Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(34)

I do it sometimes, in the dark. Lie in my bed, staring at the crosshatched pattern of springs supporting Bridget’s mattress above my head and drawing the letters of West’s name on my body.

W-E-S-T across my stomach, around the side. I use my fingernail, only my fingernail, and bring up goose bumps.

W-E-S-T along my sternum. Over my collarbone and down the swell of my breast, tripping and catching on my nipple.

His name feels like a secret, and now he’s wearing it on his wrist. I want to know all about this girl who put it there. What she looks like. If she’s got freckles, fair hair or dark, like his. If she’s scrappy or ethereal, funny or serious, scrape-kneed or ladylike.

I know that she loves him, so I want to know everything else.

But West doesn’t want to share her with me.

I shouldn’t keep trying to scale these walls he puts up. I’m a terrible climber.

I don’t like arguing, and he doesn’t owe me a thing.



“Get down on your hands and knees,” Quinn says, pointing. “And put your arm over Gwen’s back.”

The grass is cold. Dampness soaks through the knees of my sweatpants more or less immediately, but I have a feeling it’s not the worst thing that’s going to happen to me in the next few minutes. I’m tacking myself on to what Quinn calls the “scrum”—a word that sounds enough like scrotum to make me uncomfortable.

But not as uncomfortable as I feel slinging my arm around a stranger’s back.

We are a tightly formed cluster of three rows of women, hands clutching shirts, shoulders into shoulders, and hips into hips. Quinn says that in a minute our eight people are going to shove against their eight people, and then the ball will get rolled down the middle and … something. She briefed me on a lot of these rules on the way over, but when she said I’d be tackling people, she failed to mention the largeness of the people I’m meant to tackle.

Behind me, another player puts her head down and jams her shoulders into the two second-row players I’m flanking. She grasps a fistful of my T-shirt with one hand.

“All set?” Quinn asks.

“Um, no?”

She gives me a sunny smile. “You’ll figure it out.” She starts jogging backward to the sidelines, where she grabs a ball. “All right, let’s do this thing!”

Seconds later she’s rolling it between the two halves of the scrum, and my whole side of the formation is lurching forward. I have to scramble to hold on to Gwen as the grass tries to slip out from beneath my shoes. There’s grunting and shoving, another rapid forward lurch, and someone shouts, “Ball’s out.” The whole thing kind of collapses and dissolves at the same time, and I just stand there, dazed, as everyone else on the field runs away.

“It’s your ball, Caroline!” Quinn shouts. “Follow it!”

I spend the next half hour feeling like a very dumb kid sister, trailing after the older girls and shouting, Hey, wait up!

Since I have two older sisters, this is, at least, a role I’m familiar with.

Whenever I get the ball, I get rid of it as fast as possible. I am, it turns out, deeply terrified of the idea of getting tackled. Tackling also scares me. One time the opposing team’s ball carrier runs right at me, and I tell myself I’m going to take her down, but then when the moment comes, I just grab ineffectually at her shirt. Because I suck.

Still, it’s kind of fun. Right up until the parking lot beside the playing field begins to fill with cars and a van that says Carson College on the side.

Carson is a school about twenty-five miles from Putnam.

The van is full of college women in black rugby jerseys and matching shorts.

It occurs to me that perhaps Quinn made me wear a blue shirt for a reason.

And that Quinn is, in fact, a lying liar who lies, and she’s manipulated me into a rugby game, not a practice.

The Carson girls who pile out of the van are so much bigger than our girls. Sooooo much bigger.

Also, they have a coach—a real, honest-to-goodness, grown-up faculty-member coach. Putnam Women’s Rugby doesn’t even have proper shirts. It’s just a club whose membership seems to consist mostly of Quinn’s friends, many of whom were complaining a few minutes ago of being hungover.

Whereas the members of the Carson team look like they ate rare beefsteak for breakfast. The coach has a male assistant, who appears to be our age but has a whistle and a clipboard and therefore looks far more official.

I am in way over my head. I start trying to think of a good reason to beg off.

I have to study.

Lame.

I sprained an ankle.

When?

I need to do … things. Elsewhere.

Right.

I lace my fingers behind my head and look at the sky, searching for inspiration.

But I find something else there instead.

I find that it’s a perfect November day in Iowa.

The sky is so blue, it hurts.

The wind feels good on my face. The Carson players are chattering with our players, Quinn’s talking to their coach, and everyone seems so happy.

I have nowhere else I’m supposed to be today, and I realize suddenly that there’s nowhere else I want to be.

I like this.

I try to remember the last time I did something completely new and scary—something I liked—and I think of West at the bakery, his backward black hat and his white apron.