Fighting For Normal

The crowd was louder than it had any right to be for a Thursday.

Soccer practice had let out early, which meant half the boys’ varsity team had wandered into Gym A still in their practice jerseys and slides, and they’d decided the best way to support women’s athletics was to scream every time the ball went over the net, no matter who hit it. The bleachers shook every time they stomped. Above them, the faded state banners from 2009 and 2014 swayed a little on their wires. The whole gym smelled like popcorn and floor wax and three hundred people’s body heat.

Twenty-three to twenty-two, fourth set. We were up two sets to one on Castle Ridge.

Roxie’s set came off her fingers high and tight to the antenna, and I was already moving. Left. Right-left. Arms back. I loaded into the floor, and the floor loaded back into me, and for one clean second I was nothing but air and timing and the Castle Ridge middle’s face as she realized she was late.

I hit it through her hands. The ball slammed down inside the ten-foot line.

Then I landed.

Left foot first, the way I always landed. The shock went up through my heel and my knee pad and settled deep in the middle of my thigh, in a spot that felt like it was inside the bone. A low, hot ache, like a bruise that went all the way down.

“SLOANE!” Maekynzie shrieked from the stands.

I jogged back to the service line. Normal jog. Completely normal jog. I rolled my right shoulder like that was the thing that hurt, because people understand shoulders.

Roxie slapped my hand as I passed. “You’re kind of feral tonight.”

“I’m focused.”

“Feral,” she said, approvingly.

I’d gotten good at deciding which kinds of pain counted. This one didn’t. It was a bone bruise. Courtney’s knee had caught my thigh on a block at practice last week, and Courtney had been diving on a bruised hip since August without complaining once. Pain was just information. You didn’t sit out because of information. You sat out, and the freshman who replaced you shanked three passes in a row, and your team lost a match it should have won, and that was on you.

So I didn’t sit out.

The friend group had the second row, dead center. Noelle was on her feet, all five foot four of her, waving a poster that said SLOANE’S ARM IS A FELONY in pink glitter. Maekynzie gasped at every rally like it was a plot twist. Emory pretended to watch the match and mostly watched Maekynzie. Tinsley sat on the end in a black Carhartt beanie, eating Takis like a girl who claimed she didn’t care about volleyball and hadn’t missed a home game since freshman year.

Uncle Jake, Chandler’s dad, was one row behind them, still in his work clothes, his badge clipped to his belt because he’d come straight from the station. He had a bag of popcorn he wasn’t sharing, and every time I touched the ball, he yelled “THAT’S MY BABY GIRL” loud enough for the refs to hear. It was humiliating. I would never in my life ask him to stop.

Down on the floor with the cheer squad was Tahni. Platinum ponytail so sleek it looked laminated. The second each chant ended, her phone came out of the waistband of her skirt, held sideways. She didn’t film anyone else. I’d noticed that three games ago and hadn’t been able to stop noticing it.

The gym doors banged open, and every head on the home side turned, because my brother had never once in his life entered a room at a normal volume.

Stetson was still in his practice gear, cleats untied and slapping the floor, a shin guard sticking out of his duffel bag. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “THAT’S MY SISTER! I WAS IN THE WOMB FIRST!”

“By three minutes,” I muttered.

Chandler came in behind him without yelling, because Chandler never yelled. Six feet of soccer player in a gray Essentials hoodie, sleeves shoved up, strawberry blond hair pushed back into the faux hawk he never actually styled. It just did that on its own when he ran his hands through it, which he did about every forty seconds. He dropped onto the bleacher next to Tinsley, right in front of his dad, and took a Taki out of her bag without looking. She let him. From Tinsley, that was basically a hug.

He looked at me once. Even from the service line, I could see his eyes, that clear, startling blue that made teachers forget what they were saying mid-sentence.

Then he looked down at the floor. At my feet.

My stomach flipped. I served into the net.

“IT’S FINE!” Emory yelled. “THE NET HAD IT COMING!”

Half the bleachers laughed, and so did I, a real snort I didn’t see coming.

“Shake it off, Sloane! Love the aggression!” Coach Mathieson clapped twice from the sideline. He’d never once said anything negative out loud, which was how you knew love the aggression meant what was that.

Castle Ridge sided out. Twenty-three all.

The ache had stopped being polite somewhere around the second set. It hummed while I stood in serve receive. My spandex felt tighter on my left leg than my right, which made no sense, so I decided it didn’t. I came down a little more right-footed every time and stuck the landing and pretended I meant it.

