The Option Play, page 17
“Your fake girlfriend,” I put in. “And yeah, he’s terrible. But aren’t there terrible guys on the Woodsmen? Or if you want to play for the Dukes, there would be some real jerks there, I bet. In fact, I remember one of the Dukes’ equipment guys asked out my former friend Shae after their game last season, and she did go out with him and he wasn’t very nice after she slept with him.”
“And that compares somehow to Barclay throwing you off a boat?”
“You were the one who said that I was fine!” I reminded him.
Kellen just stared. “This is one of the times when I can’t read the situation. You’re speaking in a way I don’t understand.”
“If I hadn’t come here with you, then you wouldn’t have had this problem,” I explained. “I don’t want to mess things up for you, Kellen. You were really excited to be a Cottonmouth and maybe they’ll make you a great offer, give you some amazing contract so you can play with Teddy Hayes as your quarterback and have a house on this ocean. You could make a bunch more money and have sponsorships and move on from the Woodsmen. That’s what you wanted.”
“That’s what I said, yes.”
“And you hired me to be your girlfriend to help with that,” I said.
“I hired you,” he echoed. “We have a contract.”
“You getting upset and fighting with Barclay isn’t going to work toward any of your goals. But maybe you won’t even end up here! Maybe the Dukes will offer something even better,” I went on. “Maybe you’ll think, ‘Woah. I have to be in New Mexico and play for them. Never mind these dumb Cottonmouths.’ But in any case, I don’t want our fake relationship to be something that holds you back.”
Kellen still looked at me. Then he got up and walked to the door. “I’m going to make sure that they’re heading to shore. Lock this after I leave.”
I did lock the door, rearranged the ice, and forced myself to calm down, because there was no reason to keep being upset. Even if it had been very scary and that guy Barclay was awful, I couldn’t let Kellen base his career on this one thing.
After a while, I reached for my phone, because I had returned to checking that. After all the weeks of not wanting to know what people were writing, now I couldn’t stop myself from looking at it again and again. I wanted to see how they were reacting to the show that Kellen and I were putting on. Which it was, only a show.
I read the comments under the latest pictures that Kellen’s image crew had posted, of us getting on the boat and one with the sunset behind us as we’d been waiting for dinner the night before. Almost everyone was positive and excited for him, wishing him well and either hoping he’d stay with the Woodsmen, or Cottonmouth fans welcoming him to Florida. He was really developing his fanbase, which had been the goal.
Mixed in with the nice comments were more than a few remarks about how I sucked and was a naked, publicity-seeking show-off, things like that. How I didn’t deserve him. Yeah, some people were also complimentary, but those weren’t who stuck out to me. There were even a few links back to the video of me in the Silver Dollar and of that awful keg stand.
But everyone was so hopeful for Kellen, and for once, they only had good things to write. All the stuff that they’d been bitter about before—him ignoring people, refusing to sign autographs, turning down charity requests—all of that seemed to have been forgotten. It was…unfair. It was unfair that they were still writing the same things about me but suddenly, he was golden. Of course, that was my job. It was a job, I reminded myself.
Kellen didn’t come back until I’d showered and packed and I saw land through our porthole, but it didn’t look the same as the place we’d cast off from before.
“We’re in West Palm Beach,” he explained. “We’ll take a car back to Miami. I have another meeting with the Cottonmouths and then we’ll go to New Mexico.”
“Ok.” I nodded and picked up my bags, which he then took. “Are you upset with me?”
“Barclay and the other players aren’t going to approach you. No one will,” he said, and strode through the doorway. There was a car waiting for us when we walked off the quiet boat, and yeah, no one even came out to wave goodbye. Kellen opened his laptop and his phone the moment we got into the car, just a plain, black one this time with no little champagne refrigerator.
“Kellen? I asked you before if you were upset with me and you did your non-answering thing. Are you?”
