Pretty Little Touchdown

Prologue

The stadium lights turn everything into a stage.

I can feel thousands of eyes on the field, and even though I know, logically and rationally, that not a single pair is looking at me, my body doesn’t believe it. My body never believes it.

“Ready, Ash?” Melina’s voice cuts through the roar. She’s grinning at me from her spot two down the line, her blonde ponytail a perfect metronome, her waist about the width of one of my thighs.

I nod. Smile. The smile is muscle memory now. I practiced it in the bathroom mirror for a solid month before tryouts, until I could pull the corners of my mouth up without my eyes betraying me.

The trumpets blare. The band launches into the fight song and I launch with it. Arms up, sharp, snap, hit the position. Hold. Kick. The blue-and-gold skirt flares around my thighs and my brain immediately does the thing it always does: the fabric is riding up, your thighs look huge, everyone can see, everyone is watching.

They’re not. I know they’re not. The whole stadium is watching the field, where Ridgefield is lined up on our thirty-yard line, third and long, and the entire season, the entire qualifier is riding on the next play.

Kick. Turn. Clap-clap-hit.

A curl comes loose from my ponytail and sticks to the corner of my mouth. Dark brown against too-pink lip gloss. I flick it away without breaking form. Coach would murder me if I broke form.

In highschool, I was a hundred and eighty pounds and I ate lunch alone in a stairwell at Fairview High. Two years ago, I couldn’t have run the length of this sideline without stopping to gulp air. Two years ago, the closest I got to a stadium like this was watching from the couch while my mom told me, gently, that I had “such a pretty face.”

Now I’m here. At Wexford, of all places. Wexford, with its ivy-league screaming dorms and its need-blind admissions and a cheerleading squad that finishes top ten in the country every year without seeming to try. Now I’m five-foot-three and a hundred and eighteen pounds and I have a uniform with my last name stitched inside the collar and I still can’t stop tugging the hem of the skirt down every time I hit a hold.

Kick. Kick. Basket toss. Melina goes up, weightless, laughing, her legs slicing the air like she’s made of ribbon. I brace and catch and my arms burn and I think you shouldn’t have caught her, you’re going to drop the next one, everyone will see, everyone will know.....

The crowd erupts.

I whip around toward the field. Chase Callahan is scrambling out of the pocket, the Ridgefield line breaking around him like water around a stone. Six-foot-three, jaw razor sharp, hair the exact honey-gold of a beer commercial, the campus paper called him ‘Apollo in cleats’ last week and half the freshman girls printed it out and pinned it to their doors. He tucks the ball. Cuts left. There’s a linebacker in front of him and then somehow there isn’t, and Chase is running, actually running, and the whole stadium is watching a golden boy save a season and I am watching what I know is underneath the gold, and my heart forgets what it’s supposed to be doing.

Fifteen. Ten. Five.

Touchdown.

The stadium loses its mind. The band explodes. Melina is screaming next to me, her arms locked around my shoulders, and I’m screaming too, my voice raw and unrecognizable, and for one bright, weightless second I forget the skirt and the thighs and the mirror and the stairwell and all of it. I just am. I’m here. I’m part of this.

Chase spikes the ball. His teammates are already sprinting toward him, but he steps back from the pile, pulls off his helmet, and looks toward the sideline.

Looks toward me.

His hair is dark with sweat and there’s black paint smeared under his eyes, and every girl in a three-mile radius has fantasized about being on the receiving end of exactly this look. I have watched this boy on ESPN. I have watched this boy on the cover of the campus magazine. And I have spent every day since October trying very, very hard to make sure this boy never, ever looked at me.

He grins.

And winks.

The bottom drops out of my stomach so fast I nearly stumble.

Melina lets go of my shoulders very slowly. “Ash,” she says, in a voice I have never heard her use. ”Ash. Did he just-”

I can’t answer. My mouth won’t work. Around us the stadium is still shrieking, blue and gold shredding the air, and Chase Callahan is jogging off the field with his helmet swinging from his hand, the golden boy who just saved our season and every single person in this stadium thinks they know what that wink meant.

Only two of us know better.

And the very small, very old voice in my head, the one that used to whisper no one is looking at you, no one has ever looked at you, no one ever will, has gone completely, unnervingly quiet.

Even it knows better than to speak now.