Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [82]
She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn’t going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn’t going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.
Release me, she begged, silently, of her elephant.
She needed to be free of him. She needed to get on with her life. Maybe even to fall in love again. She had a candidate in mind.
It was easy to wish to let go of the torture and the heartbreak and the missing Kostos. It seemed easy, at least. But there was a catch. To let go of the pain, she had to give up the other parts too: the feeling of being loved. The feeling of being wanted and even needed. The way Kostos looked at her and touched her. The way her name sounded when he said it. The number of times he’d written I love you at the end of his third to last letter. (Seventeen—once for each year of her life.) And yes, she did still read those letters. Time for a full confession: She did.
It wasn’t the suffering she willfully clung to. It was the precious stuff. But the precious stuff attached her, irrevocably, to the pain.
She waited for Kostos to come for her. She waited for him to release her. She lived quietly, passively, at the margins of other people’s bigger lives: her father’s, Kostos’s. She took up the space they left for her.
She couldn’t wait for Kostos anymore. That was the thing she learned from the face she saw in the mirror and on her paper. There was one person who could release Lena, and Lena was looking right at her.
Beezy,
Call me, would you? These are for you, and they are full strength, so wear them well. (And carefully! I had to say that, Bee. I’m worried about you.) I am here. I can be there in a flash. Call me.
Love,
Len
I just need your star for a day.
—Nick Drake
Bridget didn’t see Eric until late Monday morning. She felt like the universe could have exploded and cooled and spat out a few new galaxies in the time that had passed.
He didn’t look at her and she didn’t look at him. Or she didn’t let him see her looking at him, anyway. He was an avoider, wasn’t he? She hated avoiders. She hated being one. How could a person transform from her hero to her destroyer in so short a time?
The intercamp tournament began Monday. Because it was tournament week, she and Eric got off lake duty. This was the time of the summer when everybody lived and breathed only soccer. Eric and Bridget stopped needing to see each other.
By Tuesday afternoon, Bridget’s team had already taken their first two games. Usually she drove her players hard, but she was fun. Now she drove them harder and she wasn’t fun. She was vicious.
Eric’s team had also won two of two games. As angry as she was, Bridget had to grant that Eric was probably the best of the coaches. He was patient and he was intuitive, and he already had three years of Division I soccer under his belt. Bridget was considered by the other staff to be talented but unpredictable and inexperienced. And she had a few real cases on her hands. Everybody agreed Eric’s was the team to beat. So Bridget determined to beat them.
Maybe it wasn’t the most mature way to deal with her anger. But she had a lot of dangerous energy, and it was better used in soccer than in, say, operating heavy machinery.
So she knew her team and Eric’s would meet in the final on Friday. She spent every moment until then working on her lineup and her strategy. She had a few really fine players: Karl Lundgren, Aiden Cross, Russell Chen. She knew exactly what to do with them. It was a player like Naughton who required some thought. She scouted Eric’s team. She scheduled surreptitious meetings of her own team by flashlight in the woods after dinner. She took them on early-morning runs. She had to hold herself back from setting a crushing pace.
Three or four times in those days that passed, Eric looked up at her and waved or tried to catch her eye. She kept her head down. She wasn’t going to hope