Free Necessary Roughness by Marie G. Lee

one of the few players who liked away games. I got a kick out of seeing the other schools in the area, even if we did have to drive three, four hours to get to, say, Croquette, a town that had a paper mill and smelled like rotten eggs.
    Today we were invading Moose Creek. All I knew about it was that it had a mental hospital and a detox center, so referring to someone as having gone “up the creek” was shorthand for a lot of things. “Look, Chan, bullet hole.” ALL-PRO pointed at aglobular swelling in the glass in the door to the school. “But the glass doesn’t shatter because there’s chicken wire in it, see?”
    The wire looked like a bunch of stop signs stuck together, or an M. C. Escher drawing. The glass at I.R.H.S. was nice and clear. For some reason no one had thought to shoot at it.
    The locker room was all concrete, covered in lumpy lime-green paint that looked like it had been poured on the walls straight from the can. The rubber mats on the floor were curled and moldy. I’m not that picky, but no way was I going to let my bare feet touch that crud.
    “These dudes won the conference title last year,” ALL-PRO said. “We were in the running at sectionals, but they just stomped us.”
    “Do we have a chance this year?” I unpacked my soccer shoes and football cleats. Lately I’d taken to putting the soccer shoe on my right foot when I kicked.
    Mikko shrugged. “A couple of their really good players graduated. And we still have Rom and Leland. This year’s the one for us if it’s any year at all.”
    “Kim, you’re going in,” Coach yelled.
    We had taken an early lead and were feeling pretty good.
    The plan was to fake a bootleg. The wide receiver and I, at halfback, would go out as decoys. Lelandwould then hand the ball off to Jimmi in a reverse.
    Moose Creek didn’t bite. A Mack-truck-size guy hit Jimmi, and the ball squirted out of his hands. The ball skittered downfield and I dove for it, ending up at the bottom of a very heavy pile.
    Coach told me to come back out.
    “You might have to punt soon. Don’t want you getting messed up.”
    “Nice going, Geronimo!” snarled Kearny as Jimmi woozily returned to the sidelines.
    “C’mon, Coach. No one could get hit like that and
not
fumble.” He was holding his elbow.
    “Would you like a little cheese with your whine?” Kearny played an imaginary violin. He always came on too strong, like anchovy pizza.
    By the half we were tied.
    “We can do it,” Coach said. “We just have to make that extra push.”
    “Look,” said Kearny. “If we push ’em back now, we’ll just breeze right down to State. We’ll be golden. So go out there and finish ’em!”
    I didn’t have a real idea of how important a team Moose Creek was to beat, until we lost.
    We lost by only one point—they made a freak two-point conversion—so I didn’t think it was so bad.
    But there was a deadly silence in the locker room, as if a glass jar had descended and sucked all the airout. No one talked. Hell, no one even breathed.
    Then Coach spoke.
    “You’ve made this all the harder on yourselves,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming from another dimension. “We want to go to State just as much as you do, but Coach Kearny and I can’t do it for you. We’ll have another crack at them at sectionals, but it’s going to be an uphill battle.”
    “Lousy, lousy defense,” Kearny snarled. “The line, except for Kreeger, was an absolute sieve. My ninety-year-old toothless grandma could’ve run past you guys. You aren’t men, just a bunch of pussy-boys.”
    “We screwed up” was all that ALL-PRO said to me on the bus ride home.

eighteen
    ALL-PRO was out sick, so after practice I worked on my kicks and did a few laps until the sun went down. The girls’ tennis team must have had a meet, because the courts were empty.
    The locker room was deathly quiet, although it smelled like a passel of steaming, putrid guys had trooped through, which, in fact, they had.