24. Kodi
CHAPTER 24
“Again!” Phloot-phloot!
“Seriously?” Ginger groans. “My shift starts in twenty minutes, Kodi, what the hell?”
“Yeah, the sun set half an hour ago!”
“We’re not leaving this park until everyone sinks three in a row!” I shout back. Beside me, Lily runs up and crouches like she’s tying her shoe.
“Uh, Kodi?” She mutters. “Don’t you think you’re going a bit too hard here? We just won a match.”
Phloot-phloot!
I watch the team gather the bean bags at each of their practice fields for another round. I’m still waiting on Piper and Mr. Landon to land their three bags. Once they get them in, we can all go home.
Seriously. Don’t they realize I also don’t like staying out til 9:00 on a weeknight? I’ve got work in the morning, too. I had a long day of paperwork and bartering, and I’m still committed to practice.
But everyone’s aim could use a little work. We used to do these kinds of drills all the time back in high school.
“More is not better. Better is better.”
Brian’s words ring in my head, but I shake them away. These are good exercises, and practice breeds results.
“Lily, you were on the JV basketball team. Didn’t Coach Kyle run layup drills exactly like this all the time?”
“Yeah, well, first of all, it helps when you can see the fucking basket,” she hisses, wheezing in between words. “It’s dark out. We can hardly make out the difference between the red and blue bags anymore. Seriously, Kodi, it’s a Tuesday night. Call the damn practice.”
Sigh. Phloot-phloot! “Alright, everybody, good enough. Thanks for your hard work out there, today, and you two–” I gesture to Piper and Mr. Landon, “Take a set home with you to run drills before the weekend. I’ll see you all Friday.”
“Finally,” D’Shawn says, rubbing his back. “I need my heating pad after all that running.”
“You can say that again,” Delilah and Jonah say in unison. Then, “Jinx!”
“If I had class tomorrow, I’d be showing a movie.” Finn says. D’Shawn gives a tired chuckle.
“How exactly does that work in gym class?”
Their voices fade, and I can just barely make out Finn saying something about “the miracle of life”. As Callie runs up to gather cones with Lily and me, I hear a few extra grumbles from the other players heading to their cars. Ginger in particular shoots me a nasty glare as she tightens her ponytail on her way out of the park. Lily narrows her eyes at her in return, but I shrug it off. A little animosity towards the captain is totally normal. They’ll all adjust their tune once we win the championship.
I’m a little bit slower gathering up all the bags and cones this time, trying to inconspicuously bend and lift the way Brian advised me to. It makes me feel ridiculous, hugging each cone to my chest before straightening my legs. It does put less stress on my joints, but it slows down the process.
I try not to think too much about Brian and our awkward dinner while I walk from cone to cone. Even though I’m sure I’m doing the right thing by checking my feelings around him, I can’t deny that I’d been entertaining the fantasy that I could have tried to have something more with the attractive Doctor after my talk with Lily the other night.
There goes any chance of sleeping with him to get these…feelings out of my system.
I know in my heart that getting too emotionally involved with Brian would be a bad idea. It would completely fuck up the plan we’ve made, and I’m not about to sacrifice my shot at fixing my knee by letting things between him and me get tangled.
Lily might think I’m in love with the guy, but that’s silly. “Love” isn’t getting tummy tingles or spending hours trying to hash out what a person’s eye color is. Those feelings, those distractions–they’re just hormones. Lust.
And while I may not totally trust Lily to tell the difference, I do believe she’s got the right idea about one thing: I need to get these distractions out of my system.
I just need to figure out how.
Lily and Callie have already moved on to the remaining practice boards while I’m still gathering my final cones.
“Long day,” Callie sighs, breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” Lily agrees. “Woulda been nice to get home before midnight.”
“It’s not even ten yet.” I roll my eyes. “Why is everyone such a wimp all of the sudden?”
“Why are you such a hardass all of the sudden?” Lily snaps back. Callie gasps.
I rear my head in surprise. That was a little harsh, even for Lily’s normally brash attitude. “Is something wrong, Lil?”
She shakes her head. “It’s just that…” She looks at Callie, whose eyes widen. Then she seems to change her mind. “Nevermind.”
“What?” I ask. I look between the two of them. They’re hiding something.
