“Your goal this year, ladies,” Shannon said, waving her index finger over the entire team, “is to win a state championship. Anything less than that is a failure. But if we bring the state title home this year, you’ll have that for the rest of your lives. No one will be able to take it away from you. No matter what else happens or doesn’t happen from then on, you’ll always be a champion. Forever.”
It was the same pep talk bullshit we had been hearing and parroting since we were little kids playing for the Rainbow Dragons, but maybe it was also like eating one too many bites of food, because suddenly I felt like I was going to vomit.
“We have the talent and the dedication and—hey, Nanette, where’re you going?” Shannon said.
“I’m quitting like a motherfucking champion!”
“What?”
All my teammates laughed, maybe because they were so surprised that I used the word motherfucking as an adjective. I hardly ever cursed. But cursing suddenly felt good, and so I yelled it once more, even louder.
“I’m a motherfucking champion!”
This time no one laughed.
As I walked across the field, I could feel my teammates’ eyes on me—dozens of deadly laser beams searing into my back; I didn’t dare turn around.
I held up two middle fingers over my head—something I had never before done in my entire life—and it felt like I was finally free.
My coach came running after me. “What’s wrong, Nan?” he said. “What’s going on here?”
“My name is Nanette,” I said, surprising myself. He had been calling me Nan for almost four years, and I hated it. It felt like he was making fun of my name, the way he said it. Always dragging out the syllable, like he thought it was stupid, maybe because I was the only Nanette he had ever met, so he chopped my name in half to punish me for being unique. “I quit,” I said. “I’m done running around after a ball. You can’t make me do it anymore. No one can! I’m already a motherfucking champion! A champion of myself.”
“Whoa. Slow down. What happened?” he said, completely ignoring the swearing I was doing.
“I just don’t want to play anymore. I hate soccer. There. I said it. Finally.”
“Do you need to talk to Ms. Train?” he said, which was code for Do you have your period? Ms. Train was the assistant coach, only she didn’t know anything about soccer. She was there to deal with “woman problems.” Here I was, telling the truth for the first time, and he wanted to erase it—make it not count—with my menstrual cycle.
“No,” I said, and then added, “Fuck soccer.”
That night, Coach came to my home, and we all had a sit-down talk.
“Where did this come from?” my dad asked. “You don’t mention anything, and then suddenly out of nowhere, you just start cursing and quitting?”
I thought about how this wouldn’t surprise the two people who knew me best—Booker and Alex. Even Mr. Graves wouldn’t have been surprised, and I hadn’t spoken with him in months. But my mom and dad, the people with whom I lived, were shocked.
My father and Coach talked a lot about how many goals I had scored and how I could break the conference scoring record this year, having already broken the school record as a junior, and how colleges would surely invite me on “official” recruiting trips to offer me full scholarships, and it was like they were arguing for me not to kill myself, the way they were talking, as if I were doomed to a shitty life if I stopped playing soccer. Like I wouldn’t count as a human being if I stopped scoring goals for teams.
“Her grades are good enough to get her into the best colleges without soccer,” Mom finally said. Mom was a cheerleader in high school, and I always got the sense that she didn’t think girls should do anything athletic but cheer, so her being on my side was depressing. Also, the smile on her face let me know that she was sort of messing with my dad in front of Coach—like she was attacking his manhood.
“That’s really not the point here,” Dad shot back at Mom, which was when I realized that my relationship with my father was about to turn for the worse and Mom was trying to form an alliance. By not playing soccer, I was severing the one real connection Dad and I had, and maybe that was why my father was so upset.
(Later, Booker would say, “Well, you weren’t going to play organized soccer for the rest of your life, so this moment with your father was imminent. You can’t live for someone else. At some point you just explode, which is probably why you began spouting curse words like a Roman candle.” At least he understood.)
“You made a commitment to your teammates,” Coach said, pointing his index finger at my face from the stylish comfort of my parents’ white leather couch. “You made a commitment to me. You signed a contract.”
“You know that every girl on the team violates the no-drinking clause. Are you headed to their houses next to give them the same lecture? I can tell you the names of my teammates who drank with the English soccer coaches you hired to train us—it was all of them except me!” I said, surprising myself again. I had never talked to Coach like that before. “But you already know that! So don’t talk to me about fucking contracts!”
Coach looked at my parents for support, and my dad dutifully said, “Don’t talk to your coach like that, Nanette. There’s no need for swearing.”
“Why don’t I let you sort this out as a family,” Coach said to my parents. He looked pale, like he was starting to fear me. “See you at practice tomorrow, Nanette.”