“Oh yeah . . .” Melissa shrugs. “You don’t mind, right? It sounds like it’s going to be fun. And, hey, that boy Alex wanted you to come!” She wiggles her eyebrows at me.
This time it’s me who almost chokes on my laughter. “Not even close, dude. He’s, like, extremely gay.”
“Oh.” Melissa laughs. “I missed that.”
“So you have zero gaydar, is what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know!” Melissa protests. “Gaydar is a flawed concept anyway. And he seemed to get attached to you super quick.”
“As shocking as it is that I can make friends . . .”
“Okay, fine.” Melissa leans close and lowers her voice. “What about John, then?”
“Why are you so obsessed with John?” I whisper back.
“Why is John so obsessed with you?”
I clap my hand over Melissa’s mouth, and she giggles.
“Shut up,” I scold. “Look, if anything happens with any quidditch boys, I will tell you immediately, okay? You don’t have to keep asking.”
“Oh.” Melissa shrugs. “I mean, I guess. You wouldn’t, like, have to.”
“What?” I blink at her. “Of course I would.”
“No,” Melissa says, shrugging again. “I wouldn’t expect you to report the second you started seeing anyone. I mean, we’re not in middle school anymore. It’s not, like, some huge deal.”
“Uh, okay.” Something angry and bitter rises in the back of my throat, but I push it down. I turn back to the pitch. Erin takes out two chasers in quick succession, leaving the ball carrier stranded without a pass option. Chris tackles the ball carrier, a tiny kid who doesn’t have enough weight to stand up to the hit. The ball carrier’s legs tangle as he tries to step free, and he crashes to the ground.
Chris gets up, quaffle in hand, already running. The kid stays down.
The ref’s whistle blasts cut across the whole field, and people watching the other pitch turn to see what’s happening. Two tournament volunteers with first aid kits jog to the downed kid. The rest of the players stand frozen, waiting for more information or a command from the ref. Chris squishes the quaffle and glances between our bench and the hurt player with his eyes wide, in serious need of some moral support. I give him a thumbs-up.
The kid gets up pretty quickly, and the medics give him a hand as he limps to the sidelines, grimacing in what could be pain or just embarrassment. The ref calls no foul. On her whistle, play resumes.
“Scary,” I say, craning my neck to see the kid getting high fives and back pats from his teammates. “Chris looks freaked.”
Melissa shrugs. “It’s fine. It wasn’t even a hard hit.”
I hate her for shrugging. I hate her for thinking everything is fine when it clearly isn’t. I hate that she doesn’t care about Chris, doesn’t care about me.
We win the quidditch game. It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would.
Halfway down the handshake line, some touchy-feely player switches from handshakes to hugs, starting a chain reaction in the people behind them. I find myself pressed into sweaty stranger chests while carefully stiff arms swipe my back. “Good game, good game, good game . . .” I keep my eyes on the headbands to avoid the disappointed faces of our opponents. Chaser, chaser, keeper, seeker. Beater. Face-beating beater.
“Ugh.” I laugh. “Good game.”
“You too!” He pauses for a second, just enough to disrupt the flow of the line, just enough for his bushy eyebrows to disappear into his dark hair and his smile to light up his face. “You’re scary!”
And then I’m leaning into his sweaty chest, and our carefully stiff arms pat each other’s backs. Because of the height difference, he has to hunch forward, so I end up with my face pressed into his shoulder. Not for long. A second, less.
One thing about this playing-sports thing—you start learning to trust your body. You develop faith that it knows things you don’t, like how to fall without impaling yourself on a PVC pipe between your legs, or how to dodge a beat, or how to catch a ball before you even know it’s coming toward you. You let it make decisions you don’t have time to make.
I haven’t had time to develop an opinion about the face-beating boy. I barely have time to register his compliment. But somehow, somewhere, a decision happens.
We let go. We step past each other. I say, “Good game” to the next face.
And glance over my shoulder. Face-beating beater boy looks back at me and grins.
“Who was that one beater?” I ask Elizabeth, who seems like a safely disinterested party, when the line ends and everyone mills around waiting for Karey’s instructions. “McAllister?” That’s the name printed on the back of his T-shirt above something that is definitely not a normal jersey number. “He was good.”
“Yeah, I don’t think he plays for them normally. I think he’s from Austin or San Antonio or something.” She shrugs, squints. “The jersey definitely isn’t his, because I know the girl he borrowed it from. I forget. I’ve seen him around, but he doesn’t live in Houston.”
I nod, trying not to be disappointed. In town for the weekend and wearing some girl’s shirt sounds pretty unavailable; the tiny new-crush tendrils wilt behind my ribs.
“I miss back when we could do silly numbers like that,” Elizabeth says, nodding to his jersey. “One guy used to have the TARDIS, and I used to do the infinity sign. Now we can only use those for unofficial games.”
“Yeah, what is that anyway? It sort of looks like the feminist sign but . . .”
Elizabeth slowly lifts her goggles, face serious. “Ellen, are you kidding me?”
“What?”
“You don’t know the love symbol?”
I shrug, face blank.
“Prince!” she says. “The artist formerly known as? ‘Purple Rain’? ‘Raspberry Beret’? Do you only listen to musicals?”
Kind of, yeah, but I nod and say, “Oooh, of course, yes,” and let Elizabeth shake her head in relief while I watch the beater incorrectly known as Prince disappear into a team huddle.
“Okay, good. I was about to say we couldn’t be friends anymore.”
Yeah, yeah, grumbles the voice of self-pity in my head, get in line.
16
“So,” Alex says, finding me on the couch pushed into the corner of the living room/dance floor of the after-party apartment. “How did you enjoy your first quidditch tournament?”