I headed home on my bike, trying not to think about her.

Holly and I were going to have a good time on break, and Jess

could jump in a lake for all I cared.

In my dorm I showered and threw some clothes, toiletries

and CDs into an overnight bag. The phone rang just as I finished

packing my book bag.

“You ready to go sit on the freeway for the next few hours?”

Holly asked.

16 Kate Christie

“Totally. I’ll meet you outside.”

“This is going to be so much fun!”

“I know.” I smiled, starting to feel a little better. I didn’t need

Jess. “Bring your camera, okay?”

“Already packed. See you in a few.”

I zipped a pair of running shoes into a side pocket on my

duffel, Doc Martens into the other. As I turned away from the

dresser, I caught a glimpse of the picture I’d placed next to the

Wallace family photo, and I paused. It was from the soccer-

tennis party at Mel’s, a shot of me, Holly, Jess, and Mel raising

our beers to the camera. Jeni had given me a copy of the photo

right before winter break.

“One of these girls is not like the others,” I murmured.

I slung my bags over my shoulder and headed out, turning

off the light and locking the door behind me.

Chapter Sixteen

Spring break, Huntington Beach. In Holly’s Spanish villa

home, I tried to forget about Jess and the more confusing aspects

of my college life. On the drive up, I’d told Holly what had

happened at the gym, insisting that I was never going to speak to

Jess again. It was over, I said. Totally over. Holly had just nodded

sympathetically and let me rant as I vowed to use spring break

to get over Jess Maxwell. Holly’s family home would provide a

respite from real life and engender an extended decompression

session, aided by sunshine and, of course, the backyard pool and

hot tub.

Each night that week we stayed up late watching Letterman.

Every morning we got up around ten and hit the beach, where

we roller-bladed for miles along the paved beachfront, almost

biting it in the sand a dozen times a day. We got sunburned but

170 Kate Christie

not unpleasantly so, hanging out in her backyard going from

the hot tub to the swimming pool and back again. Despite my

upbringing in rainy Oregon, fifteen years of soccer and two

summers working outdoors had trained my Scotch-Irish skin

not to burn badly, while Holly was one of those L.A. blondes

who had been tan since toddlerhood. We ignored her mother’s

warnings of skin cancer and only applied sunscreen when

absolutely necessary. At twenty, we figured we had a few years

left of deep-frying our skin in the ocean sun without worrying

about melanoma.

Midweek, we ventured to Vegas. Holly lost all of her money

and then some on blackjack the first hour we were there.

Meanwhile I won forty bucks on a slot machine and refused to

spend another penny. Holly called me cheap but I didn’t care.

My portion of the road trip was covered. I even came out ahead.

We wandered the glitzy city, hanging out in fancy hotels in our

shorts and tank tops and, once the sun had set, our SDU Soccer

sweatshirts. After a scrumptious seafood dinner and a final

fruitless assault on the slots, we drove off across the desert back

to L.A. as night fell. The Vegas lights lit up the sky behind us

for the first hundred miles. Holly said she’d read that astronauts

could see two human-made objects from space: the Great Wall

of China and the Vegas Strip.

We’d planned another road trip to San Fran, but we never

made it up to the city by the bay. Too much effort would be

required to drive that far, we agreed Friday afternoon as we

drank virgin daiquiris by the pool.

By the time Sunday rolled around, I was feeling nicely

decompressed. In fact, I hadn’t missed Jess at all, I announced as

Holly and I drove back to school in my Tercel.

“Really?”

I could tell from her tone she didn’t believe me. “Really.”

“Huh. What’s your plan, then?”

I had actually spent some time the previous day by the pool

considering this very question: What next?

“I’m fine talking to her,” I said, “but only if she makes the

first move.”

“Wow,” Holly said, shades masking her blue eyes. “You were

Beautiful Game 171

so pissed last week I didn’t know if you would ever talk to her

again.”

“Neither did I,” I admitted, checking over my shoulder before

switching lanes to pass a slow-moving Beamer. At mid-afternoon

on a Sunday, all four lanes of the 405 were full. Typical. “I guess

I just needed a little distance. Now I think maybe I got too close,

from her perspective. She has such a hard time letting anyone in.

I should at least give her a chance to explain.”

“You don’t seem pissed anymore,” Holly said, looking over

at me.

“I don’t think I am.”

Toward the end of the week, whenever I’d thought of Jess I’d

pictured her in the locker room as Grace had described, shaking

and crying as the storm raged outside. The image still made my

heart hurt. Jess wasn’t like other people. She hadn’t meant to

lash out at me, I was certain. In a way, I wished I hadn’t sprinted

out of the lounge like that. She’d seemed almost like she wanted

to take back what she’d said, but I hadn’t given her the chance.

Instead I’d turned away, deserted her. Although admittedly, she’d

deserved it.

“You never seem to stay mad for long,” Holly said.

“Unlike some people.” I smirked a little. “Remember

freshman year when Coach made that comment about placing

your shots? You didn’t forgive him until like halfway through

sophomore year.”

She nodded. “I would hope I’ve matured somewhat since

then. After all, in a matter of weeks we’ll officially be seniors.”

“Don’t remind me.”

Only a month and a half of school remained. Then finals

and graduation and back to Portland for the summer. Back to

Oregon for the last time, I promised myself.

We drove onto campus just before dinner.

“Can you feel it?” Holly asked as I parked the car in the half-

full student lot near our dorms. “That back-to-school tension

already seeping in?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” We grabbed our bags from the backseat

and headed toward the dorm. “When does Becca get back?”

“After dinner. What about tennis?”

172 Kate Christie

“They were supposed to get back last night. You know what?

I think I’ll get cleaned up and go over there right now. To Jess’s,

I mean. That way she can’t avoid me.”

“I thought you were going to let her make the first move,”

she reminded me as we neared my dorm.

“Guess I’ve been around you too much this week,” I said.

“I’m feeling distinctly impatient all of a sudden.”

“About freaking time.” She enveloped me in a quick hug, her

bags threatening to knock me over. “I’ll be around later. Or at

Becca’s. Give me a call if you want to talk.”

“Will do. Thanks for the awesome week, dude.”

“Quality time well spent.” She started to walk away, then

added over her shoulder with a final grin, “I think my mom got

quite an education too.”

One afternoon in L.A. while watching a spring break show on

MTV, we hadn’t realized until way too late that Mrs. Bishop was

standing in the doorway of the den. She’d overheard a conversation

full of choice phrases like, “total hottie” and “nice ass” and “I’d do

her.” Holly and I had both looked up in time to see her mother

disappearing down the hallway. When we joined her later for

dinner, Mrs. Bishop acted like nothing had happened, though her

initial smile looked a tad forced. Holly was sure her mother had

heard those sorts of things before from her children. But in the

past, it had probably been Holly’s hyper-straight brother and his

fraternity brothers doing the verbal babe ogling.

When I opened my dorm room door, the first thing I noticed

was the message light blinking on my phone. I dropped my bag,

shut the door, and launched myself across the bed. It was great

to be back in my own room after a week in one of the Bishops’

guest rooms with a Laura Ashley bedspread, matching wallpaper

and lacy curtains. Flowers just weren’t me. The room smelled a

little stuffy, so I opened the window next to my bed as I dialed

voice mail. Three new messages. The first one was from an on-

campus extension I didn’t recognize, dated the Friday before

break at 2:58 p.m. I frowned. I should have gotten it before I left.

Campus voice mail must have been overloaded.

Jess. I closed my eyes and listened, trying to feel nothing at

all at the sound of her voice. “Hi, Cam. You just took off from

Beautiful Game 173

the lounge. I don’t know. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I think

we need to talk. I know I blew you off all week when I should

have just asked you. . Anyway, call me when you get back, okay?

I didn’t mean what I said about not wanting to hang out. Just—

give me a call.”

The message ended. “Shit,” I said out loud. I knew I shouldn’t

have run off the way I had. Could have cleared the whole thing

up before break. At least she wanted to see me. At least she hadn’t

meant what she’d said. Relief flooded me even as I realized that

sometime soon, probably in the next few hours even, I was going

to tell Jess Maxwell I loved her, for better or worse. God, I hoped

it wouldn’t be worse.

The second message was from Mel, dated yesterday afternoon.

“Came back a day early. Just called to say hi. Give me a call when

you and Holly get back.”

The third message was from Jess again, dated earlier today.

She sounded infinitely more upbeat. “Hey, Cam. Tennis was

great. Arizona was beautiful. I even sent you a postcard, but you

probably won’t get it because we all mailed our postcards on

Friday. Anyway, give me a call when you get in and we’ll talk,

okay? I should be around. I—um, see you.”

Now that I had heard her voice and knew she wanted to talk

too, I felt a little calmer. Our friendship apparently wasn’t over,

after all. Of course, she hadn’t heard what I had to say yet.

I took a quick shower and changed into shorts and a clean T-

shirt, all fresh smelling from the Bishops’ fabric softener. Holly

and I had done our laundry this morning before we left, taking

advantage of the free washer and dryer. I pulled on my Sambas

and headed out. I wasn’t even going to call ahead.

On Jess’s quiet tree-lined street, I parked my car behind her

Cabriolet. As I locked the door and walked up the long driveway,

I tried not to feel nervous. I was going to tell her how I felt, that

was all. I was going to hear what she had to say and then I was

going to tell her. Period.

I rang her doorbell but got no answer. After a few minutes

of indecision, I went around to the front of the house and rang

that bell.

Sidney appeared at the door, smiling when she saw me.

174 Kate Christie

“Hello, Cam. Haven’t seen you in a while. Come on in.”

She held the door open and I stepped past her. Their living

room, to the left of the entryway, was decorated in dark reds and

blues with hardwood floors and warm cream walls. It reminded

me of an upscale version of Jess’s apartment.

“Thanks,” I said. “I was just wondering if you knew where

Jess was. Her car’s here but she’s not answering.”

“She borrowed Duncan for a walk. Said she was stiff from

the bus ride home. She should be back anytime.”

This explained why Duncan wasn’t snuffling eagerly around

my legs and crotch. “Okay. Thanks.”

“Who is it, Sid?” Claire called from the kitchen.

“It’s Cam,” Sidney bellowed back. “Why don’t you come

in?” she added to me. “I’m sure Claire has some fresh lemonade

in the fridge. It’s her favorite spring treat.”

“Bring her on back,” Claire called out just then. “We can

have a glass of lemonade.”

“Okay, darling,” Sidney hollered back. She waved me through

the living room. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

In the kitchen at the back of the house, Claire was chopping

piles of vegetables for dinner. She took a break and we sat at the

finished oak table that occupied the back portion of the kitchen,

sharing a pitcher of lemonade. Sidney and Claire seemed like

opposites, Sidney so gruff on the outside and Claire so talented

but slightly clueless when it came to people instead of pianos. We

talked about spring break and SDU and their alma mater, Smith,

a women’s college in Massachusetts where they had met thirty

years earlier. When I said I couldn’t believe they’d been out of

college that long, Claire called me a wonderful liar.

Ten minutes after I arrived, the front door slammed and

we heard the sound of Duncan’s toenails on the floor as he

trotted through the living room. I felt my shoulders tense as Jess

appeared in the doorway.

