Chapter 10
Mireya
The ball hits the top corner, and the entire stadium loses its mind.
I hear twenty-five thousand people screaming something that sounds like my name, and the goosebumps hit so hard it takes me a moment to actually process what just happened.
Iris comes sprinting over with her arms wide open and slams into me from the side.
“Oh man, Guerrero, thank God you didn't listen to me. I took three defenders with me, and there was no room left for a decent pass!” she shouts in my ear. “If it hadn't gone in, Hades would've killed you twice. Now it's only once,” she adds, squeezing me hard.
Lucía joins us, grabs my face between her sweaty hands and shakes it. Park and Walsh arrive right after, and the four of us pile up against the corner flag.
When the opposing team goes to kick off from the center circle, I glance over toward the bench.
Diana is standing with her arms crossed, tablet tucked under her arm, jaw tight.
I can't tell if she's furious, surprised, or something in between.
She nods once toward the field, not directed at anyone in particular.
Iris decides it's for her, or maybe she just doesn't care either way, and pumps her fist back.
The north stand is still chanting my name, the same stand that used to throw every kind of insult at me every time I came to play at this stadium as a visitor.
“Did I tell you or did I tell you?” Tina whispers as she passes me, bumping my shoulder. “I can smell goals coming, I'm basically part witch,” she jokes.
Iris scores the winner in the ninety-second minute, a header from a corner. Pure luck, to be honest, but it counts the same. First official game of the season for the Seattle Emeralds.
Later, in the locker room, Tina and Jamie are dancing on a bench to reggaeton, Lucía is hugging Carter for reasons only the two of them understand. Castillo, the goalkeeper, sits in a corner with an ice pack on her knee, going over a play with Zoe.
Everything stops when Diana walks in.
“Three points. Good. Tomorrow we rest. Monday at ten. Iris, the first twenty minutes were awful, then pretty solid. You showed up when it counted, and that's what you ask of a striker.”
“Oh, Coach, thank you.”
“Castillo, the goal was partly on you. Guerrero.”
My stomach drops when I hear my name.
“We'll talk Monday.”
She gives each player a short line, less than two minutes with the full group, and leaves by saying we have a lot of work left to do.
The music doesn't go back up until she's out the door.
Iris sits next to me and pulls my neck into the crook of her arm, pressing me against her.
“Guerrero, deep down Hades is pleased with you. She's tough, but she's fair. She knows you made the right call, even if you didn't stick to the system.”
**
Through the month of March, the Tuesday individual video sessions are almost all the same. Folder open, whiteboard, red marker for drawing a lot of lines, and two water bottles; one for me, one for her.
Toward the end of the month, she stops and looks at a small tattoo on my forearm I just got, one I'd been waiting two years to get. I tell her it's a tribute to my father. She nods and goes back to the session. No questions.
In one of the April sessions, I knock my water bottle off the table, and it soaks her notebook. We both jump at the same time to try to fix things, and our hands touch. Just a second or two, my hand over hers. She looks up and finds my eyes. I pull my hand back, maybe a little too fast.
“God, sorry, Diana.”
It's the first time I've called her Diana. Until now it was always “Coach,” and with the rest of the team, Hades. Never Diana, that name I'd kept only for my own thoughts.
In the first session of May, she asks about the tattoo I got a month and a half ago.
“What does that mean, what you got tattooed?” she says, just as I'm pushing back from the table to leave.
“Morrina. It's like nostalgia: missing something you can't quite name, but it includes your family and your home. My father was born in Mexico, though he was of Galician descent. When the family moved to the United States, he always used that word.”
She nods and smiles slightly. Again, no comment.
The sessions have started running longer, and we've started talking about more personal things.
About how my father built Aura Valley from nothing, about my mother's expectations when she coached me, about her daughters, even about Lauren, her ex-wife.
Neither of us moves away anymore when our knees brush under the table.
“Saudade,” she murmurs one day in early June, tracing the tattoo on my forearm with the tips of her fingers.
“What?”
“One of my grandmothers was from Portugal, though she came to Seattle when she was sixteen. It means the same thing as morrina,” she explains.
She slides her fingers over my tattoo again and leaves me literally shaking.
“Oh man, does that room have really bad wifi or something?” Iris jokes when she sees me come out. “Because you've been in there for three hours.”
“We were going over plays.”
“Sure, yeah. I also lock myself in with Paula for hours, we just don't call it going over plays,” she says, narrowing her eyes.