And every time I glanced up at the stands, Chandler was watching me. Elbows on his knees, hands laced together so tight the veins stood out along his forearms. Every time my left foot hit the floor, his whole body tensed, like he’d bitten down on something.

It wasn’t about me. Chandler watched everybody. When Stetson rolled his ankle last spring, Chandler watched him walk on it for a month.

That was what I told myself, anyway.

Courtney took the serve clean. The pass hung in the air, perfect. Roxie got under it without even glancing my way.

Twenty-four to twenty-three. Match point.

The soccer boys were on their feet. Noelle was standing on the bleacher with her poster over her head. Stetson was yelling something that was mostly my name with extra vowels. Down on the sideline, Tahni’s phone went up, and the camera found me before it found the court.

Left. Right-left. The takeoff was fine. The takeoff was always fine. I got up and saw their middle shading inside, the line wide open.

I hit it straight down the line so hard the line judge flinched.

The whistle blew.

Then I came down on my left leg, and the whole world went white at the edges for half a second.

Nobody saw, because the team was already on me. Roxie crashed into my side, Courtney jumped on my back, and somebody’s ponytail whipped me across the face. I was laughing, and my thigh was screaming, and I let both happen at once because there was nowhere else for either of them to go.

“FELONY!” Noelle howled. “ARREST HER!”

Over Roxie’s shoulder, I found Chandler in the stands.

He was on his feet, clapping with everybody else. He was the only one not smiling.

I made it to the locker room without limping. Mostly.

The trick was to walk fast, like you had somewhere to be. Nobody looks at your legs when you’re walking fast. They look at your face, and my face said great game, love you guys, see you tomorrow.

Inside, the locker room was chaos. Somebody’s speaker was blasting a song I’d heard nine hundred times this summer, and half the team was singing along badly. Jerseys were half off. Knee pads were peeled down around ankles. Courtney was standing on a bench doing a play-by-play of my last kill with a Gatorade bottle as a microphone.

I didn’t sit down. Sitting down meant getting up again.

I dry-swallowed two ibuprofen, showered so fast the water barely got warm, standing on my right leg, and pulled on black leggings and my oversized cream Bighorns hoodie without looking at anything below my waist. As if the thigh couldn’t hurt if I didn’t see it. The leggings dragged wrong over the front of it anyway.

I caught myself in the mirror by the door on the way out. Wet ponytail. Green eyes too bright, the gold flecks in them almost feverish under the fluorescent lights. Five foot seven, an outside hitter’s shoulders, a girl who had just won a match.

I looked fine.

“You coming to Java Junction?” Roxie called.

“Can’t. Homework.”

“Nerd.”

“Proud nerd,” I said, and got out of there before anybody could look at me too long.

The hallway was cold after the gym, all cinderblock and trophy cases and a fluorescent light that flickered every few seconds. Chandler was leaning against the wall across from the door.

There was a small dark birthmark on his collarbone, just visible at the neck of his hoodie, shaped a little like a thumbprint. I’d known it was there my whole life. I didn’t know why I noticed it now.

He was holding a blue gel ice pack from the trainer’s room, wrapped in a brown paper towel. He didn’t say good game or nice kill. He just held it out.

“Figured,” he said. One word, handed over like a pencil.

The back of my neck went hot. “I don’t need an ice pack,” I said, hitching my bag higher on my shoulder. “I need you to stop watching my legs.”

A laugh exploded from around the corner, loud enough to bounce off the cinderblock.

Stetson. Doubled over by the water fountain. The whole hallway smelled like the citrus body spray he thought hid the smell of grass and sweat. It didn’t. It made the hallway smell like an orange that had gone to soccer practice.

“Oh my God,” Stetson wheezed, his blue eyes watering. “Chandler. Bro.”

Chandler went red, starting at his collar and climbing all the way to the tips of his ears. “Your approach,” he said evenly, to a point somewhere past my left ear, “is sloppy. That’s what I was watching.”

But his thumb was pressing a slow dent into the paper towel, and when his eyes came back, they went to my left knee instead of my face.

“My approach is flawless.”

“My approach is flawless,” Stetson repeated in a high voice. “I’m putting that on a T-shirt.”

I should have taken the ice pack. Thanks, you’re sweet, bye. But if I took it, that meant there was something to ice.

My hand twitched toward it anyway. I hated that.

Chandler just waited, which was the most annoying thing about him. He was really, really good at waiting.

“Fine.” I grabbed it and shoved it in my bag. “Happy?”

“Thrilled,” he said, still red.

He was just being Chandler. The guy who noticed when your water bottle was empty and refilled it without asking. He took care of everybody. Tonight I happened to be the one limping.