“Hey you guys,” she started. Then she saw me and stopped,

biting her lip. “Cam.”

I stood up. Duncan was at my side in an instant, and I rubbed

his back obligingly. “Thanks for the lemonade,” I said, nodding

at Sidney and Claire.

Beautiful Game 175

Sidney looked from me to Jess. “Just leave your glass,” she

said. “We’ll see you kids later.” Claire started to say something,

but Sidney quieted her with a glance.

I brushed past Jess, heading for the front door. After a second,

she followed.

“Do you want to come up?” she asked once we were

outside.

The late afternoon sun angled through the trees, dappling

the street and the front lawn, while the house cast its enormous

shadow over us. This really was it. By the end of the day, Jess

might well decide she didn’t want to be my friend, after all.

“If you want me to.”

She shot me a quick look but didn’t say anything as we made

our way up to her apartment. I watched her walk up the stairs

ahead of me, leg muscles rippling beneath her shorts. Why did

she have to be so damned hot, I thought, scowling. Her tan was

darker after a week in the sun, while my face was now overrun

with freckles. Holly had thought it hysterical that people in L.A.

saw me in my baseball cap and baggy shorts and mistook me for

the younger brother she didn’t have.

Jess waved me into her apartment and locked the door behind

us. We stood in the hallway between the closet and her Sabatini

poster, watching each other. Sunlight from the kitchen window

lit the apartment. Jess looked so good to me in her shorts and

white T-shirt, her shoulders straight, eyes questioning, and I

realized it had been more than two weeks since I’d last seen her.

In the kitchen, I pulled out a chair and dropped onto it as she

kicked off her sandals and padded barefoot to the fridge.

“Want a soda? Or a beer?” she asked, hand on the door.

I shook my head, slouching down in the chair. “Nah, I’m

okay.”

I still loved her, more than ever somehow. The realization

elated and depressed me at the same time. There were those

extremes again, the same old roller coaster. But did I want to

take the ride? Did I have a choice?

She leaned against the unopened refrigerator door, facing

me. “So.”

“So.” Deliberately I tipped my chair back. It always bugged

176 Kate Christie

her when I did that. Whether she was concerned for my safety or

the longevity of the chair she never said.

Her eyes flickered, and she crossed her arms across her chest.

“I think we should talk.”

My pulse quickened, and I let the chair dip to the floor. “I

think you’re right.”

Sunlight wavered in the apartment as trade winds brushed

through the branches of the trees in the backyard. I knew this

room so well, the color of the walls, the framed Picasso poster

over the table, the shape of the light fixture overhead. I knew Jess

too, the twist of her ponytail at the back of her head, the line of

muscle in her arms and legs. But only these physical impressions,

I reminded myself. Only outwardly.

“Did you get my message when I called from the gym?” she

asked.

“Not until today. Phone mail must have been down again.”

Nodding, she glanced out the partially open window into the

backyard. Birds were singing as the sun slowly angled toward the

horizon. It was only five thirty. We would have another couple

hours of daylight yet.

“I guess I owe you an explanation,” she said finally, expelling

a short breath. “The thing is, you were right. Something was

going on.” She hesitated. “You know that tournament a couple

of weeks ago? The one in San Francisco?”

I nodded.

“You called me the day I left but I didn’t pick up,” she said.

“I was here, but I didn’t want to talk to you because—well, I

thought you were dating that girl, Alicia, and you hadn’t told

me.” Her eyes were slightly defiant as she regarded me.

“Alicia? How did you know—” I stopped, realizing how that

sounded. “Where did you hear that?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “Julie saw

you at the coffee shop on Main with her and I saw you outside the

cafeteria together. Then when I got home from San Francisco, I

ran into Cory Miller at the gym and he said you took her to the

dance.”

Everything clicked into place—Jess must have been the

woman Alicia had seen at the cafeteria shooting daggers at us.

Beautiful Game 177

But why would she be upset at seeing us together? I didn’t think

she was the possessive friend type. I felt a glimmer of hope.

“You thought I was dating this woman and that’s why you

were avoiding me?” I clarified. She nodded. “Why didn’t you

just ask me?”

She shrugged and focused on the poster of the Picasso dove,

red and orange flowers trailing through its feathers. “I’m asking

now. Are you, Cam? Going out with her?”

“No, I’m not. She has a crush on someone else on the soccer

team. I went to the dance with her, Holly and Becca. It wasn’t a

date.”

Jess was watching me now, eyes shadowed. “Cory saw you,

though. He said you were dancing together, like, together.”

“We were. I had a good time. But why do you care?” I knew I

was pushing, but I wanted to hear her say it. I was tired of feeling

like the lecherous lesbian looking for a convert. “It’s not like you

and I are anything more than friends. Right?”

As my words hung in the air, she blinked and looked out

across the backyard again. “Right,” she said. “You don’t owe me

anything. You can date whoever you want.”

Abruptly she pushed away from the fridge and headed

down the hallway, stepping into her sandals on the way. She was

reaching for her keys when I caught her.

I moved between her and the door. “Where are you

going?”

She stared at the floor. “I don’t know.”

“Jess.” My hands on her shoulders, I pressed down until she

looked up at me. I could see tears in her eyes threatening to spill

over, and felt my own throat tighten. “Don’t run away,” I said,

my voice as gentle as I could make it. “You don’t have to leave.”

Shrugging my hands off, she took a step back. “Stop it,

Cam.”

“Stop what?” I took a step toward her, slid my arms around

her waist, felt her shiver against me. God, I’d wanted to do this

for so long. “Don’t you know how I feel about you?”

“No.” Suddenly she pushed me away, shoving me hard against

the door. “I don’t want this.”

The doorknob had nearly impaled me, but I ignored the

17 Kate Christie

pain. “You don’t want me to love you? Well, too bad, because I

already do.”

I stared at her, hardly able to believe I’d finally told her. Now

what?

The object of my affection seemed less than overjoyed by my

pronouncement. A tear spilled over and trickled down her cheek.

She swiped at it and gazed down at her feet again.

“No, you don’t,” she said bleakly. “You don’t even know

me.”I’d been prepared for her to cringe away in disgust, to pat my

arm patronizingly, even to—yeah, right—leap toward me in joy.

But I wasn’t prepared for her to tell me that I didn’t know her.

I touched her arm, more hesitant this time. “What do you

mean?”

She walked away without answering. After a moment, I

followed her back down the hall and into the living room,

increasingly confused as she sat down on the couch and curled

her feet under her body, wrapped her arms around herself, rested

her chin on her arms. Unsure what else to do, I dropped down

on the opposite end of the couch and waited.

She gazed at me, her eyes dark and sad. “You’re not going to

let this go, are you?”

“Of course not. You can’t convince me I don’t love you.”

Despite my bravado, though, every time I said it out loud and

she didn’t respond, I felt a little less sure of myself. My family is

hardly demonstrative. We rarely hug, let alone freely verbalize

our deepest feelings.

Sighing, she plucked at a couch cushion. “Fine. Then I’m

going to tell you something, and it might change your mind.”

As if that would happen. Unless… she hadn’t killed anyone,

had she? Tortured any innocent animals? Of course she hadn’t. I

knew her well enough to be sure of that much.

“When I was a senior in high school,” she said slowly, brow

furrowed, “I was—well, I was raped. I told my mom but she

accused me of lying. That’s why I don’t have a relationship with

her.” She stared down at the cushion, avoiding my eyes.

Raped? “Oh my God. I’m so sorry, Jess. I had no idea.”

I reached for her hand, crushing her fingers between mine

Beautiful Game 17

as a rush of feelings swirled through my mind. Shock that

someone could have hurt her, rage at the faceless man, anger

with her mother. How could a parent do such a thing? It turned

my stomach. And yet, suddenly everything clicked into place:

why Jess flinched whenever anyone came too close; why she had

constructed massive emotional walls to retreat behind at the

first sign of trouble. The mystery that was Jess dissolved, leaving

before me a scared, hurt girl in place of what I’d believed to be a

strong, resolute woman.

But maybe she was both of those people simultaneously, I

thought—strong and frightened, brave and uncertain, stoic

and vulnerable. And all at once, I loved her even more for this

complexity that had been there all along, hidden just beneath the

surface.

Then something else occurred to me. “Wait, is this why

you thought I couldn’t love you? Because some asshole—are you

serious?”

She pulled her hand away and nodded, hugging herself

again.

My throat tightened and I moved toward her, shifting on the

couch until our legs were touching.

“Jess,” I said, brushing back a curl that had escaped from

her ponytail, “what happened in the past could never change the

way I feel about you. I love you.” She looked at me, eyes nearly

black, and I half-smiled. “You’re stuck with me. I’m not going

anywhere.”

“Don’t you see?” she asked, her voice raw. “I’m damaged,

Cam. I won’t ever be the same. I can never undo what he did.

After it happened I drove all the way to the ocean and I walked

down to the water and I thought about walking in, just being

done with everything. That’s what my dad did. But I didn’t

want to be like him, so I stayed on the beach all night and in

the morning, I asked Barbara, my art teacher, for help. I stayed

with her until I came here. She asked, but I never told her what

happened. I never told anyone. I just wanted to forget it. Only I

can’t. I wish I could make it go away, but I can’t.”

I leaned back beside her, unsure what I should feel. Anger,

horror, relief? Thank God she hadn’t killed herself, I thought,

10 Kate Christie

rage at the unknown man and her pathetic mother bubbling up

again inside me. I’m not particularly violent, but at that moment

I found myself fantasizing about hurting another person. If I

ever met the man who had preyed upon her, I vowed to myself,

I would kill him.

“Was it someone you knew?” I asked, my face flushing with

the heat of suppressed rage.

“Yeah, it was.” She blinked. “You’re disgusted, aren’t you?”

“Disgusted? No way.” I caught her hand in mine again and

gave it a squeeze. “I was just thinking about what I’d do to the

bastard if I ever got my hands on him.”

She winced a little, and I took a deep breath. The last thing

she needed right now was the threat of more violence.

“I’m sorry,” I added. “I don’t mean to upset you. It’s just…”

I trailed off. What could I say that wouldn’t make matters

worse?

Shifting again on the couch, I moved closer, tugging her

toward me. She resisted at first, but when I didn’t let go, she

seemed almost to fall into me, hiding her face in my neck.

“It’s okay,” I said softly, my lips against her hair. “I’ve got

you.” And I held her gently, there on the couch in her third-

story apartment while the seconds ticked past and the light faded

beyond the windows.

After a little while, she murmured, “So you love me, huh?”

“I do.” I was glad I couldn’t see her face. What would she say

now that her revelation had failed to send me packing?

“Good,” she said, breath warm against my chin.

“Good?” I repeated.

“I think so. I mean, I knew I liked you and I thought you felt

the same way, especially after the party at Mel’s. I wanted to go

home with you that night, I really did. I just wasn’t ready.”

That meant I hadn’t imagined the Kiss Me look she’d given

me at Mel’s. Funny—the party seemed like a million years ago.

“Are you ready now?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was terrified of telling you. I thought it would

change the way you felt about me, the way you look at me.”

