Chapter 9 #2
I finished with a rustle of my poms and a big front kick.
“Gooooo team!”
Then I whooped and clapped like the high school squad always did when they finished a routine, the crowd screaming along with them.
But no one joined in.
Mike’s teammates and supporters were staring in silent shock.
I distinctly heard, “What the fuck?”
Then someone started laughing. As the laughter gained the momentum the cheering was supposed to, I stood there, confused. Tanz cupped a hand around her mouth and gave a whoop, but she was also laughing.
Cheeks flaming, I slunk back to the sidelines.
“Was that not good?” I whispered to Tanz.
“Good?” She was barely able to breathe through her laughter. “Definitely not. But it was amazing. Best thing I’ve ever seen.”
I looked around. People were positively howling. The captain of Mike’s team was doubled over; she was laughing so hard.
“That’s good,” I said weakly. “I’m glad it made people laugh.”
“Is this an American thing?” Tanz asked when she could speak again. “Do people always cheer at social sports?”
“No,” I said, even though I had no idea because I hadn’t been to a sport thing… ever. But I didn’t want to take my whole country down with me. “I guess it’s a me thing.”
I tried to say something to Mike—maybe sorry? Or did my ass look cute when I twirled? —but he was glaring at someone over my head. He made a slashing motion over his neck, and when I whirled around, a group of guys in their rugby uniforms were sniggering.
The whistle blew again, and Mike ran back out onto the field. The tips of his ears were bright red, so he must have been very angry with me for embarrassing him in front of his friends.
Misery settled in my gut, and I fought the urge to run back to Kevin’s car.
But if I was going to convince people I was in on the joke, I couldn’t flee.
I gritted my teeth and laughed along, taking it on the chin as best I could.
One of the supporters clapped me on the shoulder, and another said she hadn’t laughed like that since she quit drinking.
Which was a strange thing to say, but I inferred it was a compliment.
A few people asked me about American sports, and a few more about the cheerleading outfit I’d made.
When I finished my coffee, someone refilled it from their thermos and gave me a cookie they’d made to go with it.
During the first half of the game, only Tanz had spoken to me. Now, everyone was talking to me, even if it was to make fun of me.
Somehow being the butt of the joke had broken the ice.
New Zealand was weird. When I worked in fashion in New York, being celebrated was a sign of fitting in.
If you worked hard and stood out, you got recognition.
That was literally what success was. Here, everything was the opposite.
Getting teased was how you fit in, and fitting in was how you succeeded.
It was a complete mindfuck. I needed someone smarter than me to dissect all this—although, probably, one of my mom’s cultural anthropology colleagues already had.
If I’d raised this topic at one of Mom’s famous dinner parties, it likely would have sparked the most interest from her about anything I’d ever had to say.
The realization made the teasing infinitely easier to bear.
Turned out, enduring negativity was a completely different experience when it wasn’t malicious. The delineation was now very clear to me.
For example, Tanz saying before she tossed me a water, “Lyssa, are you ready? Okay!” was acceptable mockery.
Comments about killing my cat were not.
Thinking about that comment again made me want to cry.
I blinked quickly, not wanting any of the Woodville people thinking it was due to their teasing.
I knew as surely as I knew how to steam organza that tears would take me back to square one with them, and it was nice to feel like part of the group.
The sad truth was I had hundreds of thousands of followers but only one friend.
I threw myself into the Kiwis’ teasing and talked to as many people as I could. I completely lost track of the game, and I even forgot to stare at Mike’s thighs—that’s how important belonging was to me.
When the full-time whistle blew, I didn’t hear it, because I was sitting on the now-dry grass with Lia, who ran the Woodville bakery, showing her the stitch I’d used on my pom-poms to make the chiffon fluffy.
For noise, I’d padded the strands out with some torn up pages of Vogue —not my first choice of magazine to massacre, but it was the only one I traveled with, and it was all for the cause.
Lia had taken sewing class in high school and was thinking of getting back into it as a hobby.
She showed me some of the images of what she wanted to make, and I promised to send her some of my beginner tutorials.
A shadow fell over us. “Lyssa, are you ready to go?” Mike asked.
