2. — run it out.
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Staten Island, New York
Francesca Gallo, Ashbourne Academy
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“What was that?”
The shout breezed past an indifferent ear as Francesca jogged beyond the white boundary line of the soccer field. She didn’t even wait to see the red card that had already been shoved at her face get dropped at the runners of her coach. The man’s face turned the color of Sissy’s garden-grown beets.
“What in the hell was that, Frankie?!” Coach Denadei roared louder.
“Eight-minute penalty—Ashbourne Flyers! Penalty shot to the Challengers!”
“Eight minutes! Eight?” Coach continued to rant while Frankie spit out her mouthguard, full of saliva and blood, into the trash bin next to the team’s bench.
She refused to meet the gazes of her teammates, knowing she had given the opposing team an opportunity to catch up the couple of point difference in the game that would determine whether they placed in the upcoming finals.
“There’ll be thirty seconds left on the clock when I get her back out on the field, goddammit! ”
Someone cleared their throat.
The ref repeated the penalty, adding simply, “The girl is still spitting out mud and grass, man. You’re lucky I gave her another thirty seconds to try me one more time.”
“Uh, Coach,” someone said from somewhere behind Frankie’s retreating form. How many noticed her leaving the scene of the crime behind? It didn’t matter to her. When the game hit the three-quarter mark on the clock, and she knew her father wouldn’t show up, Frankie stopped caring about any of it.
How they finished. Tournament qualifiers. Highest goal count of her high school career. A record-breaking year for their district; the promise of plaques and scholarships that she wouldn’t take because she didn’t need them.
It didn’t matter, then, and it hurt to admit why.
Maybe that was why when the tall, blonde bitch on the Raiders side asked which university Frankie’s dad had paid for her to attend the following year, after the girl had already elbowed her in the mouth once and got away with it, she let that shit rip.
If the girl’s veneers made it through the weight of Frankie’s cleat shoving her head deeper into the turf, then so be it.
“Frankie! Francesca, where are you going?” Coach yelled behind her. “We need to have a conversation about this!”
She just tossed the white gym bag she had left on a rear bench over her shoulder without a look back. Thirty seconds didn’t matter, either. She was starting to think that none of this did at all.
The swing of an exit gate followed the last shout of her coach slapping at her back like the wind caused by her speed cutting further away from the soccer field.
She reached the parking lot and promptly came up with another problem. Being hopeful that her dad would show up, she didn’t consider how she would get home. The rose-gold Supra, her sweet-sixteen present, sat at home because she grabbed a ride to school in her boyfriend’s Hummer.
He still waited in the parking lot for her. James Perry wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to watch his girlfriend play the best games of her life, he only cared about the benefits that came after the win.
“What the fuck?” he asked her, stepping off his bumper as she closed in.
“I got kicked out the game,” she lied. “Give me a ride home, would you?”
“So, no daddy, then?”
Ew. She couldn’t explain how James managed to pick up on her daddy issues from the start. Like it had a smell, or something.
“Are you gonna give me a ride, or what?”
“Are you gonna be pissed if I go to a party at Cliff’s later?” James asked, cocking a brow in a way that he thought was challenging. To those who shared his shallow personality, it probably seemed that way.
Frankie couldn’t be scared. This boy didn’t touch her fears.
“I don’t care what you do,” she told him. “I just want to go home.”
“Hey! Frankie, get back here, I am not done speaking to you!”
The sudden shouts had Frankie giving James a pointed look. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Shit, what’d you do?” James asked, eyeing the encroaching coach with fury in his every step.
“Nothing. I mean, I just showed someone how their outside can be just as ugly as their inside.”
An awkward laugh answered her back.
“Let’s go,” she muttered.
Coach had caught up fast, and she couldn’t have the kind of conversation needed to explain her earlier actions. She knew her father wouldn’t show and still hoped he would. A very raw nerve found its way between some idiot’s teeth, and she let it get to her.
Because yeah, her father would hang the stars for her, but he couldn’t manage to show up to a fucking soccer game once a week. What could she tell Coach? The truth hurt worse than a lie?
···
“Are you ever gonna invite me in?” James asked. “We’ve been dating three months, and I haven’t even seen the inside of your foyer.”