“You don’t have to worry.” I leaned away so I could see her

face. “Something like that could never change the way I feel

Beautiful Game 11

about you. I don’t think you’re damaged. I think you’re beautiful

and resilient and amazing, even more so now that I know how

strong you really are. Okay?”

“Okay.” She leaned her forehead against my chin. “Would it

be all right if you just held me?”

“Of course. Come here.”

We stretched out side by side on the couch and I wrapped my

arms around her. Half on top of me, she slipped one arm around

my waist and rested her face against my shoulder. Outside the

streetlamps flicked on one by one, while in my arms Jess cried,

softly at first, then harder until her entire body shook with gut-

wrenching sobs. Her tears soaked my T-shirt and slid down my

neck, and I held her tighter, stroking her hair and whispering

soothing words, wishing I could take her pain and sorrow into

me and dilute it somehow, relieve her of the burden of what had

happened to her before we’d ever met. But I was as powerless as

anyone else to change the past.

Powerless—that was exactly what the man who had raped her

wanted. To rob her of choice, to inflict physical and emotional

pain, to erode her confidence in herself and the people around

her. How could you trust strangers when someone you knew

could do such a thing?

As a lesbian, I’m used to being accused of hating men. I

usually prefer to think of myself as a lover of women, not a hater

of men. But as I held Jess in my arms, the sobs ripping through

her, I felt the ember of rage that had ignited inside me at her

admission growing stronger, feeding on the images that curled

through my mind: Jess with a man’s thick-fingered hand over

her mouth, a heavy male body pressing her into a mattress or

against a wall or onto a floor, blood between her legs, under her

fingernails, on her lips where she’d bitten herself as he forced

himself into her. I didn’t hate men as a whole because of what had

happened to her. My brother and dad were good men who would

be outraged by the bastard who had assaulted Jess. But just then

I hated a man I had never met more than I had ever hated anyone

before.

I shut my eyes against the awful pictures, but it didn’t help.

Then I thought about Jess lugging around this horrible memory

12 Kate Christie

she thought she had to hide from everyone, this history she

seemed to believe divided her from her peers, made her damaged

goods, unlovable.

She wouldn’t be alone with this anymore, I decided as her

sobs eased and her body relaxed against mine and her breathing

took on the regular rhythm of sleep. I would be whoever she

needed me to be. No matter how she felt in return, it was enough

that I loved her. For some reason, this realization was freeing.

At that moment, I didn’t need anything from her except to be

allowed to try to help however I could. I had never felt anything

quite so selfless before, I thought, slightly in awe of the strength

of my own sentiment.

I closed my eyes and kissed Jess’s hair as she slept in my arms.

I only wished she could be this at peace always.

A little while later she started awake, and we sat up and

turned on the lights. Her tears had dried. In the lamplight, she

blinked and smiled at me shyly.

“I’m glad you came over tonight,” she said.

“Me too.”

Despite what she’d told me, I felt a growing sense of peace.

She hadn’t sent me away and I didn’t have to hide anything

anymore. Seemed like a win-win to me.

I stood up and stretched my hands above my head, my muscles

tightening and then releasing. “Hey, are you hungry?”

She stood up next to me. “I could be. You want to make some

dinner?”

“Definitely. You still have to tell me about Arizona.”

“And you have to tell me about L.A.”

Which reminded me… “Can I use your phone? I told Holly

I’d call her.”

“Sure. Is pasta okay?” she added, heading into the kitchen.

“Awesome.”

While Jess poked through the cupboards, I dialed Holly’s

room.

“Hola,” I said when she answered. “I was just over here at

Beautiful Game 13

Jess’s and remembered I was supposed to call you.” Hint, hint. In

the background I heard a door slam. “Am I interrupting?”

“You could say that.”

We were both speaking in code for our respective

audiences.

“What, a fight?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Glad I called then.”

She laughed shortly. “Me too. What’s up with you? You’re

still there, so obviously she didn’t kick you out. Or else—maybe

you didn’t tell her?”

“No, I did. We’re making dinner right now.”

“That means you’ve been there a couple of hours, you

confessed, and you’re only now eating dinner. Hmm,” Holly

said. “Does this mean what I think?”

In other words, had we slept together? That was the way her

mind worked. Mine too, usually.

“Not quite,” I said, looking over at Jess, who was setting a

pot of water on the stove. “I have to help with dinner, since I’m

the one who dropped in. Can’t leave all the work to Jess.”

The subject of our conversation looked over her shoulder and

smiled. “Sure you can.” She pulled a jar of tomato sauce from the

fridge. “Tell Holly I said hi.”

“I heard that. Give her a big kiss for me, Cam.”

“She says hi, too,” I told Jess.

She held up a bottle of red wine questioningly. I nodded.

“Wuss,” Holly said.

“Anyway,” I said into the phone, “want to meet for lunch

tomorrow so you can tell me what’s going on with you and Becca?”

“Sure,” she said, “and vice versa. In the meantime, don’t do

anything I wouldn’t do,” she added. Jackass.

I hung up and walked over to the stove, resisting the urge

to wrap my arms around Jess’s waist from behind. After all, it

wasn’t like she’d said she loved me back. Then again, she hadn’t

said she didn’t, either.

“What can I do?” I asked, peering into the water.

“It’s pasta,” she said, pouring tomato sauce into another pot.

“Not much to do.”

14 Kate Christie

“Tell me about Arizona, then. How was the trip?”

I leaned against the counter and listened to her talk about

the week in the desert—double sessions on the courts, days off

when they hiked to the top of mesas, nights hanging out around

a campfire. They had outlined their team plans and goals. This

was the year they were going to win nationals, they’d decided.

That rung a bell. I remembered a soccer meeting early on

in the fall before Jamie and I were at each other’s throats. With

a couple of wins behind us and the whole unknown season yet

ahead, we’d talked about our goals for the season. A national

championship was the ultimate objective for plenty of teams,

realistic or not. Tennis, though, would have a significantly better

shot at it than we’d had.

“What did you and Holly do all week?” Jess asked as we sat

down at the table a little while later, plates heaped with steaming

pasta and red sauce.

“We were a lot lazier than you. Mostly we laid out.”

“I can tell. Nice freckles,” she teased.

“Hey now, not all of us can have perfect tans.”

“I don’t know. Yours looks pretty good to me.”

“Thanks. You look pretty good yourself.”

She glanced away. “What else did you guys do? You couldn’t

have spent the entire week by the pool.”

We sat in the kitchen talking over our meal as if nothing had

happened, trading stories of our separate spring breaks. This was

the way it was supposed to be, I thought as I took a sip of wine to

wash down the pasta. Jess seemed lighter than usual, almost as if

telling me about the rape had somehow lessened the power the

memory held over her. I knew it couldn’t be as easy as that, but I

hoped that telling me would signal the beginning of something

good for her.

After we’d cleaned up the kitchen, we returned to the living

room and switched on the TV. Curled up together on the couch,

shoulders and thighs touching, wineglasses on the coffee table, we

watched the Movie of the Week, a made-for-television film about

a couple’s struggle to rescue their daughter from a religious cult.

I wasn’t really focused on the movie, though. I was just happy to

be in Jess’s apartment with her beside me and everything out in

Beautiful Game 15

the open. Happy to look at her and smile and have her smile back

even though the girl in the movie was being drugged by the cult

leader at that exact moment. Happy that Jess had decided not to

walk into the ocean three years before.

She fell asleep again, her head on my shoulder, before the

movie ended. I stayed awake with my arm around her shoulders,

hand stroking her hair, cheek resting against her forehead. So

this was what it was like to really love someone, I thought, new

feelings rising and falling inside me. There was tenderness,

vulnerability, protectiveness. If anyone ever tried to hurt her

again, I would kill them. It wasn’t even a very fierce thought this

time, more a matter-of-fact promise I was making to myself. I

wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again.

My eyes wandered from the television to the painting on

the wall, the one I’d guessed on my first visit was supposed to

depict a storm. And all at once, I understood—it was hers. Jess

had painted the night she’d been raped, the night she drove to

the ocean and sat on the damp sand thinking about ending her

life. She displayed the image now in her living room, I supposed,

to remind herself that she’d chosen to live. That she’d decided to

be strong.

I wondered how long she could continue to be strong. I

wondered what I would have done in her shoes. I wondered if the

storm was still somewhere inside her just beneath her collarbone,

maybe, waiting to deluge her again. Not if I had any say. But

realistically, I knew I probably didn’t.

When the movie ended, I hit the power button on the

remote.

“Come on, Jessie,” I said softly, squeezing her shoulder.

“Time to make the doughnuts.”

Her eyelids fluttered, and she looked up at me, blinking in

the semi-dark room. Outside the window the sky was black, stars

pricking the canopy of night. “Oh. Hi.” She yawned.

“Hi,” I said. “Time to get you to bed.”

She sat up. “Are you staying?”

“Sure. This couch and I are buds.” I patted the cushion.

“No, I mean, with me.” She gestured toward her bedroom.

Gulping, I glanced toward the bedroom. “Are you sure?”

16 Kate Christie

She nodded.

“Okay then.” Didn’t have to ask me twice. Actually, she

already had, probably because even in my most optimistic

moments, I hadn’t pictured ending the night in her bed.

We got ready in shifts. I changed into the boxers she loaned

me while she used the bathroom. Then, while I was brushing

my teeth and taking my contacts out, she changed clothes and

pulled the covers down.

I left the nightlight on in the bathroom and crossed to the

bedroom, aware of the creak of the wood floor beneath my feet.

Sidney and Claire had to have noticed that I hadn’t left yet. Then

again, they were probably happy that Jess was hanging out with

a lesbian. One of the family, so to speak.

She was already curled up under the forest green comforter,

bedside lamp glowing. I hesitated, looking at her questioningly.

Her hair was down, flowing about her shoulders in a dark wave.

She smiled, shy again, and patted the bed.

“It’s okay, Cam,” she said, her voice calm. “I promise.”

Taking a deep breath, I closed the bedroom door partway

behind me and crossed the room. I couldn’t quite believe this

was happening. Then I was climbing into bed beside her and

sliding down beneath the cool sheets and warm comforter. My

feet brushed against her leg and she pulled away with a laugh.

“Your feet are freezing!”

I had heard that complaint before. I shrugged, grinning

nervously at her. “You know what they say. Cold feet, warm

heart.” I had used this same line before, too. I burrowed down in

the bed until my head was on the pillow facing her. “So.”

“So.”

We were only a few inches apart now. This close, I could see

tiny laugh lines fanning out from her eyes.

“You have beautiful eyes,” I said. Another line. I had to

stop.“I was just thinking that about you. Yours change all the

time. Right now they’re green.”

“Because of the comforter.”

She smelled clean, a combination of shampoo, soap and

toothpaste. And something else that was just her.

Beautiful Game 17

We were both quiet. I was afraid to move, afraid I might

trigger some awful memory. But she was looking steadily at me

with the open, vulnerable look I’d only glimpsed a couple of

times. I moved closer and lifted my hand to her cheek. Her skin

was so soft.

“Jess,” I whispered.

