Page 11 of Don't Hate the Player
“Oh, we’re starting now? Like now, now?”
“Romeros don’t lose, and we don’t waste time. We’ll check the light and see which side of the field you favor. And maybe record something today if you’re up to it.”
Fine, fine. This is all fine, as long as I’m free for the first round of the tournament this weekend. “Yeah, sure. I can bring it at practice today. I’ll check a little, score a little. Whatever you want.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Get dressed; I’m going to stop by the end of the booster meeting and meet you outside.”
All of the other girls on the team are finished getting ready by the time I hustle to the locker room, so I have a few minutes to cool off before I have to reenter the spotlight as Emilia Romero: person who cares about field hockey. I know that my mom sitting in on my first meeting with Grimes isn’t the end of the world, and I’ll probably have another opportunity to ask him about schools in New York and Chicago, but the fact that she was able to ambush me makes me feel stupid. If my mom were an enemy DPS inGLOand she pulled that kind of surprise in a match, Fury would roast me for days.
Since I know I’m going to be on camera, I pull my hair back in a ponytail instead of twisting it into a bun. Normally my curls flopping around my neck would distract me, but having a distinctive hair pattern will make me stand out more on-screen. I hate that I’m thinking about that, but it’s the kind of thing my mom would suggest if she was in here helping me get ready. Better to do it now before she can correct me. I can also wear a headband since our school colors are an eye-catching light blue, but if I don’t have anything in UPenn navy, I could accidentally look like I’m repping Columbia. Perish the thought.
What would my days be like if I didn’t have all of this per-formative garbage bouncing around in my brain? Quieter, maybe. I’d probably sleep better too.
Out on the field, Mom is already set up with the camera and a tripod that she has produced out of who knows where. As far as I know, she has no prior experience with videography, but that’s never stopped her from spontaneously developing a skill before.
“All right, ladies, circle up!” My mom’s voice carries across the field and summons everyone to the center. The roll call confirms that we’re all here—even Audra Hastings, who threatened to quit for the lacrosse team when she found out Connor asked me out. She’s had an obvious crush on him forever and thinks I’m too . . . something (studious? loud? brown?) to date the guy she likes. I’m not 100 percent sure I want Connor to be my boyfriend, but if him buying me matcha pisses her off so much, I don’t mind seeing where this goes. Audra can buy her own coffees and also eat shit.
My mom in coach mode is a sight to behold. She’s shorter than most of the girls on the team but shouts with all the authority of a drill sergeant. A lot of the girls on the varsity team like her because she doubled our win/loss ratio in three years, but there are still a few who complain that she’s harsh. To be clear, she is harsh, but you can tell the girls who don’t get her are the ones who can, like, call their mom a bitch when their friends are over and feel no fear. You know. White girls.
Coach Mama separates us into two teams I can tell are set up to give my squad an advantage for the camera. She’s given me Kendra, who passes to me whenever she gets the chance, and Preeti, the goalkeeper I can never score against. The other players are assigned on the same principle, so Audra (a weak link, let’s be honest) is on the other side. We line up, Mom blows the whistle, and the game is on.
Like I do inGLO, I play offense in field hockey. Instead of calculating damage and shooting bolts at enemy tanks, my job is to pass this ball out to someone who can run it down the field and line myself up for a shot at the goal. Field hockey doesn’t have healers because, uh, magic isn’t real, but I guess our defense kind of does the work a healer would do on aGLOmap. They can’t make the offense any less exhausted or make it hurt less when we take a stick to the shins, but they do prioritize giving our damage dealers a shot at scoring. Aw, this metaphor is almost making me excited to play today.
So wait, if DPS is offense and healers are defense, then I guess the goalie is the tank? No, that doesn’t 100 percent work. Tanks are strong-ass characters with more health and special abilities than DPSes or healers. They’re really hard to kill, which is why taking an enemy tank out is an instant win inGLO. We call that method of winning a match a “checkmate.” If someone took the other team’s goalie out in field hockey, we’d call it a “homicide.”
