25. Brian
CHAPTER 25
Iwatch Kodi storm off to her car from my vantage point behind the maple trees, gobsmacked.
What the hell, Kodi?
Lily and Callie, her two friends, are also staring at her retreating form, looking like they’re at a total loss for what to do.
“Should I know something about that?”
I approach them, abandoning the copse of trees, and they jump at the sound of my voice. Lily’s curly red ponytail swings as she turns her head to me and plasters on a smile. “Brian! Hi! What are you doing here?”
“I came out to watch practice, see what all the fuss is about.” I don’t tell her that I wanted to see for myself why the guys at the gym had been complaining. Now that I have, I don’t blame them for feeling a little cold toward Captain Kodi. I'm even a little frightened by what I just saw. “What’s wrong with Kodi?”
“Don’t worry about her, she’s just had a hard day–”
“Oh I know all about her day. She was just at my place before practice,” I interrupt. Lily’s face falls, but Callie smiles.
“Oh! Did you two have a date?”
I grimace. Not quite. “I made her dinner. What’s this about her obsession with the perfect game?”
“Oh, that?” Lily laughs nervously. “That’s nothing. Just some silly little thing from high school…”
She trails off, and then the pieces start to come together.
Her obsession with perfection. Her injury.
As someone who’s done martial arts for most of their life, I’ve seen fighters with an obsession with winning. Usually, it’s that kind of all-or-nothing attitude that leads to injuries. One of the main reasons I decided to go to chiropractic school was so I could help people actually recover from those defeats.
But often, in cases like that, it’s just as much a mental game as it is physical. Kodi didn’t just lose a game or a scholarship when she tore her ACL. She lost her sense of self.
It’s hard to believe that someone as confident and smart as her would succumb to those kinds of feelings, but maybe that’s part of her coping mechanism. She fell back on other talents, which was enough to make her seem okay to everyone around her, but now that she’s back in competition mode she’s reverting back to bad habits.
Something tells me Dr. Cratchet never exactly gave Kodi the kind of support and instruction she needed to learn any of that after her surgery. It seems like nobody in Tuft Swallow did.
Instead, she took on her recovery alone. Worked herself to exhaustion, got hurt, and was left out to dry when she wasn’t a champion anymore.
No wonder she shut down so fast before dinner. When I tried to let her know I understood. No one in her life has ever understood, and she still hasn’t healed.
Not just physically. Emotionally.
“How can I help?”
Callie and Lily stare blankly at me, taken aback by my comment, which I realize now probably seems a little out of left field. But then the redhead gets a gleam in her eye and looks me up and down appraisingly.
Uh-oh. I don’t like that look.
“I think I know something that might help her open up a little.”
She crosses her arms, taps her finger to her chin, and her lips curl up into a smile that I can only describe as ‘Grinch-like.’ Callie looks between the two of us, and a lightbulb goes off above her head. Meanwhile, my stomach is sinking further and further into my knees with every tap of her pointer finger.
I have a feeling I’m going to regret this.