He loved her for that. “I think we’d better play it by ear,” Jack said. The ref held up his hands, looking to Jack for a replacement so that play could be resumed.
The second- and third-string centers on the bench stared up at him like wallflowers at a dance, praying with all their hearts that this time, they might be chosen. Jack’s eyes flickered from one to the next, settling on Catherine Marsh, the daughter of the school chaplain. Her teammates seemed to like her; Jack had never really paid enough attention to form an opinion. Now, she stared up at him, full of hope. It seemed to light her from the inside.
She stood in the spot usually handled by Arielle, who had been taken to the hospital. Catherine’s eye was so focused on the ball that any minute she expected it to burst into flames. Coming in at the goal kick, the very play where the ball had gone out of bounds, gave her no time to ease into this.
Shaking out her arms and legs, she loosened her body and instructed herself to relax. Not that it did any good.
Settle down, she ordered, but it only made her heart beat harder. She imagined her blood raging like a river. Her eyes followed the trajectory of the ball as the wing attempted a shot. The goalie, a bulk of a girl if Catherine had ever seen one, deflected it with one massive hand . . . but the ball spiraled up and over the metal rim of the net, thudding down beyond the boundaries of the field.
“Corner kick,” the ref yelled from somewhere behind her. Catherine knew her position. As the wing stood at the squared edge of the field behind the goal, Catherine moved closer to the net. Her right fingertips brushed the goal, a sensory print of where she was standing. A hundred thoughts raced through her mind: If she arcs it, I can head it in. The rim of the goal is warm to the touch. The sun’s in my eyes. God, what if I miss? Fingertips grazing again, she fought to see around the goalie, who was a full head taller than she was. Eye on the ball. Wait. Head it square in. Don’t look like an idiot.
The wing’s foot shot out, but she whiffed the ball-Catherine craned her neck to see it arch, heading away from the goal. Oh, God, I’ll never get to it, thought Catherine, and an enormous pressure lifted from her chest, because she was no longer obligated to perform. Catherine watched the ball hang like a second sun in the air . . . and then it outpaced her, a spinning sphere angling over her right shoulder in a sweet, true arc.
Without conscious thought, Catherine leaped. As her shoulders dropped down, her legs came up, and she scissored her legs in a bicycle kick, so that her right foot rocketed the ball back in the direction from which it had come.
Catherine didn’t see the ball speed over her shoulder, to stretch the upper left corner of the net. She didn’t know at first why all her teammates were screaming and piling on top of her, so that she couldn’t have gotten up even if she’d wanted to. Instead, she lay flat on her back with the wind knocked out of her.
A teammate offered her a hand up. Catherine searched the sea of faces on the sidelines, all cheering for her . . . for her! She finally stopped when she found the one she was looking for. Coach St. Bride stood on the sidelines with his arms crossed. “Thank you,” he mouthed silently.
Catherine smiled so wide she was sure all her happiness would simply spill out at her feet. “My pleasure,” she whispered back, and turned to the field to play.
Muddy and spent, but buzzing with the euphoria that comes on a victory, the girls gathered their water bottles and jackets and headed into the locker room. Fans drifted from the sidelines like milkweed blowing from a pod, wandering to the white buildings of Westonbrook or the parking lot, where they could wait for the players they had come to cheer on.
The school nurse had passed along the news that Arielle’s collarbone had snapped; she’d be out of commission for six weeks. But where this news would have sent Jack into a tailspin just that morning, he was now remarkably calm. And all because of Catherine Marsh, a little wren he’d never even noticed simply because he’d been too busy admiring the peacock.
She was straggling behind. Her blond hair had managed to untangle itself from a ponytail and swung in front of her face like a veil as she bent to pick up her belongings. “Hey, Pelé,” Jack called out.
She glanced up blankly.
“God, you’re making me feel old. Forget Pelé. Mia, then. Or Brandi.”
“Not quite.” Ruefully, Catherine tugged at her jersey. “See, I still have my shirt on.” After a moment, she added, “Thanks for giving me a chance today.”
“A smarter move,” Jack said soberly, “would have been to let the wing trap the ball and bring it back into play. I could just as easily be standing here asking you what the hell you were doing, instead of holding you up as MVP.”
“I know.”
“If you’re going to do such a low percentage kick, I’d better teach you how to do it without hurting yourself in the process.”
Catherine’s head snapped up. “For real?”
“Yeah. Come here.” He tossed her a ball and ushered her toward the flag so that she could do a corner kick. In the meantime, he assumed the position she’d been in, by the goal. “Go on.”
She tried, but the first shot landed in the goal. “Sorry.”
Jack laughed. “Don’t ever apologize to your coach when you score.”
Smiling, Catherine tried again. The ball curved toward the midfield, and Jack started running. His blond hair caught on the wind, and he could feel every cell of his body straining with the pure joy of play as he kicked his feet up and pedaled them to change position, catching the ball and firing it back over his dropped right shoulder. As he fell, he braced his palms, landing on the flat of his upper back and rocking forward.
“Wow,” Catherine said. “You make it look so easy.”
“I make it look less painful.” Jack got up, then put his hands on Catherine’s shoulders. She smelled of powder, and there was mud caked on the tip of her ponytail. “You land here,” he said, skimming his palm over her upper back. He slid his arms down over hers, flexing the palms out. “You’re going to roll down your spine, so that you hit your shoulders and your elbows and your forearms and then your butt makes contact.”
They switched places, so that Jack could lob the ball over her shoulder from behind. With each try, Jack offered a new piece of advice; with each try, the sun sank a little deeper in the sky. On the seventh attempt, Catherine landed perfectly. “I did it. I did it!” She leaped to her feet and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. “This is so cool!”
