Disclaimers in previous chapter
Chapter Two
It took more of an effort than I thought it would, but I actually survived all my classes. It's time for me to actually do what I'm good at now. I've already changed into my workout clothes and am standing in front of the temporary locker the coach gave me. I'm standing here and I'm trying to focus my mind on the next hour.
I have to push away all that crap that's been going through my head. There's no way I can play and have all that floating around up there. I brace my hands against the lockers and take a deep breath.
The past doesn't matter on the court. No one out there cares about what I've been through or what my parents said to me or that I'm forced to say with a sister who hardly even knows my full name. They only care about how well I can pass and shoot a ball. They don't care how smart I am. They only care about whether I can not let the other team score.
Nothing but my abilities on that court matter. Everything else is a distant second.
"Sidle, are you going to work your way out to the court today?" The coach calls out to me.
"Focus, Sidle," I say to myself before I run to the locker room door and meet up with the coach. "I'm sorry," I say. "I just needed to pick myself up."
Her blue eyes turn to me concerned. "Hard day?"
I shrug. "It's the first day back." I say as an explanation. She knows my situation' just like all my other teachers know.
She puts her hand gently on my shoulder. "If you want to put this off for another day I'll understand."
I take her words as a challenge. "Basketball doesn't wait for the perfect moment."
The coach smiles and pats my shoulder then her hand drops away. "Just don't take too much on at once."
She walks ahead of me into the gym and I follow her letting the day's emotions flow off me at the door. I look at my soon to be teammates and can't help but feel a little bit intimidated. I don't know any of these girls, and they're all going to be judging me seeing if I'm good enough to be a part of their team.
The season has already started. They've got their starters already picked out, and I'm here to replace one of them. I don't doubt that I'll be able to do it, and from looking at them I don't think they doubt it either.
Coach Compton introduces me to the team and tells some girl named Rebecca to lead us in the warm-ups. The entire team stands and begins following Rebecca in her warm up laps around the court. I fall in with the rest of the team and try to find my rhythm.
Once we've finished the laps we do some stretches and immediately fall into drilling. I quickly realize that I'm the best player on this team and so does everyone else. The rest of the team starts smiling at me and treating me as a person instead of an unwanted guest. The practice gets less tense as we move along and when we're done I've got a place on the team. I'm their new starting shooting guard.
The next morning I've got breakfast on the table and waiting for when Sara gets home. I'm happy about making the team and decided to spread the joy a little bit. Plus, since I'm staying at her apartment for the next two years rent free, I should probably pull some of my own weight.
She walks into the door and when she sees the food waiting for her she gets this confused look on her face. It's like she's not even sure if she's walked into the right apartment.
"What's this?" She asks carefully.
"It's food." I finish setting the table. "It's not poison."
She opens her mouth, but quickly shuts it again. "You should sit down." I tell her. "I've got to get to school, so I've got to eat fast."
She does as I say and takes a seat. "I hope you don't mind that I didn't make any bacon or anything." I take my own seat and start filling up my plate. "I can't stand eating meat, let alone cooking it."
"You're a vegetarian?" She sounds surprised.
I nod. "I don't have an objection to people eating meat, but I played with ducks when I was a kid."
"You played with ducks?"
I nod again. "I had a friend whose mom would take us to the park sometimes. The park had a lake with ducks. I'd play with them. Eventually, I realized that people ate ducks and I couldn't imagine eating my friends. Then I thought that all animals were someone's friend, so I stopped eating meat. Plus, I finally read that book Charlotte's Web." I know that I'm rambling, but I'm not very comfortable in Sara's presence. I shove a forkful of food in my mouth so I don't say anything else.
Sara chuckles a little. "We have something in common."
I chew my food thoroughly then swallow. "You have a duck friend too?"
"No," she shakes her head. "I don't eat meat."
I blink a couple of times. "Oh." It's all I can think of to say.
"So how was your first day?" Her attention is on her food. She doesn't ever really look at me. I don't know why my appearance bothers her so much. I don't look anything like her parents. I'm taller than both of them. My skin is darker. My hair is different. The only thing we share is our eye color. We're nothing alike.
Sara raises her head from her food and catches me staring at her. I don't turn away. I meet her gaze straight on. "I'm not like them." I don't know why I say it, but I do. "They never let me be close enough to them to be like them."
"I know." Sara drops her head again.
"If you know, then why do you hate me?"
She puts her fork down and raises her gaze to mine again. "I don't hate you."
I don't really believe her. "Okay." I stand up from my chair and carry my plate to the sink. I rinse it off and walk to the room given to me to retrieve my backpack. When I turn back around to the door Sara is standing in front of me.
"My co-worker, Catherine, she wants us to have dinner with her and her daughter on Friday." Sara is shifting her stance from foot to foot. She's nervous. She always seems nervous around me. "Is that uh… is that okay with you?"
I put the strap of my backpack over my shoulder and shift the book filled pack into a comfortable position. "I have a game on Friday." I walk up to my sister. "I made the team."
She gives me a weak smile. "Congratulations. What time is your game on Friday?"
"You want to go?" I'm genuinely surprised. Her going to my game would actually show she has some sort of interest in my life. That or she's starting to pity me. Sara is never interested in my life just for the sake of interest.
"Yeah," she still has that weak smile on her face. "I was thinking that maybe we could all go to your game and get some food afterwards."
"It's at seven."
She nods at me then I squeeze through the space between her and the doorframe in my effort to get away from this very awkward situation.
"How are you getting to school?" she calls to me my back.