The other method of winning aGLOmatch is more mundane: you have to stake a claim on a payload that’s hidden somewhere on the map and stay close enough to it to jack up enough points on a payload timer. If a team member dies or gets pushed too far from the payload, they lose points. You also need every team member alive to get a payload win. To that end, the field hockey ball is the payload. Or it would be if a field hockey ball were made of diamonds and all it took to score was to sit on it while a bunch of wizards and aliens and shit attacked you with a host of elemental magic spells whose effects can be countered with a complex strength/weakness system that depends on which character you’re playing and the map’s environmental factors.
Yeah, no.GLOis so much cooler than field hockey. I really tried something just then, but this game will never get me going the same way sniping fools as Pharaoh does. That doesn’t change that I still have to play. Starting now.
I smack the ball out once the whistle goes off and pass to Julie, who can dribble like no one else on the team, and charge forward to see if I can find a gap in the defense.
“Woo-hoo! Go, Lia! Hit her with your stick thing!”
That’s Penny, who I didn’t know was coming to practice but am glad to hear from the sidelines anyway. She’s bouncing up and down so hard she has to hold her braids in her hand so they don’t whip her in the face. I check to see if Connor is with her, but I don’t see him there. That’s fine. It’s nice that he still does other things besides follow me around. My mom objected to me dating Connor when I told her about our accidental first date, but I think she’s secretly pleased that I’m dating another varsity player. She thinks we look nice together, and we do, but IMO we looked just as nice when we were just friends hanging out with everyone else.
I quickly scan the other people watching the practice to see if there’s anyone else I know. Sometimes guys show up just to watch us do things in shorts, but there aren’t that many this time. Well, there’s a few. A couple of dudes are camped out on the bleachers, but they’re not watching the practice. One of them is Todd Price, who I’ve known since we were little kids pouring beans in Monteronni, and the other is a guy with dark hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a T-shirt that—Wait a minute!
His T-shirt is black with a shield design and bluish X across the front. I know that shirt, or at least I know that cross. It doesn’t look like something he got in a store; it has mesh sleeves like a sports jersey and something written on the breast pocket. Can’t read it from this distance, but that symbol issoclose to sparking something I feel like I’ve forgotten. Something really, really important.
I’m still staring at him when he looks back. Oof, now it’s weird. I feel like I’m halfway to recognizing him, and because I’ve been caught, I find myself smiling. Who are you? I’m so close. What a crazy feeling! Isn’t he—
That’s when Audra wrecks me. Staring at the bleacher guy took longer than I thought, and I miss a pass from Kendra. I react too slowly to snag the ball with the flat of my stick, so the only thing I’m feeling now is a hard weight slamming between my shoulder blades and the muddy grass of the field coming up to meet my face. I have the sense to toss my stick away so I don’t break or land on it, but the fall still knocks the wind out of me. The squelch of the wet ground in my ear is gross enough, but grosser still is rolling over and seeing Audra’s blond head looming over me with the fakest apology face I have ever seen in my life. She really should stick to sports since Penny has the theater covered.
I’m still on the grass when my mom makes it over to me from the sidelines and offers a hand to pull me up.
“Can you stand? Does anything feel like you can’t move it?”
I’m more worried about my wrists, which would be a big injury for field hockey and an even bigger one forGLO. I roll them once, twice, and then stretch my fingers. Everything feels fine. Throwing my stick away was a good call.
“We got that on camera, didn’t we?” I say to show my mom I’m fine. As long as I got jokes, she’ll know I’m not that hurt.
“Big time,” Mom replies and peeks over to where the DSLR is still sitting on top of the tripod. I’m dazed, but I can make out the red glow where the recording light is still on. That’s not making it into the highlight reel.
“You stopped midswing.” She’s back in coach mode, trying to make whatever just happened to me into a learning experience for the team now that she knows I haven’t broken any bones. “What happened, you cramp up?”
“Yeah,” I lie and take one more look at the bleachers to see if the guy in the T-shirt is still there. He’s not, but Penny is, and I can hear her cussing out Audra in some gorgeously colorful terms. “My arm seized up, and I couldn’t follow through, and then Au—”
Audra interrupts me to save her own butt. “I thought she was shielding and couldn’t stop on time. I slid right into her, and I’m so, so sorry, Coach Romero. You sure you’re okay?”
