Chapter 1

I’m not turning over a new leaf; I’m turning over an entirely new tree!

I think it started when Mom left us ... Dad and me ... when I was seven. Although I didn’t know the word, then, I was devastated and began turning inward. I had already begun playing soccer ... and thank Goddess for that! (I got that phrase from a friend, recently. I like it, so I’m trying to get it to replace other such idioms in my speech. And writing, I guess.) Soccer became my only aggression outlet and even the minimal team spirit for the girl locked inside my body, the latter caged by a mind afraid of being so deeply hurt again.

One of my teammates, and a girl I was so jealous of all year ... Wait. This needs more explanation.

Last year, I graduated from John Glenn Middle School and started at Central High. Somehow, I found when tryouts started for the school team and, somewhere, I found the drive to actually go to the first day of practice. I knew no one there, but everyone was pleasant to me. Two different sets, two very different sets of girls dominated pre-season practice. One group was led by the most impressive girl I’ve ever met. She is black, like me; a senior; and was so very obviously the leader of the team, particularly of all the girls that were on the team the previous year. I was in awe of her so could barely talk to her. The worst part of that is that I’m a defender, a fullback, and so was she. She was named to the state’s first team as a fullback last year, and I could easily see in practice why she earned such an honor. The other worst part of that is that all last year’s fullbacks on a city-league champion team returned and were also seniors. That fact almost had me quitting, as there was obviously no way I was going to start, and it looked like I might not even get to play much.

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The other set, and the one I found hard to figure out, was an incoming set of freshmen. Freshmen like me. It took me a long time to figure out how they could be so confident, so with it enough to talk ... as a group (!) ... with the seniors. I would later learn that the four girls had been on a premier team this year and won the freaking state championship! And their coach had been the woman who was the new Central High girls’ soccer coach! No wonder they were so confident! I found myself being jealous of those girls’ assuredness, something I lacked in most aspects of my life! It didn’t help that the group of girls, including a girl who was the coach’s organizer, all had breasts, one of them in particular, something I completely lacked. Yes, I was still only 13 and they were all 14, but c’mon! I’d had classmates in 6^th grade who had more up top than I did going into 9^th!

I mostly kept to myself, only infrequently and for only short periods talked with other girls trying out. The coach told us at the outset that three of the 28 girls wouldn’t make the team due to roster constraints. However, it became fairly obvious to me that I was better than three of the girls, so I gained at least some confidence I would make the cut. And I did. Even though I expected to make it, that was the first real confidence booster I had gotten in a long time, and I could feel some slight cracking in the shell I’d put around my heart.

I did not get a ton of playing time on that team, but got much more than I had expected, and that helped my confidence levels a bit. But every day, I’d go to lunch at school and see that group of freshmen girls on the team enjoying themselves at a particular table they had commandeered, and which no one ever tried to take from them. As school progressed through September, more and more girls ... Well, it wasn’t really that many, but other girls began joining them, no doubt due to the fun those girls obviously had while eating lunch in school! They were obviously used to being popular girls, and their confidence was on full display at that table. Hell! Even that impressive center back from the team visited them there occasionally! To top it off, in late September this really cute white boy I had in one of my classes began sitting with them. He never talked to girls in class, as far as I could tell, and seemed even shyer than me. I didn’t see him talk to those girls at that lunch table for a while, but he never missed a day. Then, Holy Hell, he became an assistant to the soccer coach! Two of the other girls at that table had become assistants to the team earlier, but, now, that dreamy boy was in the locker room with us! I could not have written this at that time, much less stated it out loud, but I began having fantasies about him in the locker room. While I might not have been able to write that last bit previously, the part I certainly could not have written was this: He became the star player in my nighttime fantasies when I ... would rub myself to orgasm.