The parking lot was lit in orange patches by lights that buzzed overhead. It was September, and the air had that thin, early-evening bite it gets when the sun drops behind the mountains, the Front Range a dark, jagged line past the football field lights. Every step on the asphalt sent a jolt up into the bone.

Tahni was leaning against her white Bronco two rows over, still in her cheer uniform, with Kleo and Gemma on either side of her, matching bows, matching expressions of mild boredom. Phone in her hand.

“Great game,” she said, in the voice she used for teachers. Then her pale blue eyes dropped to my leg.

I was limping. I’d run out of energy to fake it somewhere around the gym doors.

“Limping for attention now?” Tahni tilted her head. “Bold.”

Kleo and Gemma laughed in stereo.

I didn’t stop walking. “Filming for content now? Consistent.”

Her smile held, but her knuckles went white around the phone.

Stetson’s black Lexus was parked crooked across two spaces, because he’d gotten his license on Monday, the day after our sixteenth birthday, and hadn’t yet grasped the concept of lines. I climbed into the passenger seat on my right leg and pulled the door shut before anyone could watch me do it.

Across the lot, Chandler was standing by his Jeep with his keys in his hand, not getting in. Watching me.

This time, I couldn’t pretend it was my approach.

The drive home was loud. Stetson talked the whole way about soccer. The sprinklers coming on in the middle of the scrimmage. The header he’d scored off a corner kick, described three times, each version more heroic than the last. The senior Chandler had nutmegged so badly the guy sat down on the field and stayed there.

I stared out the window at the dark houses and porch lights sliding past and kept my left leg very still against the seat.

“You’re quiet,” he said, at the last light before our street.

“I’m tired. We played four sets.”

“Four sets and a felony,” he said, and turned the music back up.

Dad and Pops were at a firm dinner downtown, one of the partner things Dad had complained about all week and still couldn’t get out of. The porch light was on, but the house behind it was dark.

Pops had texted during the fourth set, clearly from under the table: SUNSHINE!!!!!! did we win?? tell me EVERYTHING 💛

And then, a minute later: how’s my girl feeling? tell me the truth.

I sent back a flexed arm emoji. He’d know it wasn’t an answer.

Bernard met us at the door, all fluffy white chaos, wagging so hard his whole back half swung. He shoved his face into my hand, and I rubbed his ears with my free one, the ice pack still cold in the other.

Then he dropped his nose to my left leg and sniffed. He took his time about it.

“Traitor,” I whispered.

Stetson went straight to the kitchen and started eating leftover birthday cake out of the container with a fork. The frosting still said HAPPY 16TH SLOANE & STETSON in blue and gold, most of it gone now, just 16TH SLOANE left on the corner nobody wanted.

I climbed the stairs. Fourteen of them. I’d never counted before.

On the ninth, my leg buckled. I caught the railing before Bernard could see.

I counted now.

In my room, I waited until Bernard was through the doorway, then shut the door and locked it, which I never did. I didn’t turn on the overhead light. I reached behind my headboard and clicked on the fairy lights instead, the warm white ones Noelle and I had strung across the wall in eighth grade, and the room went soft and gold.

I sat on the edge of my teal comforter and set the ice pack on my nightstand. Bernard hopped up and flopped down with his back against my hip.

Then I pulled my leggings down past my left knee.

At first, my leg looked normal. Then I compared it to my right one, and I saw it.

Halfway up the front of my thigh, it was bigger. No purple, no yellow. No bruise at all. Just more, as if the bone had grown a ridge that hadn’t been there before. In the fairy lights, the skin over it looked tight and shiny.

I put my palm flat on it.

It was hot. Hot like a mug straight out of the microwave, in one spot and nowhere else.

I pressed, a little.

My breath went out of me in a sound I’d never made before. Bernard’s head came up. His eyebrows pulled together, and he pushed his nose against my knee. Softly.

Bone bruises could swell. Probably. I’d never looked it up, because looking it up made it a thing you had to look up.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Chandler: You landed wrong on every kill in the third set.

The three dots appeared, then vanished. Then appeared again.

Chandler: How long?

I stared at it until the screen went dark.

I knew exactly how long. Since August. Since before school even started. I just didn’t know why he needed to know.

Down the hall, Stetson’s music thumped through the wall. I turned my phone over, pulled my leggings back up over my thigh, and left him on read.

Under the fabric, my leg throbbed in time with the bass.

Bernard shifted closer, his thick fur warm against my arm, and settled his chin across my ankle. On the nightstand, in the gold light, the ice pack sat in its paper towel, slowly going warm.