Page 7 of Rock Bottom Girl

The high school was a little bigger than when I’d walked its halls thanks to a ten-years-too-late addition to manage the overcrowding. But the student parking lot was the same. It sat at the bottom of the hill the fall sports teams ran in an S formation, an exercise that would now almost definitely cost me at least one of my ACLs.

At the top of the hill was the school’s expansive practice fields. Two baseball and one soccer with a little extra green space between. I remembered running around the outskirts of the fields during preseason. It had been horrible then, and I didn’t see a reason for it to have improved with time.

Myteam, and I mentally used air quotes around the word, would be arriving for an 8 a.m. practice. And I wanted to be as ready for them as possible.

I had zero money for a new athletic wardrobe, so I settled for old yoga shorts and a t-shirt. I’d tried a tank top since it was seventy-five million degrees already. But I was paranoid about the roll around my middle. I wasn’t about to stroll onto my old turf with a visible belly roll. I’d given Culpepper enough to talk about over the years.

“I can’t freaking believe I’m doing this.”

Talking it over with my parents hadn’t helped. Neither had sleeping on it. The only thing that made any difference at all was the fact that I literally had no other options. I could take this job—and the adequate money it offered—and stay in town until the holidays. Or I could wallow in depression in my childhood bedroom, most likely ruining my parents’ Airbnb ratings.

So here I was at 7:10 a.m., I noted, checking my phone. I had my freshly printed team roster and the dozen orange safety cones my parents had surprised me with. Wondering how the hell I’d ended up back in the place that I’d felt the most self-loathing and disappointment.

I’d worked some shitty jobs since graduation. There’d been the front desk admin for the concrete company with men in dirty flannel who called me “sweetheart” all day. Then the community magazine that had suffered from so much drama the publisher had called in an HR consulting company to lay down the law before firing fifty percent of the staff. And let’s not forget the time I decided that working retail management was what I was meant to do. One Black Friday, and I’d turned in my two weeks’ notice.

But none of those jobs compared to how much of a dumb, insecure, loser I’d felt at Culpepper Jr. Sr. High School. Maybe it was the hormones in the milk. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t live up to the example my older sister set. Or maybe—and this was an even worse theory—I just didn’t fit here…or anywhere. Whatever the reason, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was queasy.

I was glad I’d turned down my mom’s offer of breakfast that morning. Because those burnt eggs poured from a carton would have been working their way up my throat right about now.

* * *

They arrivedin minivans and sedans. Some driven by harried-looking parents, others arriving in clumps of gangly teenagers with driver’s licenses. We eyed each other in suspicious silence over the row of orange cones I’d set up four times before I was happy with the relative distance between each one.

I stared at the sea of ponytails and bandanas and general sense of disdain and let them look their fill. Diversity-wise, things had changed a lot since I had been in school. My sister had been the only “brown kid” in her senior class. It was comforting to see box braids and darker skin, to hear a Caribbean accent and some muttered Spanish. Central Pennsylvania was finally catching up with the rest of the world.

Some of the girls giggled, hunching over to whisper confidences to each other. Others stood tall and unsmiling, waiting for whatever athletic wisdom I was about to unfurl on them. One or two others stood off to the side, and I could identify them as soul sisters.

God help us all.

“I’m Marley Cicero, your new coach,” I said. I wanted to play it cool, maybe dazzle them with some fancy footwork. But even in high school at the height of my soccer career, I’d lacked fancy anything. I’d been a midfielder. An endurance player who never scored a goal and rarely did anything but chase my marks up and down the field. It didn’t take a lot of skill to just be a body in the way.

A hand shot up in the back. “What do we call you?”

The Asian girl and her artfully messy bun screamed Pinterest Princess. She was tall and confident. I couldn’t begin to guess her or anyone’s age. These girls were all in that nebulous twelve to twenty-four age range that I couldn’t identify.

“Uh. Coach? Marley? I don’t know. What do you want to call me?”

Mistake number one.

“How about Loser Lesbo?” an unfairly pretty brunette suggested. “No offense,” she said to the girl with the buzzed short purple ’do on her right.

“Angela,” Mohawk sighed. “You can’t use it as an insult to one of us and not all of us.”

Angela Bitchface rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’m sorry for my insensitivity, Morgan.”

“Apology accepted.” Mohawk Morgan nodded graciously.

Okay, team peacemaker. Good to know.

A hand on the left side of the pack shot up. She was very tall, very lean, and her hair hung in dozens of pristine braids down to her bra strap. Her skin was dark and impossibly flawless for a teenager. She was dressed in name-brand gear with her cleats and knee socks already donned.

“Yes, um?”

“Ruby,” she told me. “What are your coaching qualifications?”

How about the fact that I’m physically present? No? Not an actual qualification? Hm.

“I played AYSO from second grade on up and then JV and varsity in high school,” I told her.