“You might have broken my nose!”
“I warned you.”
I was something of an expert on noses, given I was on my second. “It doesn’t sound broken,” I offered, which made Tanz snicker even though I was trying to be helpful.
Eloise tossed a wad of paper napkins to Oz, which he grudgingly mopped his bloody face with.
“Either say sorry now, Oz,” she said calmly, “or keep being a little bitch and I’ll hit you too.”
Oz’s eyes flicked from Mike to Eloise. Then reluctantly to me. He mumbled something that barely resembled an apology, but I nodded and smiled. With one last scowl at Mike, he turned on his heel. No one said anything as Oz got in his car and pummeled his steering wheel. We couldn’t hear his stream of profanity from here, but we could see it. He dragged another napkin over his face, then threw the bloody wad out the window and reversed out of the parking lot.
“What a prick,” Tanz said.
“ ‘A cream-faced loon,’ ” I agreed.
Eloise burst into laughter. “Yeah, that.”
“Hi, by the way.” I turned to her. “I’m Lyssa.”
She grinned. “Call me Lou.”
“As nice as it’d be to stay and chat with you gals,” Mike drawled. “I’m covered in mud. And Oz’s blood. Come on, Lyss, let’s go home.” He grabbed my camping chair, collapsed it with a single firm thrust, and swung it over his shoulder. “Teamies, see you on the battlefield next week. If anyone sees Oz before I do, remind him that he is, as Lou says, a little bitch.”
The other mud-splattered players and their thermos-clutching supporters waved.
When we got close to the cars, Mike’s dad stuck his head through his window. “Did you have to punch him?”
“Yeah,” Mike replied, tossing my chair in the back of his truck, which was parked next to Kev’s electric car.
“Did he say something about your sister’s job, again?”
“No.”
Kevin looked like he felt he should press, but his heart wasn’t in it. They started discussing a café supplier instead, and my mind wandered.
This whole day—actually, this whole Woodville experience—felt surreal.
Mike had made sure I had a chair and a coat, and Kev had fixed me a hot drink, and they were both determined I should never need a ride anywhere. Caregiving like this seemed to come naturally to both of them. I was a proud New Yorker, and I should have been chafing at this loss of independence, as Caroline had when she lived here. But I wasn’t. I loved it. It made me feel cosseted. Special.
I always acted like I was special, it was part of my brand, but now other people were acting that way too. It was healing something in me that I hadn’t realized was broken.
Mike’s particular brand of aggressive caregiving was especially appealing to me. I’d never had someone stick up for me like that. What Oz had said wasn’t even that bad; I read worse about myself on a daily basis. Yet Mike had swung without hesitation, and there wasn’t a whiff of regret about him now.
It made me feel giddy, the same way I’d felt in elementary school when I used to hang upside down from the monkey bars. This was the same feeling, except also sweaty and a bit breathless.
I watched Mike gesture as he said something passionately to Kev. His dad handed him a water bottle to rinse off his hands. In my mind, this all played out in slow motion, like he was doing a red carpet Glambot. Water ran down his hands in rivulets, streaming to the ground. He finished rinsing them, then dragged a hand through his hair. The knuckles on his right hand were red around the peaks, and there was a random cut on his forearm. Mike’s hands were craggy. There was no better word for it.
Other than sexy.
Craggy and sexy, sexy and craggy. The adjectives looped in my head. To distract myself, I buckled myself into the passenger side of Mike’s truck. Then I pulled out my phone, propping it on the dashboard to take a few fit selfies and a video of myself lip-synching to something popular. Usually I’d regale my audience with the story of my cheer embarrassment and use it to build rapport with anyone who’d ever made themselves vulnerable by going out on a limb and getting humiliated. Embarrassment was a useful and relatable tool for an influencer—in general, we were quite an unrelatable pack. As influencer culture grew (and influencer fatigue grew), it was getting harder and harder to build authentic rapport, so universal levers like humiliation were valuable. Which was all to say: I should have shared my experience on the field of being humbled.
But I didn’t.
While I knew how to shape situations like this to my advantage online, being othered always stung, and I wanted to keep my stings to myself these days. Instead, I posted my outfit content with a fun little caption about on-field playing and sideline slaying. Comments and messages immediately started rolling in. Some were hateful, riding for Paul, which I deleted quickly. But there were nice ones too.
Some of my eagle-eyed followers noticed the lack of a steering wheel in front of me and wanted to know who was driving. This made me realize there was a whole passenger princess angle I could tap into here.
Mike’s words from earlier popped into my head.