Frankie stayed quiet. Was foyer the right word for the marble water fountain and winding staircase that greeted guests into her family’s estate? It didn’t matter. Her father had rules.
“Not yet,” she eventually replied.
James pulled a face, annoyance pushing out his tsk from between pouting lips. Maybe he thought she didn’t hear or see it as she pulled her dirty soccer jersey off to replace it with a hoodie.
“So, when?” he returned.
“When my father’s dead.”
That shut him up with an audible snap of his jaws. “You’re joking, right? You can’t have anyone over? Or just—”
“Just you.”
Actually, her father had a list of people who could and could not enter their property from the security gate, and even a second more extensive list at the gated community where their estate had been initially developed.
Something else her family owned, not that James had any clue about that side of her life.
Not giving him time to think her comment over before she removed herself from the conversation altogether, Frankie exited the Hummer and slammed the door. She stood up on the sidebars to lean inside the window.
“Don’t be offended, it’s harder to get let in than you might think,” she said.
“Right.”
He eyed the gray hood she had pulled over her golden-brown hair disdainfully. “You coulda kept the hoodie off for five minutes. You’ve barely let me see you in a sports bra. I mean, there isn’t much to see, but...I’d still like to.”
James seemed oblivious to Frankie’s narrowing stare.
“Excuse me?”
“Shit, I was just joking.”
“About the size of my tits?”
“Well, I mean, I wouldn’t complain if you went up a size. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t all girls like you get something done for their eighteenth? Pretty standard practice. It’s not like you need your nose done.”
She blinked a couple of times, digesting what he had just said. As if it were the easiest thing in the world to do, she decided to throw another bomb into her life by finishing something that felt like it had started destroying her first.
“You’re a joke,” Frankie deadpanned.
“Huh?”
She made herself not laugh. Somehow.
He had that cute, boyish thing going on with his dirty blonde hair that always seemed to cling to his eyes. His broader build spoke to his defensive position on the football field. The guy was kind of an asshole, too. That didn’t help.
Honestly, she didn’t like James. That’s not why they went out.
“You’re a joke,” she repeated slowly and then pointed at the looming home that climbed several stories high and stretched farther on either side than he could see from his position behind the wheel.
“Do you really think I need a fancy injury lawyer’s son as a boyfriend? Is that what you think I wanted?”
James’ mouth opened to speak, but she barked out a laugh that tasted as bitter and dark as her heart felt.
“Get fucking real. Layla and Nat drooled over you at every rally and never missed a chance to treat me like shit whenever they got the chance. Imagine how it felt for them every time you dropped me off at a practice or game these last three months. You would’ve looked so fucking stupid in your white tux and pink cummerbund at prom, but it isn’t even worth it anymore. I’m so sick of hearing you talk and—”
“Fuck you,” he snapped, lurching toward Frankie although the seatbelt kept him from going far. She laughed louder as she jumped back from the Hummer and landed easily on the ground, bag over her shoulder.
“And the only thing that kept me listening this long was that thing you do with your hand,” she added, just for spite.
“We’re done,” he hurled at her.
“Duh.”
Just to prove how far she could take this, and how little control James had, Frankie strolled straight to the front of the Hummer and took her sweet time crossing as he glared through the windshield. The engine roared but the vehicle didn’t move an inch.
She hoped the last thing James saw before his tires left marks on the way out was her middle finger. It wouldn’t hurt if a brick fell from a bridge and straight into his face as he drove underneath on the way home, either.
Tires screeched leaving the property and continued through the community. Every time the echo of James’ retreating engine reached Frankie as she headed for the garage entry to the family home, she smiled. The sting of rejection hurt a boy’s ego like nothing else.
Frankie rarely entered the house from the front doors.
It left a sinking, empty feeling deep in her gut to stand in that large space, all the wealth and opulence of her privileged life staring back at her, and then the silence stretched on.
Why they lived in such a place where wings separated studies and dining halls, she never understood.
One couldn’t understand how lonely a table felt when it stretched on for twenty feet and only three or four people filled the seats. It could only be made worse by the fact that those same people sitting there barely liked one another on a good day. That’s how it felt sometimes.