Page 38 of Rock Bottom Girl

“Throw up on Coach Vince’s shoes?”

“Har. Har. Hilarious.”

Vicky elbowed her way into the conversation. “You girls might not know this, but Coach Marley was quite the prankster in high school. She once convinced our entire trigonometry class to speak only in lines fromThe Princess Bride.”

My lips quirked.Yeah, that was a good time.

“Oh, and how about the time you snagged Coach Norman’s car keys out of his bag and hid his truck in the adult store parking lot?”

“Yeah, yeah. I was a real rebel. Let’s at least pretend we’re interested in soccer.”

“You stole a car,andyou kissed Mr. Weston?” Angela demanded. She was wearing her dark hair in two buns on top of her head. They looked like horns.

“Badass,” Natalee said.

“If only there was something we could do to get back at Coach Vince and the boys team,” Vicky mused.

I eyed her suspiciously.

“Let’s prank them!” a sophomore with braces said, hopping up and down.

“Yeah!”

Vicky wiggled her eyebrows at me. “What do you say, Coach?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be an adult, a mother, a respected member of society?” I demanded.

“Come on, Coach. It’ll be like a team-building exercise,” sneaky Morgan W. begged.

“You guys, I could lose my job, and you could get suspended.”

“Not if we don’t get caught,” Vicky announced.

“Are you kidding me right now, Vic?”

“Tell me you don’t have at least three ideas floating around in that devious brain of yours,” she insisted. I actually had four working concepts that I could build on. “They took our field. They humiliated us. They forced you to back down with shame!”

“You are taking this very seriously for only joining the team an hour ago.”

“We are on an elementary school playground because a bunch of zero body fat buffoons chased us off of our turf,” Vicky reminded me.

“Come on, Coach!”

“Yeah, please!”

“Weneedthis.”

“They took our field.”

I groaned and scratched a finger over the bridge of my nose.

“I know that look,” Vicky sang.

“I refuse to dignify that with an answer.” I had a great idea, and I was pretty sure I was absolutely going to go through with it. But I didn’t need my team getting arrested with me or suspended after I got fired.

A collective groan of disappointment rose up.

“Weare not retaliating. Now, don’t tempt me to make you run,” I warned them.