I would have to lose more weight.
2
August
I saw him first, before Addison did. He was tall, slender, and Asian, and he kicked the football with the same purpose and economy of motion I tried for when I twirled batons. Every muscle in his body and every thought in his head focused on punting that ball perfectly across the football stadium. After his leg followed through with the powerful kick, he landed on the grass and watched the ball as it sailed through the goalposts, yet another score.
Then he turned around again and his dark eyes met mine again. The first time this had happened, I had assumed I was imagining things. Boys did not look at me. They saw through me. He must have been looking at some statuesque majorette behind me. When he huddled with his coach, I actually turned to see what he had been looking at on our end of the field. A hundred girls twirled thumb-flips in unison. I was on the end of the front row, and nobody stood directly behind me. He must have been looking at Addison beside me, then. But if he were, the tilt of his head would have been different, I thought. He really did seem to be looking at me.
Over and over.
This was the third and final day of majorette camp for Addison and me. The camp was taught by college majorettes and feature twirlers and was held on the campus of Georgia Tech. I’d had some idea that we might pass hot college guys walking back and forth between the gym and the caf. I would never have talked to them. I was not Addison. But I wanted to look like I could have talked to them. Keeping up my personal style was a challenge now that I’d lost almost fifty pounds in nine months. Even my Courtney Love T-shirt had gotten so big that it flowed around me like a muumuu. I could only wear it by safety-pinning a pleat into the back of it, which was getting uncomfortable.
I hadn’t had a lot of time to go shopping, because I’d spent pretty much my whole summer teaching little girls at the dance studio, then rehearsing with the marching band. And honestly, new clothes hadn’t been a big concern of mine until now. I never noticed my old clothes didn’t fit anymore until I put them on and they fell off. I had no choice but to replace my shorts, because I couldn’t be dropping my pants in public. But I didn’t want to buy a lot of new tops yet. I had plenty of money from my allowance and working at the dance studio. I was just afraid that if I bought clothes, I would stay that size. I was not finished losing weight.
So the first day at camp, I wore one of my few shirts that fit. The second day, I wore the other. By day three I’d figured out that camp was held entirely in a gym set apart from campus foot traffic. All the cute college nerds had gone home for the summer anyway. Besides, I was out of clean laundry. I wore my MARCHING WILDCATS T-shirt, which fit because we’d turned in our sizes only a few weeks before.
Of course on this day, the instructors decided to move us to the huge football stadium for the afternoon so we could get a taste of what twirling would be like if we tried out for a college majorette line. And while high school majorette camp was going on at one end of the stadium, high school football camp was going on at the other.
But with this guy staring across the football field at me (I hoped), I was glad for once that I was not dressed with my usual edge. My MARCHING WILDCATS T-shirt could have passed for band geekdom or, wonder of wonders, school spirit. And in certain circles, the purple streaks in my hair, which I was wearing in two low ponytails down my back to combat the August heat, could have been misconstrued as fashionable.
Was he really looking at me? Nothing would come of it, of course. He wasn’t from my high school. He could be from one of countless other high schools in Atlanta or from a tiny town hours away. I would never see him again after the camp session ended in a few minutes. In the meantime, it was nice to dream.
A group of twenty hulking quarterbacks passed footballs to one another. They threw balls down the field in a hailstorm of pigskin. They ran complicated formations that the coach halted every few seconds, before they could fully execute them, which must have been frustrating.
My guy was in a different group. Each player had a tall, slender kicker’s body. The coach of this group talked more. He explained with his hands, and from the looks of it, whatever he was telling them involved astrophysics. Each time his lecture ended, the boys would line up to kick the ball through the goalposts. Whether I was doing thumb-flips or one-turns, I made sure I watched my guy, from his step up to the tee to the follow-through of his kick.
His legs were long and muscular. His shirt stuck to his chest with sweat. His longish hair bounced as he ran up to the ball and punted it. The coach would talk to him after each turn, pointing down the field. But from my lay-chick’s point of view, this boy did not need camp. He put the ball through the uprights every time.
And then he turned around to see if I was watching. I couldn’t tell at that distance whether he was hot. But his stare showed that he unabashedly appreciated the movements of girls—or, just possibly, this girl. That was hot.
The football camp ended with one last pep talk. The kickers gathered around their coach, and the quarterbacks gathered around theirs. Occasionally the coaches’ voices rang so loudly against the stadium seats that I could hear them over my own instructor counting thumb-flips. Soon the kickers shouted “Break!” and moseyed off the field.
But not my guy. He stood on the sideline and watched the quarterbacks like he was waiting for one of them. Finally the quarterbacks shouted “Break!” and a towering blond guy headed for my guy. I knew the blond was huge because my guy had seemed tall before, half a head above his coach, but the blond was another half a head above him, and almost twice as wide. They stood together by the exit that the other players had taken out of the stadium. My guy said something to the blond. They both turned and looked at me.
My heart sped up, even faster than it had each time my guy had caught my eye.
While they talked, they nonchalantly crossed their arms and pulled up the sides of their shirts to reveal hard six-pack abs like nothing I had ever seen in real life, possibly because I still, out of habit, avoided the community pool.
As if in slow motion, they exposed their muscular chests.
Triceps flexing, they pulled the shirts over their heads.
They stood there, chatting, wiping their faces and chests with the cloth. Admittedly, I had never played sports, and I did not hang out where the athletic boys hung out, so maybe I was misreading the entire situation. But it sure looked to me like the high school football player’s striptease. I enjoyed it way more than I meant to. I started to feel like a stereotypical guy gawking at girls and accidentally running his car into a pond.