Playing Hurt - By Holly Schindler Page 0,1

my hips firing bullets with each step.

“I don’t know why you torture yourself,” Brandon says. I jump, slam my finger down on the remote’s pause button. What should have been the first game of my last season as a Fair Grove High Lady Eagle freezes on my TV screen. Should have been. Things just didn’t work out that way, though.

I relax my shoulders inside my worn-out Mizzou Tigers T-shirt, trying to act completely blasé as Brandon leans against my doorjamb in his rumpled pajama bottoms.

“It’s not torture,” I insist, flashing a smile. Brandon doesn’t buy it; he tosses a disgusted look at me, his braces gleaming in the TV glow.

I try to look away, but my eyes land on the old trophies that pose triumphantly on my bookshelves, all those tiny little brass sculptures of athletes dunking their metallic balls or going for victorious lay-ups. But they don’t really make me feel good anymore. Not proud. Just … furious at myself. I smile at Brandon, pretend this isn’t the case. “I’m just watching it,” I tell him. “Like some old movie on cable, you know?”

“Sure,” Brandon grumbles, rolling his eyes behind the lenses of his glasses, which shine, tonight, like two circles of moonlight on his face. “And that’s exactly why you only watch it in the dead of night, alone in your room. If it was all that innocent, you wouldn’t have to hide.”

I narrow my eyes, cross my arms over my shirt. Raise my eyebrow in a way that shows him I don’t intend to put the remote down. Or turn my TV off.

“I’m right next door, Chelse,” he informs me. “I can hear what you’re doing in here. Watching your last game over and over. Do you even sleep anymore?” He clings to the doorway, waiting for an answer.

Attempting to ignore his very existence, I push play. The court at Fair Grove High bursts back onto the screen. Our state-of-the-art glossy floor shines under the gym lights like skin coated with baby oil. The regulation markings—black paint indicating the half-court and free throw areas—are still as familiar to me as the lines on my face.

I lean forward on the edge of my bed and squint at the screen, at the former me, marveling at the way my player’s concentration has sharpened my senses; I’m just like a real eagle swooping in to tear the flesh from its unsuspecting kill. Which is exactly what I’d planned to do to the Aurora Lady Houn’ Dawgs, who’d come to my home court. Tear the juicy flesh from their vulnerable little puppy bones.

The cheerleaders along the sidelines are screaming their ridiculous fight song. The rhyme sounds awkward to me even now, watching it all unfold again for what must be the five-hundredth time.

Eagles, Eagles, we’re so regal. Rule the court like queens!

The camera lens swivels away from the court, zooms in on a pair of tan thighs bouncing beneath the violet hem of a pleated skirt. My entire TV screen fills with tight muscle.

“Brand,” Gabe moans from somewhere off-camera. “The game. Shoot the game.”

The screen blurs as Brandon swivels again, clears as the view settles on Gabe’s beautiful face.

“Come on,” Gabe moans. “Help me out here.” He shakes his head, a few blond curls tumbling down toward eyes so green you’d think for sure, at first, they’re dabs of paint. Or contacts. They’re yeah, right green—only, it’s the kind of yeah, right that really does turn out to be true after all, the same way the rolling landscapes of the Emerald Isle turn out to be reality, not just something Photoshopped by an advertising exec for the tourism industry.

Gabe purses his full lips in distaste. “You could be a little proud of your sister, you know.”

The screen jiggles as Brandon turns back to the cheerleaders, three of whom are staring not at the camera, but just to the side of it. At my Gabe. Three of them wave with their fingertips. Giggle and shove their chests out, displaying their figures the way models on The Price is Right point out items up for bid.

“I just don’t get you,” Brandon says. “When you could have that …”

Gabe chuckles while the camera zeroes in on his left earlobe, then pulls back in a jerky motion. “Your sister’s more interesting,” he says. “’Cause I had to convince her.”

Gabe’s words pick me up like a Wilson game ball, toss me back into my junior year when the King of the Ladies-Pay-All Dance kept popping up