We return to our drills, some of us (me) more reluctantly than others (Melissa). Roshni switches to practice with the chasers, citing small hands and a desire to score. Lindsay and John show us new exercises, talking strategies and techniques that go way over my head. I practice trying to wrestle the ball out of Elizabeth’s hands. I practice racing her to pick up a loose ball. I practice aiming while she sprints past me. I fail consistently, and I fail hard. Elizabeth doesn’t let up for a second, though, which makes me like her a lot more than if she’d started going easy on me.
“Watch out,” John calls when his ball bounces off Lindsay and rolls past me. I try to kick it toward him but miss, knocking it into my other foot instead. I stumble.
“Keep trying, newbie,” John calls as he snatches up the ball one-handed and hurls it at Lindsay, ten feet away. It smacks solidly against her shoulder, and he winks at me before running away.
I don’t know what to do with that wink any more than I know what to do with my broom or my bludger or my feet.
The drills, especially the wrestling, bring up another problem: endurance. More specifically, my lack thereof. It’s not just the red welts up and down the inside of my legs or the ripped thumbnail or the now multiply skinned knee. My arms ache from grabbing, throwing, grappling. My legs shake from running and falling and standing back up.
The next water break doesn’t come soon enough. Elizabeth gives me a silent nod, and Lindsay gives me an enthusiastic thumbs-up while I lean against the tree and down half my water bottle. Melissa has to find me this time, because I’m busy sliding slowly to the ground.
“Isn’t this awesome?” she whispers while Karey reminds us about team dues and what they’ll help pay for. I keep my mouth full of water so I have no chance to answer.
Karey splits us up into teams. We’re going to do a scrimmage, apparently—a practice game. Melissa raises her eyebrows excitedly at me. I try to contain my overwhelming enthusiasm.
Chris dons a green headband and moves to one side of the field. Green means keeper, which is like goalie. The other keeper—“Carlos,” Melissa whispers—is shorter than Chris but about twice as wide. He has the look of a football player with a black buzz cut and thick eyebrows.
Karey sends more players to each side of the field. One of the beaters, a white girl with calves that bulge like they’re trying to escape her body, twirls her broom like a baton and sends it flying into the air a few times, catching it perfectly and dipping and spinning around with each catch. Her platinum-blonde bangs flop under her black headband as she twirls. I saw in practice how her aim with a bludger is just as precise as her baton skills.
“Ellen.” Karey’s voice calls my name, which surprises me because I thought for sure this would end with me getting picked last. “And, um, Ellen’s friend . . . ?”
Melissa looks as shocked as I feel that someone remembered my name and not hers. Karey’s in charge of a lot of newbies, and I’m sure it was just luck and possibly my awkwardness that made my name stick in her head. Still, I feel oddly encouraged as I walk to where Karey points us, the side of the field opposite Chris. Melissa shakes off the insult quickly, reintroducing herself and then sticking her tongue out at Chris as he talks very mild trash about our team (“Your team probably didn’t shower today! . . . Our team is way better at Scrabble than yours!”). But she has a glint in her eye when she picks up her broom, and I get the feeling that she’s going into this game with one goal: make Karey remember her name.
With the draft finished, each side has nine players. The veterans on my team encourage us new players to take a spot as one of the six starting players, but I offer to be a substitute instead. I want to watch at least the first few minutes of the game before I’m expected to play.
The starters line up in front of each set of hoops. Karey, Lindsay, and John line up one volleyball-quaffle and three bludgers in the middle. So I guess this works like dodgeball as well, where players have to race to get to the balls. I’m suddenly very glad that I didn’t volunteer.
Melissa, who did accept a starting position, grins at me as she scoots forward on the instruction of Carlos, our keeper. From the sidelines Karey calls, “Brooms down!” and the players kneel.
The game begins on “Brooms up!”
It’s utter chaos.
I immediately lose track of which players belong to which team, other than Chris and Carlos in their opposing green headbands, and of course Melissa. Balls fly in every direction, and bodies follow clumsily. For the first few minutes it seems like anybody who picks up the quaffle immediately drops it, and it takes me a while to notice that it’s because they’re all getting hit by the dodgeball bludgers. The Ninja Turtle–shirt boy I met last week—Jackson—spends several plays doing nothing but running forward, getting beat, and jogging sadly back to his hoops. Beaters, apparently, are pretty crucial.
I track Melissa as she runs back and forth across the field, which helps make at least some sense of the game. I follow a pass from Carlos to Roshni to Melissa, who is waiting unnoticed behind the opposing team’s hoops. She throws her hand forward as Chris barrels toward her, long arms pinwheeling.
He doesn’t even come close. Melissa puts the ball straight through the hoop.
I make a noise I probably haven’t made since I used to watch WNBA games with Xiumiao in elementary. I believe it is called a “whoop,” and it springs out of my mouth completely on its own. I even pump my fist. Sports are weird.
“Ha!” Melissa screams, throwing her hands in the air and jumping up and down. “I scored! I am unstoppable!”
“Off your broom!” Chris calls over his shoulder as he chases down the volleyball. “Go back to your hoops!”
Melissa’s broom is up in the air, distinctly not between her legs like it’s supposed to be, but Karey (our ref for the moment) waves her hand for Melissa to keep playing. “Newbies get warnings,” she says. “If you can’t handle your girlfriend scoring on you, quidditch isn’t really your sport.”
“He’s going to learn the hard way why you don’t bring your partner to quidditch,” the baton-twirling beater whispers next to me. “Quidditch breakups,” she explains when I raise an eyebrow. “They’re, like, the most common off-pitch occurrence, second only to quidditch make-outs. We’re all messy nerds who love drama here.”
“Sub!” a voice calls. “Hey, beater sub! Sub!”
“You want to go in?” The baton twirler flips her bangs and points at the figure barreling toward us. It’s John, the beater boy of the nice arms and the strange wink. He wants me to sub in, to take his place in the game. Right.
I pick up my broom and start to run toward him. “No!” John yells. “What are you— Get back on the sideline!”