She met me halfway. Our lips brushed, softly, lightly, just for

a moment. I pulled away a little, but she was too close. I couldn’t

focus on anything except her eyes, half-closed and shining. I

closed my own eyes and kissed her again.

We kissed for what felt like hours, bodies pressed together

beneath the sheets, legs intertwined. I kept my hands shoulder-

level, afraid of scaring her. The last thing I wanted was to remind

her of the last time presumably she’d been this close to another

human being. Eventually she pulled away, kissed me once more

sweetly, and shifted onto her back, staring at the ceiling. Her

breathing wasn’t steady.

Neither was mine. I watched her, feeling my pulse pounding

at my neck. She was so beautiful.

“You okay?” I asked.

She looked over at me and nodded. “Better than okay.” She

lifted her hand to brush my hair off my forehead. “I’m really glad

you’re here.”

“So am I.” I hugged her against me. This was what life was

all about, I thought, closing my eyes and burying my face in her

hair. Jess turned out the light a few minutes later. We fell asleep

holding each other. In the middle of the night I woke up,

disoriented. Then my eyes focused in the dim light from the

doorway and I saw Jess, asleep on her side, face turned toward

me. I lifted my arm to her waist. In her sleep she moved closer to

me. I smiled and sank back into darkness.

So this was love.

Chapter Seventeen

Jess and I skipped our classes the next day and lay around her

apartment eating bread and fruit and cheese, drinking Gatorade

and watching old Laverne and Shirley reruns. Among other

things. Half the day we spent in bed. Jess wasn’t as nervous as

she had thought she would be, she said. Still, we took it slowly.

I didn’t want to hurt her, not ever, so I let her set the pace,

pleasantly surprised when she pushed me down on my back that

first morning and had her way with me.

Every time I opened my eyes to see her leaning over me,

I felt the same thrill that it was her lips on my collarbone, her

fingers trailing over my taut belly, her hand tracing circles on

my inner thigh. For so long, I had viewed Jess as cool, remote,

asexual even. In reality, her interest in my body was unabashedly

prurient. She seemed fascinated by the texture of my skin, the

Beautiful Game 1

sounds that escaped the back of my throat as she caressed me,

the slickness between my legs after she had kissed her way across

my stomach.

Took a little longer for her to let me return the favor, but

eventually she did, biting her lip as I slid my hand under the

tank top she’d slept in. Despite the desire flooding through

me, I went slowly and let her call the shots, and didn’t take it

personally when she stopped my hand at the waistband of her

boxer shorts. I knew it would probably be a while before she

could let go completely and trust me with her body. Good thing

I had a healthy ego when it came to sex. Not to mention, ample

experience “helping women reach their full orgasmic potential,”

as Mel had once jokingly put it.

On Tuesday, we reluctantly left the apartment and returned

to real life. In the days that followed, school quickly reasserted

itself in the form of classes, homework, practice, matches, all

trying their best to keep us apart. We fought the pull of other

commitments as well as we could. I started spending nearly

every night at Jess’s apartment, even the ones pre-competition,

parking my car behind hers outside Sidney and Claire’s house

and letting myself into the upstairs apartment with the spare

key Jess presented me with a week after I’d started staying

over.“Is it too soon?” she asked worriedly as I stared at the key in

its tiny jewelry box sitting between us on the kitchen table.

We had just finished dinner, and I had been wondering how

she would react if I suggested we make it an early night. I’d been

thinking about her all day, my palms damp as I remembered the

way she’d gazed at me the night before, all sexy and in charge, as

she did wonderful things to me.

Now I looked from the tiny box up into her eyes and smiled.

“What took you so long?”

In response, she pulled me up and led me toward the

bedroom. Seemed I wasn’t the only one who’d been having X-

rated fantasies all day.

Friends become lovers, we were officially dating from the

night I told her I loved her, unofficial honeymooners from the

first morning we awoke wrapped around each other. We shared

10 Kate Christie

most meals, talked on the phone incessantly when we were apart,

and even Holly claimed to find our cuteness nearly unbearable.

“Payback’s a bitch,” I told her unapologetically one Saturday

afternoon as we lounged in the tennis stands watching my

girlfriend pummel the top singles player from CU-Rancho

Cucamonga. Becca had chosen not to attend the match, and I was

just as happy—gave Holly and me some needed best friend time.

I hadn’t told her about the rape, and I wasn’t sure I ever

would. Not without Jess’s permission, and even though matters

were progressing in the bedroom—Jess had taken my hand and

moved it under her boxers for the first time the night before—I

doubted she would be comfortable with anyone other than me

knowing her history anytime soon.

“So how’s the sex?” Holly asked, lowering her voice so that

no one around us would hear.

“Dude!” I shoved her sideways. “None of your effing

business, that’s how.”

Holly rolled her eyes. “You Oregonians are so uptight.”

“Yeah? Well, you Californians are too loose.”

“And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?” she asked, arching

a superior eyebrow in my direction.

She might have had a point, not that I would have admitted

as much to her.

At the end of our second dreamy week together, Jess confessed

that tennis somehow no longer seemed quite as important.

Secretly I was pleased by this admission, but outwardly I scolded

her. She was still number one in singles in the country, and SDU,

the top-seeded Division II team, was due to host nationals in a

matter of weeks. She couldn’t afford to lose focus now.

As they always do after spring break, the weeks began to slip

away in a blur of warm weather, spring fever and rising academic

pressure. They went even faster this time because I desperately

wanted to slow everything down. Despite the auspicious

beginning, my growing relationship with Jess felt tenuous

somehow, as if everything could suddenly end without warning.

We were a couple now, double dating with Holly and Becca

for real, holding hands on campus and around the city when it

seemed safe to do so, attending LGBA functions together, even

Beautiful Game 11

occasionally dirty dancing at eighteen-and-up nights at Zodiac.

But at times even now Jess retreated to that place no one

else could reach, her eyes blank and body rigid. Sometimes after

we made love, she closed her eyes and turned away from me,

shutting me out entirely as she took deep, calming breaths. I

understood where she went to at those moments—and why—but

I was still powerless to bring her back. I could only quell the urge

to touch her and wait for her to soften toward me and everything

else around her. She was well worth the wait, but I wasn’t always

sure she’d come back to me.

The days and nights marched inexorably past, taking us closer

to summer and our inevitable parting. With tennis season in full

swing, my girl was busier than I was. Sometimes I only saw her

late at night for a cuddle session and the perennially too-short

sleep of the exhausted. She spent three weekends in April away,

traveling throughout the region for various tournaments and

away matches. I slept in the dorm then and got caught up with

my other friends, who teased me about spring mating season and

my recent vanishing act. Alicia was envious I’d gotten the girl

when she hadn’t, but she graciously congratulated me over lunch

the week after spring break, agreeing that there were indeed

other fish in the sea, even for her. Mel’s roommate had asked her

out, and she was thinking of saying yes. The hockey player was

no Anna, but she had a nice smile. Had to start somewhere, I told

her, trying not to glow too brightly.

April came and went while I was too love-struck to notice,

and then suddenly, somehow, it was only a week until finals and

I was finishing up end-of-term projects and studying for my

Macro and Word War II exams. I went into the econ final with a

solid B. Not bad considering I hadn’t cracked my textbook even

once during the semester. Even if I bombed the exam—which

I didn’t plan on doing—I couldn’t get lower than a C+ overall,

according to my calculations. No matter what, my eligibility was

safe, and I had won the bet. Laura was not just a little pissed that

I had managed to make a mockery out of her beloved Macro. She

wasn’t nearly as annoyed as Holly, though, who, in accordance

with the terms of our wager, had to pack my room for me at the

end of the term.

12 Kate Christie

Tennis nationals were slated for the week between finals

and graduation. I was supposed to go home as soon as I finished

my tests, but I decided to stay an extra week to watch Jess play

in the tournament. Holly stayed too. In fact, she had no plans

to go home except for a brief visit. She and Becca were going

to try living together in San Diego for the summer. Becca was

planning to look for a job in her field, marine science. But there

wasn’t much you could do with a bachelor’s degree anymore, she

kept telling Holly. She was putting off grad school until Holly

graduated so that they could plan a future together.

The week before commencement, I helped Holly and Becca

move into their new apartment, a one-bedroom place a mile

north of San Diego’s business district. They had the top floor

of a two-story house on a quietish street a few blocks from

University Avenue, and Holly had a job at Starbuck’s on Fifth.

Afternoon and evening shifts only, she told me as we hung her

posters throughout the apartment. No early mornings for her.

Jess was busier than ever that last week, getting ready for

nationals. Every day she had double practice sessions, and nearly

every night there seemed to be some sort of team event. I felt

like I barely saw her, even though I was staying at her apartment

the week between finals and commencement. I spent a lot of

time working out, hanging out with Holly at the beach before

her shift, riding my bike around town, and reading magazines

and paperback novels—my respite after a semester of academic

study—under an umbrella in the tennis stands while Jess and the

rest of the team practiced.

She might have said tennis didn’t seem as important anymore,

but you couldn’t tell to look at her. At least, I couldn’t tell. I tried

to tamp down rising jealousy as she worked on and off the court

on a single goal—playing the best she possibly could at nationals.

There would be time later for us, I told myself as Jess crawled

into bed each night with a half-hearted kiss for me, falling asleep

on my shoulder almost before I turned off the bedside lamp. But

time was dwindling for us. When tennis season ended, so would

my sojourn in Southern California.

National semis were Saturday, finals on Sunday. Sidney and

Claire came to all of Jess’s matches, waving occasionally from

Beautiful Game 13

under their sun umbrella on the hillside overlooking the courts.

Holly and I sat in the stands in baseball caps, tank tops and shorts,

cheering on SDU and sunning ourselves at the same time. Becca

didn’t come either day, citing her job search. Holly thought she

might be envious of the sports thing Holly, Jess and I all had

going. Momentarily, I felt sorry for her. It passed quickly.

On Saturday, Jess rolled through her matches without

dropping a set while SDU beat its opponents easily to advance

to the team finals. After the match, as I waited for Jess to come

out of the field house with the rest of the team, I thought I saw

a tall, slim woman in a familiar tan and gold suit disappear into

the crowd. Was she Jess’s mother? I was tempted to run after her,

but the tennis team exited the field house just then, laughing and

chatting a million miles a minute. I didn’t mention the woman

to Jess. No need to risk knocking her off her game.

I thought about her later, though. Would she come back for

the finals? Who did she think she was, anyway? I pictured telling

her off. I saw myself decking her. I imagined asking her what

she’d been thinking when she turned her back on her own child,

if she knew the damage she’d wreaked. But in the end, I knew I

probably wouldn’t get a chance to enact any of my fantasies. It

was Jess’s life, her decision to talk to her mother or not, assuming

my hunch was right and the mystery woman was Jess’s mom.

That night we ate leftover pasta and salad at the apartment,

careful not to load up on too many carbs. Then we went to bed

early so that I could give her a full body massage to work out the

kinks from the day’s matches and get her relaxed and ready for

the finals.

In the bedroom, she took her shirt off and lay on her stomach.

I straddled her hips and went to work on her back, kneading

lotion and a bit of tiger’s balm into her muscles and trying to

ignore my own tingling. I’d been flying solo in that regard all

week. Jess had told me she’d make it up to me somehow, but I

wasn’t sure how she planned to accomplish that one.

