“Get your cleats on,” Karey says when we reach our teammates, tugging Melissa’s ponytail. “We’re playing the first game in like ten minutes, and I’ll give you one guess who we’re playing first.”
“Katy Quidditch?” Melissa asks. “We hate Katy Quidditch,” she stage-whispers to me.
“Oh,” I say, trying not to care that I couldn’t guess. “Right. Why do we hate Katy Quidditch again?” Katy is a suburb far enough outside of Houston that it has its own Greyhound bus stop, but that doesn’t seem like a reason to dislike their team.
“We don’t hate Katy Quidditch,” Karey starts to correct us as the huddle opens to make room for her, but as soon as she mentions the team name several people hiss, Erin rolls her eyes and flicks her bangs, and Carlos scowls.
“Katy Quidditch headhunted us,” John explains, making room for me on his end of the circle when Melissa fills in the space next to Karey. “They formed last year and stole a bunch of our good players, right before the Midsummer tournament.”
“The tournament went poorly,” Chris adds, talking to the sky, since apparently eye contact with me is too buddy-buddy.
“And Katy Quidditch won the whole thing.” Lindsay sighs.
“We hate Katy Quidditch,” Melissa repeats with a nod.
I shrug. Maybe the players who left to join the Katy team had a good excuse for what they did. Maybe Katy was more conveniently located. Maybe Katy was really badass and shaved its head and wore shirts with ripped sleeves, and the players just got sick of hanging out with boring old Houston, who spent most of its time doing laundry and not talking on the internet.
“All right, y’all, put down the pitchforks.” Karey flaps her hands until everyone gets quiet. “It’s just summer quidditch.”
“So you don’t care at all whether we lose to the other Chris? And Cassie and Rex?” Chris asks.
“Wait, Rex defected?” Aaron asks. “I thought he retired. Screw him.”
“Come on,” Karey sighs. “You know that no team can steal anyone who didn’t already want to go. Good riddance, right?”
“She’s just saying that because they tried to headhunt her,” Lindsay whispers.
Karey is totally and annoyingly right, as usual. Good riddance to people who don’t want to be on your team.
“But to answer your question,” Karey continues, nodding at Chris. “No, I definitely do not want to lose to those jerks. I want to prove that we are the superior team with the superior Chris.” Karey offers a hand for Chris to highfive. “So let’s get warmed up and show them what we’ve got! John, are you done with the strategy meeting?”
“Our strategy,” John says, looking around the circle and pausing to wiggle his eyebrows at me, “is to crush them.” He smiles at Karey. “Yeah, I’m done.”
I don’t usually like to warm up (because it involves running), but right now my feet tap against the damp grass, fired up by some combination of friendship frustration, team spirit, and John’s eyebrows.
“Looking good,” Karey calls as we run a simple offense and defense drill. “It’s two minutes until game time. Let’s go, Team Johnny Cash!”
“Johnny Cash?” I wonder aloud as I wait in a nonlinear clump of beaters who still need to run the drill.
“If we had to be a country singer,” Elizabeth moans, “couldn’t we at least be Lil Nas X?”
“It’s because of the black shirts,” John explains.
“Besides,” Lindsay adds, “ridiculous temporary team names are half the fun of summer quidditch.”
Karey calls us to the center of the pitch after everyone’s gotten a chance to practice. A girl in a striped black-and-white shirt and miniskirt—head ref—is chatting with the opposing team on their side of the pitch. I stare down Katy Quidditch, a team in gray T-shirts ranging from super light to that’s-going-to-get-confusing-next-to-our-black-jerseys dark.
“Their name is Team Fifty Shades,” Elizabeth says, staring in the same direction I am. “In case they weren’t gross enough already.”
I nod and make a barf face at both the team and the reference. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think the corners of Elizabeth’s mouth twitch up.
“Give your team another minute,” the head ref calls to Karey. “There’s an equipment issue.”
“I should have known,” Karey jokes back. “It wouldn’t be a quidditch tournament if everything were on time.” On the other pitch, the ref hasn’t yet called Brooms Up for the League City match, either.
Elizabeth picks up a bludger, and we toss it back and forth, not trying too hard to hit each other, just keeping our arms loose while we wait. Carlos calls Jackson, Melissa, and Roshni over to work on quaffle passes.
“Pow!” John pegs me in the side with a second bludger and has the audacity to add his own sound effect. “Heads up!”
Ass.
“Why are you such a Slytherin?” Aaron asks after John knocks his baseball cap off his head with a face-beat.
“You know I didn’t read those books, Levine.” John shrugs.
“Wait, really?” I let Elizabeth’s beat hit me because I’m busy staring at John. I guess I never thought I had to ask if a team full of quidditch players had ever read Harry Potter. “You haven’t . . . But then what are you doing here?”
“I joined quidditch to tackle nerds,” John says, like it should be obvious. Elizabeth scoffs, and Aaron wraps John into a retaliation tackle, which he escapes with a spin and a cocky grin. Then he looks over his shoulder at me. “Um, no, actually, I got into it because I used to do football and baseball in high school, and at some point it got really not fun. My little brother is just getting into that middle school sports culture, and it’s just . . . the guys are gross sometimes, and the schedules are stressful. It reminds me how glad I am to be out of it.”
I spent a lot of my high school career feeling totally baffled by (and, I’ll admit, vaguely superior to) jocks. I’m only just starting to get that athletics might actually be fun. I definitely never thought about sports being a source of stress or having their own cultures with their own problems to solve, but it’s probably the sort of thing S.P.I.F. deals with. “That’s actually interesting,” I say, and then I hope I don’t sound rude.
John shrugs. “I thought I wasn’t going to play anymore in college, but then I heard about this and it seemed like, I don’t know, a chance to remember that sports are about hanging out and having fun with your team.”
“Oh wow, I misspoke,” Aaron says, clapping John on the shoulder. “You’re a total Hufflepuff after all.”