Beep. Ow.
In big, bright, uncaring numbers my phone tells me it’s 7:06 a.m. on a Sunday, which is not a time that the people who ordinarily text me would text me.
In small, beautiful, mysterious letters it tells me that Jackson Oates is congratulating me. I don’t know for what. For getting a text from Jackson Oates?
Congrats!!!
For what?
Glad you’re up. Didn’t want to wake you
Why are you congratsing me?
His thought dots take forever.
You’re a volleyballerina!
Volleyball emoji, ballerina emoji, volleyball, ballerina, volleyball.
The butterfly that hatched when I met Jackson wakes up annoyed, but the second she sees the messages, she starts jumping up and down and clapping her wings together. I haven’t peed yet, so I wish she’d calm down, but neither one of us can. I want to believe him, but I can’t figure out how Jackson would have inside information I don’t have. I’ve taken too long to respond, so he writes again:
It’s already posted
I yank my computer off my desk and pull up the school website. Athletics has its own page but there’s nothing there besides a note congratulating girls varsity soccer on winning the conference finals. I find the tab for volleyball, then instead of just having the list up, there’s a PDF for Varsity Roster and a PDF for Junior Varsity Roster. I click on the JV one, and it opens a spreadsheet with a list of names. There, near the bottom, is Walsh, Greer Eleanor. Soph. I made the team? I made the team! The bottom of the team, but still, I made the team! And then I look at the rest of the list and realize that it’s alphabetical—Kate Wood is after me—so I’m only the bottom of the list because of Walsh! I’m on the team!
Jackson keeps sending GIFs of fist pumps and runners crossing the finish line and one of SpongeBob giving me the thumbs-up. I will love all of them later, but right now, they are getting in the way of me scrolling the list and quadruple-checking that it’s really the real list and not some list of rejected players that I’m on.
Nope. I’m really there. And so are Nasrah Abdullahi and Kate Wood and Sylvia Suprenant and a bunch of other good players. And Jessa is listed as captain! I check the varsity list and see all the people I expected to see.
I didn’t realize how much I cared until I saw my name on this list. This is the list. And I’m on the list. Now I can’t stop smiling. The Stabilizer and I are on the team. Maude and Mavis are on the team. We’re all on the team!
I page through the emojis and GIFs to find a good one to show how excited I am. They are all stupid. On a whim, I take a selfie. In the background you can just see a corner of the whiteboard Maggie and I were supposed to use to map out ideas for Seven Brides but which turned into a hundred games of Hangman; a bookshelf full of books, dusty Rubik’s Cubes, dustier stuffed animals, tiny boxes and containers, and a Bluetooth speaker; and my crumply bed.
In the middle of all this, me, with my mouth and eyes wide open like I’ve just won my own private space shuttle. I don’t have the stiff look I usually do in a picture, when I’m so uncomfortable that someone is permanently recording what I’m wearing and how I’m standing. I look happy. Just plain happy. My hair and face are all 7:06 a.m. on a Sunday, but still, it looks exactly how I feel. It’s how I wish I looked all the time. Before I can change my mind, I hit send.
A half second passes and Jackson sends back a heart emoji. I wouldn’t even want to see my expression if I took a selfie now. Probably like a startled moose who is about to either be run over by a motor home or has found her way to a secret forest of willow branches and blueberries. A startled, happy, volleyballerina moose who still really needs to pee.
CHAPTER 29
Practice has been brutal, but we are all getting better and stronger, and people are starting to work together really well. We know who will go for an impossible dig and who will save her knees if it’s a lost cause. We know who will blame the setter and who will blame herself for a bad hit. We can tell when someone needs a Lärabar, and we know if someone hands us one it means we’re acting hangry.
I still won’t change in front of any of them.
I’ve got a system for getting in and out of the Stabilizer, but it involves some arm waving and pinning myself up against a wall. I duck into one of the single, all-gender bathrooms on the third floor on my way down from Mr. Feiler’s room. I’ve worked a couple more T-shirts into the rotation, too, so I’m not just practicing in Run for the Zoo all the time.
But today is uniform day. The first game is tomorrow, and Coach had to rush the order to get everything on time. Everybody else is thinking about the game and how that’s going to go with so many new players. Kaia Beaumont, Nasrah, and I are still trying to understand substitutions, and I swear they are making up new rules every day. Every time someone says we’re not ready, Jessa tells them “We were BORN ready!” and then explains that Chatham High School is famously terrible and so there’s nothing to worry about.
That’s not what I’m worried about. It’s the uniform.
Coach R is sitting on an overturned five-gallon paint bucket straddling a big cardboard box. She pulls plastic bags out of the box and reads the label on each. “Cappell? Where’s Cappell? Make sure everything fits.” She tosses a bag to Cappell, who just steps to the side, whips off her shirt and slides into the uniform top. It’s a long-sleeve V-neck, and it’s not the washed-out maroon of the school swimsuits. It’s deep and rich, like a more expensive version of red, and the sleeves have got gold creeping up from the wrists so that right around the elbows it’s like an oil slick of the two colors. There’s a gold 11 in the middle of the chest and Kennedy in script.
It’s awesome.
“Woot-woot!”
“This just got real!”
“You look fierce, girl!” say the varsity girls, while Coach keeps handing out uniforms.
“Patel? Anyone seen Patel? How ’bout Vang-Ellis? Vang-Ellis, make sure everything fits. Suprenant— Oh, you’re right there.”
One by one, the mismatched jocks of Kennedy High become a maroon-suited army. The minute that jersey slides over their heads their ponytails get tighter, they stand a little taller, and they look, well, this is going to sound obvious, but they look like a team. An unstoppable team.
But as cool as that is, it’s also getting harder to swallow, because I’m looking at these girls admiring each other in their uniforms (now people have started dropping their sweats and sliding into the tiny little butt-hugging black shorts, too) and realizing that those shirts are even tighter than I thought. They are made out of fabric like a compression shirt—the kind of squeezy thing Ty wears under his lacrosse uni if it’s a cold early-spring game.