Sidelined Read online

  “Hey, Connor.”

  I turned around to find Tina, the home economics teacher and head of the teachers’ union. Gibb towered behind her.

  “You know Charlie already. Can you show her the ropes of lunch duty?”

  I briefly raised my eyes to Gibb before looking back down at Tina, so short I often stared down at the top of her brown hair. “You don’t have lunch duty this year?”

  “Nope.” She touched my arm. “I’ve got study hall this semester. Could you help Charlie out today?”

  “Help, huh?” I raised my eyebrow at Gibb, and her lip curled like a mean dog’s. A smirk tugged at my lip, but I turned away because of a commotion by the snack machine. A kid had jokingly lifted up another one, feet in the air. Students laughed and took pictures. Exactly how heads split open.

  I whistled through my teeth. “Hey!”

  They all stopped and turned.

  “Sit down!”

  They quieted and sat at the nearest table.

  By the time I faced back around, Tina was gone, but Gibb was still there. I unconsciously skimmed her over from head to toe. Her hair was down and a lighter color than I remembered—I didn’t know why I’d remember that to begin with. I didn’t usually notice much about her. I just wasn’t used to seeing her with some makeup on her eyes. Or in the fitted purple shirt that clung to her body.

  I was a team player by make, but I didn’t want to play nice with her. And I certainly didn’t want to look at her any differently than I would at any of the other coaches. But, good God, it was hard not to. She was a woman after all. With a bad habit of snarling at me. Not to say I didn’t deserve it.

  On the other hand, she didn’t deserve my job.

  We were rivals. And teammates. A bizarre structure.

  “Are you havin’ a good first day?” she asked, making conversation I wasn’t interested in.

  I nodded.

  “You know, some people think it’s polite to answer when you’re asked a question.”

  “I am not one of those people,” I said without looking at her.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw her fold her arms across her chest.

  “I don’t know how you’re a teacher,” she said, her accent getting the best of her. “What with your delightful personality. Must be a joy to be in your class.”

  “My students love me.”

  “With all your charm and wit, I bet they do.”

  I turned to her. “Do you know what they say about gym teachers?”

  “No, what do they say?”

  I took my time saying the words. “Those who can’t teach, teach gym.”

  Her fists balled up, and I imagined she was thinking about hitting me. It’s not that I liked when she got all riled up, but I didn’t hate it either. This baiting between us was easy, almost natural. As if we were meant to compete with each other.

  We didn’t speak for a while, but she stayed in my peripheral vision, her hands twisted together. It struck me that she might’ve actually been nervous on her first day of school, but I refused to feel any sympathy. We weren’t friends like that.

  Instead, I focused on what was comfortable. Football.

  “We need to watch that defensive back on Friday,” I said, referring to our first game this weekend.

  “I know. We watched the same film.”

  “Spencer tends to not check down the receivers. He’s got to—”

  “Connor.” She had her hands on her hips, one eyebrow raised. “I know.”

  It was the first time she’d used my first name, and the sound of it took me by surprise. So much so that I found myself apologizing with a quick, “Sorry.”

  “You’re a good coach, you know,” she said softly, and I almost didn’t hear it over the din of the cafeteria. “You’re patient and knowledgeable. The kids listen to you.”

  I jerked my head back in surprise at the compliment.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said, her perturbed face melting a bit. “Game recognizes game.”

  I laughed. A real laugh. The picture of a five-foot-ten blond woman telling me game recognizes game was too funny.

  “What?” Her own smile crawled across her face. “Andre Valentine said that to me once.”

  And then my laughter died down real quick. Andre Valentine, former Georgia Tech player and current wide receiver for the Bills. He had one of the highest total receiving yards in the league. A reminder that Charlie Gibb had a long history with the sport, with more experience than I could have hoped for.

  Jealousy was a dangerous game.

  And it gnawed at me for the rest of the day until I grabbed a few minutes to call my brother before practice began.

  I closed the door to my classroom and pulled out my cell phone. If there was one person who could distract me, it was him.

  He picked up after a few rings. “Nono!”

  “Seanie, what’s up?”

  “Not so much,” he said with his usual lisp. “What’s up with you?”

  “Just hanging out before practice, thought I’d give you a call.”

  “Practice? You have it now?”

  “In a few minutes, yeah.”

  I heard a noise that sounded like a slap. He’d probably hit his thigh like he always did when he was excited. “Awesome.”

  My brother was the opposite of me, happy-go-lucky all the time. He’d make a conversation with anyone and everyone. There was a seven-year age difference between us, but we got along great. He was everything I wished I was more of, open and courageous. He said whatever he felt without fear. Maybe it was his naïveté, or that he hadn’t been jaded by the world yet, but it was one of the reasons I looked up to him even though he was my little brother.

  “I saw a picture of Charlie Gibb. She’s pretty.”

  I rolled my eyes. My brother, the ladies’ man.

  “I brought it to school and showed Ava, and she got mad at me when I said Charlie was pretty.”

  For the past three years, Sean had attended an adult program for people with disabilities in the Twin Cities. He loved it there, loved the girls there more.

