“He did what?”
“We had a time-out left,” I explained. “Our coach called it at the last second before Max was going to kick, just to rattle him.”
“I want us to win,” Delilah said, “but that doesn’t seem fair.”
“Max would be the first to tell you that life isn’t fair.” And icing the kicker seemed to have worked. While the time-out ticked away, Max paced up and down the fifty yard line with his hands on his helmet. Carter stood stationary, watching Max and yelling at him. Carter probably wished he’d been a little more supportive of Max during summer practice.
The time-out ended. The teams lined up again. The play clock ticked down. Max stood beside Carter, where the ball would be. He counted a pace to the side and a pace upfield to find his position in relation to the ball. Then he should have signaled to Carter that he was ready for the ball. The play clock showed he was running out of time. Three . . . two . . . one . . . and the referees blew their whistles again.
I groaned. “Max!”
I couldn’t tell what Carter was shouting at Max, but judging from the way he jumped up and waved his arms, he was losing his mind.
“What now?” Delilah asked.
“Delay of game. Max never started the play, so the ball has to move back five yards.” As I said this, the refs moved the ball farther down the field. Max walked to his new position with his head down. Now the distance between him and the goalposts was more than half the length of the football field. The crowd booed him.
His own crowd.
The home fans quickly shushed themselves, but I had heard the boo. So had Max. He looked toward the home stands as he walked.
I jumped up. “Go, Max!” I screamed, clapping for him. “You can do it!”
“God, Gemma!” Addison snapped. “Can’t you cheer for your own team?”
I almost sat down sheepishly. After all, I was the only person standing up on my side of the stadium, yelling like an idiot. Everybody, and I mean everybody, was staring at me.
Including Max. I couldn’t see his face behind his face mask, but I felt like he was staring straight at me.
“He is my boyfriend!” I yelled at Addison. Then I turned back to the field and clapped. “You can do it, Max!”
The silence on the other side of the field slowly morphed into a supportive cheer for Max, and the whole stadium roared, louder than before.
“Gemma!” Robert called above me.
I turned around.
“Can he make that goal?”
I nodded. I wasn’t so sure, but I wanted to be sure. I grinned my majorette grin and turned around to watch Max again.
Delilah slipped her hand into mine and squeezed. “I’m not rooting for them, but I’m rooting for you.”
“Thank you,” I whispered as Max stood beside Carter. He counted a pace to one side and a pace upfield. The play clock wound down. He signaled to Carter. The ball snapped. Carter caught it neatly and grounded it. Max took a step, dragging his powerful kicking leg from behind him, and connected with the ball. He followed through with his kick and stopped to watch where it went.
The ball sailed fifty-three yards, the crowd noise rising with it. The ball passed exactly through the middle of the uprights.
The opposite side of the field erupted in a huge, booming cheer. We could hear it perfectly because our side was dead silent, except for me, sighing with relief. Their band burst into their fight song.
Max stood motionless, stunned, while Carter jumped up and down. Their entire team, the coaches, and the cheerleaders dashed onto the field to surround Max. Even the student section of the stands spilled over the fence and swirled onto the field, so that I couldn’t find Max in the crowd anymore.
“You won the game,” Addison said. “Happy now?”
I sat down next to her and tried to think of something soothing to say. I should remind her that she’d ended up with Carter, whom she’d decided she liked better anyway.
Instead, I told her, “I can’t be friends with you anymore.”
Her blond brows went down, and her lips parted. I could tell she was gearing up to give me a tit-for-tat response. I can’t be your friend either, so there.
I put my hand on her sequined sleeve to stop her from speaking. “Seriously. I don’t say that to be mean, or to get back at you, or to hurt your feelings. But you have hurt my feelings over and over again, for six years. I read insults into everything you say, even when you’re trying to be nice.” If she ever really was. “That makes me angry, and I do mean things to you in response. I don’t like the person I become when I’m around you.”
Addison looked down at my hand on her arm. “You’re breaking up with me.” She didn’t sound sarcastic. She sounded sad.
I took my hand off her arm. “I’m not laying blame. I don’t want us to have hard feelings against each other or try to get revenge on each other for this. I just think that sometimes two people are meant to be together. We aren’t.”
I looked nervously at the majorettes around us and the flutes behind us. I didn’t want them to hear what Addison was sure to say next above the opposing team’s fight song. She would scream that I was being mean and immature by telling her I wouldn’t be her friend anymore, all because I stole her boyfriend.
But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I will always love you.”
Before I could stop it, my jaw dropped open.
“And I hate you a little bit too.” She reached out and hugged me.
Bewildered, I hugged her back.
She squeezed me once and let me go. “Maybe we could just take a break, then see how we feel.”
Normally I would have run away from this proposal, screaming, It’s a trap! But she was acting so bizarrely mature about all this that I said, “That sounds good.”
We would see.
16
As soon as our band played our school’s fight song, sounding somewhat mournful under the circumstances, we marched back to the buses and piled on to wait for the trombones to load the instrument truck, and then to drive fifteen minutes home. I was so happy for Max, and hopeful about what might happen next between us. Until I saw the huddle of sequins at the back of the bus, I’d completely forgotten that the majorettes were voting for next year’s head.
After all that rigmarole about keeping our noses clean, the vote was casual. Mrs. Baxter handed us each a slip of paper and a pen. We wrote our choice and handed the slip back to her. She counted the votes. In thirty seconds we knew. She walked to the back of the bus and put her hand on my shoulder. “For grace under pressure, we have chosen Gemma.”