Page 73 of Catch and Cradle
I sprint into position and see her attention lock on me. The pass is almost botched by the defender, but I manage to catch the ball before the girl marking me realizes what’s happening. I’m out of there before she can catch up, tearing towards the goal at full speed as half a dozen players charge at me. My wrist whips back and forth in a frenzy, the rhythmic movement of cradling as instinctive as breathing, as living, as wanting.
A deep, guttural sound bursts out of me as I launch the ball at the net. The goalie dives but misses by at least half a foot.
I just scored.
I scored with less than a minute left in the game.
Everything rushes back into focus. I can hear my teammates cheering, see Coach doing a very dad-like happy dance on the side of the field, feel the sweat trickle down my back as my lungs burn for air.
I scored.
“YES, BECCA!” Bailey slams into me from behind. “OH MY GOD!”
We still have to get through the last forty seconds, but they pass by in a rapid blur that leaves our score intact. Everyone piles into a group hug with me at the centre when our win gets announced. I laugh and cheer and whoop with everyone else, but part of me feels distant, detached, separate from the thrill of the moment.
We won, but it was far too close.
I can’t let this happen again.
* * *
I stand outside Hope’s room in the McGill dorms, urging myself to knock while my arms stay glued to my sides.
I think this is Hope’s room. It’s going to be an awkward encounter if I’m wrong.
The whole team is planning on getting a late dinner tonight, but for now, everyone is taking a few hours to chill or explore the city. My plan is to ask Hope if she’d like to hang out and somehow segue that into giving her a primer about what happened in my freshman year. I still don’t know if a team-wide trip to a city a twelve hour bus ride away from Halifax is the best time to do this, but the more I wait, the more this starts to feel just like it did with Lisa: like bracing for a match to drop and set off an inevitable explosion.
I don’t want to be in that position again, and now that we’ve made it through the game, I need to at least tell her something.
My arm finally obeys my order to lift itself. I’m just about to knock when the door opens and Hope nearly runs straight into me as she charges into the hall.
“Oh! Becca!” She pauses with her arm halfway through the sleeve of a denim jacket. Her purse is slipping off her shoulder, and her glasses are slightly askew. “What’s up?”
“Um...are you going somewhere?” I ask in a complete statement of the obvious.
“I had a nap and slept through my alarm.” She gets the jacket on and straightens her glasses. “I’m meeting up with my brother and his girlfriend for a few hours.”
“Oh, cool.” I slide my hands into my pockets. “That sounds fun.”
“Did you need something?”
I don’t know why I didn’t text first like a normal person.
“No, no. I just uh—I was gonna ask if you wanted to hang out.”
“Oh.” A grin spreads over her face. We stand there for a few seconds, me shifting my weight from side to side and her adjusting and readjusting her purse.
“He was at the game,” she says, breaking the silence. “My brother. I was gonna ask if you wanted to meet him, but you seemed busy, and I didn’t know...”
I can guess what she’s thinking: we don’t even know what to call what’s going on between us, never mind how to take it to the meeting family stage.
Besides Kala—who doesn’t really count, since we’ve been friends since childhood—I’ve never met the family of anyone I’ve dated. I’ve never introduced anyone to mine, such as it is.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“Huh?”
Hope starts fiddling with the edge of her jacket. “I mean, it’s not a big formal thing. You can just come along as my teammate. They’ll love it. We’re going to the Biodome.”