  “Which one is Ava again?”

  “My girlfriend with black hair.”

  “Well, you can’t go around showing your girlfriend a picture of another woman. Of course she’s going to get mad. What did you expect, man?”

  “Chelsea didn’t get mad when I showed her.”

  “Chelsea? Who’s that?”

  “My girlfriend with pink shoes. She loves pink shoes.”

  I shook my head. My brother did better with women than I did. “How many girlfriends do you have?”

  “Three.”

  “I think you should not show them pictures of another girl. And I think you should also just have one girlfriend at a time. It’s not okay to date more than one at a time. It’s not nice.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh.” I chuckled. “Are you coming to the game on Friday?”

  “Yes! Gonna kick butt. You have to tell them to play good.”

  “I will.”

  “And tell Charlie Gibb she’s pretty, and I hope she coaches good. I want them to win this year.”

  My brother, the voice of reason.

  “We’ll try,” I said.

  “Hold on, Nono, hold on.” I heard him saying something in the background before he got back to me. “Mom asked if you wanna come to dinner tonight. It’s meat loaf night.”

  “Well, I guess I could pencil you in.”

  “You need a pencil?”

  “No, it’s a saying. You know, like, I’ll put it in my schedule.”

  “Ooh. Oh, okay. I’ll pencil you in too.”

  “You do that.”

  “Okay, see you later. We’ll play Mario Kart, ’kay?”

  “Definitely. See you later.”

  “Love you, Nono.”

  “Love you too, Seanie.”

  I hung up with a smile on my face, as usual after talking to Sean. When it seemed like my life sucked,
I could talk to him and he’d make me feel better. I could never be upset when I was with him.

  Sean had been to all my games since I was in high school and he was the ball boy. Now he sat in the front row, cheering the loudest of everyone. He’d become kind of a legend at Douglass and made himself right at home, next to the band, in front of the cheerleaders. The team and everyone in the stands had come to know him. Sometimes it seemed they liked him more than they liked me.

  Probably true.

  I shoved my cell phone in my pocket and grabbed my duffel bag before heading toward the gym for practice. With a promise to keep to my brother, I needed to make sure we kicked butt this year. And to do that, I’d have to try to put my feelings about Charlie Gibb aside.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Charlie

  We lost.

  When the final buzzer sounded at the end of our first game, the scoreboard showed 14–12. A loss on our home turf, and I couldn’t have felt worse.

  My first game as the Otters head coach, and I’d failed them. I ripped my headset off and tossed it in the case, stepping over the pile of lollipop sticks that littered the sideline.

  Everybody had a nervous tic. Some people chewed their fingernails or clicked pens. But the most annoying of all these habits was lollipop chewing, by none other than Connor McGuire. He’d brought a bag of Dum Dums and methodically chomped on each and every single lollipop in the bag until there was nothing left except tiny white sticks surrounding his feet.

  “You’ve got to be fuckin’ kiddin’ me,” I’d said to him when I first heard the sound in my ear through the headphones during the first quarter.

  He’d barely spared me a glance as he stuck a little blue sucker in his mouth.

  And now, as he bent down picking up his trash, I met his eyes while I sat for a moment on the bench.

  “Tough game,” he said, putting all the sticks back into the bag. “They’re a good team.”

  “They aren’t better than us.” I curled and uncurled the list of plays in my hand. “They just outplayed us. We could’ve won.”

  He didn’t say anything as he threw the bag into the trash and walked off toward the track. The boys had all made their way back to the field house, their heads hanging in defeat. But McGuire didn’t follow. Instead, he went to the bleachers. He met a woman with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing an Otters sweatshirt, and a younger man with Down syndrome, who was decked out in the school colors of blue and yellow.

  He excitedly jumped at McGuire, alternating between hugging him and patting his shoulders. McGuire, for his part, acted just as happy to see him. It was the most emotion I’d ever witnessed out of him, even during this game when he shouted instructions to players and held their attention in huddles.

  Curious, I walked over to Ken, who had made his way down from the booth and was putting all the headsets back in their cases. “Hey, who is that?”

  He followed my gaze over to the stands. “That’s Mrs. McGuire and Connor’s brother, Sean. They come to every game.”

  “What do you mean, they come to every game?”

  Ken huffed out a laugh like he didn’t understand why I didn’t get it. “They come to every game. Home and away games. Sean wouldn’t miss it.”

  I watched them for a minute longer, trying to comprehend how this seemingly gentle and smiling Connor McGuire meshed with the sour-faced and irritable one I knew. I had a lot of questions but couldn’t ask them. It wasn’t my business. He wasn’t my business. He’d made it known he didn’t want me in this position to begin with, and now that I had a loss under my belt as our first game, I was sure it wouldn’t take him long to try to boot me out.

  My curiosity about his family wasn’t important when I, quite literally, had a job I needed to defend.

  “Hey, can I ask you a quick question?”

  I turned, finding the voice belonged to a man who stood a few feet away by the water tanks with a bag over his arm and a cell phone in his hand—a journalist.

  “Not right now, thanks.”

