Playing Hurt - By Holly Schindler Page 0,2

at my locker door, winking at me in the hallways. Texting me during bus rides to away games. I can still hear the team razzing me like Gabe had cooties, their elbows in my ribs, because jealousy behaves that way sometimes. You don’t want that, do you, people say, pointing at the chocolate chip cookie you’ve got your hand on, wrinkling their nose, because the minute you agree, No, I really don’t, they can swoop in and pop the entire cookie into their mouth, making their cheeks bulge out like Dizzy Gillespie.

But even when I said it about Gabe—No, you’re right, he’s so not my type—he wouldn’t give up. Wouldn’t let himself be swooped up by anyone else. Not one of my teammates or the cheerleaders or the tennis girls in their short skirts or the debate captain or the salutatorian. He kept chasing me, telling me he just wanted to spend a little time bathed in the glow of my star. Nobody’d ever talked to me like that. And when I finally agreed to go out with him, the entire female population of FGH stomped their feet on the tile floor of the hallways. I swear, it felt like the Big Quake—the one that seismologists have long predicted for Missouri’s New Madrid Fault—had finally hit.

“I wish I’d never brought the stupid camcorder to that game,” Brandon says from my doorway.

“You didn’t bring the camcorder, Gabe did,” I remind him. “You were just shooting while Gabe took notes for the paper.” Because, in addition to recapping the Eagles’ wins and losses for The Eagle Eye, our school-wide Monday-morning newscast, Gabe Ross’s mug shot showed up every week at the top of his sports column for the Fair Grove High Bulletin.

“I know what you’re doing,” Brandon tells me. He slathers me with such a disapproving look that I almost think, for a minute, we’ve traded our ages like baseball cards. Like suddenly I’m the one who’s two years younger. “You’re watching that last game to figure out where your big mistake was, right? FYI—there’s no mistake here, Chelse. It was an accident. And there’s no way to redo it, either. It happened.”

I stare at the edge of the bench, visible at the bottom of the TV screen, wishing like hell I’d been sitting on it. Just a game or two, I catch myself thinking. If I’d just sat a couple of games out …

“I’m serious, Chelse. Watching this crap is self-imposed torture. All it’s going to get you is hurt all over again,” Brandon warns. “I know it—just like I knew you were hurt that day at the game.”

“I’d been hurt a million times before,” I remind him in a near-shout. “Jammed fingers and pulled hamstrings and sprained ankles. Every athlete gets hurt. The best players just suck it up and push through it.” But my hip was different. I knew that—I should have known to sit it out. I start kicking myself internally all over again.

“Getting loud in there,” Dad says, with the same warmth as a corrections officer. He steps into view in my doorway, beside Brandon, a glass of water in his hand. The moonlight bleeds through my venetian blinds, casting horizontal shadows on Dad’s face the way the crossbars of a cell might.

I hit stop, so that my final game disappears and the screen fills with a late-night infomercial for a juicer.

Scratches, the gray tomcat Dad brought home for my eighth birthday, mews from my bedroom doorway and swirls his body between Dad’s legs. He slithers across the floor, then launches himself up onto my antique iron bed.

I’d bet that, for Scratches, the distance between the carpet and the top of my fluffy white comforter is practically the same as the distance between the gym floor and the rim once was for me. And Scratches is ten—a senior cat—but he can still make the leap. Here I am, young enough that an entire career in college basketball should be spread out before me. But I’m done. It’s over. Time has run out. Basketball is an hourglass with a whole pyramid of sand on the bottom.

Scratches climbs into my lap, then instantly starts purring and working his paws against my stomach. Okay, it’s not like I’ve completely let myself go. So my stomach’s still flat. But now that it’s not rock hard, it just seems—doughy to me. Especially when Scratches starts kneading like this.

“You’ve got finals tomorrow,” Dad barks at me. “Last finals of your senior year. Got