Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [29]
“I’m sure I’ll be back,” she said. “Valia can’t drive here—especially now—and I have a car all to myself right now and…”
He nodded. He got up to go. “Maybe I’ll get to see you again. I hope so.”
“Me too,” she said faintly, watching him go. She felt her heart streaming into different parts of her body, places she hadn’t felt it beat before.
And yet, as she went back over the conversation, she felt a trace of apprehension. Valia was her friend Lena’s grandmother. Carmen was bringing her for tests. Carmen had a car to herself.
Carmen was also getting paid eight fifty an hour. She realized she could have mentioned that, too.
Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.
—Winston Churchill
Today was a day during which Bridget would almost certainly look upon the face of Eric Richman, and he would look upon hers. It made getting dressed a different project than usual. Usually she didn’t care that much. Or if she did, it was to satisfy her exuberance (like the shiny, shiny pink pants) or her idiosyncracy (like the pilly green turtleneck everyone hated).
This morning, it was more her vanity calling out to be satisfied. Did she want the ponytail high? Nah. Too severe. Braids? Carmen looked saucy when she arranged her hair into two braids on the sides, but Bee’s pale hair made her look like Heidi. Anyway, how much did she want to use that particular weapon?
The Hair, as Tibby called it. It had launched a thousand comments. Cars honked and delivery guys whistled; even respectable men looked too long. Hairdressers exclaimed over it as though it were a living miracle. The Hair. Marly’s hair, Greta’s hair. In fact, it was nothing more than a bunch of dead cells sprouting out of her scalp, but it was her birthright.
Do I want you to notice me? she wondered, leaning so close to the mirror that her eyes formed one large Cyclops eye.
The mirror in the cramped cabin was speckled with gray and only showed the story from midhip to midforehead. If she backed up, she’d be sitting in Katie’s messy bunk.
She shouldn’t care about this so much. She felt an annoying buzzing around her head: expectations, clustering like so many mosquitoes. She did not like those. She refused to have them.
She would just…throw on the first pair of shorts she found. And okay, so they were the really nice short blue Adidas ones. And the first top. Well, the second, because that was the white tank with the racing back, and it looked better than the first one. And the hair. She’d just leave it down. She was not setting a trap. She was not! She was just…in a hurry. A coach could not be late. She pulled a hair elastic around her wrist just in case.
She loped out of the cabin barefoot, swinging her cleats by the laces. She’d grown so much, she would probably be taller than Eric in her cleats.
Five coaches were already milling around on the center field. One of them happened to be Eric. Not that her eyes went there first.
Having finally read the camp’s handbook in the hour after sunrise when she couldn’t sleep, she now knew the deal. The camp was split into girls’ and boys’ sides. Each side was broken into six teams. They played soccer for four hours every morning. They put the boys and girls together for speed and agility training for an hour after lunch, and then for the other activities—swimming, waterskiing, hiking, rafting, and all kinds of other campish things. After dinner they had a couple of free hours. Usually there was a movie or something.
Now that she’d bothered to look at the roster of coaches, on which Eric Richman’s name did indeed appear in twelve-point type and which had sat folded inside an envelope in her room at home for several weeks, unread, Bridget knew she was assigned to coach a boys’ team. That was all right. Diana was coaching one on the girls’ side, that was the only negative. They would have had fun together.
Bridget sat down in the middle of the field and plucked out the socks she’d balled up in her shoes. She pulled them on and laced up her cleats. She