“That feels so good,” she murmured, turning her head on

the pillow to sigh softly. “You’re amazing.”

Not the context I’d hoped for such accolades, but it would have

to do. After all, a national championship hung in the balance.

14 Kate Christie

“Face forward, Ms. Tennis Pro,” I said, working on her lats.

“Even out your shoulders.”

“Mmm.” She buried her face in the pillow.

After ten minutes, my hands were tired and Jess’s breathing

was deep and even. I lay down beside her, running my hand across

her back and feeling the muscles beneath my touch. My hand

drifted over her hair, silky strands soft against my fingertips.

She turned her face toward me, blinking in the lamplight, and

smiled sleepily.

“Thanks, Cam. That felt awesome.”

“My pleasure,” I said, sliding my fingers down the side of her

face. “I’m going to miss you so much.”

I didn’t mean to say it out loud. We should be focusing on

tennis, both of us, specifically on finals the following day. Not on

our impending separation, slated for first thing Tuesday morning

when I would climb into the Tercel and point my wheels north.

Her eyes narrowed. “I know. I’ve been thinking.” She

hesitated. “Do you really have to go home for the summer?”

A spark glimmered in my chest. She didn’t want me to leave?

But I couldn’t enjoy the feeling long.

“I wish I didn’t have to,” I said, “but I told the Parks guys a

while ago I would work this summer. I can’t back out now.”

“I knew you would say that,” she said, closing her eyes again.

“You’re so good.”

“We can’t all be California flakes,” I said, but the joke felt

hollow even to me.

I had thought more than once how perfect it would be, the

two of us in La Jolla hanging out with Holly and Becca on the

beaches and at the parks and around town when we weren’t

working, taking weekend trips to the mountains and Baja and

L.A. But La Jolla in the summer was Jess’s turf. I hadn’t wanted

to invite myself into her life. Now it was too late to do anything

other than reluctantly head home for the summer and wish I’d

had the nerve to say something sooner.

“Does this mean you would want me to stay if I could?” I

asked.

“Of course I want you to stay,” she said, eyes closed, voice

and body relaxed. “I love you. I’ll always want you to stay.”

Beautiful Game 15

She’d said it, finally. I leaned my chin on her shoulder and

kissed her cloud of hair. “I love you too,” I murmured.

In response, she snored, and I laughed quietly. Such was the

life of an intercollegiate athlete.

While my girlfriend slept, I took the phone into the kitchen

and called Holly to tell her about the latest happy milestone Jess

and I had managed to achieve.

“Great, now you two will be even more obnoxiously cute,”

Holly said, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “Bet you’re

glad now you don’t ever stay mad,” she added.

“My friend,” I replied, “I’m ecstatic.”

Now if only life could continue this unfailingly happily.

Somehow, I doubted it would. But I had hope. After all, I was

from Oregon.

On Sunday, Jess woke up at six a.m. and never went back to

sleep. She told me this later—I didn’t wake up even when she left

the apartment to take Duncan for an early walk. I know, some

girlfriend, right? Jess had to meet the team for breakfast at a

bagel shop near campus, so she left after her walk. But she came

home between breakfast and the match for another massage.

Her muscles had tightened since the previous night’s

bodywork. I kneaded a knot below her shoulder blade until she

grunted in pain.

“You’re tense this morning,” I said, relenting a little.

“No kidding,” she muttered.

“You know you guys are going to kick ass. All you have to do

is maintain your focus.”

“Right.”

She was unusually quiet. Understandable, since it was

nationals.

“Are you okay?” I asked, working my way down her spine.

She hesitated. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” I asked, pressing down against

the small of her back. “What can’t you do?”

“I’m not as good as everyone thinks,” she explained, voice

16 Kate Christie

muffled against her hands. “It’s like, when I’m on the court, I

have this anger inside me that makes me win. You know? But it’s

not really inside of me. That’s the problem. It’s outside of me. I

have to keep it there or I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

I tried to choose my words carefully. “Are you saying the

emotion you use to win comes from the assault?”

Her muscles tensed even more beneath my hands. We hadn’t

talked about the rape other than that one time. I’d wanted to, but

I hadn’t wanted to push her. Besides, the timing never seemed

quite right, with tennis and the end of the semester propelling

us forward.

“Yes,” she said, her voice quiet. “I was never this good

before.”

I sat back on my heels. She turned over and watched me, eyes

shuttered in the old way.

“Jess,” I said, taking her hand in mine, “you know that

saying—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

She nodded.

“I know it sounds cheesy and clichéd and all of that, but it’s

true. You survived something terrible and it didn’t kill you. It

made you stronger. That strength is deep inside you, where your

athletic ability comes from. In here.” I touched her forehead.

“And in here.” I placed my hand on her chest, above her heart.

“And especially in here.” I tickled her stomach.

She squirmed away, smiling reluctantly. “At least one of us

thinks I can do it.”

“I believe in you,” I said, and lay down beside her. “Now

come here.”

My arms around her, we lay quietly, listening to each other

breathe as the sun climbed higher beyond the window.

When it was time, we left the apartment and drove to

campus, where I dropped her at the gym. She kissed me as she

left the car, her lips pressing firmly against mine. Then she was

sliding out the passenger door, bag in hand, and striding toward

the gym entrance. She looked back at me once and I flashed her

a thumbs-up. She nodded and disappeared inside. As I went to

park the car, I tried to contain my pride. This was it.

The top nine singles players from each team met each

Beautiful Game 17

other in the finals. Jess was seeded number one. Her opponent,

a woman named Michelle Argot from Hawaii-Pacific, was a

former Division I top ten player who had blown her knee two

years earlier and struggled back. A senior, she was ranked just

behind Jess in our division. They had met once over spring break

in Tucson. There, I knew, Jess had lost the first set and been

taken to a tiebreaker in the second, but ultimately she’d won the

match with two service breaks in the third set. That boded well,

I thought, crossing my fingers.

The stands were packed. Holly and I scored seats in the

second row only with difficulty. When Jess took the court to

warm up, I felt pressure on my bladder—just like a soccer game.

Meanwhile, out on court, Jess didn’t appear nervous at all. Her

movements were careful and controlled, graceful as ever. I

couldn’t believe she was my girlfriend. I wondered if my head

was swelling visibly with the pride my chest couldn’t quite seem

to hold.

Jess had first serve. Tucking an extra ball into her tennis

skirt, she took a deep breath and looked toward the stands. Do

it, I thought as her eyes found mine. Kick her ass. She nodded

slightly like she’d heard me, bounced the ball twice, and tossed it

up. The match was underway.

Sometimes in sport you feel so strong and good and skilled

that it’s like you are the ball or the racquet or the bat. Everything

clicks and the sun is perfect overhead, never in your eyes, and

even the wind seems to gust in your favor. It’s almost as if you are

the game and the game is you. You’re in the zone. Jess, it quickly

became evident, was having one of those days, buoyed along by

the gods of sport or whatever inner strength it was that made

her swing powerful, her shots accurate, her serve deadly. At first,

everything she did was just right.

But it rarely lasts long, that perfect synchronicity between

body and mind. Something gives and you return to mortality,

after the match or game if you’re lucky. For Jess, the come-down

occurred in the middle of the second set. She’d won the first

6-4 and was leading the second 3-1, thirty-love on her serve.

Three more games, and she would be the undisputed national

champion, no matter what the rest of her team did.

1 Kate Christie

She served and moved in immediately to play the net, but

Michelle anticipated her step and angled a clean shot crosscourt.

Jess did something she had done a thousand times before—she

scrambled and reached for the distant ball. A drop shot, all she

could manage, and the ball skipped over the net, bouncing twice

before Michelle could manage more than a few steps. Jess hit the

ground and rolled. Forty-love. The fans went wild.

Then the clapping died away as Jess stayed down holding the

back of her right leg, face twisted in pain.

I grabbed Holly. “Her hamstring!” She’d had problems with

it during the winter season.

“But I thought it was okay now,” Holly said, grimacing.

“So did she.” Despite the heat of the day, I shivered a little.

This was not supposed to happen.

We watched as Carrie, an SDU athletic trainer, sprinted out

onto the court, bag of medical tricks in hand. Adrienne, Jess’s

coach, followed, her steps quick. I resisted the urge to jump the

barrier and run out with them, holding tightly instead to Holly

and waiting with everyone else.

After a few moments, Adrienne conferred with the chair

umpire. He granted Jess a ten-minute injury time-out. After

that, he said loudly enough for those of us in the first few rows to

hear, Jess would have to play—or forfeit the match.

Adrienne and Carrie helped Jess off to the side of the court

and began working on her there. Steve, the student trainer,

squatted down next to Jess as she said something. Then he stood

up and headed for the stands.

“Cam,” he said, catching my eye. “Can you come down here?”

I scrambled down from my seat and followed him around the

edge of the court, barely aware of the eyes of the crowd on my

back. She had to be okay. She was only three games away.

When I reached her, Jess was holding a bag of ice to the back

of her right thigh. Her eyes were red and full of tears, but she

managed to fake a smile as I squatted down next to her.

“Hey, champ,” I said, a hand on her shoulder. “How you

doing?”

“Not so good,” she said. “I was almost there, but now. .” She

shook her head, staring down at her leg.

Beautiful Game 1

I glanced over at Carrie, who was checking her watch, Ace

bandage in hand. “Can she play?”

Carrie shrugged. “If this were any other match, I’d say no.

But she’ll have the summer to recover. It’s up to her.”

“What do you think?” I asked Jess.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice low. “It’s bad, Cam. Really

bad.”“Okay, but this is it,” I said, tightening my grip on her

shoulder. “This is the championship match. And you know what?

I don’t think you’ll let yourself just bow out. You’ve come too far

to quit now. What do you say? Want to get back out there and

give it a try?”

Jess looked at me staring hard at her at the edge of the dark

green court, restless spectators murmuring in the background.

She squinted into the sunlight, and then all at once, she nodded.

“Okay. But if I never walk again, you’ll be the one pushing the

wheelchair.”

“Deal.” I held out my hand and she slapped it. “Now get out

there and finish her off.”

While Carrie wrapped Jess’s leg, I went back to the stands.

Everyone around me asked if she could play. I told them she was

damn well going to try.

Moving gingerly, Jess headed onto the court. The trainer

had sprayed her leg with a deep numbing spray, anesthesia in an

aerosol can. Not a long-term fix, but at least it would temporarily

dull the pain. Back in position again, she took a few practice

swings, wincing each time her weight shifted onto her bad leg.

This was going to be ugly, I thought, slouching down in my

seat.Jess held on to win one last point on her serve to go up 4-1 in

the second set. On Michelle’s serve, though, she barely moved.

She didn’t score a single point. 4-2. Her serve again, only this

time Michelle upped the pressure. Jess lost again. Now it was 4-

3, back even on serve. I was starting to get nervous. So were the

other SDU fans.