He closed the computer but looked at his phone. “I don’t know how you’d think that I could play with them now. There’s no way. I—hold on.” He put the phone to his ear. “Yes. What?” He didn’t speak for a long time and I watched his face. “I understand. Yes.” And he put it back down.
“What was that?” I asked, but he leaned forward and spoke to the driver.
“We need to go to the closest airport. Would that be Fort Lauderdale or Palm Beach?” They discussed it for a moment and the car got off the freeway.
“Kellen?” I asked him. “What’s going on?”
He was back on his phone, typing, and he didn’t answer me for a long time. Then, when he looked away from the screen, he still didn’t meet my eyes. “I just booked your flight back to Traverse City. You’ll have to hurry to get to the gate.”
“Wait, what? We’re going home?”
“You’re going to Michigan. I’m going to New Mexico,” he told me, and I stared at him.
“You don’t want me to come with you? Are you firing me?” I glanced toward the driver. Oops. “I don’t understand,” I went on, my voice lower. “This was working so well and I can tell that you’re mad at me—”
“I’m not mad. I’m not firing you and I’ll pay you the amount we agreed on in the contract,” he said, very, very calm.
I shook my head, still confused, not getting it. “So this is over?” I asked him.
Finally, he looked at me. He nodded and his words were slow. “This is over.” And that was all he said for a lot of miles.
We got to the airport and the driver went to the trunk to get my bags. “Are you sure?” I asked Kellen. “Are you sure that you don’t want me to come with you to New Mexico? Because I think we do pretty well together, don’t we? And it seems to be working, this strategy that Zalamero guy set up.”
“Right, my image.” He breathed in, then out. “No. I got rid of Zalamero when we were still on the boat.”
“Then, I guess you don’t need me anymore,” I agreed. I was sorry to hear it, very sorry. “Thanks, Kellen. Thanks for bringing me on this trip with you. I had a lot of fun.”
“Did you?”
I nodded. “I guess that I won’t see you very much again, or ever?” That sounded awful. “I wish you the best of luck with everything. I hope—I know you’ll be happy with your new team. I’ll be watching you, every game.”
“I wish you the best, too.” He looked at me, like he was searching for something in my face. “Goodbye, Caitlyn.”
“Goodbye.” I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, like he’d done once to me. I let my lips linger there for a moment and my breath caught in my throat as I pulled away.
I didn’t look at Kellen again as I got out of the car. But then, even though he’d said that I’d have to hurry to get to my gate, I just stood there on the busy sidewalk. I watched the black car maneuver slowly through the traffic and toward the airport exit. I realized that I was crying as I watched it go. “Goodbye,” I said again.
Then I went home.
Chapter 10
“That doesn’t look funny. Not at all.”
I glanced up, blinking against the bright glare of the July sun, and saw Isaac pointing to my book. “No, the title says that it’s a ‘Divine Comedy’ but that’s not really what it means.” I closed the thick volume by Dante and used it to fan myself, because it was so dang hot in here. It reminded me a lot of when I’d been in Florida, except that they had all that lovely air conditioning inside and my dad’s shop certainly didn’t. It was even worse in the back with all the equipment going and Isaac appeared to be sweating bullets.
“Did you come out here to cool down?” I asked him sympathetically. “It’s not much better where I sit.”
“Uh, no,” he said. He wiped his forehead and took a deep breath. “Uh, no, I wanted to talk to you about something else. I wanted to ask you—”
“Oh, yeah, the order is getting delivered tomorrow. But there’s no rush, right? We aren’t running low on anything.” Because, since I’d come back from my trip several weeks before, I’d been working hard on keeping track of everything at the shop. I’d been working on a lot of things, actually.
“Great, good,” Isaac said, but he kept twisting a drive socket in his hands. “That’s great.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, and went back to Dante. It was actually a very interesting book, but I really needed to concentrate when I read it. I’d had to go back through a few parts again and again, but I was getting it.
“Uh, Caitlyn?” Isaac said, and I glanced up again, but then looked past my coworker through the big front window. I closed The Divine Comedy and sat straight as the bell rang when a woman opened the door.
