Page 139 of Rules of Association

She glared for three more seconds before continuing. “I’ll take Mateo, and Lis has the ball.”

“What about Tine and your sister?” I asked.

“Is Clementine any good at soccer?” Melissa asked, raising an eyebrow.

Clay and I’s eyes met and without a doubt we both answered, “No.”

Ceci just smiled, “Then don’t worry about them.”

The girls knew what they were talking about. Just like they instructed, boxing Ox out was the right thing to do. He was the most adept with the ball by far with Melissa as second. They were both better than any one of us, but the difference was, Ox had no chance at getting the ball. Not when Clay was just as impish as our little devil leader in his pursuit of Ox and Ceci guarded Mattí like a dirty elbowing Chihuahua. And then there were the girls…

The girls were just…terrible.

To count how many times they fell would be cruel. To count the number of missed kicks would be worse. We racked up goals at alarming rates (alarming to poor Ox who had called no less than three team huddles in the same number of plays). And Lord save him, I’d only seen him snap at my sister one time, but the way she looked at him after he’d calmly (but frustratedly) told her to “open your damn eyes when you kick ball, Clementine”, might as well have been him yelling at her. He spent the next team huddle just trying to get her to look at him again.Ouch.

The game was decisive. Ox had gotten a hold of the ball exactly three times and they’d scored just as much. The other ten, we could attest to Melissa for the skill and Cee for the strategy. Me and Clay just pawns in their vicious game.

We were tied. One point for team Ceci and one point for the other guys. Which just left the tiebreaker.

Dodgeball was a disaster. Okay—to be honest, it wasalla disaster, from the trash talking, continuous tripping, and dirty tactics—but dodgeball most of all.

It was clear how the origin of this game started between the siblings. The boys liked soccer, the girls liked volleyball,noneof them liked losing so they had to settle on a game to break the ties between the two. If I had to guess, it was the two troublemakers Mattí and my very own Ceci, who had come up with the idea that dodgeball be the tiebreaker. The proof of which was in the savage way the two of them played.

Everyone else seemed to have some decency when it came to who they went after and how. Bouncing balls off of people’s shoulders or hips, or at best their backs. But the two of them—Dirty, dirty, dirty.

Ceci was what we call a nutcracker. Yeah. She went for them. And sometimes, (sorry Mattí) she aimed true. Mattí, on the other hand, had just as good an arm and had no problem going for the face. Poor Melissa had taken one so badly to the head, she needed to sit down for a while on the sideline. And I had almost gotten my ear sheared off as I barely dodged his Hail Mary of a shot whizzing by my face.

Playing with the Fernandez’s was dangerous. But, as I watched and participated and laughed so much my head started to hurt, I understood why we were out here in the first place. This was a reminder that they had each other’s back. That no matter how much their lives were changing, they all came from the same place, and they would always bring each other back to that place when one of them went astray.

And honestly, they succeeded. The girl laughing and running and bringing smiles to everyone’s faces was proof of that.

To look at Ceci at that moment was like looking at gold. Not just because the sun was shining on her like some magical beacon of burning anglicism. Butshewas gold. She was so precious and rare and even though her presence didn't always bring out the best in people; it brought out the real in them. Which, in my eyes, made her more desirable than anything else. She was irresistible.

And it was probably because I was looking at her, noticing all of this, that I saw the exact moment when her attention was pulled away from the game to somewhere beyond our little slice of field.

I think I heard the sound of female voices calling out, “Selena!”

Her head snapped up, and it only took that split second of broken concentration for her fate to be sealed. In that second, Mattí ran to the line, cocked his hand back and beamed Cee with a ball right to the head. Only, she had been looking the other way and wasn’t expecting it, so she didn’t duck or move away in the slightest, like I’m sure Mateo was expecting her to. Instead of the ball just grazing her, her face took the full force of the hit.

And she dropped like a ton of bricks.

“Oh shit,” I heard myself say before I was running to her.

Chapter Thirty-one

CECI

Bleariness and ringing.

That’s the only thing I noticed for about five whole seconds. The last thing I remembered was having a ton of fun. Three ball was an old game we played as kids. But with only five of us, there was always some finagling that had to be done with the odd number. It was good to have enough players for a change.Fun. The last time I remember it being this fun was when we’d played with a bunch of our cousins. A brawl had broken out after dodgeball in that game though, so it edged out today by a little bit.

Maybe it was because we knew just how to get under my older brother’s skin, or because I’d seen Clay Ferguson get hit in the face three times, ha! Or even because I’d seen Connor, my Connor, trip up over a soccer ball of all things! The man who seemed larger than life with his brains, brawn, and everlasting patience with me, falling to the grass and rolling around. Even I had stopped and stared for a second as he laid there and laughed. His big chest shaking up and down until his brother came over and gave him a hand up. I'd run over too and snuck a slap on his butt mumbling, “Nice one, twinkle toes,” and he’d given me one of those kid smiles that made me want to see baby pictures of him and compare the resemblance.

The day had served its purpose. I came into it feeling apprehensive, but I was almost immediately feeling lighter. I loved every single person here. My siblings in a strong, familiar way; Connor in a stronger, unfamiliar sense that scared me but calmed me at the same time.

But as perfect days went,of coursesomething had to go wrong. Not terribly wrong, though. Hearing the name Selena and seeing the two fresh faced girls I had only ever seen on nights cooped up in a stuffy brick building wasn’t exactly a hardship. Glimpsing Nina in a cute little sundress and Christine in jean shorts instead of their usual work attire was actually refreshing and new. But it took my attention off the game. And I had maybe taunted my brothers a little too much during the first two rounds. So did I deserve the ball to the face? Probably. Did I expect it, or expect to lose my balance and fall so hard the back of my head was the first thing to break my fall? No.

Hence the bleariness.

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