I tried to say something to Mike—maybe sorry? Or did my ass look cute when I twirled?—but he was glaring at someone over my head. He made a slashing motion over his neck, and when I whirled around, a group of guys in their rugby uniforms were sniggering.
The whistle blew again, and Mike ran back out onto the field. The tips of his ears were bright red, so he must have been very angry with me for embarrassing him in front of his friends.
Misery settled in my gut, and I fought the urge to run back to Kevin’s car. But if I was going to convince people I was in on the joke, I couldn’t flee. I gritted my teeth and laughed along, taking it on the chin as best I could. One of the supporters clapped me on the shoulder, and another said she hadn’t laughed like that since she quit drinking. Which was a strange thing to say, but I inferred it was a compliment. A few people asked me about American sports, and a few more about the cheerleading outfit I’d made. When I finished my coffee, someone refilled it from their thermos and gave me a cookie they’d made to go with it.
During the first half of the game, only Tanz had spoken to me. Now, everyone was talking to me, even if it was to make fun of me.
Somehow being the butt of the joke had broken the ice.
New Zealand was weird. When I worked in fashion in New York, being celebrated was a sign of fitting in. If you worked hard and stood out, you got recognition. That was literally what success was. Here, everything was the opposite. Getting teased was how you fit in, and fitting in was how you succeeded.
It was a complete mindfuck. I needed someone smarter than me to dissect all this—although, probably, one of my mom’s cultural anthropology colleagues already had. If I’d raised this topic at one of Mom’s famous dinner parties, it likely would have sparked the most interest from her about anything I’d ever had to say.
The realization made the teasing infinitely easier to bear.
Turned out, enduring negativity was a completely different experience when it wasn’t malicious. The delineation was now very clear to me.
For example, Tanz saying before she tossed me a water, “Lyssa, are you ready? Okay!” was acceptable mockery.
Comments about killing my cat were not.
Thinking about that comment again made me want to cry. I blinked quickly, not wanting any of the Woodville people thinking it was due to their teasing. I knew as surely as I knew how to steam organza that tears would take me back to square one with them, and it was nice to feel like part of the group.
The sad truth was I had hundreds of thousands of followers but only one friend.
I threw myself into the Kiwis’ teasing and talked to as many people as I could. I completely lost track of the game, and I even forgot to stare at Mike’s thighs—that’s how important belonging was to me.
When the full-time whistle blew, I didn’t hear it, because I was sitting on the now-dry grass with Lia, who ran the Woodville bakery, showing her the stitch I’d used on my pom-poms to make the chiffon fluffy. For noise, I’d padded the strands out with some torn up pages of Vogue—not my first choice of magazine to massacre, but it was the only one I traveled with, and it was all for the cause. Lia had taken sewing class in high school and was thinking of getting back into it as a hobby. She showed me some of the images of what she wanted to make, and I promised to send her some of my beginner tutorials.
A shadow fell over us. “Lyssa, are you ready to go?” Mike asked.
He had grass stains all over his uniform, and my face was perfectly level with the apex of his shorts. I looked down, for modesty, but that was hardly better. His thighs were indecent at close range like this. The thick lumps of muscle over his knees were kind of shaped like a dolphin’s nose. No one had legs like this in the fashion world. I had trouble pulling my eyes up to see his expression. Not that I needed to have bothered. He was very carefully keeping his face blank.
“Sure,” I replied. “I don’t have a cheer prepared for the end of the game, but if you want, I can repeat the halftime one?—”
“It’s all good,” he said quickly. “Once was enough.”
One of Mike’s teammates came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. I recognized the tall white guy from the café on my first day in Woodville. His mousy brown hair was somehow still perfectly styled, even after all the running around the players had been doing. He was an objectively pretty man save for his expression, which was decidedly giving me the ick.
“Hey, Mikey! Good game, bro!” Then he mimicked, “With Mike on our team, we can’t go wrong!”
This teasing did have malice. I was an expert at recognizing it.
“Shut up, Oz,” Mike said. “Or I’ll sock you one.”
“I knew you two were boning.” Oz turned to his other teammates. “Didn’t I tell you they were boning?”
“He did say that,” one of the other men said, almost apologetically.
“I knew the deal the minute I saw you two together in Levitate. You don’t need to play it cool, Mikey, I get it.” He reached out and ruffled Mike’s hair. “After fucking your way through town, you had to start importing pussy.”
Mike moved like a viper. One of his fists shot out and gripped a fistful of the guy’s shirt. The other plowed directly into Oz’s face.
Oz’s head snapped back and he stumbled, his hand flying up to his cheek. Blood welled under his fingers and slid down his hand.
“What the fuck, Mike!”
“Oops.” Mike shook out his fingers.