“May I help you?” I asked carefully.
The beautiful girl smiled a little. “Hi. Are you Caitlyn? Caitlyn Waite?” She smiled at Isaac too and ran a hand through her blonde hair, tossing it over her shoulders. He looked like he was about to faint.
“I am Caitlyn,” I told her coldly. I wasn’t going to admit that I knew who she was: Danni Lalka, the girl who’d replaced me on the Wonderwomen squad. She’d replaced me in my friend squad, too, if all the dumb stuff they were posting on their @WoodsmenWonderwomen accounts was to be believed. I did believe it.
Rather than deal with her, I turned to my coworker. “Did you need something else, Isaac?” I asked him.
“Huh?” He swiveled to me, blinking and staring like he’d never seen me before in his life. “Did I?” He returned his big-eyed gaze to Danni. “Who are you?” he wondered, his voice shaking slightly.
“Isaac, my dad probably has a lot for you to do in the back,” I told him sharply. The last thing he needed was to have a woman like this get her teeth into him! He listened but he threw her one last, longing glance before he left.
“Hi,” the girl said to me, and gave me a shy smile. “I thought you might know who I am, but maybe not.”
“Are you famous or something?” I asked, and typed on the computer. Gibberish, I typed total gibberish, but she didn’t know that. “Make, model, and year, please.”
“Oh, no,” she answered. “I’m not here about any repairs.”
“This is a place for cars,” I told her, and remembered saying the same thing a while before to Kellen Karma when he’d come into the auto body shop. But he had needed something totally different.
“Right, I know that,” the girl said. “I wanted to talk to you personally. I wanted to know—I was hoping to—it’s about the Wonderwomen.”
“I’m no longer a cheerleader, but I know that you are. Congratulations. So what?” I challenged. “Did you come here to rub it in my face?”
To my shock, I watched her eyes fill up. She held her index fingers under them, keeping the tears from spilling down her cheeks. “No,” she told me. “I didn’t come for that. I’m really having problems and I didn’t know what to do.” The tears ran over her fingers. “I’m in sooo much trouble.”
I bit my lip. Then I took a tissue from the box that was still on my desk, even though I didn’t need it anymore. I held it out to her.
“Thank you.” She dabbed at her eyes and by mistake, she took off most of her eyeliner. “Sorry. I usually carry a bigger purse so I can have my own box with me. This bag only holds a travel size and I already used them up today.”
“Why are you crying so much?” I asked.
More tears. “I’m going to get kicked off the Wonderwomen. They’re going to tell me I can’t cheer anymore.”
“No, you made the team. Sam and Rylah did the final cuts at the end of auditions. They already announced the final roster,” I explained, but not very patiently. Didn’t she know anything? “The only way you’ll be booted off now is if you get pregnant or injured.”
Danni shook her head. “I’m not. And I am going to get cut, I know it!”
“Well, I guess you could totally mess up the routines.” I smirked, because no one good enough to be a Wonderwoman would be that forgetful and bad at memorization.
She stared at me and her eyes filled again. Oh.
“I know you have a ton of dance experience,” I said. I knew because Shae had bragged about it to me, saying how great her new bestie Danni was. “How did you make it this far if you don’t know what you’re doing?” I was curious, that was all. I didn’t care about her tears, and too bad for her if she got cut. It happened to people all the time and they got through it. But I watched more droplets spill down her cheeks, bringing mascara with them. She really looked pitiful.
I sighed. “Here,” I told her. “Take the box.”
She accepted the tissues from me. “I do know what I’m doing,” she insisted. “At home, when I practice in front of my mom, I totally do. But then I go before the judges—I mean, in front of the coaches and the other Wonderwomen, and I can’t. I’m sooo bad! I forget everything. I lead with the wrong foot, I turn the wrong way. I make mistakes that I haven’t made since I started in dance when I was four.” Danni blew her nose loudly and made it all red. “I tripped walking out onto the field yesterday.”