"Bus," I call back not chancing to actually turn around. It's really not good for me to have these kinds of conversations in the morning. My brain hasn't fully woken up yet and can't process any kind of good response.
I lock the apartment door behind me and continue on out of the building. Sara stays inside the apartment, and that's a real good thing. The other good thing is that it's only Tuesday morning. Sara is working all up until Friday. By the time I get home from practice she's at work. The only time I'm going to see her is in the mornings before I go to school.
I can handle that kind of schedule.
Friday rolls around a lot quicker than I thought it would. Sara confirmed our plans this morning before I ran off to school. Apparently, Catherine—a woman I only met at my parents' funeral—and her daughter are going to join Sara in watching me play a game of basketball at the team's first home game of the season.
Any moment now, Sara is going to walk into this gym and take a seat in the stands with our group of meager fans. I can't help but keep looking at the gym doors. A part of me actually believes that Sara isn't going to come. Something more important was going to make it on her schedule and I would be forgotten and put aside, like she had done to me for my entire life.
Not that I really minded that. We wouldn't have made really good sisters anyway. We would never have anything to talk about. She was twice my age. How much could I talk to someone who was so much older than me?
"Melinda!" One of my teammates yells right before a basketball smacks me right in the forehead. Immediately, I put my hand to my forehead and start rubbing away the pain with the palm of my hand.
"Get your head in the game, Sidle!" Coach yells to me from the sidelines.
"You okay, Mel?" Jenny puts one hand on my shoulder and gently pulls my hand away from my face with the other. "Rebecca hit you pretty good."
I pull away from her, not in a mean way, more like in a jock way. "I'm fine." I blink my eyes a couple of times waiting for my vision to clear up. When there is no more fuzziness, the first thing I see is Sara standing across from me near the bleachers with a worried look on her face. Catherine is standing next to her, holding her hand, and Lindsey is staring at me with a smile on her face. The kid got a kick out of seeing me clobbered by a basketball, brilliant. There is nothing quite like making a first impression as a complete idiot.
"Is that your… family?" Jenny asks me following my line of sight.
I shake my head. "Not really. The taller one's my sister and the other two are friends of hers. I guess."
"She's your sister?" Jenny seems surprised by this.
"Yeah," I sigh. "I know we don't look anything alike, but that's because I'm adopted."
"Well that's not…" Jenny starts to say before Coach calls out to both of us yelling at us to stop chatting when there was work to be done. We quickly take our places in our warm up drills and get on with looking like actual basketball players instead of amateur idiots.
To make up for my complete unprofessional appearance before, I decided that I was going to score at least thirty points in this game. I also decided that I would get at the very least ten steals and four blocks. I like goal setting.
By the end of the game, I fell short in my goals but only when it came to getting the four blocks. I only got two. There were no recruits at the game tonight, I don't think, but I still have to do better than that. I can't play bad games anymore.
"You did really well tonight." My head is inside my locker. I am reaching in to get my stuff so that I can meet up with Sara and crew outside.
"Thanks." I take my head out of my locker and see Jenny standing right next to me.
"You're going to be great for this team." She smiles at me and I smile back. There's not a whole lot I can say to her at the moment.
"You played good too." My words sound stupid, of course. I think moving to Nevada has somehow made me dumber.
"Some of us are going to go out and get some pizza; do you want to join us?"
"My sister is waiting outside," I point in the general direction of the locker room door.
"That's okay. Our families are going to be there too. We usually all try to meet up after a game, especially for home games. It boosts team morale."
This seems way too much family oriented for me. I've never done anything like it before, but the plus side is I won't be left alone with Sara, Catherine, and Lindsey. "I'm in. Where are we meeting at?"
"At that pizza place off that road near the school," Jenny moves her hands around in multiple directions.
"You're good at giving directions, huh?" I smile to lighten my comment.
Jenny shrugs. "I suck at directions, but I'm sure your sister knows where it is. It's the one with the mini-golf and arcade inside."
"Arcade?" The word really isn't a foreign one to me, just not what I was expecting.
"Hey, we work hard we play hard."
I don't know why but the comment makes me laugh. I grab the rest of the stuff out of my locker and stuff it into my athletics bag, then slam my locker shut. "Please lead the way," I motion for Jenny to move ahead of me and she does so with a bow.
We exit the locker room smiling. I turn my head and immediately see Sara. My smile fades. Jenny waves goodbye to me, saying she'll see me in a few and runs off to wherever her ride is waiting.
"Hi," I give a stupid little wave to the three people waiting for me and feel a lot more nervous than I did when I started playing the basketball game.
"You played really well tonight." Catherine smiles at me and I smile back.
"Thanks." I adjust the strap of the bag on my shoulder and pretend like there's something really attention-grabbing on my shoe.
"You were awesome," The younger girl says excitedly from between Catherine and Sara. "I'd wish I could play like you if I wanted to play basketball."
"Thanks." Apparently my vocabulary has broken down to one single word.
"I… I didn't know you were that good," Sara's voice sounds almost as unsure as mine. "You're a lot better at sports than I ever was."
I don't know quite how to take her comment. I don't ever really know how to take anything she says. Maybe if she actually talked to me a little more I'd be able to decipher her meaning once in a while.
"The team is meeting at this place. They do it after the games and they invited me and I told them that I would go." I speak quickly, but only because I'm afraid the longer I talk the higher chance I have of screwing up my words.
"The other parents told us about it," Catherine says after Sara has kept her silence for a while. "We told them that we'd meet them there if that's what you wanted."
"Okay." I don't know how we manage, I don't know how I manage, but we eventually all end up in the same vehicle having agreed to go to the same place. It seems kind of like a minor miracle.