Chapter 28

"Bitch!"

I didn't realize I said it out loud till the two girls I was following into the locker room whipped their heads around and stared at me. I stomped past them, threw my gym clothes in my locker and headed for the showers.

Somehow I managed to send off enough anger to make them change their minds about showering. The water was plenty hot but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the steam all around me wasn't caused by the shower. By the time I got back to my locker, the two I'd followed in were long gone.

Fuck her. I didn't need this shit. I had enough on my plate without having to put up with a bitch who thought she was Hitler just because she had a fucking whistle.

I got dressed in my street clothes and was on my way back to the field when I thought about my project. I took a detour to my book locker and got the materials Ms. Evans had given me the previous week. I had room in my book bag once I did some quick rearranging.

The rest of the team was finishing up a lap around the court when I got back. The dirty looks I got from a couple of the girls convinced me I probably had something to do with them being forced to run more laps. I could just see one of the girls complaining or trying to defend me and Coach Donahue penalizing the whole team for it.

I sat down, pulled my bag over to me and dug out my laptop. I turned it on to warm up while I got the pack of materials I needed to figure out a plan for. I'd decided the best way to tackle it was to put a spreadsheet together with the classes on the left column and listing requirements as column headers. I figured I'd make it simple. In the CHAPTERS column, I'd put the number of chapters to be read in each class. After a slah mark would be the number I'd finished. For the English class, there was room to insert the word Books. I had a column for the number of TESTS, a Yes or No column for a FINAL EXAM, # of WEEKS I figured each class would take, planned START and END dates and the TEACHER for each class. As I progressed, I could use colors to show what was done and what was left to do. The plan was to be able to look at the spreadsheet and tell exactly how my progress was going at a glance. I decided a DONE column would be a good addition, mostly for my morale as the Xs started to show up.

I figured I could do a simple text document for each class. Pretty much a list of things in order, one action per line. For example, part of the English page would have:

Read Taming of the Shrew

Write report — Shrew

Exam — Shrew

I could change a line to blue when I was working on it, then red when it was complete. There would be room to put in expected completion dates for any of the line items. I could always add to the list. Putting in a few chapter numbers and a date under the "Read" line would set up targets that would be easily met. A project as big as the one I was embarking on could be overwhelming. Breaking it into smaller pieces that I could handle in a reasonable amount of time and actually see as completed would do wonders for my attitude towards completion.

I'd just gotten this all straight in my head and had picked up the laptop to actually start creating it when I felt someone come up next to me. It didn't feel friendly.

"What do you think you're doing, Miss O'Hara?"

"I'm working on a project that's due next Monday, Coach."

"I see. Tell me, do you see anyone else working on projects, Miss O'Hara?"

"No, Ma'am. I just thought..."

"That's what I figured. It seems to me that every time you think, you and a lot of your friends seem to get deeper in trouble. Have you thought about that?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Well maybe that's something you should think about."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Now, put the computer and all those papers away and just sit there and watch what the other girls are doing. Maybe you'll learn something you can use next year. That is, if you make the team next year. Just sit there with your hands in your lap and pay attention. Do you think you can do that?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Good. I don't want to have to come back here and tell you again."

God, what a bitch. I powered down my laptop and put it away, then stuffed my pack of early graduation requirements in the outside pocket.

I sat there on the bench with my eyes open and my mouth shut. The more I did the first, the harder it was to do the second.

A good half hour was spent with the team split into two lines, maybe eight or ten feet apart, each player five feet away from those on either side of her. I was reminded of a game we used to play at birthday parties when I was a kid. We'd get split into two or three groups and each group would get a balloon. When given the signal, the person holding the balloon in each group would hit it up in the air and the group that was able to keep theirs from hitting the ground the longest won. More than just being able to hit the balloon, it was an exercise in control. The first team to lose was almost always the one where someone pounded the balloon and it ended up where nobody could get to it before it hit the ground. Half the time it was because whoever hit it was struggling to reach it and made a last ditch effort. The other half was when somebody wanted to impress everyone and hit it so hard it ended up out of everyone else's reach. Somehow, the others didn't seem so impressed when everyone on the winning team was eating their ice cream cones or whatever the prize was.