He had grass stains all over his uniform, and my face was perfectly level with the apex of his shorts.
I looked down, for modesty, but that was hardly better.
His thighs were indecent at close range like this.
The thick lumps of muscle over his knees were kind of shaped like a dolphin’s nose.
No one had legs like this in the fashion world.
I had trouble pulling my eyes up to see his expression.
Not that I needed to have bothered. He was very carefully keeping his face blank.
“Sure,” I replied. “I don’t have a cheer prepared for the end of the game, but if you want, I can repeat the halftime one?—”
“It’s all good,” he said quickly. “Once was enough.”
One of Mike’s teammates came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder.
I recognized the tall white guy from the café on my first day in Woodville.
His mousy brown hair was somehow still perfectly styled, even after all the running around the players had been doing.
He was an objectively pretty man save for his expression, which was decidedly giving me the ick.
“Hey, Mikey! Good game, bro!” Then he mimicked, “ With Mike on our team, we can’t go wrong! ”
This teasing did have malice. I was an expert at recognizing it.
“Shut up, Oz,” Mike said. “Or I’ll sock you one.”
“I knew you two were boning.” Oz turned to his other teammates. “Didn’t I tell you they were boning?”
“He did say that,” one of the other men said, almost apologetically.
“I knew the deal the minute I saw you two together in Levitate. You don’t need to play it cool, Mikey, I get it.” He reached out and ruffled Mike’s hair. “After fucking your way through town, you had to start importing pussy.”
Mike moved like a viper. One of his fists shot out and gripped a fistful of the guy’s shirt. The other plowed directly into Oz’s face.
Oz’s head snapped back and he stumbled, his hand flying up to his cheek. Blood welled under his fingers and slid down his hand.
“ What the fuck, Mike !”
“Oops.” Mike shook out his fingers.
“You might have broken my nose!”
“I warned you.”
I was something of an expert on noses, given I was on my second. “It doesn’t sound broken,” I offered, which made Tanz snicker even though I was trying to be helpful.
Eloise tossed a wad of paper napkins to Oz, which he grudgingly mopped his bloody face with.
“Either say sorry now, Oz,” she said calmly, “or keep being a little bitch and I’ll hit you too.”
Oz’s eyes flicked from Mike to Eloise. Then reluctantly to me.
He mumbled something that barely resembled an apology, but I nodded and smiled.
With one last scowl at Mike, he turned on his heel.
No one said anything as Oz got in his car and pummeled his steering wheel.
We couldn’t hear his stream of profanity from here, but we could see it.
He dragged another napkin over his face, then threw the bloody wad out the window and reversed out of the parking lot.
“What a prick,” Tanz said.
“?‘A cream-faced loon,’?” I agreed.
Eloise burst into laughter. “Yeah, that.”
“Hi, by the way.” I turned to her. “I’m Lyssa.”
She grinned. “Call me Lou.”
“As nice as it’d be to stay and chat with you gals,” Mike drawled.
“I’m covered in mud. And Oz’s blood. Come on, Lyss, let’s go home.
” He grabbed my camping chair, collapsed it with a single firm thrust, and swung it over his shoulder.
“Teamies, see you on the battlefield next week. If anyone sees Oz before I do, remind him that he is, as Lou says, a little bitch.”
The other mud-splattered players and their thermos-clutching supporters waved.
When we got close to the cars, Mike’s dad stuck his head through his window. “Did you have to punch him?”
“Yeah,” Mike replied, tossing my chair in the back of his truck, which was parked next to Kev’s electric car.
“Did he say something about your sister’s job, again?”
“No.”
Kevin looked like he felt he should press, but his heart wasn’t in it. They started discussing a café supplier instead, and my mind wandered.
This whole day—actually, this whole Woodville experience—felt surreal.
Mike had made sure I had a chair and a coat, and Kev had fixed me a hot drink, and they were both determined I should never need a ride anywhere.
Caregiving like this seemed to come naturally to both of them.
I was a proud New Yorker, and I should have been chafing at this loss of independence, as Caroline had when she lived here.
But I wasn’t. I loved it. It made me feel cosseted. Special.