  I pivoted away from him, only to be met by Philander, approaching me at a fast clip. “Miss Gibb! Good game, Miss Gibb,” he said, meeting me with a tight, fake smile. I didn’t offer him one in return. “This is Ralph Goldberg from Morning—”

  “Nice to see you, but I gotta get to the locker room to talk to the team.”

  “But Ralph here is doing a piece on—”

  I stopped him with a shake of my head, then turned to this Ralph Goldberg guy. “Listen, I don’t do interviews. I have no comment on my history at Georgia Tech or my career in the IWFL. I’m here to rebuild the football program at Douglass, and this loss is a minor setback. We’re going to work hard and come back next week with a win against Edison.”

  I offered him a pleasant wave before grabbing my clipboard to head back to the field house, where I was met with the usual scent of sweat and grass, but what I wasn’t prepared for was so many ruddy cheeks, eyes wide with sadness.

  Marcus sat on the bench closest to me. He had good instincts and fast feet. He just needed better blocking to give him time to complete his routes. I hit his shoulder pad and walked toward the center of the benches, which were shaped in a U around me. Jaylin sat opposite, his uniform clean. With his ankle still not 100 percent, I’d kept him out of the game. He wasn’t happy about it, but his health came first.

  “You played well tonight. Just not well enough. I won’t coddle you. We have a lot of work to do, a lot of improvement, but we can use this first game as a learnin’ experience. For all of us.” I paused for a moment to look around, the coaches standing here and there among the team. Al leaned up against a locker, utterly bored. McGuire, though, who’d come in right after me, stood just off to my left, staring at the ground, almost imperceptibly nodding along with what I had said.

  I caught some of the players’ eyes and held their attention before I went on. “I know what it’s like to be the underdog. It’s pretty much been my life,” I said, and some of them laughed. “The thing about bein’ the underdog is that the others let their guard down. They don’t expect you to be great. So that’s what we’ll be, great. Let’s give them a little shock and awe.”

  Heads nodded, and I clapped a few times. “Bring it in. Let’s go.”

  A couple kids yelled out sounds and words of encouragement as they crowded in around me, hands in the middle. I started the chant, which had become commonplace now.

  “Work!”

  “Hard!” They called.

  “Be!”

  “Better!”

  “Douglass on three. One, two, three!”

  “Douglass!”

  We all broke up, and they went to shower off the grime as I escaped to the hallway. Once in my office, I jotted down a few notes on a legal pad, things to watch for during film tomorrow morning. I’d meant it when I’d said the opposing team tonight wasn’t any better than we were. We’d just been outplayed and outcoached.

  And some things needed to change.

  But before I could finish writing down my last thought, I overheard the coaches in the hall making plans to go somewhere called the Public. I assumed it was a bar, and that I wouldn’t get an invitation. After a few seconds, the voices passed and my assumptions were proved correct.

  They left, and I was alone in my closet. In no rush to go back to my new house, I called my father. It was late and I knew he wouldn’t pick up, but I left a voicemail anyway. I might be the head coach of the Otters, yet sometimes I needed a little pep talk from my coach.

  “Hey, Daddy. I know you’re probably asleep by now and you have a game tomorrow, but I was calling to fill you in on what’s been going on here. . . . You can probably guess it hasn’t been smooth. We had our first game tonight and lost by two points—might as well have been two hundred though.” I tapped an Expo marker on my desk. “Anyway, I’ll talk to you soon. Good luck tomorrow.”

  I hung up and tossed my phone on the desk. My father and I weren’t big talkers. Outside
of football and the Falcons, we didn’t have much to say to each other. But I guess when you’re raised by a single father, that wasn’t unusual.

  I grabbed my bag and headed out to my car. The parking lot was empty, since I was the last one to leave. Of course. I drove to Sonja’s house in silence and quietly unlocked the front door, making sure to keep my footsteps light so as not to wake her. I didn’t mind.

  I was comfortable being on my own and had learned to stick to myself, but as I sat in my new bedroom, I glanced around the bare walls and it made me sad. Was this what my life had become? A lonely existence with no pictures to hang, no memories to relive.

  I flopped back on my mattress, the idea of being truly alone haunting me until well into the night.

  • • •

  BY THE next morning, I was ready to get back to work with the team. I called a brief meeting before film to talk about the changes I wanted to make. We were all there, stuffed in my closet office, except for Al and McGuire.

  Surprise, surprise.

  I reached for my frozen coffee, my eyes watering with yet another yawn.

  “Late night?” Ken asked, eyeing me with playful suspicion from the corner of the room.

  “Late night, but not for what you’re alluding to.”

  “Oh no?” We all turned to Connor, who stood in the doorway. His angry glare was perceptible even under the brim of his hat.

  I narrowed my brows at him. “Excuse me?”

  “I’d think the beauty queen coach would have men falling at her feet.”

  Al stepped forward and tossed a few pieces of paper on my desk. I didn’t need to see what was on them to know what he was referring to, but I pulled them toward me with my index finger anyway.

  There it was in big bold letters.

  Georgia Beauty Queen Becomes Douglass High’s New Football Coach, Loses First Matchup