Though similar, this exercise was quite different. Our fifteen member team was split into three groups. Two groups of seven facing each other and one group of one sitting on the bench. There were seven volleyballs in play, going back and forth in each pair. Every four or five minutes Coach Donahue would have the player on the far end of the line closest to the net run around to the other end and the whole line would shift down one place. By the time the half hour was over, everyone in each line had hit to everyone in the other.

Each girl would hit the ball to the girl across from her who would hit it back. Unlike the birthday game, there were no prizes given out for doing it correctly. It was pointed out with vigor to any party who didn't do it perfectly, though. What Coach wanted was each girl to stay right where she was, not even lifting a foot, hold her hands together and hit the ball when it came to her. Coach made it clear that she was interested in accuracy above all else. The ideal shot would arrive somewhere between the stomach and the groin so that the girl could swing her hands straight up and hit it back. If a ball went to the right place but was too hard to handle, the girl who hit it was the one who heard from Coach, not the girl who missed. Of course, any miss of a ball that should have been hittable was fair game, too.

Coach never looked in my direction but it was pretty evident that she was talking to me much of the time. She came down on Annie the hardest but Becky and Roberta were a close second. All three were accused of hot-dogging it and of course, the "No I in Team" cliché made an appearance a couple of times. Coach pointed out that a group of star players might be good enough to make it to the top of the pile in our school district but it was going to take a lot more than that to beat the other teams that had made it to the playoffs. We were good enough to win the last eight games last year and make the first round as a wild card but we didn't make it to a second game. She also pointed out the caliber of the teams in our district, pretty similar to our team's before I'd come on the scene. Of course, she didn't put it that way; she used the phrase "previous years. Just because we were able to beat a bunch of lousy teams didn't mean we'd skate through the playoffs.

I guess I wasn't completely worthless in Coach's eyes. She talked about the skills some of the girls had picked up over the past couple of years and that the team would never have gotten as far as it had without them. But playoffs were a different atmosphere altogether. A bunch of individuals wouldn't last long, no matter how good they were. Skill was great but the team that was going to come out ahead was the team that played as a team. And the one that would make it to the top of the hill would be the one in which each player knew what every other player on the team would do practically before they knew themselves.

The changes I saw in that half hour were remarkable. At first, there was a lot of resentment, both at being made to do an exercise that most or all of them felt was beneath them and then at having Coach Donahue yell at each of them for every deviance from perfection. When she explained how to rotate the line the first time, the girl who had to switch ends was reamed for walking like an old lady. Balls were going all over the place at first and I think more were chased after than hit back for the first few pairings. But Coach was consistent and it became evident that nobody was going to get away with anything and that the only time they would have to listen to her was when someone had actually screwed up. Soon, the girl at the end of the line would run when it came time to switch and the others would jump to the side while all the players in the other line hunched down in anticipation of that first ball. All of a sudden, there were a lot of smiles, the ball was going back and forth consistently, rarely ending up anywhere other than the hitting zone of the hitter's partner. It wasn't Coach I heard anymore; it was the recipient of the ball exclaiming "All right", "Atta Girl" and similar. At the beginning, Coach had come down on several girls for hitting the ball too hard, telling them speed didn't count, that kind of thing. Now the balls were zipping back and forth, as fast as or faster than the wild shots she'd screamed about. Once the accuracy got in, the speed came. But it didn't work the other way around.

After the row had rotated all the was through, Coach blew her whistle and told the team to take ten laps around the gym to loosen up. It was a different group of girls than the one I saw when I walked in less than an hour ago. They were probably moving about one and a half times as fast and there weren't any disgruntled looks. There also weren't any stragglers; it was a cohesive unit moving around the gym, not 14 individuals.

Once the laps were completed, Coach blew her whistle and waved her arm, shouting "Line up!" Two seconds later, there was a perfect line of fourteen girls, eagerly awaiting the next order. Coach walked down the line from the near end, counting each girl till she got to seven, then sent each group to a different side of the court. She arranged them in rows of 2-3-2 and then stood at the side of the net.

"All right. Now we're going to take it a step further. We're still working on accuracy, here." She tossed a ball to one of the girls. "Becky, you need to hit the ball to Amanda. Amanda, you need to hit it back to Lizzie." She pointed at the girl standing next to Becky. "Lizzie, you hit it back to Annie. I want you to work it around the court in a big 'S' like this." She moved her hand around, pointing first at Becky, then Annie, then back and forth to show the order of girls to hit to. "On this side, you go this way." She drew a similar zig-zag, starting with Lizzie. "Any questions?"