“Kodi, you know that we have a blast at practice, right?” Callie smiles at me, but I can feel a “but” coming. I narrow my eyes.
“Uh-huh…?”
“A few folks are tossing around the idea of quitting the team.”
I stare at Lily, who refuses to meet my eyes, despite the fact that she just dropped a bombshell in the middle of the park.
“What?” I shout. Jumping at my own volume and glancing around to make sure I didn’t cause a fuss, I compose myself. “And you didn’t think to tell me this last night??”
“I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks!” Lily throws her hands up in the air. “Why do you think I keep telling you to take it easy?”
“Who wants to quit?” I ask angrily, changing the subject.
“No one in particular just yet,” Callie tries to reassure me. “It’s more of a vague collective concept right now.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think, Kodi? We’re exhausted!” Lily grabs the stack of cones from me and throws them in my trunk. “You’re too hard on everyone.”
“Any winning team–”
“Enough with that!” She slams the hatch closed. “We’re already a winning team! We don’t need to drill fucking cornhole, Kodi. It’s a stupid lawn game!”
“It’s our town’s pastime!”
“Which is kinda weird, right?” Callie chimes in nervously. I think she’s trying to lighten the mood, but Lily and I are currently staring daggers at each other, and she hasn’t been in town long enough to realize just how heated the two of us can get when we start arguing. “I mean, I’d never even heard of competitive cornhole before I moved here–”
“You need to let it fucking go, Kodi.”
I freeze. Callie’s eyes dart nervously between me and Lily, as if she realizes that this fight goes back way beyond when she lived in Tuft Swallow.
“This is about making up for States, isn’t it? That’s why you’re out here like Coach, drilling us for perfection. Doing to us what he did to you. Because this is your chance to change the outcome.”
I feel the muscles in my jaw twitch. Dammit. When she says it like that, it just sounds stupid.
And I’m not. Stupid.
“I said I wasn’t ready to talk about that yet, Lily.”
“Well, that’s too fucking bad, girl. Because it isn’t just your problem anymore. You’re making it everyone’s problem. And I love you, but I’m not willing to let you torture me just because you haven’t dealt with your trauma.”
“What trauma?” I’m shouting at her now, sick of this same line she keeps shoving in my face. Telling me I was abused, for Pete’s sake. I wasn’t abused. I worked hard. I trained. Just like I always have.
And then Brian trying to feed me all that crap about how hard it is to recover. I know how hard it is to recover. I’m not afraid of hard work. I never have been.
As the team pitcher back in high school, I worked harder than everyone to drill plays and throws with Coach. To him, no game was good enough but the perfect game. And he was right: for me to get a scholarship? To attract the pros? I needed us to win. And that’s all on the pitcher–knowing how to judge each batter and sink each pitch to strike out every last one.
So I’d stay late. Drill until dark. Night after night. It’s just what I had to do.
“Your obsession with perfection. With needing to be the best. Pitching the perfect game.” She uses air quotes around “perfect”. “But you can’t do that in softball anymore, so now you’ve decided to do it with cornhole.”
“Don’t be stupid, Lily. There’s no such thing as a perfect game in cornhole.”
“No, but three sinks in a row every turn would be pretty close, wouldn’t it?” She shoots back.
“Okay, guys, why don’t you take a breather. I have a feeling this is getting into some testy territory.”
Both of us look up at Callie, and I see the confused and slightly worried look on her face. I shake my head.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Just a stupid thing from high school.”
“It wasn’t stupid to you,” Lily says. “You didn’t lock yourself in your bedroom for three months straight because you thought a perfect game was stupid, Kodi. Coach had you–”
“Enough.”
I don’t raise my voice this time. I don’t even make an angry face. Because suddenly, all of that anger and fight I was feeling has leaked out of me. Now? Now I’m just tired. Callie’s right. This isn’t going anywhere. Even if…
No. Not here. You’re not going to solve anything by cracking open those old wounds.
I just want to go home, to my bed, where I can be alone without Brian’s or Callie’s or Lily’s worried eyes on me anymore.
“Thanks for helping me pack up, and warning me about the team. I’ll–I’ll think about what you said.”
And then I elbow past them, climb into the driver’s seat, and peel away, avoiding their faces in the rearview.