When Jess asked for a break, the chair umpire granted a

short time-out. She went to her bench, waved Adrienne and

Carrie away and hung her head, a damp towel draped over her

200 Kate Christie

face. She sat motionless, invisible to the crowd. I wondered where

she was—in her sunlit apartment upstairs at Claire and Sidney’s

house? On a storm-swept beach west of Bakersfield? Snuggled

under the covers with me on a laid-back Sunday morning?

Wherever it was, I hoped it was galvanizing her. She would have

to break Michelle again to win.

When the time-out ended, Jess rose, tossed the towel aside

and walked toward court, barely limping. She was ready. Whether

or not her leg would hold, that was the question.

Whereas earlier in the match Jess had been in the zone, now

she had to work desperately hard for every point. Sweat poured

down her face, dripped from her shirt, darkened the edges of her

white tennis skirt. A scowl seemed etched permanently into her

face as she switched to a long serve-and-volley game, wearing

Michelle down slowly, relentlessly, moving her from one side of

the court to the other. She let Michelle make all the attacks and

most of the unforced errors. With this strategy, she managed to

hold her next serve.

With Jess up 5-4 in the second set, Michelle broke herself

with a double fault at thirty-thirty and another at thirty-forty.

Then, on match point, she returned a crosscourt volley well over

the end line. And just like that, the match was over.

The shocked silence in the stadium was broken by the chair

umpire’s calm, “Game, set, match to Jessica Maxwell, San Diego

University.”

Jess dropped to her knees while Holly and I screamed and

threw our arms around each other. The stands erupted around

us, the pent-up tension of the past half hour released in cheering

and whistling. Jess had done it. Despite her injury, she was the

new NCAA Division II national tennis champion.

She finally allowed herself a smile as she shook hands with

her opponent and the chair umpire. Then she waved at the

stands, briefly, and headed for the bench. She would prefer not

to have the attention, I knew, now that the match was over and

she wasn’t out there playing her guts out anymore. Adrienne

and Carrie met her at the edge of the court, and the stands

began to empty as people wandered off to watch the remaining

top matchups. So far, two other SDU players had won. Things

Beautiful Game 201

were looking good for a possible team championship as well.

“Go get her,” Holly said. “And come find me later, okay?

We’ve got some celebrating to do tonight.”

“Yeah we do!”

On the other side of the court, Jess was listening to the

trainer and nodding, her forehead lined. She glanced up, straight

across to where Holly and I stood beside the emptying stands.

She nodded at me almost imperceptibly.

“See ya,” I said, clapping Holly on the back as we headed in

opposite directions.

Adrienne was still standing beside Jess when I reached them.

The coach glanced at me, then returned her attention to the

trainer. I stood behind the bench, eavesdropping.

“For the next hour,” Carrie was saying, “I want you to ice

fifteen minutes, then walk and stretch for twenty. Then ice

fifteen, walk and stretch for twenty. Keep moving around or

you’re going to seize up, which you definitely don’t want. No

running, either. I’ll take another look after the last match.”

She handed over four Advils and a water bottle to wash the

pills down, then patted Jess’s shoulder and stood up. “Good

work,” she added. “You showed a lot of courage out there. You

should be proud of yourself, kiddo.”

Jess glanced back at me and smiled, then returned her

attention to the trainer. “Thanks, Carrie. Thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome.”

Carrie nodded at me, eyes gleaming knowingly. I had it on

good authority from one of the student assistants that our head

trainer was a softball-playing, died-in-the-wool dyke herself.

Adrienne, however, was a straight mother of two young

children. As Carrie walked away, Adrienne looked from me back

to Jess again. “She’s right. You did show a lot of courage out

there, Maxwell. You earned this victory.”

“Thanks, Coach,” Jess said. Then she focused on the next

court over where Julie Seaver was battling the second seed.

“How’s everyone else doing?”

Adrienne gave her an update on the team competition,

congratulated her again on her win, and strode away with a final

nod to me.

202 Kate Christie

I sat down on the bench next to Jess and threw my arm across

her shoulders.

“Awesome match, champ! I knew you could do it.” Not the

time to tell her I had doubted her inner strength. Probably there

wouldn’t ever be a right time for such an admission.

“Thanks, Cam.” She leaned into me. “Couldn’t have done

it without you.”

A mild glow centered in my belly, and I didn’t even mind her

sweatiness. Must be love.

“You’re amazing,” I said. “You don’t even know how incredible

you are, do you?”

She smiled some more, her eyes tired. The adrenaline

appeared to be wearing off. “I can’t believe I won. It doesn’t feel

real yet. I still feel numb.”

“That’s just the ice talking. Dude, you came back from an

injury to win! You know, triumphing over personal tragedy and

all of that.”

“Ha, ha,” she said, swatting me.

We were sitting on the aluminum bench at the edge of the

empty court on an early summer’s day, smiling into each other’s

eyes. And I suddenly thought, This can’t end, not ever. But what

if it did?

A shadow crept across us. My arm fell away from her shoulders

as we looked back, squinting in the sunlight. I had an impression

of a slightly familiar patrician woman in a tailored suit with a

gold necklace and matching earrings. Then Jess jumped to her

feet, the Ace bandage around her leg unraveling, the bag of ice

tumbling to the ground.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, eyes suddenly

flat, voice harsher than I had ever heard.

I stood up too. The stranger was definitely Jess’s mother—she

had the same high cheekbones as her daughter, the same long waist.

Only Jess’s muscles were bulkier and more clearly defined, while the

lines about the older woman’s eyes were etched deeper.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” the woman who had to be my

girlfriend’s asshole mother said. “I just wanted to congratulate

you, Jessie. I wanted to tell you how proud I am. Your father

would have been too.”

Beautiful Game 203

Her eyes were a pale blue, her hair in its tight bun streaked

with golden highlights. She was beautiful in a cool sort of way and

very well put together. But she didn’t sound nearly as confident

as she appeared.

“Thank you,” Jess said, her voice clipped. Her eyes were

dark, narrowed against the sun and something else. “But you

don’t get to be proud. This has nothing to do with you.”

I tried not to squirm as they stared at one another. “I can

leave you two alone,” I offered, “if you want.”

Jess blinked at me. “You don’t have to go, Cam.” She glanced

back at the woman. “My mother and I have nothing to say to

each other. Do we, Mother?”

The older woman clutched a small white purse to her side. “I

hope that’s not true,” she said, her voice uneven. “I’m sorry about

everything, Jessie. I’ve tried to tell you, but you won’t answer my

letters, you won’t return my phone calls. I divorced Harvey years

ago. He moved back to Connecticut.”

Harvey? Who was Harvey? And then an idea occurred to

me, too horrible to entertain seriously. It couldn’t be.

As if she could sense the wheels spinning in my head, Jess

shot me a quick unreadable look before glancing back at her

mother. “I know. Gram told me.”

Her mother took another step forward, stopping as her

nyloned knees brushed against the bench. “I wish I could take

it all back. I would do it all over differently if I could.” She

hesitated, looking down at the ground for a moment. Then she

took a deep breath and said, “I know I don’t deserve it, but I am

your mother. Can’t you find it somewhere in your heart to even

consider giving me another chance?”

For a moment, I thought Jess wavered. Her eyes glistened

as she stared into her mother’s face. Then a tear spilled over,

slipping down her sweat-dampened cheek and breaking her

reverie. Scowling, she swiped at it and stood straighter.

“No,” she said firmly. “You’re right. You don’t deserve it.”

“Jess,” I protested inadvertently, feeling my throat tighten.

How could she turn away her own mother? And yet, this was the

same woman who had, apparently, brought Jess’s attacker into

their lives to begin with.

204 Kate Christie

Jess cast a wounded look my way. “Don’t, Cam,” she said, her

voice low. “You don’t understand.”

“It’s okay,” her mother said, looking at me. “She doesn’t

deserve a mother like me. She deserves so much better.” She

lifted her chin. “I understand, honey, and I don’t blame you.

When you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, Gram knows how to get

in touch with me.”

Jess looked down at the dark stain that had begun to seep onto

the court from the melting bag of ice. She didn’t say anything.

“Congratulations, Jessie,” her mother added. “I do so love

you.” Then she nodded at me, turned and walked quickly away.

In a few moments she had disappeared into the passageway

between the courts.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jess said. She blinked, and the tears

spilled over again. She stooped to pick up the ice, wincing as she

bent her leg. “Shit.” She dropped onto the bench.

I knelt beside the bench, trying to take the bag from her.

“I’ve got it.”

But she shoved my hands away and arranged the ice again,

securing it to her leg haphazardly with the Ace bandage.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, her voice hoarse. “How could

you do that? How could you take her side?”

I inhaled deeply. She was upset from seeing her mother,

I told myself, not to mention emotionally drained from the

roller-coaster match she’d only just finished. I was feeling fairly

overwhelmed by the day’s drama myself, and I hadn’t won a

national championship or faced down an estranged parent.

“I’m sorry it seemed like that,” I said. “But I’m on your

side.”

“You have no idea,” she said, shaking her head. “I went to

her for help, and she told me I was ungrateful, that I couldn’t be

happy for her. She said I was just jealous of their relationship.”

Her voice broke again, and she pressed her hands over her face.

She was right. I couldn’t possibly know what it would be like

to be raped by my stepfather and then abandoned by the one

person I should have been able to trust. Her mother should have

taken Jess to a hospital, should have called the police, should have

kicked the son-of-a-bitch to the curb faster than you could say

Beautiful Game 205

“Prison.” But she hadn’t done any of those things. Instead, she

had turned her back on her child. Now Jess was reciprocating.

I took a risk and sat down on the bench, wrapped my arms

around her and pulled her against me. She resisted at first,

actively trying to push me away. But I stayed where I was and

refused to let go, and eventually she gave in, leaning into me and

pressing her face into my shoulder.

She cried like she had our first night together, the salt of

her tears mingling with her sweat against my bare neck as she

sobbed. The sounds were so gut-wrenching that I felt tears

stinging my own eyes, a lump in my own throat. So much pain,

terror, hurt, rage. It didn’t seem possible she could survive as

wounded as she was.

But more than anything, Jess was a survivor. She’d proven

that fact over and over again. My pep talk earlier in the day had

contained elements of truth—the pain she’d suffered had made

her stronger, even as she maintained it had left her permanently

damaged. But maybe strength and injury weren’t contradictory

states of being. Maybe, instead, they were intimately connected.

“I love you so much,” I murmured, stroking her hair and

kissing her forehead, “and I’m so freaking proud of you.”

“Good,” she mumbled through her tears, tightening her grip

on me.

We stayed at the edge of the court like that, me propping

Jess up while tennis matches played on around us, the crack of

racquets, grunts of battle, cries of myriad fans echoing throughout

the complex as, slowly, her tears abated and her breathing settled

back to normal.

Finally she checked her watch, unwrapped the Ace bandage,

and looked at me, eyes bloodshot and swollen but clearer

somehow too.

“Time to move around,” she said, and cleared her throat,

laughing a little at her own hoarseness. “You ready, Wallace?”

“Ready, Maxwell.”

Standing up, I held out a hand. She took it and let me pull

her up.

As we headed for the passageway where her mother had

disappeared, Jess added, “Thanks for sticking around.”

206 Kate Christie

“You got it,” I said, looping my arm through hers. “I told

you—you’re stuck with me.”