There were a couple of "No"s, but there were also some confused looks here and there.

"OK. Don't make this into something complicated. It's OK to yell out the name of the next girl the ball's supposed to go to. If you pay attention, it won't be long before you won't even have to think about it. Once again, I'm not interested in speed, just accuracy. The first person who spikes the ball into the other team is going to be doing laps for the rest of the day. We're working on control and being a team here. It's all yours, Becky."

A regulation volleyball court is 9 meters by 18 meters. Throw a net in the middle and that makes each half nine meters square. For the metrically challenged, that works out to six inches shy of thirty feet on a side. As long as we got the ball in that box that was ten yards on a side more times than the other team did, we were doing OK. A shot now and then into a small part of that space that didn't have any players in it was icing on the cake. Coach had reduced the size of the box from ten yards a side to about one by having the ball returned to specific people. Another way to look at it is a reduction from 100 square yards to one square yard.

I noticed the difference between this activity and the previous one immediately. First off, all fourteen girls were enthusiastic about doing it, right from the beginning. The whole team would call out the name of the next girl the ball was to go to as it was coming toward the person on their team. Coach was quiet this time, letting the girls police themselves. There was a lot of laughing and good-natured kidding when balls went to the wrong place.

The first few shots were within a few feet of their targets. When Roberta hit hers right to Nicky, everyone on both teams cheered. Unfortunately, they were all bouncing around so much that Nicky's return shot to Amanda hit the ground. I screamed Amanda's name but it didn't do any good. I noticed Coach glancing at me with my peripheral vision. I thought I detected a slight smile on her face but when I turned to get a good look at her, she was already facing the court and I couldn't tell for sure.

By the time they were on their third rotation, most of the shots were going right to the person they were aimed at and all but the shooter would jump and cheer the successful shooter. They went through the drill five times and then Coach said, "Great job, Team. Take a couple of quick laps and then in to the showers. I'll see you guys for class tomorrow. Don't forget — another late day on Thursday."

They all ran their two laps full out, closer together than the last time they ran, lots of laughing and chattering the whole time. They kept up the speed as they turned the corner and ran to the locker room. If anything, the volume of the chatter increased. I saw Annie turn around and run backwards, holding both hands up for Amanda to slap just before they turned the corner.

I pulled up the handle on my suitcase and stood up just as Coach put her arm on my shoulder and said, "You did good, Jill."

Not knowing what in the world I did that was good, I mumbled "Thank you" back to her.

I felt her hand lift off my shoulder, then she patted it a couple of times. I turned around and saw her back as she headed off towards the locker room.

I went over to my locker and got the stuff I'd need for my homework, then went out to the parking lot. Wanda was waiting for me with the engine running. I opened the back door and threw my case on the floor, then got in front.

Wanda had a plate covered in tin foil on her lap. She handed it to me after I'd snapped the seat belt closed.

I lifted a corner of the foil and recalled the smell the first time Wanda cooked for all of us. Jack and Mary called it an "Aunt Debbie smell." The smell wafting up from the plate was completely different, reminding me how hungry I was. I removed the rest of the foil and brought the plate up to my face, inhaling deeply.

"Smells great, Wand."

She had a big grin on her face as she said "Thanks," and handed me a fork and spoon wrapped in a napkin.

The plate had a big slab of meat loaf, a mountain of mashed potatoes with a lake of brown gravy inside plus a good sized handful of green beans slathered in melted butter. Just the kind of meal my father would love. The kind he should know better about, being a doctor.

I was chewing my third mouthful when Wanda said, "How was practice?"

I'd settled down a bit but got pissed off all over again as I told her how Coach had humiliated me in front of the whole team. By the time I got through telling Wanda how the girls had banded together and become a team, I was feeling some sadness because I hadn't been included. "It was pretty amazing, really. I mean, it wasn't like they were a bunch of players. They turned into something else. Something more than you think of when someone uses the word 'team.' It was like they were one organism, working together, feeding and taking energy from each other, better than all of them as individual players would be."