The rest of June, none of the sessions runs under three hours. The conversations get much more natural, and the accidental contact keeps adding up, and God, it feels so good.
**
“Are you pissed because Hades put you on the bench in the last game?” Iris asks out of nowhere at the first training session back from Houston.
She drops down beside me to tie her cleats. She always does the left one first. Three knots per cleat, one of her many superstitions, I'd guess.
“She's got me a little confused,” I admit.
“Sometimes she's really warm with me, in the individual video sessions she tells me she's very happy with my performance, we talk about all kinds of things, she can even be funny…
and don't make a face, because nothing you're imagining is happening in there, we just talk,” I warn her, catching her expression.
“Right, and then she benches you for Nika Wallace, like in the last game.”
“Exactly. I don't get it.”
“Okay, Guerrero, I'm going to tell you something I don't tell anyone.”
“I'm not in the mood to keep secrets this morning, Iris, so don't tell me if it's something I'll have to sit on.”
“Nah, I'm telling you because you're closest to me right now. Look, Hades benched me a million times in my first years at this club. A million,” she repeats.
“And at first I wanted to kill her, I swear.
I thought it was personal, that she didn't like me because I talked too much and liked going out.
That she was a bitter woman taking it out on me because she couldn't take it out on her ex. I thought about it constantly; I had poor Zoe absolutely exhausted on that subject.”
“Okay, are you going anywhere with this?”
“So impatient! The thing is, one day Ethan said something to me. It was six years ago, on a bus after a game in San Diego. He told me Hades benched me because she knew that if she did it, I'd get fired up and play better. And that that, deep down, was her way of caring about me.”
“He said it like that?” I ask, puzzled.
“Well, a bit drier, but same idea. It took me a whole season to forgive Hades for the minutes she'd stolen from me, and another two to thank her for stealing them, because without those minutes on the bench I wouldn't have a few top scorer trophies,” she admits.
“That's easy to say now that you're always in the starting lineup,” I say, raising my eyebrows.
“I know, but back then I'd go home and spend two days turning over in my head why she'd taken me off in the seventieth minute. Now, if she does it, Wesley draws me a green frog; it's this thing we have, and by ten at night I've already forgotten about the game. You know what I'm saying, Guerrero?”
“You want me to ask Wes to draw me a green frog?”
“No, damn it. It's an example. I mix things up when I talk sometimes.
It doesn't matter, that's just how I am.
The question isn't whether Hades benched you for one game. The question is why that bothers you so much more than it should,” she says, standing up fast and starting to whistle an old tune.
When we go out to the field, it's raining. I still haven't quite gotten used to Seattle's drizzle.
“Scrimmage. Fifteen minutes, small-sided. Red vests against yellow vests.”
Diana reads out the teams. I get a red vest alongside Iris, Zoe, two defenders, and the backup goalkeeper. Lucía gets yellow, and so does Nika Wallace and Castillo.
“Oh, we're the good guys, did you see that?” Iris whispers, leaning toward us.
“I want to see the whole team defend with intensity!” Hades shouts. “Forwards included.”
The moment the whistle goes, we go all out, because with Iris there's no other option.
Even in a training scrimmage, if we don't win, she'll be in a mood for the rest of the day.
Two minutes in, she's already tried to take on Carter twice, and at four minutes she buries a shot from the edge of the box that she celebrates with as much joy as if she'd just scored in the playoffs.
A little while later, Walsh plays me a pass between the lines. I receive it with my back to goal, three-quarter field, turn right, and feel the impact before I understand what's happening.
Nika goes in hard, studs first, sliding across the wet grass and catching my standing leg. I hear a small, dry crack; the sound of a toothpick snapping between someone's fingers.
I go down sideways, the wet grass against my cheek. Nika bends over me, pale, apologizing over and over.
“Don't move. Tessa's already coming,” Diana says, kneeling beside me and brushing a strand of hair off my face. “Where does it hurt? Ankle, knee?”
“Ankle,” I breathe, wincing.
“Did you hear a crack?”
I nod.
Diana closes her eyes for a full second, and when she opens them, her gaze gives me the same thing it did on that Florida terrace at dawn.
In front of me, Iris crouches with her hands hanging between her knees, her eyes moving back and forth between us. And right then it hits me clearly: the question Iris asked me in the locker room just over an hour ago.
Why it matters so much more than it should that Diana puts me on the bench.