Death Match - Diane Duane [6]
The whiteness went away, leaving Catie looking at the far wall of the family room—the bookshelves, her dad’s easy chair, the Net computer in its low case, and the place over to one side of the last bookshelf to the right, near the corner of the room, where a crack running down from the ceiling had become apparent in the plaster last week. Her mom had been complaining about the increase in heavy traffic down the street that ran parallel to theirs. It seemed there might be something in what she’d been saying.
“Time?” she said to the clock on the wall.
“Eight fourteen P.M.”
“Oh, good,” Catie said, glancing out the window at the backyard. The sun was nearly down behind the fruit trees that mostly hid the back wall. Dimming yellow light danced and glittered through their leaves. It had been a nice day, but she hadn’t done what she’d first been tempted to, go out and have a few goals with her “casual” soccer team. Instead she had elected to stay home and get the homework done, so that she would have tomorrow and Sunday free. And then Hal had shanghaied her into watching “The Game” with him. The best-laid plans…Oh, well.
She got out of the implant chair and stretched, and was grateful she didn’t have the muscle strain right now that poor Brickner did. If he was smart, his team trainer was putting him into a hot whirlpool bath right about now. Catie stretched again, trying to get rid of a crick in her back that wasn’t really there, and glanced around. She had promised her mom that she’d clean up a little in here this evening, but Hal had sidetracked her into watching this game, and now the serious cleaning was going to have to wait until considerably later. For which I will probably catch a certain amount of grief. Oh, well…
Catie sighed and spent a minute or so moving around the family room, making a desultory attempt to pick up some of the books and magazines and dataflips that had been left lying around. When her little brother caught an interest, he caught it completely. He ate and slept and breathed it…until something more interesting came along. Right now it was spatball, and his enthusiasm had been sufficiently contagious, today, to pull her in, too.
For her own part, Catie had to admit that there was something there worth being interested in. Her own acquaintance with the game had been strictly theoretical until the last couple of weeks. Now she knew more about it than she had ever really intended to. And yet at the same time, there was no pretending that the sport wasn’t intriguing. Hybrid descendant of soccer in a spacesuit it might be, but—
“Wow, huh?”
The non sequitur had come from Hal, who was standing there now in the doorway of the family room. He apparently hadn’t bothered with the postgame show. He was breathing hard, too, which hardly came as a surprise to Catie.
“Wow, yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think they were going to make it.”
“Yeah, it was intense. But the Slugs are go for the eighth-finals!”
Catie chuckled as she watched him wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Were you ‘being’ George Brickner, too?”
“Who else?”
“There were five other people. That cute brunette you were blathering about last week, for example.”
“Oh, her.” The tone of voice was dismissive. “Day-strom. She’s okay, but she’s not as sharp as Brickner is….”
Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “A captain can’t be a team all by himself,” she said. “Isn’t that what you were saying the other day?” She grinned at him as she slipped past him, dropping into his hands some of the books and flips she had been picking up, the ones that were his. “I think it’s just a case of hero worship.”
“Not a chance!”
She went out into the hall and glanced up and down. “Mom get back from the mall yet?”
“If she did, I didn’t hear her.”
“I don’t think either of us