I always acted like I was special, it was part of my brand, but now other people were acting that way too. It was healing something in me that I hadn’t realized was broken.
Mike’s particular brand of aggressive caregiving was especially appealing to me.
I’d never had someone stick up for me like that.
What Oz had said wasn’t even that bad; I read worse about myself on a daily basis.
Yet Mike had swung without hesitation, and there wasn’t a whiff of regret about him now.
It made me feel giddy, the same way I’d felt in elementary school when I used to hang upside down from the monkey bars. This was the same feeling, except also sweaty and a bit breathless.
I watched Mike gesture as he said something passionately to Kev.
His dad handed him a water bottle to rinse off his hands.
In my mind, this all played out in slow motion, like he was doing a red carpet Glambot.
Water ran down his hands in rivulets, streaming to the ground.
He finished rinsing them, then dragged a hand through his hair.
The knuckles on his right hand were red around the peaks, and there was a random cut on his forearm.
Mike’s hands were craggy . There was no better word for it.
Other than sexy.
Craggy and sexy, sexy and craggy. The adjectives looped in my head.
To distract myself, I buckled myself into the passenger side of Mike’s truck.
Then I pulled out my phone, propping it on the dashboard to take a few fit selfies and a video of myself lip-synching to something popular.
Usually I’d regale my audience with the story of my cheer embarrassment and use it to build rapport with anyone who’d ever made themselves vulnerable by going out on a limb and getting humiliated.
Embarrassment was a useful and relatable tool for an influencer—in general, we were quite an unrelatable pack.
As influencer culture grew (and influencer fatigue grew), it was getting harder and harder to build authentic rapport, so universal levers like humiliation were valuable.
Which was all to say: I should have shared my experience on the field of being humbled.
But I didn’t.
While I knew how to shape situations like this to my advantage online, being othered always stung, and I wanted to keep my stings to myself these days.
Instead, I posted my outfit content with a fun little caption about on-field playing and sideline slaying.
Comments and messages immediately started rolling in.
Some were hateful, riding for Paul, which I deleted quickly. But there were nice ones too.
Some of my eagle-eyed followers noticed the lack of a steering wheel in front of me and wanted to know who was driving. This made me realize there was a whole passenger princess angle I could tap into here.
Mike’s words from earlier popped into my head.
You’ve never had it rough, have you, Princess?
The potential made me feel giddy.
I’d thought the answer to the problem of the internet thinking I wasn’t tempting enough for a man to behave badly over me was to become sexier, but I was realizing now I didn’t even have to do that. I could just imply I was a hot commodity.
Mike climbed in his truck and we waved goodbye to his dad. I watched with assessing eyes as he took the vehicle out of park and started the engine. It had nothing to do with his sexy, craggy Glambot hands. Not at all. I was framing content . Just content.
“Can I video you changing gears?” I asked as we drove onto the main road.
“Why?”
“It’s a passenger princess thing.”
“A what?”
“You know. Gorgeous, gorgeous girls get driven around. They have perfect nails on fingers they never lift. Their partner does everything for them because they’re the princess.”
“Okay…?” he said slowly, and he seemed to take his time changing gear as he thought. “So it’s nothing to do with how you can’t stop staring at my hands?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “And no I wasn’t. This is just about content.”
The sound he made in his throat said he was unconvinced, but once we pulled onto the main road, which we’d be on for about twenty minutes before getting back home to Woodville, he agreed that I could film him.
“Just my hands. Not my face, and no crotch shots.”
“I wasn’t going to?—”
“Because if it’s dick pics you’re after, I want better lighting.”
“Calm down, Mike,” I said, trying to sound wry instead of flustered. “I promise not to take pictures of your dick and post them on the internet.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t, just don’t post them for free . No free feet and no free peen, capisce?”
“Capisce.”
He was still wearing his little white rugby shorts, and he drove with his legs splayed. We might joke, but there was genuinely a chance that if I looked for it, I would be able to see the outline of his dick.
I had to stop trying to see it. That way lay danger.
“Okay, start your camera,” Mike said.
He didn’t need to tell me twice.
This was for content purposes, I told myself. Not perving, just content.
If I kept telling myself that, it might start to feel true.