Page 23

In for a Penny

Colt

I haven’t left Prosperity since getting into town, a fact I realize as we drive past the endless fields and farmland that blanket the outskirts of the city. It’s a nice break from the chaos of last weekend, an away game in Atlanta. The silence is exactly what I’ve needed. Okie students always joke that they’re the outermost layer of Oklahoma City, but they’re wrong – this is the outermost layer. Maybe a farmhouse every half mile or so, if you’re lucky; the rest of it is for grazing or crop.

We whip past the sign: EAGLE ROCK, POP. 562. With the sun beginning to go down post-Monday practice, the sky is lit up in dusky oranges and pinks in the background. It’s fucking unreal. I remember coming down here to play pickup, guys versus girls. A couple of them had grown up with traditional Choctaw stickball and then moved into lacrosse, and they were lethal. Loss was imminent.

‘Wow.’

May turns into the little intersection that takes you towards Main Street. When we hit the tiny strip, it’s just as I remember. The church is on one side, the bakery and grocer on the other, and away in the distance are the feed and tractor supply stores, all bracketed by endless clear skies, burning with sunset. God. I’d forgotten what these parts of Oklahoma looked like after years in Boston, and I hate myself for it right away.

May rolls a window down and extends her hand out into the open space, wiggling her fingers against the wind. Her curls dance about in total and utter freedom. Her face, for the first time since I’ve seen her again after all these years, is truly at peace, her eyes fluttering blissfully. Disturbing her feels like a sin.

We pass the corner café and bar – a true hole-in-the-wall spot – before driving another three or so minutes out to the red-awninged feed shop. A left takes us down a rocky dirt road that rattles the truck, smoothing out when we hit the hand-painted sign that tells us we’ve reached the Veracruz Ranch.

The lowing of multiple cattle greets us through May’s open window when she pulls the truck up the narrow driveway and parks it. May’s Birkenstock sandals smack the asphalt, and she yawns with a stretch. ‘Might need a nap after this, but hey, best get it over with.’

I remove my cap, unfortunately allowing the setting sun to beat down on the top of my head. By Boston standards, it’s way too early in the year for it to be hot like this. ‘Is this us finally making good on your mom’s dinner invitation? Why are we here, exactly?’

‘We’re more making good on my dad’s invitation. They’re out for the market, so …’ May scratches her shoulder, squinting at the sun and towards her house. ‘Maybe not so much the dinner as the “back to where it all started”.’

‘Back to where what started?’

‘Us.’

If it weren’t for the way she fidgets nervously, toeing the dirt driveway as she inspects my face for a response, I would have thought the word was easy as pie for her to let slip: ‘us’. The thought entertains my delusions, the fact that maybe she feels just a fraction of what I do. That would be enough hope. Because I’ve had girlfriends, but I’ve never, ever known a girl like her.

‘And sure, my parents aren’t home,’ she says to me, ‘but some of the ranch hands are. We have a bit of a walk.’ Under her breath, she mumbles, ‘Take my hand.’

I freeze in my tracks at the notion. Take her hand? She’d probably take off my head if I so much as tried. But she takes a step forward, glowering back at me with an insistent raise of her eyebrows. We’ve already had to kiss in public, right? What could this hurt?

I reach out, and gingerly, my palm meets hers, our fingers effortlessly weaving their way around one another. The hesitation I feel at first touch becomes more comfortable as we walk, side by side, around her house and down the dirt path towards the ranch. Hand in hand.

‘No way you guys kept this.’

‘Well, where do you think the Eagle Rock kids play pickup on the weekends?’

‘Good point.’

My sneakers stir up dust as we approach the half-size lacrosse field mowed into the back of the ranch. A fixture of Eagle Rock itself, ever since the Velascos decided the local lax and stickball kids needed somewhere closer to home to practise, the field is quite literally the lacrosse analogue of Field of Dreams , except – instead of mid-cornfield – it’s just fences that divide us from the cows. You can hear the cattle even more clearly here. The sound brings me right back. Way, way back.

‘I was ready to call you a liar when you first told me you had a lacrosse field in your backyard, back in, what? Elementary?’ I remark with a laugh.

We cross onto the short-grass field, with its dull white markings, and May smiles wryly. ‘For once, I can’t blame you. This is the most ridiculous small-town shit ever. I told Papa it would be weird. He did it anyway.’

‘Do you still think it’s weird?’

‘Not a bit.’ May jabs a thumb back towards the house. ‘I’m gonna grab some sticks and balls.’

‘Sticks?’ I stop in my tracks where I’m walking around the goal, one foot in the crease.

‘Uh. Yeah.’ She raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘We’re on a lacrosse field. It’s not a school trip. We’re not just here to grab concessions, take photos, and hit the road.’

Without any further explanation, she heads off to the garage, leaving me outside with just the field, so many questions, and a singular memory.

