John nods, winks at me, and moves on. The drill continues. Elizabeth hits harder and faster, apologizing after every snakelike strike. We push back, trying harder to stay upright. I get grass stains on my shorts and scrapes on my elbows. By the time Karey calls a water break, my shirt sticks to my lower back and my dry throat aches with each breath, but I’m laughing anyway.
Karey joins me by the tree.
“Good job out there,” she says. “I’ll have to partner you with someone bigger next time so you can practice working at a size disadvantage.”
My mouth still full of water, I make a face and give a half-hearted thumbs-up.
“What do you think, youngling?” Karey catches Chris as he shuffles past. “Want to let Ellen destroy you a bit next time?”
Chris startles, then shrugs, avoiding my eyes. He quickly shuffles away.
“Oh, shit,” Karey whispers. “I thought that y’all were, you know, friends outside of Melissa.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I wonder if Chris told Karey we were, before he found out I wasn’t.
Karey clears her throat. “So . . . you’re going to UT next year, right?”
I gulp and answer, “Yeah.”
“They have a fantastic quidditch team. Are you going to play?”
“Oh, um, I’m not sure . . .” I have given almost zero thought to my quidditch career beyond this summer. But like Dad said, college is a good time to try things out. I already know I like quidditch. I could definitely play next year.
John claps my shoulder from behind, interrupting my thoughts, and I choke on the water I was sipping. “You need to get more muscles if you want a chance to make it onto the UT team,” he says.
Why does he do that? My face burns and Karey frowns at John.
Melissa walks up, water bottle dangling from her hand. “Hey, Ellen,” she says, but she’s smiling at Karey.
“What are you thinking of studying?” Karey asks me, shifting her whole body to face me and cut John out of the conversation. She also ends up turning her back on Melissa, who frowns and bends down to adjust the laces of her cleats. John shuffles away from the tree and joins a group of chasers talking strategy by the hoops.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answer Karey’s question with a shrug, still shaken. “I’m kind of undecided. Definitely some sort of social science or liberal arts thing. I want to try out anthropology and sociology and all that cool stuff they don’t offer in high school.” I’ve actually thought about pre-law, but I’m kind of embarrassed to say it out loud.
“I think she’s crazy,” Melissa volunteers, popping up from the ground. “I’ve seen my cousin’s reading packets from those classes. I’m sticking with biology—good old memorization.”
“Ableist language.” Karey shakes her head, and Melissa winces. “And I told you, if you want plain and simple, engineering is where it’s at. None of the stickiness of bio, but all of the linear thinking.”
“Sure, but engineers have no life,” Melissa retorts.
“Right, not like those party animals in the bio labs,” Karey snarks. “If anything, it’s the soft-science slackers who get to have fun. That’s where the smart money is, right, Ellen?” She elbows me, and I know she’s trying to cheer me up, so I convince myself to smile.
“Well,” Melissa starts to argue, but Karey cuts her off with a loud two-fingered whistle.
“Hey, y’all! That’s enough lollygagging, I think. Break up for chaser and beater drills!” She tosses her water bottle at the tree roots. “You should think about UT quidditch, Ellen. It’s a lot of fun, and we’d get to play against you. Don’t worry about John.” She jogs away with a smile.
Melissa and I linger by the tree, and for one second she looks at me with her head tilted and I think she’s about to say something, and I’m sure she’s going to apologize or make a joke (probably at John’s expense) and everything will be fine between us and we can sneak to her house for cookies and a Disney movie before she drives me home. But she gives me the weirdest blank look, like she’s mad at me. Without a word, she tosses her water bottle to the ground and follows Karey toward the hoops.
I throw down my water bottle with maybe more force than it or the tree roots deserve and drag my feet toward the rest of the beaters.
* * *
• • •
After practice, riding home nursing my aching shoulders and still way too scrape-prone knees, I don’t invite myself to Melissa’s house with the excuse of “extra conditioning.” I don’t ask if we’re going running later this week. I don’t say much of anything.
“Do you talk to Karey a lot?” Melissa asks me right as we pull into my driveway. “On Facebook or whatever?”
“Huh? I don’t know.” Karey and I chatted a bit after the League City game, when she asked me how I felt and what I wanted to work more on at practice. Team captain stuff. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Melissa echoes. I wait for her to elaborate, but after a long silence she just sighs and says, “See you later!”
She’s still lying, and maybe if I were more confident I would call her out on it, but instead I hop out of the car and drag my bruised body inside. I do the little bit of laundry and kitchen cleaning to finish my list and then use up all the hot water taking a glorious shower before curling up on my bed in a smartphone internet coma. Karey does not message me, and neither does Xiumiao, or Chris, or Melissa.
My exhaustion and self-pity run so deep, I almost scroll right past the Facebook post. Only a couple of choice curse words in the comments catch my attention, and I scroll back up to see what’s causing the controversy.
It’s a post in the International Quidditch Forum, some guy arguing against the decision made at a New York tournament over the weekend. I don’t know what the decision was. I didn’t know there was a tournament in New York this weekend. The post drops a lot of names and a lot of terms and is basically incomprehensible to me.
Most of the comments, on the other hand, are all too explicit. In between the reactionary name-calling I recognize a few people trying to have a real conversation. Merrick TheGreat and Nico X from the S.P.I.F. group (working together in this post instead of fighting like before) counter the original poster’s points using paragraphs of explanation instead of angry quips, but their comments sink under the sea of bad feeling.
Before I remember that we’re sort of fighting, I text Melissa.
What exactly is going on with the quidditch forum?
Her response is immediate: Give me a sec. Trying to figure that out.