Monday, January 13, 2014

The Throw In

As Marty's leather Sperrys carefully plodded their way down the hill, they were in perfect rhythm with his internal monologue, which was simply "no. fucking. way."  Left.  Right.  Left.  No.  Fucking.  Way.

Kelly's hair was lighter than he remembered.  It had always been blonde, but Marty's memory told him it had been more of a dirty blonde than the bright blonde on display now.  Her tight curls, however, were the same; they'd caught his eye from nearly a half block away.  She was running roughly in his direction.  Her hair was up in a ponytail just like all the girls in this game, as the warm, late summer Virginia air virtually demanded.  But somehow Kelly's ponytail managed to be different.  It had a life of its own, always gently brushing her face and neck in playful summersaults of tight, blonde ringlet curls.  It might as well have been a neon sign advertising her presence.

As she ran she stopped just short of the in-bounds line and let the ball fly; she seemed to be throwing the ball at him, which was preposterous, as he was a good seventy yards away.  Instead the ball found a streaking striker, who made one move before giving a crossing pass to a teammate who promptly beat the goalie easily.  It was a really good throw in.

Kelly was the same living Coca-Cola ad she had always been.  As she now jumped around with her teammates in celebration, you couldn't help but celebrate with her.  From a half football field away her smile still hit him.

He had photographed her smile a thousand times.  At least that many.  He had put one of those pictures on a stock photography website, and he still made roughly twenty-eight dollars a month from sales of it, mostly from small-time dentists.  It wasn't even a perfect smile, there were straighter teeth, brighter teeth, by negligible margins, but something about the way her lips framed them gave her smile a life that led many local dentists to pay upwards of fifty-eight cents to use it on flyers.

She was lightly sweating, and the big sulfur lights gave her a bit of an ethereal glow as the light bounced off her glistening, slightly flushed face.  He had a large Slurpee cup, it smelled more of Redbull and vodka than the cherry flavoring that was nominally on display on the cup's side.  He didn't have the slightest idea she'd be here.  As far as he knew, she still lived in DC.

Things might have worked, he was a decent guy by his own reckoning, but Hill workers and law students are a pretty unfaithful lot.  Everybody comes into both experiences with significant others, nobody leaves with the same ones.  He'd visited her a half dozen times, and she visited him maybe three times.  And by "maybe," deep down, he really meant "exactly."

In his moderately intoxicated state, it was just dawning on him that if she was playing on these fields, she must be a student at UVA again.  The game was now over and Marty didn't have anything so easily identifiable as a bouncy blonde ringlet ponytail to mark him; functional alcoholism, by its very nature, isn't easily noticeable from seventy yards away.

"Well," he figured, "I guess she'll tell me if she wants to."  It was the first big party of his last year in law school.  "There will be shit ton of first years there tonight, fuck it."