May came around the ranch house from where they kept the horses. She had on worn jeans and a pink equestrian jacket. Stomping over wearing the chunkiest boots, she eyed all five of us, myself and four friends from Prosperity and Eagle Rock, with exasperation. Even at ten years old, she had an attitude like a barbed whip, an attitude that I felt the full force of when her analytical gaze fell on me, and the corner of her mouth twitched sassily.

I shifted my stick from hand to hand. ‘We were gonna play, if you are.’

May’s brow furrowed. She tightened her ponytail, which, back then, had been a big poof of curls that she hadn’t yet managed to tame, and grabbed her matching hot pink lacrosse stick from where it leaned against the fence. An insistent snap of her fingers in Michael’s direction got her the ball. She tossed it up in the air and caught it and, in her boots, marched towards the face-off circle her parents had drawn in the field.

‘I’ll play.’ She pointed to the spot across from her. ‘Draw, Colt.’

I was doubtful. May was a whole foot shorter than me, and definitely more than a couple pounds lighter. I thought I’d tip her over, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that May Velasco didn’t just have the uncanny ability to lead a team. She had the ability to lead herself, and that allowed her to push the limits of what everyone else thought was possible. Including me, I learned when she planted her booted feet across from my sneakered ones, met my eyes, and propped the back of her stick’s head against mine. That was the first time I ever played her in lacrosse, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

‘Colt!’

May’s voice, from the centre of the field, snaps my wandering mind to attention. She waves my way. ‘Well? Right into it!’

This is a different time. I don’t know why she’s trying to start a one-on-one, I don’t know what she thinks I’ll do, but we’re not young any more; and for my part, I can barely figure out how to cradle the ball. I jog towards her, and when my fingers close around the stick she holds out to me, it’s a grip of uncertainty. Embarrassment. I try my best to mirror her draw position, but the second I get low, bend my knees, my injury flashes before my eyes, the pain scorching my entire leg. I feel the scratch of the grass against my arms, the sting in my throat when I hold back tears, even as I yell in agony.

‘Colt!’ May calls again. I think she’s going to whack me upside the head with her stick for a moment, but instead, she lowers it. She removes a hand from her stick, then the other, letting it fall to the ground next to her. And she does something that makes me forget all about the pain.

She presses her hands to either side of my head, her thumbs at my temples, and she looks me dead on. ‘I will not hurt you, Colt. I promise. There is no stake in this game. You are not being held to anything.’

I blink. She doesn’t budge. Her face is so close to mine that I can feel her breath caress my cheeks when she exhales shakily. ‘I just … I just want to play a round with you again. Just once. Semi-properly. I fucking missed you, idiot.’

I swallow hard. The air between us is electric, silent but for the sound of the cows and her last sentence hanging in the air. I would find the mooing comedic in any situation but this one.

‘Missed you, too,’ I manage.

She nods, and the moment is over, just like that. She turns away, re-arming herself with her stick. ‘Go for it. Let’s do a face-off. You know that better than the draw.’

May readies herself close to the ground, bottom of the head of her stick touching the grass, right by the ball. With unsteady arms, I do the same on my side. ‘How … how did you—’

‘Rod told me.’ She smiles apologetically. ‘He didn’t need a second glance to figure out we were lying about the fake dating crap, apparently. But that’s not your biggest problem.’ Her smile falls right off, giving way to a new emotion – a very new emotion, one I’ve never seen in May, at least: sadness. ‘Is it?’

I cleverly duck her question, and instead try my best not to focus on all the things Rod could have told her about me, pressing my stick’s head closer to the ball. ‘In for a penny, I guess.’

‘Alright.’ May clears her throat. ‘On three. One, two, three!’

On three, we push our sticks against one another’s, battling it out for possession, but even with May’s sobering moment of emotion, it doesn’t help what Dr Mendoza called my ‘yips’. I keep pushing, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing. My arms go numb, and suddenly, I’m not pushing any more. I pull my stick back, and May immediately takes the opening. She snatches the ball up easily, starting a play for the goal, but her beeline slows right away as she looks over her shoulder.

I’ve come to hate the look. The pity, the moment when people figure out that a guy who could have been an MLL champion can’t even push his stick in the right direction now. It’s easy to blame it on an injury. They get that. When something physically hurts you, it gives them something to look at. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to call it what it is. Because when they don’t have something to look at, it becomes an excuse.

‘Oh,’ May finally says, but it’s not pity on her face. It’s a certain type of pain.

The kind someone only reveals to you when they’ve been exactly where you were before.

May’s junior season. Lifeless games. Dead passes. Goals that most youth players could have made.

‘This isn’t new to you,’ I exhale, letting my stick hang carelessly in my hands. ‘Your junior year.’

She purses her lips. ‘Guess not. Wasn’t just my junior year. My life crept into my game plenty of times. When you left. And then when …’ With a twirl of her stick, May gazes up at the clouds, and then back at me. ‘Anyway. To answer your question, no. This isn’t new to me.’

‘How the hell did you come back from it?’

‘I don’t know exactly how.’ She shrugs, and she does that little combination of things again, the purse of her lips, the look up, a blink or two. Holding back her emotions. ‘I found the right reasons to move on, I think.’