But I remembered one thing she’d said with perfect clarity, now. I could hear her voice, her exact delivery: “I don’t think anyone makes it through their freshman year together, and I don’t want that to be us.” The implication was that we would break up once college started, so we might as well break up now and save ourselves the time. The implication was that senior year was about friendship, about being single and unattached and free, savoring the easiest versions of everything and everyone you loved before you left them.
But if she really believed that, what was she doing with number-three, formerly presumed straight girl Natalie Reid? Was what she’d said just bullshit, meant only as it applied to me?
I spent all night thinking about it, always somewhere between asleep and awake, madder and madder the closer it got to morning. By the time my alarm went off I was practically radiating resentment. I grabbed my phone to silence it and saw that Ruby had texted me back overnight, a little after eleven-thirty, and I’d missed it. I read it and reread it, breathing in deeply and blowing air out. I didn’t need to care so much about Jamie and Natalie. I had my own thing going on. Here she was, on my phone screen, having written Yes! I’m there. She liked me enough to come watch me play soccer on a Saturday night, and that wasn’t nothing. I closed my eyes and held my phone to my chest, forcing the endless breakup replay out of my head, replacing it with Ruby with heart eyes, watching me score from the stands, shouting my name. I fell asleep that way, for eleven perfect minutes, until my mom knocked on my door and ruined it. I couldn’t believe I still had to go to school under these conditions.
* * *
—
Frankly, I thought I deserved a medal for not interrogating Alexis about Jamie and Natalie the moment I saw her at lunch. It was excruciating to see her smile at me, knowing she knew something so relevant to my interests but wouldn’t say it to my face. But I also knew there was no way she could have. We only had lunch together, and Jamie was always there. I could have texted Alexis about it, and I’d thought about it, but texts could be screenshotted and sent elsewhere, and the last thing I wanted was for Jamie to have physical, incontrovertible proof that I still cared. Alexis was my friend, but she was Jamie’s friend first, the same way Ronni was mine. If I gave Alexis material she could pass on to Jamie, she’d do it immediately, reflexively, out of loyalty. It was probably agonizing for her to not tell me about Jamie and Natalie herself, but I had to imagine that Jamie had asked her not to. Which was probably why Alexis had told Ronni instead: so Ronni would tell me, and Alexis could remain technically innocent while satisfying her urge to spread information. She operated by a strict, if slightly confusing, ethical code.
So I waited. Somehow time kept passing—hours and even days. At lunch, whenever Jamie was focused on her sandwich or looking at her phone, I stared at her, trying to see through her, analyzing her expressions to see if they seemed like those of a person in love. But she was as stoic as ever. So either nothing was happening…or something was.
By game time Saturday I was both exhausted and jittery. We were playing Albion, most of whose players were eight feet tall and blond and went to private school. Instead of a huddle, they held a prayer circle, and whenever they beat us we took comfort in reminding each other they had God on their side. To make matters worse, they were all polite, modest winners, which made us feel terrible for celebrating when we beat them.
With fifteen minutes to go before kickoff, the field on the visitors’ side of the bleachers was already packed with parents and friends wearing blue and white. Down below I spotted Hanna Ward, Albion’s sacrilegiously beautiful lead midfield, who used to play for us before she moved in seventh grade. After she moved, it became a recurring fantasy of mine that she and I would fall into forbidden love, Romeo and Juliet style, and get found together in the locker room showers. She caught me looking, so I gave her a little wave, and she smiled tightly. Progress.
I turned around for the hundredth time to survey our own set of bleachers, which were still three-quarters empty and would likely stay that way. My mom always came to a handful of my off-season club games, but, encouraged by me, saved most of her momly duty for the school season, when attendance felt like more of a value judgment. And anyway, it made me nervous to have her there, and she got too worked up over what she perceived as bad referee calls, which were all the ones that favored the other team. Most of the time I had no one special to look for in the bleachers, and no reason to scan them. Which was fine, because the people I really wanted to impress were on the field with me. But I couldn’t lie: I felt giddy scanning the bleachers for Ruby Ocampo.
Only I didn’t see her.
I dug my phone out of my bag: four minutes until game time, and no explanatory text messages from Ruby.
But it was cool to be a little late. I wasn’t happy about it, but it was.
Coach called us over for a pep talk, the usual stuff about playing our best and working together and remembering what we’d talked about in practice this week. We put our hands in and shouted the Surf Club chant, and then we dispersed to take final sips of water and stretch. I dipped a hand into my bag to check my phone again, but when I stood back up, Coach was right there.
“Ah!” I sort of shrieked.
“Do you need surgery?” Coach asked me, unsmiling.
“What?”
“To get that thing removed from your hand.” She pointed to my phone, and I instantly dropped it into my bag.
“Oh. Ha. No. All better.”
“You need to focus, Ryan,” she said. I knew what she was thinking: Is this how you plan to get off the wait list?
Guilt rolled into a ball in my stomach. “I know. I will.”
Coach gave me a stern-but-encouraging clap on the shoulder, and I ran onto the field.
* * *
—
I couldn’t be sure when exactly Ruby arrived. I didn’t have a chance to look in the first quarter—we were down a goal early, and I took Coach’s scolding to heart, going after the ball like my whole future depended on it. Which, in a way, it did. Only when I scored the tying goal, and my teammates rushed to crush me in a hug, did I feel safe glancing at the bleachers.
And there she was, sitting at the very back, perfectly and oh my God thank God alone. She was leaning against the fence, and when she saw me looking, she sat up and lifted two thumbs high above her head. My whole body blushed and surged with adrenaline. It wasn’t like I’d expected her to actually bail, but I must have very nearly lost hope without realizing it, because I was so happy, and so relieved, that I felt like I could fly if I took off running fast enough. Or else I really, really liked her.
Having Ruby in the stands wasn’t like having my mom there, or even Jamie. With them I felt like I had something specific to live up to. They’d both been to enough of my games to know what I was capable of on my very best days, and to show them anything less felt like letting them down. But Ruby had never seen me play before. I was fairly certain she’d never been to a high school–level soccer game at all. She had no expectations, so it was easy to beat them. When Jamie was in the stands I felt her eyes on me with every step I took. Ruby’s being there to see me was so improbable it felt made up, like a daydream I’d had as a freshman. My perpetual disbelief allowed me to forget she was there between time-outs, when I’d check to make sure she still was. As a result, I played better than I had in weeks. If only UNC were here to see me now, I thought. But then, of course, that would have ruined it.