Laughing, Jack set her away from him. If he could bottle the enthusiasm of the average fifteen-year-old, he’d be a very rich man. He tossed Catherine her water bottle and jacket. “Go on home, Pelé.”
“That’s Brandi, if you don’t mind.”
He grinned as she bounced her way across the darkening playing fields. And he wondered how, in the three months she’d been on his team, he ever could have underestimated Catherine Marsh.
“You’re shitting me.” Jay Kavanaugh stared at the television set over the bar, his bottle of Bud arrested halfway to his lips. “She’s not sixteen.”
“She is,” Jack insisted. “I kid you not.”
They both watched the teen pop princess jiggle her way through an MTV music video. “But . . . but . . . Jesus, look at her face.”
“It’s all makeup.”
“Guess she keeps the cotton balls to apply it stuffed in her bra, then?”
Jack took a pull of his drink. “Early bloomer.”
“That’s no bloom,” Jay muttered. “That’s a whole fucking tropical rainforest.” He grabbed the remote control off the bar counter and turned the channel to a movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was pummeling a man bloody. “There. Something less inflammatory.” Jay slid his empty bottle across the counter and gestured for another one. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Stick yourself smack in the middle of sin every day.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Jeez, you’re surrounded by . . . by sixteen-year-old pop princesses all day long.”
“Jessica Simpson is not enrolled at Westonbrook.”
Jay shrugged. “You know what I mean. I know DAs who won’t drive home their teenage baby-sitters. How can you look at them day in and day out and not . . . notice?”
“Because I’m their teacher and that would make me as moral as a slug.” Jack grinned. “You don’t interview felons and suddenly decide to turn over a new leaf of crime, do you?”
Jay twisted the top off the bottle that the bartender set in front of him. “No . . . but sometimes I look at a drug dealer all decked out in Armani and before I can stop myself, I think: ‘It’s got to be a nice life, long as you don’t get caught.’ ”
Jack lifted the beer to his lips. “Well,” he admitted, laughing, “sometimes I think that, too.”
Dinner at the Marsh household was a stiff affair, with Catherine and her father sitting across from each other at a long, polished table and eating whatever she’d managed to cook for them. “Pasta again?” Reverend Marsh asked, picking up the bowl and bringing it closer to heap on his plate.
“Sorry. We’re out of meat and chicken.”
“The Lord turned water into wine. All I’m suggesting is a trip to the grocery store.”
Catherine reached for her glass of milk. “I haven’t had a chance, Daddy.”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. You’ve had the chance. You just chose to use that time for a different purpose.”
“You have no idea how amazing an opportunity it is for me to be able to play first string. I can’t just throw that away.”
Ellidor twirled his fork in the spaghetti. “Barbaric, if you ask me. All those half-dressed young girls being put through their paces by some drill sergeant.”
“Daddy, we’re not half dressed. And Coach St. Bride isn’t the Devil.”
The minister pinned his daughter with a stare. “They are still not the sorts of girls you ought to be spending time with,” he said. He stood up, walked to the sideboard, and tossed a Glamour magazine onto the table. “Which one of them gave you this smut? It was right in your gym bag.”
“It’s not smut-”
Ellidor lifted the magazine and read from its cover. “ ‘How to look like a siren for less than $25’ ‘Can you keep your man happy?’ ” He glanced at Catherine. “ ‘Ten sex secrets to drive him wild.’ ”
Catherine stared at her plate. “Well, that one’s worse than normal. It was last year’s Valentine’s issue. Cynthia gave it to me because there was this really cool haircut in it.”
“I brought you here to Westonbrook so that you’d be less tempted by the things that lead young women into trouble. Magazines like this are just the first step. From here, it’s an easy slide to boys, to drugs, to drinking.” Ellidor sighed. “Catherine, what would people think if they knew that the chaplain’s daughter was a slut?”
“I am not a slut,” she said, her voice pitched low. “And if they saw me reading Glamour, they’d think I was like any other fifteen-year-old girl.”
“That’s the problem,” Ellidor said, touching his daughter’s cheek. “You’re better than all of them.”
Catherine leaned into his palm. And thought, But what if I don’t want to be?
“Well,” Jack said, looking up from his seat as Catherine emerged from the locker room. “You look nice.”
It was an understatement. Dressed in a short black skirt and a tight sweater, she appeared nothing like the ragged scrapper who’d run up and down the field under his explicit orders until he was certain she’d collapse if asked to take another step. He hadn’t asked, for just that reason: If he’d wanted it, Catherine would have driven herself into the ground.
Jack closed the salt-and-pepper composition book he used to record notes on the team’s practice. “Your dad taking you out to dinner?”
Catherine smiled wryly. “On a weeknight? That’s got to be a sin.”
Jack had wondered more and more often how a prig like the Right Reverend Ellidor Marsh had managed to create a girl as vibrant as Catherine. He knew Catherine’s mother, a free spirit who didn’t fit the mold of church wife, had walked out on the family when Catherine was still a toddler. Maybe that was where her personality came from.
“I am going out to dinner,” Catherine admitted shyly. “But on a date.”
“Ah. Your father knows, of course.”
“Oh, absolutely.” Catherine glanced at Jack’s book. “You write about me in there?”
“You bet.”
“What do you write?”
“All my wicked little thoughts,” he joked. “And a few decent plays we might try every now and then.”
The door opened, and Catherine’s date entered. His eyes lit on Catherine as if she were a feast. “You ready?”
“Yeah.” Catherine slipped her arms into her coat. “ ’Night, Coach.” At the door, the boy very properly put his hand on the small of her back.
“Catherine,” Jack said, “can you come here for a moment?”