“How did you get through the tryouts, if you’re that awful?” Mercy, I was mean! “How did you get avoid being cut if you make so many mistakes?” I corrected myself.
“I wasn’t making them, not then. I was sooo good,” she told me seriously. Bragger. “But after I got past the audition, I started to think a lot about it. Like, there’s a lot of pressure! My mom was a cheerleader when they were called the Dames, and so was my grandmother. My grandma was one of the first women to wear the iconic orange halter top when they decided to move away from sweaters!”
Woah. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was impressed by her lineage.
“What if I mess it up?” she went on. “Shae keeps saying that I’ll learn everything eventually but then she shakes her head and runs to talk to the other girls and I think she’s been telling the coaches that I’m, like, unstable.”
“That’s not up to her to do,” I said angrily. “She’s not a team captain! They’re the last line between us and—I mean, the last line between the squad and the coaches. What are they saying about this?”
“Nothing,” Danni answered miserably. “I haven’t talked to them. I think they’re, like, gathering information about me. Shae told me that the captains are totally on the side of Rylah and Sam, not the cheerleaders.”
“Really? That’s not how the captains acted when I was there.” But I wasn’t there. I remembered that this girl was on the team because she’d taken my place. My spot, maybe even my particular halter top! Although I thought that the uniforms were probably sized for each new dancer.
She sniffed again, a big one. “Shae said that the other girls, they all think that I’m really snobby and my hair’s bad. I guess they’re talking about me all the time, like they’re sooo nice to my face and then they say mean stuff behind my back.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t sound like…anyway, I don’t see why I should care,” I announced. “I’m not on the Wonderwomen and your problems don’t concern me if they’re not about your car. If you don’t need repairs, the door is that way.”
Danni blew her nose again but didn’t move towards the exit. “I know that you were sooo good when you were part of the squad. I watched you on the sidelines and I saw it. And all the girls this season say that there’s, like, a hole because you’re not on the team anymore.”
“They do?”
She nodded hard and snot dripped down onto her lip. “They say stuff like, ‘Remember Caitlyn’s high kick there?’ And I don’t even remember that there’s supposed to be a high kick there!” She gulped in a breath, a sob.
I wasn’t feeling sorry for her! “You’re very lucky that you made the Wonderwomen,” I said. “Lots of girls try out, and very few get to wear the orange and white. You should stop messing up or you’ll ruin it for the whole team.”
She put her head down on my tall desk and sobbed. My dad walked out of the back with a pile of papers in his hand, took one look at Danni, turned right around and left again.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry I said that. I’m sure you’re exaggerating and you’re actually doing fine.”
“No.” She sat up and dug around in her little purse. First she took out an empty Kleenex package, then she found her phone. “Look.”
She showed me a text from Coach Rylah. It said that they needed to have a meeting in the studio with Sam, too, and that Danni should wear her practice uniform because they wanted to watch her perform all the routines. Yeah, that didn’t sound good.
“It’s because Fan Day is next week,” she said. “Will you be there because of Kellen Karma? All the players’ families come.”
I shrugged a little. Of course I wouldn’t be at Fan Day at the stadium, but no one knew that yet. No one knew what had happened between me and Kellen…
“We’re going to perform three routines in front of everyone,” she went on. “I’ll mess up in front of all those people!”
“It’s actually a really small crowd compared to what you’ll have on game days,” I noted. “On top of all the people in the sold-out stadium, there will be a national audience. No, international, because the Woodsmen games get broadcast to Canada and Mexico and a bunch of other countries.” I named them, and I knew where they were, too.
Danni put her head back down on the desk. She wailed something that I couldn’t understand but I got that I shouldn’t have mentioned the international audience. It was like when Kellen had told my mom and that it was a beautiful day, at least in our area, but he had concerns about microbursts in Miami. I smiled a little as I remembered that, and Danni happened to pick up her head and saw.