“Yay.” She tugged me closer and we crossed the court arm in

arm while the midday sun beat down and tennis fans cheered all

around us just out of sight.

Chapter eighteen

You know how people are always saying that anticipation is

worse than what you actually fear? Yeah, well, that wasn’t the

case for me. Leaving La Jolla—and Jess—for the summer sucked

even more than I’d anticipated.

We spent Sunday night celebrating NCAAs with the tennis

team and Holly and even Becca, Jess limping on crutches around

the off-campus apartment of one of her teammates, laughing and

drinking more than I’d ever seen her do before. The pressure was

finally off. In addition to facing down her mother, she had finally

lived up to the hype of her preseason All-American selection

and number one ranking throughout the year. Talk about a

momentous weekend.

The next morning, though, I woke up to find her sitting in

the chair beside the bed watching me sleep.

20 Kate Christie

“Good morning, Miss National Champ,” I said, yawning

and stretching.

She shook her head and frowned.

I mock-frowned back. “Is it not a good morning?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, this is our last day together for

three entire months.”

“Well, when you put it that way.” I pulled a pillow over my

head. “I’m going back to sleep.”

She limped to the bed—I could hear her uneven gait through

the pillow—and threw herself on top of me. “The better to tickle

you, my dear,” she said, reaching under the covers to find my

sensitive armpits.

Naturally, this led to a different form of physical interaction

much more satisfying than tickling, and we occupied ourselves

for some time that morning—finally!—before the growling in

both of our stomachs could no longer be ignored. Then we got

up and fixed a big breakfast. We’d worked out that I was good

at eggs and she highly skilled at French toast, so that’s what we

made that morning, drinking coffee (me) and tea (her) and both

of us talking almost without taking a breath. There seemed to be

so much to say and not nearly enough time.

The whole day was like that. We had lunch with Sidney

and Claire in the backyard, a combination celebratory/send-off

meal. They carefully guided the conversation away from the

immediate future and on to topics like favorite foods, the tennis

tournament, SDU classes and professors we’d especially liked.

The last thing Jess and I wanted to talk about was how we’d be

spending the next three months until we saw each other again,

and Jess’s landlords seemed to understand instinctively.

After lunch, they suggested we borrow Duncan for a

neighborhood stroll. Twenty-four hours of Carrie’s ice on, ice

off routine, minus a few hours of naked fun this morning, had

left Jess’s hamstring in considerably better shape. She no longer

needed crutches.

As we walked slowly away from Sidney and Claire’s house,

I said, “I’m glad you have them. They take such good care of

you.”“I know. They’ve been amazing.”

Beautiful Game 20

I hesitated. “Have you ever thought of telling them what

happened? Or your teacher back in Bakersfield?”

This time, Jess didn’t flinch away at the mention of the rape.

She tilted her head slightly, pursed her lips and said, “I’ve thought

about it. But I don’t want to always wonder if they’re thinking

about it whenever they look at me.”

“What about someone else, maybe a professional?” I

hazarded.

“I’ve thought about that too,” she admitted, “but I haven’t

gotten much past the thinking stage. Can’t tell you’re a psych

minor or anything.”

“Gotta proselytize. It’s in the contract.”

We walked in silence for a few minutes while I pondered

what she’d said. Then I asked, “So do you ever wonder that with

me? You know, if I’m thinking about it?”

“No,” she said, nudging me with her shoulder. “I know

your mind is on other things. For example, what we did this

morning.”

“True,” I agreed. “I fantasize about your French toast all the

time.”

“Who wouldn’t, really?”

When we reached the park at the end of the street, Duncan

tugged on the leash. I unhooked it from his collar so that he

could snuffle about the bushes. Then I leaned against a tree and

tried to memorize the way Jess looked, midday sun glinting in

her hair and reflecting from her sunglasses.

“Stop looking at me like you’re taking a picture,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

But I couldn’t keep from looking at her like that throughout

the day, our last together for what seemed like forever.

That evening, we had a marathon dinner at a fondue restaurant

in town with Holly and Becca, where we relived the tennis

tournament and heard about Holly’s new barista job and Becca’s

job search, again carefully avoiding the topic of my impending

absence from the city where the three of them would all be

going about their lives while I lived at home with my parents

and mowed lawns, trimmed hedges and painted fences, no

doubt wishing I could be here with them. I even suspected I

210 Kate Christie

would miss Becca. Once you got past the poor little rich girl act

she wasn’t so bad. Really.

After dinner, the four of us walked to Seal Beach and watched

the seals settle in for the night as the sky darkened and the tide

receded and the day grew closer and closer to an end. Finally Jess

hinted that it was time to go. We walked back to the cars, where

I hugged Holly and Becca goodbye, forcing a grin as they drove

off toward their apartment in the city. Not jealous, I told myself as

I waved until Becca’s car was out of sight. But I was a lousy liar.

Back at the apartment, Jess watched me pack my bags and

putz around checking for forgotten objects. I’d managed to

make myself quite comfortable in her space in the ten days since

Holly had helped me move out of my dorm room. I couldn’t

believe now how quickly the time had gone. If I could have any

superpower, I’ve often thought, I would pick mastery of time.

Then nothing terrible would ever have to happen because I’d be

able to go back and prevent any tragedy from ever happening.

Of course, then I’d get stuck living in reverse, and that would no

doubt be unsettling. But think of all the lives saved. Certainly

it would be worth losing the rhythm of my own life if I could

have a positive impact on hundreds or even thousands of others,

wouldn’t it? Not that they’d ever know I’d saved them, of course,

and there was part of the rub.

“Hey.” Jess’s voice interrupted my metaphysical reverie.

I turned from my search of the couch cushions for my

missing Walkman. “Yeah?”

“Come here for a sec.”

I followed her into the bedroom, where she opened the drawer

in her bedside table and pulled out a small object wrapped in the

funny papers. “This is for you.”

“I have something for you too,” I said, and retrieved a bag

from my backpack.

I sat beside her on the bed and made her open the bag first. It

contained a small jewelry box and a mix tape stocked with tunes

from the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, Fleetwood Mac, the Some

Kind of Wonderful soundtrack, and “I Can’t Tell You Why” by the

Eagles. As she read the names of the songs from the cassette case,

she started laughing, and I wasn’t sure if I should be hurt or not.

Beautiful Game 211

“Sorry—I love it. Just, open yours,” she said, smiling

sideways at me.

Turns out she’d made me a mix tape too, with nearly the

same exact songs on it. Apparently we’d both paid attention to

our relationship’s soundtrack.

“Open the box,” I said once we had recovered from our

mutual mirth.

She lifted the lid carefully and pulled out the silver locket

I’d picked out for her weeks before, etched with stars on the

outside and containing tiny pictures of each of us—our official

athlete photos from the SDU Sports Information office—on the

inside.

“Now we both have necklaces,” I said, nervously fingering the

sun pendant she’d given me at Christmas, which I rarely took off.

“I love it,” Jess said, tracing the engraved stars lightly. She

hesitated and added, “I love you.”

It was the first time she’d looked me in the eyes as she told

me she loved me, and I couldn’t help grinning. “Good thing.”

“It is a good thing.” She reached under the bed then, pulling

out a small flat, rectangular package wrapped in brown paper.

“I have one more thing for you. I thought it might give you

something to think about for next fall.”

It had to be a painting, I thought as I tugged at the string

and slid the paper away from the canvas. I held my breath, not

sure what I’d find as I turned it over. And then I had to laugh—

Jess had painted a close-up of a white soccer ball resting on a

gorgeous lawn of springy, bright green grass, the stalks of which

were enormous, as if the viewer were an ant or other invisible

creature looking up at the giant leather ball, the words “SDU

Soccer” and the stitches holding the individual panels together

clearly visible.

“Dude, this is awesome,” I said.

“You thought it would be something serious, didn’t you,”

Jess said, biting her lip.

“Yeah, but I love it. It’s perfect. You’re perfect.”

“Hardly,” she said, but she returned the hug I gave her. Then

she kissed me, lightly at first and then more seriously, devouring

my lips with hers until I felt a little dizzy.

212 Kate Christie

“Get rid of this, please,” she said, tugging at my T-shirt.

“And these.” With a pull on my shorts.

“Gladly.” I paused briefly to place our gifts to each other

someplace safer than the comforter cover. Then I stripped down

and slipped under the covers with her, my hands and mouth

running over her body, which opened so easily to mine now.

She loved me, but what was more, she trusted me. That was the

better gift, really.

Later, when we lay sated and quiet next to each other, as

much of our naked skin touching still as was humanly possible,

Jess murmured, “Now that we’ve given each other the sun and

the moon and the stars, guess there’s not much else, hmm.”

I loved that she was as appallingly cheesy as me.

“I don’t know,” I said, and kissed her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll

think of something.”

We lay in her bed under the slanted ceiling together as

the last of the summer light leaked from the sky and darkness

seemed to settle on the house more heavily than it usually did.

The bedside lamp was on, and we moved without talking so that

we could look into each other’s eyes, both of us clearly trying to

memorize what we saw. As her eyes seemed to grow lighter, more

transparent, I wondered if this was the last time we would ever

be together. Three months apart was a long time—longer than

we’d been dating, even. What if Jess changed her mind? What if

she got used to being alone again and decided she didn’t want me

anymore at the end of the summer? What if by leaving now I was

ruining any chance we had at a future together?

Jess lifted her hand and smoothed it over my brow. Her eyes

intent on mine, she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you this all

day—is now when we talk about monogamy?”

This was so far from what I was expecting that I burst out

laughing for the second time that night.

“What?” Jess asked, looking worried. “Is this not the right

time? Sorry, I’m new at this relationship thing.”

I laughed again. But a little while later, after we’d agreed on

a monogamous summer, nothing seemed funny anymore as we

lay in her bed wishing we could hold off morning.

Chapter nineteen

As I drove away the next day, suffice it to say that we both

bawled and it was awful and I almost turned around half a dozen

times, possibly more. Only the Wallace family sense of honor— I

Have Given My Word to the Portland Parks Department—compelled

me to continue forward when I glanced in my rearview mirror

and saw Jess standing alone on the street beside her car, watching

me leave her. I wiped away tears as I headed toward the freeway

and turned north toward Oregon. Why was I doing this? Just

then, money for school seemed seriously unimportant.

The day after I got home, I was up early and off to work

downtown, and my summer of sullenness officially commenced.

“What’s your problem?” my friend Joe asked me that first

day. We were out for the afternoon together on an irrigation

job.

214 Kate Christie

“I had to leave my girlfriend in San Diego,” I groused.

“Oh, poor you,” Joe said.

His girlfriend, Jennie, lived in a tiny forest town out on the

eastern side of the state, not far from the Idaho border. He left

her for eight months every year to come work in the city, where

the wages and benefits were too good to pass up. During those

months, he was lucky to see her every other weekend.

“Shut it,” I said. “At least you live within driving distance.”

“Yeah, if you don’t mind an eight-hour trip every couple of

weeks.”

Okay, so he had a point.

