LaRose(94)

Diamond was team captain. She looked at each one of them in turn. They silently rose and each put three fingers in the air. Everyone thought they were pointing to the Holy Trinity, but it was their special move, a W for Warriors. Then they roared Warriors, Warriors, Warriors, jumped high, smacked hands.

Josette was first up to serve. She loved the moment when the team slung off its false girly vagueness and became a machine.

Rock that serve, baby! Emmaline’s voice was then consumed by the other parent voices.

Josette flew up and bashed it. But one of the brutal redheaded Planet twins, Gwenna, caught it on one forearm. A mishit, but a setter managed to play it and Braelyn boomed it down the seam. Snow nonchalantly lobbed it, Diamond set with a precise fingertip pass to Regina, and that was that. Regina could drop the ball on a dime. An actual dime. For fun they had set up shots for her, twenty dimes on the floor. She kept every one she hit, and made two dollars.

A medium blonde named Crystal, pretty, twisted to return Josette’s next serve and shanked. So it went. Josette got six serves in before the Planets called time-out.

They’ll blast back now, said Coach Duke. Maggie, you’re our secret weapon right now. They haven’t tested you. So be ready. Josette, they will try to get your next serve if it kills them, so give ’em heck. Regina, if you get a chance . . .

Don’t say it, Coach.

Take a dump, said Diamond.

Let’s call it a surprise left-hand attack, okay? And everyone, remember, an assist is as good as a kill.

Maggie didn’t think so. After each game she totaled her kills on a piece of paper taped to her bedroom wall. The scorekeepers added them up too, and if a girl reached 1,000 she got a foot-high golden trophy. Maggie wanted one. Newspaper headline: Girl of 1,000 Kills. She had developed her jump to ballerina height and perfected a sliding tip. The merest tap, never push, a deflection of trajectory that sometimes happened so quickly that it was uncanny. She could score without remembering how the ball came at her. Sometimes she’d even feel its shadow and think the shadow off her hand onto the floor of the opposing court. When she was rotated into the hitter’s position up front, the other team always wanted to show the tiny girl what. With her slippery, eccentric, high-leap blocks and tips, Maggie got to show them what.

Josette’s serving surf was upset by the interruption, as the Planets’ coach intended, and Maggie felt the energy on the court shift. The Warriors crouched, pep-talking one another, passing around Call it call it call it so they’d remember to use their voices. Braelyn was at serve. Square-shouldered, chubby-jawed, goth-eyed, she didn’t look at Maggie or seem to aim at her, but Maggie was ready anyway. Braelyn got an ace off her. The ball had hesitated, Maggie could swear, and changed direction. She flushed. But once she knew Braelyn’s trick she could handle it. She watched the ball come off the heel of Braelyn’s hand this time and saw where it would break. Maggie was there, but the ball wasn’t. That was two points. Back-to-back aces. The Planet parents were shouting. Her parents were tense and silent. Maggie shimmied all over and stepped back into the game.

She kept her eyes on the serve and pried a weak rescue off the floor, something Josette, on her knees, could put into play for Diamond. But the Planets returned the shot and there began a long, bitter, hard-fought, manic volley with miracle saves and unlikely hits tamed into dinky wattle-rolling blurps off the top of the net that drove the parents nuts. They leaped up gasping, yelling, but it was friendly pandemonium. By the time Regina finally won a joust with Crystal, everyone was in a good mood. Except Crystal, who hissed at Regina, a startling freckled cat. Regina turned away and said, Freaky. The players bounced into formation and although the Warriors continued their five-or six-point lead they fought hard for it. Luck was with them in close calls, causing a few Planet parents to grumble. The Warriors took the first two games. Then the Planets bore down, the luck went their way. So did the next two games. The tiebreaker fifth game was now on.

Most volleyball games were competitive but affable, everyone straining toward good sportsmanship. Coach Duke had even sent home a code of conduct that the player and her parents had to sign. But during the fourth game there had been hard hits, harder looks, a few jeering yells, smug high fives on points. By the fifth game, an ugly electricity had infected the gym. Nola knew which parent was for which team. There was no placatory murmur, Nice hit, when the opposing team scored a point, no friendly banter. Nola had yelled hard but held back her glee, as the coach’s flyer counseled, when the other team faulted. She had tried not to contest line hits. Tried not to call out when she thought she knew better than the player where the ball would strike. She had tried, as Coach begged, not to dishonor the game of volleyball.

Nola surreptitiously ate a grape. It was disappointing, with a tough tasteless skin, a watery chemical pulp. She tried another. Maggie didn’t always serve, but the coach did not remove her from the lineup. There she was, up. The Warriors had lost the first two points. This serve had to stop the Planets’ momentum. The pressure! Why Maggie? Peter shouted encouragement, but Nola was silent. She stared hard at her daughter, trying to pass luck into her daughter by force of love.

Maggie served into the net. Desolate, her mother threw her hands into her lap like empty gloves.

The Planet parents with the knobby knees in the Raviches’ backs, the Wildstrands, cackled in pleasure. Peter caught Nola as she turned, put his arm around her.

Don’t go there, honey, he said into her hair.