My parents were more receptive to my whining, and happily

reminisced about the summer after their junior year of college

when my mom went to work in a resort town a hundred miles

north of San Francisco and my dad would hitchhike up on the

weekends to visit her. Then they’d take a bus into the redwood

forests and wander the trails there, feeling as if they had traveled

back in time to an era with no cars, no telephones, no universities.

A time that contained only them and the primordial forest.

I, of course, was less than sympathetic to this turn of

conversation. For one thing, I’d heard these stories innumerable

times. For another, my parents currently got to see each other

whenever they wanted and had done so for the last twenty-nine

years. Kind of unfair to compare their long-ago separation,

which, incidentally, hadn’t been nearly as extended or remote

as Jess’s and mine, to the visceral heartbreak I was currently

experiencing. I mean, couldn’t they see my heart literally breaking

inside my chest as I pined away for the love of my life? They

thought I didn’t see the condescending smiles they exchanged

when I described my emotional state. Just made me grouchier.

The only way around the distance, Jess and I decided my

first week at home, was to talk every night and write copious

letters. Nearly every evening I took the cordless phone out into

the backyard and sat in one of the deck chairs watching birds

and red squirrels flit about my parents’ garden while Jess and I

talked for an hour about our days, our jobs—she was working

as a camp counselor at the Y for the third summer in a row—or

nothing at all.

Beautiful Game 215

Hummingbirds who guzzled sugar water from the various

feeders hanging around the yard were my favorite. I came to

know them by the sounds they made as they fed—the high-

pitched chirps accompanied by the buzzing of their wings, like

a hundred bumblebees circling overhead. On the weekends I

helped my mom clean and refill the feeders, and sometimes the

birds were so anxious for food that they would hover outside the

kitchen window watching us and dive bomb us as soon as we

emerged with the refilled feeders. Napoleon’s complex, my mom

called it.

Sometimes I took the phone into my bedroom and Jess and

I ventured down the road of phone sex, me always praying my

mom and dad wouldn’t happen to pick up the phone themselves

and accidentally receive an ear full. Occasionally I wondered if

Jess preferred sex via telephone to the real thing—this way she

didn’t have to cede any control over her body to anyone else.

Personally, I found the long distance line to be a poor substitute,

but hey, it was better than nothing.

After a couple of weeks, the phone bill arrived and my mother

sat me down to have a talk about the cost of long distance phone

calls to Southern California. I glowered through the whole

lecture, though I knew she was right. What was the point of me

coming home to work and save money for school if I was going

to blow hundreds of dollars a month talking to Jess? For that, I

might as well have stayed in La Jolla for the summer.

“I know,” I finally said when she paused. “I just miss her so

much.”

“You really love this girl, don’t you?” my mom asked.

“I really do. You would too if you met her.”

From then on I timed our calls, and we took turns so that

we were both spending money, since my parents had made it

clear that any communication expenses I incurred were my sole

responsibility. Harsh but fair, I had to admit.

We went on like this for weeks, both of us working long

hours outdoors at physically strenuous jobs during the week,

good-naturedly arguing about which was more taxing—diesel-

operated weed whackers or large groups of seven-year-olds. On

the weekends, I would traipse around the city taking photos and

216 Kate Christie

writing accompanying letters to send to Jess. She returned the

favor, sending photos and pictures she painted of Sidney and

Claire’s backyard and the ocean at sunset and my favorite, a

collage from Seal Beach.

But the letters and pictures and phone calls weren’t enough.

I missed her deeply, in an almost sweet way. It was like when you

get a bruise from soccer and you test it all the time, pressing on

it to see if it still hurts just as much. Only in this case, the pain

didn’t ever really fade. In this case, I wouldn’t be able to heal

until the summer was over and we were back together again.

I turned twenty-one the Friday before the Fourth of July,

which fell on a Tuesday this year. The guys on the crew were

psyched about the holiday—we’d get Monday and Tuesday

off paid, which meant a four-day weekend. I should have been

stoked to be turning twenty-one, but summer birthdays were

often less than memorable. You were lucky if school friends even

remembered, let alone sent anything on time. Jess told me the

night before that she’d sent me a package. It should be waiting

for me when I finished work today.

“Happy birthday, Cam,” Jim, my boss, said as I was leaving

the Park Bureau building just across the street from Chapman

Square.

“It’s your birthday?” Joe echoed, pausing as he changed out

of steel-toed boots into beat-up sneakers.

“Yeah. I’m legal today,” I said, and waved as I ducked out into

the summer evening.

I had to hurry if I was going to catch my bus. But as I rounded

the corner, I stopped dead. There directly in front of me, leaning

against my Tercel at the edge of the curb, was Jess. She smiled as

she saw me, straightening up and pushing away from the car. It

was the best smile I’d ever seen. Best birthday present ever.

“Tell me again how this happened,” I said that night as we

lay in my childhood bed in the dark, naked flesh to naked flesh.

We’d had dinner with my parents, and then we’d gone out for

a drink—my first legal alcoholic experience—with Todd, Ben

and Josh, guy friends from high school, and their respective

girlfriends. We’d had a good time, and I’d been happy to show

off Jess, who was of course the most impressive of the assembled

Beautiful Game 217

g-friends, in my entirely unbiased opinion. But the entire time

I had buzzed with sexual energy. We’d been apart for nearly six

weeks now, and I couldn’t wait to get her into bed. It was all I

could do not to nibble on her ear or feel her up in the Irish pub

my buddies took us to, especially after I got a couple of shots of

tequila into my belly. But I refrained, and so did she—barely, she

admitted later—and we waited until we got back to the house to

slide our hands down each other’s pants.

We didn’t, however, make it all the way upstairs. Our first

encounter took place on the staircase, and we both had the rug

burns to show for it afterward. I was aware the entire time that

either or both of my parents could at any moment stumble out

of their bedroom in their matching bathrobes from Christmas

1983, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. Jess couldn’t either.

Eventually we made it up to my bedroom, where we shushed

each other as we made love again just down the hall from

where my parents were sleeping. My mother used a machine

that simulated ocean waves to drown out city noises. I hoped it

also drowned out the sounds of lesbian lovemaking two doors

away.

We were finally winding down when I asked Jess to tell me

again the story of her sudden appearance in my Portland life.

“It was your mom’s idea,” she said, her arm under my neck

and her fingers toying with my hair, standing up now all over

my head from our exertions. “The night she talked with you

about the phone bill, she started thinking about how and when

to get me here for a visit. Your birthday seemed like the perfect

opportunity, so your parents pooled their frequent flyer miles

and sent me the ticket. I asked for time off work, and because I’m

the best counselor they have—okay, I actually didn’t give them a

choice—my boss at the Y agreed I could take next week off.”

“I can’t believe my mom lied to Jim.”

My mother had reportedly told Jim that I would need to miss

the following week at work for an important family event. In

reality, Jess and I were going to spend a few days at my uncle’s

condo at Mt. Hood. By ourselves.

“She loves you that much,” Jess said, her hand stilling.

I knew she was thinking about the differences between our

21 Kate Christie

mothers. I snuggled closer in the narrow bed, my arm across her

chest, my chin on her collarbone.

“She already loves you too,” I said. “So does my dad.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. For my parents to talk that long about tennis

voluntarily? It was you they were interested in, not the sport, I

can guarantee it.”

Over veggie burgers, spinach and kale from the garden, and

homemade sweet potato fries, my parents had been warm and

caring and accepting. Which hadn’t been a surprise to me, but

I’d noticed Jess’s shy smiles of gratitude as they invited her into

our home and tried to make her feel like part of the family. They

were good eggs, and so was she. I’d felt damned lucky as we sat

outside on the deck that evening drinking beer and lemonade

and trading stories.

At one point my dad had said, “Cam tells us you’re quite the

painter.”

Jess had stared at me. “She does, does she?”

Now, as we lay murmuring together in the dark, Jess said,

“So when did you figure out the storm painting was mine?”

I froze, my eyelids the only part of me moving as I blinked,

trying to decide how to answer. We’d never discussed the fact that

I knew the painting’s creator nor that I’d deduced its meaning.

“It’s okay,” she added, her hand gentle in my hair. “I know

you know, Cam. I’m glad, in a way. You know me better than

anyone and you still love me.”

“Of course I do,” I said, kissing her chin because it was the

nearest thing to my lips. “I figured it out the night I told you

that, in fact.”

“You did? I didn’t realize.”

“Well, I do tend to hide my superior intelligence beneath

this jockish exterior,” I said, trying to lighten the moment.

“You don’t always have to do that, you know,” she said. “Make

a joke out of everything, I mean. I promise I won’t cry.”

“It’s okay if you do,” I said quickly.

“Kidding, Cam.”

A little while later, I could feel sleep tugging at me, trying

its hardest to extinguish my consciousness for the night. But I

Beautiful Game 21

didn’t want to give in yet. We only had a week together and then

she’d be back in San Diego again and I’d be here refusing to wash

my sheets so that I could hold onto the scent of her as long as

possible.

I blinked myself awake and said, “I wish you didn’t have to

go back to La Jolla next weekend.”

“I know, but it’ll be good for me to go back.”

I couldn’t keep the whine out of my tone—it had been a

long day, and happiness had lowered my defenses. Or maybe it

was the tequila. “What, you’d rather hang out with a bunch of

second graders than me?”

“No,” she said, running her hand lightly up and down my

arm. “But I do have some things to work out.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe I thought over what you said, you know, like

talking to someone about what happened. Someone professional,

I mean.”

I was glad it was dark so she didn’t see my chin drop, though

she may have felt it hit her shoulder. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. I actually went to see a woman last week, a

therapist who specializes in cases like mine. It’s still early, and

it’s obviously not going to be easy, but I think I might be ready

to deal with what happened. I need to if I’m going to get beyond

it.” From the outside, she already seemed to have gotten beyond

the rape—successful student three-quarters of the way through

college, All-American singles Division II National Champion,

girlfriend to another Division II success story, if I did say so

myself. But it didn’t matter what I thought, only what her life felt

like to her.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said, and leaned up to kiss her.

She pulled me on top of her and deepened the kiss, sliding

her hands down to my hips. Quickly any notion of sleep fled, and

I only had time to think, Again? Then I stopped thinking, lost

in the feel and taste and touch of her skin against mine. It was

just too good. She was too good. I had never loved anyone else

like this, and somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I never

would again.

220 Kate Christie

We did wonderful things to each other, and when we’d finally

gotten our fill, we lay pressed together in my twin bed, light

from the streetlamps leaking in the window, the faint sound of

the ocean reaching us from down the hall.

On the edge of sleep, I knew all at once we’d be okay. Jess

wasn’t going to suddenly change her mind or freak out about

what had happened to her, and I wasn’t going to get distracted

by soccer this fall and drift away from her. Like Holly and

Becca, we were beyond the beginning of our relationship now.

We had made it through an uncertain takeoff, and now we were

safe together in midflight, the sky wide open before us. I wasn’t

afraid anymore, and I thought Jess probably wasn’t, either. At

least, I hoped not.

“Hey,” she murmured beside me.

“Yeah?”

“Can you move over a little? My arm’s asleep.”

“Of course,” I said, and shifted to make room for her.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter twO

Chapter three

Chapter FOur

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter FOurteen

Chapter FiFteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen