“I’ll look into it,” Coach Sandy assured him, then went back to her speech. “When you barely beat a weak opponent, you shouldn’t be satisfied with your performance. I’m certainly not, so think about that before practice tomorrow. Because you’ve got two more matches this week, only two, in which to prove to me you’re players I can work with. Make a team out of. Make a winning tennis team out of.” She turned her back on them and went into her office, her short pleated skirt bouncing from side to side in irritation. She tossed the door shut behind her. They saw her through the big window, putting on her windbreaker, unlocking a drawer to take out her purse.
People moaned and mumbled among themselves, “What’s with her?” “How was I supposed to get that serve back? You saw that serve.” “I had some really good points—I’d like to hear about those, too.” Mikey, as the only underclassman on the team, had no one to moan and mumble with so she just left, heading down the hallway and out the big main door of the gym to meet up with Margalo and catch the bus.
Hadrian Klenk was waiting with Margalo, his knapsack hanging from his hand, looking like his everyday self. Mikey carried her knapsack over one shoulder and her tennis bag over the other. Margalo had her knapsack on her back.
“I won,” Mikey greeted them, “but it was closer than it should have been.”
“We saw the end of it,” Margalo said.
“Do you ever use a slice backhand?” Hadrian asked.
“What do you know about tennis?” Mikey demanded.
“I watch television,” he answered.
They walked down the sidewalk, away from the school buildings, Mikey in the middle. Margalo, the heavy knapsack on her back so that her hands were free to tuck her straight brown hair behind her ears, looked across Mikey to confer wordlessly with Hadrian before asking, “What do you mean, closer than it should have been?”
Hadrian cut in, looking across Mikey to Margalo, “Because we thought she made a lot of bad calls.”
“A lot of them we’re positive were bad,” Margalo said.
“Especially your last service game,” Hadrian said.
Mikey took that information in. “So I was making those serves? Good.” Then she took the information in further. “She was cheating?”
“We’re pretty sure,” Margalo said. “On a lot of them.”
“I didn’t see you there,” Mikey said.
Margalo observed, “You don’t notice much when you’re playing tennis.”
“Focus is important,” Mikey told her. Then she took in the information entirely. “She was cheating!”
When they arrived at the road, Hadrian left them. “My mother’s waiting.” He waved at the white Audi parked behind the Activities bus. “But there’s no question about it. Ask your coach, she was watching too.” He ran off. Mikey and Margalo watched.
“You’re sure?” Mikey asked. “Coach Sandy was there for my last service game too?”
“Didn’t you say, a couple of times in the sets you played on the tennis ladder, didn’t you say you thought they were miscalling?”
“That’s different. A ladder challenge isn’t like a real match. It’s . . . it’s just to make the team, not at all like playing against another school.”
Margalo wasn’t buying that. “It’s exactly the same and you know you think so too.”
Mikey didn’t argue.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Mikey didn’t know, and she didn’t want it to be true, either, so she changed the subject. “How was rehearsal?” she asked.
Margalo let her change it. “It went okay. Hadrian can’t sing or dance, not really, but he acts like he can, and he’s getting away with it so far.”
On the bus she suggested to Mikey, “You could ask your dad.”
“I should be able to handle it myself.” This time Margalo had the window seat. “I’ll ask Coach Sandy, but what I can’t figure out,” Mikey said, giving voice to what really worried her, “is, if she saw what was going on, like you did, why didn’t she say something?”
“Because you were winning anyway?”
“That’s what I think. But then she yelled at us because we didn’t win by enough. So what’s she after?”
“You’re the competitive one,” Margalo pointed out. “You should be able to figure her out.”
“Yeah, but cheating is a fake victory. Do you cheat at solitaire? Because if you do and you win, you know how it feels like you haven’t really won?”
“I don’t play solitaire.”
“But if you did.”
The next day Mikey walked down to the tennis courts with Coach Sandy, which meant going side by side down the gym hallway carrying the long-handled metal baskets in which the practice balls were stored. Mikey carried two baskets, and her racket in its case over her shoulder. Coach Sandy carried one basket and her clipboard. The coach never brought a tennis racket. When she wanted to demonstrate a stroke or a move, she would take a racket from one of the players. “I’m here to teach you what I know,” she explained. “Not to play. What do I need a racket for?” They all understood that her racket—except she probably had several of them—was too valuable a tool to be used with high school players on high school courts. They knew they were lucky to be coached by someone who’d really played the game, played professionally. They believed that she was way too good for this job, and she believed it too.
Coach Sandy moved fast, with energetic steps, her attention on her clipboard. Mikey had to hustle to keep up with her. They went down the long hallway and out the rear doors towards the playing fields—soccer and football and baseball and track. Beyond them were the six tennis courts, surrounded by a high wire fence. Some players had already arrived and were stretching out or running laps around the courts to warm up. From a distance they looked like little-kid-size dolls.
“Coach,” Mikey said. “About yesterday. About my match.”
Coach Sandy stopped. She turned to study Mikey out of her pale blue eyes. “What about it?” She was taller by a few inches, but they had the same build, stocky, muscles in their arms and legs, and they were both unsmiling types. There was no question in the coach’s mind who was the kid and who was the coach.
There was no question in Mikey’s mind either, although she wasn’t sure just what that difference meant, if it meant as much as Coach Sandy thought it did. The coach sensed this and didn’t like it.
“There’s a complaint you want to register, Elsinger?” she asked. Never give an inch was her teaching rule. On the offensive was her teaching style.
Mikey actually preferred this directness. “A complaint about bad calls? I sure do.”
“Are you ready to make a formal accusation?”
“You were there,” Mikey pointed out.
“I’m asking you, Elsinger.”
In absolute honesty Mikey couldn’t be positively sure, not the way you should be to make that kind of an accusation. She said what she was sure of. “There were too many bad calls. My friends—”
“Your friends.” The coach dismissed this evidence. “Are they trained linesmen?”
Mikey took a breath. A deep one. “Okay,” she said. For a few seconds the coach stared right at her. Mikey, who recognized intimidation when it was being blasted at her, stared back. She smiled, just a little smile, a little bending of the lips. You think you’re scaring me?
The coach nodded and didn’t smile. She turned and started walking again. “You don’t believe they were just bad calls.” She said this glancing back over her shoulder at Mikey, to show how unimportant it was.
“No,” Mikey said, following. “I don’t.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“That’s why I’m talking to you,” Mikey pointed out. The woman might be a good tennis player, but she didn’t seem any too swift at making logical connections.
“But I just asked you,” Coach Sandy said, now with a sideways glance. “I mean, it could be that she was just outplaying you. Maybe you we
re actually losing those points, did you ever think of that? Maybe you aren’t as good as you think.”
Until that last statement Mikey had been willing to consider doubting herself. But she knew how good she was, as clearly as she knew how good she wasn’t—not yet, anyway. The coach was pushing her for some reason, in some particular direction.
Mikey didn’t like being pushed, in any direction. “I was winning,” she repeated patiently. “I was the better player and I was playing better. I hit harder and I got to net more times. And”—she held up one of the baskets to keep the coach from interrupting her before she was finished—“I won almost all the points I went to net on. Although”—her hand was still raised—“she had a good down-the-line backhand passing shot.” The coach opened her mouth but Mikey got in first. “And a pretty good serve out wide.”
Then Mikey waited.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the score didn’t reflect that big a difference between the two of you,” the coach said.
“That’s what I’m asking you about,” Mikey insisted.
Coach Sandy sighed, a teacher with a slow student. “You know, Elsinger, we’re not in this for the fun of it. Take a look around you, winning’s what it’s about.”
“And I did win,” Mikey repeated patiently.
That stopped Coach Sandy again. They had almost arrived at the courts, and the rest of the players were half-watching them, curious, and half-pretending not to notice them.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re asking me what you do if you think someone is cheating on line calls.”
Mikey nodded. She waited.
“Seems like a no-brainer to me,” the coach said.
Mikey didn’t get it. She shook her head, as if to clear it.
“Did you ever hear When in Rome, Elsinger? Ever heard When in Rome, do as the Romans do?”
More Latin, Mikey thought, irritated. Then it came to her. “I should make bad calls too?”
That made Coach Sandy angry. “I never said that. What kind of a sportswoman would I be to say something like that?”
But wasn’t that exactly what she’d said?
“Or what kind of a coach,” Mikey agreed.
“All I’m saying is, I want winners on my team, people who know how to do what it takes to win. Tennis is a game of figuring out your opponent’s weakness and then hitting hard, right at that spot. She was no fool, that girl, she knew exactly how and where to attack you. So think about it. That’s my advice to you,” and she turned her back on Mikey to call out, “All right, people! We’ll start with cross-court drills. Get your feet in gear, people! We’ve got two matches in the next three days, and I can promise you, you’ve got a lot of work to do. Jacobs, Masters, Thompson and Elsinger, I want you on Court One. Go—go!”
Mikey reported in to Margalo on the phone that night, before Margalo even had a chance to ask—before, in fact, she even remembered what Mikey had told her she planned to do at practice that afternoon. Mikey wasted no time. You’d think that with so many of their combined children out of the house, Aurora and Steven would have increased the phone limit to ten minutes, or even fifteen, but Mikey didn’t voice that complaint, not if she wanted to have time to hear what Margalo had to say about Coach Sandy.
“She blamed me for not cheating,” Mikey concluded. And waited.
“You must have heard her wrong,” Margalo decided.
“When in Rome—she quoted that at me.”
Now Margalo was surprised. “She actually said you should cheat?”
“Not exactly actually. It’s what she meant, though.”
They were both quiet, wasting their time, but neither could think of what to say. Finally, “What are you going to do now?” Margalo asked.
Asked that direct question, Mikey knew the answer. “She can’t make me.”
“Can you get away with not doing what she says?”
“All I want to do is play good tennis,” Mikey answered, and hung up.
Margalo took the receiver away from her ear and looked at it, as if it had a face and a long brown braid. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
– 16 –
Seriously Bad Stuff
Things were going badly for Mikey. Her set in the away match on Wednesday was as riddled with bad calls as a mobster’s car in a movie about the thirties. It was so full of holes made by the bad calls that the few good calls lay bleeding inside, dead bodies. None of them were Mikey’s bad calls, although she was tempted. Really tempted. And furious, too, and frustrated, thwarted—the only person angrier than Mikey was Coach Sandy, who didn’t even let Mikey get on the bus before she let her have it. “That’s it for you and singles, Elsinger.”
“You know she was cheating,” Mikey argued. Being the object of someone’s anger had never troubled her.
“And before you start telling me about how you won didn’t you, let me tell you that the score was too close for singles. A tiebreaker! What were you thinking of? You don’t have enough experience to play singles. I’m putting you on a doubles team. With Chrissie,” Coach Sandy added.
Her own anger flamed up through Mikey like some exploding volcano. Her jaw was clenched so hard it hurt, but getting angry felt—as usual—pretty good.
However, she wasn’t about to say one word. If she said one word, she didn’t know what she might say next, but she was pretty sure whatever she said wouldn’t be what Coach Sandy wanted to hear. So Mikey merely smiled. Don’t you wish you knew what I’m not saying?
Coach Sandy glared at her, a beady blue glare, for a long minute, and Mikey kept on smiling right back, If you did, you wouldn’t like it, not one bit. The other members of the team moved around them, hefting their tennis bags up the steps onto the bus. Only Hal Weathersing failed to notice all the anger flowing back and forth between them. He took advantage of the silence to say, “Coach? You don’t have to worry any more about my racket being stolen, because I forgot my mom took it to be restrung.”
Mikey didn’t know what the coach was waiting for, but she knew she could outwait the woman; and she wasn’t about to say one single word until she had a chance to talk to Margalo. She didn’t even know where she would begin when she told Margalo about this.
What with Aurora’s five-minute rule, it took three phone calls to tell Margalo about the tennis debacle. “You’re kidding,” Margalo said whenever Mikey stopped for a breath. “I don’t believe she did that,” first about the opponent and then about Coach Sandy. “She said that?” At the end, the first thing Margalo said was, “That was really smart of you, not saying anything.”
“I didn’t do it to be smart,” Mikey said.
“I know that, and I also know you didn’t do it to be safe. I’m just saying.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think it stinks,” Margalo said. “And it’s stupid, too. It’s not like anyone is going to get a lot of glory if her tennis team wins a match, or get a lot of money, either. The regionals might be worth cheating on, but—”
“They aren’t. And if I’m spending all my time checking to be sure if some ball is in or out, how am I supposed to set up for my shot?” Mikey lapsed into fury again.
“I think,” Margalo said, “that you’re just supposed to call it out. I think,” she added slowly, “that might be Coach Sandy’s point.”
“That may be what she thinks the point is,” Mikey muttered. “But what am I going to do?”
“I have no idea,” Margalo admitted.
“But you will by tomorrow, won’t you?” Mikey answered her own question, “Probably. I hope so, because the only idea I really have for right now is to punch her in the snoot, and even I know that’s not a good one. So you can stop laughing,” Mikey said, but she was starting to laugh herself, at the satisfying picture in her head of her fist landing right on Coach Sandy’s little snub nose. Smack.
Mikey took a deep breath and focused her complete attention on the feel of the tennis ball in her left hand and the feel of the han
dle of her racket in her right hand. Then she exhaled slowly, picturing in her mind where the serve would land. This was a point they had to win in this no-ad scoring system. It was a game they had to win to avoid the risk of a tiebreaker. Her problem was not her serve, which was just fine and occasionally terrific. Her problem was her partner. Chrissie planted herself at net and didn’t move, not to right or left, not backwards either. This meant Mikey had to stay back to cover deep service returns, which meant they couldn’t take advantage of her own net game to dominate the match.
Also, the opponents had figured out pretty quickly that if they fired a service return right at Chrissie, she would give a little scream and turn her back to the ball. Also, Chrissie was the kind of partner who muttered at the end of a game that a serve that had been called out was actually in. “That serve? It was in,” she had muttered to Mikey four times in the set, and once could have been right; but even if she was right, that made no difference when it had been called out and scored out. In fact, the distraction of wondering about calls made it harder to focus.
Mikey was reaching a level of frustration—she hated playing a defensive game and she wasn’t that good at it anyway—a level of frustration that was higher than she’d ever run into before. Day forty-one, she said silently to herself. End of week nine. This was her mantra. She let the ball float off her left hand, up into the air, and served.
The return came cross-court to her forehand, and she put it away down the alley to win the game. Good.
The leggy redhead across the net looked over at her partner. “Was that serve in?” she asked. “I couldn’t—”
“Definitely in,” the redhead’s partner said. “Nice serve.”
Mikey nodded her acceptance of the compliment. Now all she and Chrissie had to do was break the redhead’s serve, which they’d already done once, so the girl was starting out demoralized. Chrissie returned the first serve, then stayed planted just inside the baseline, waiting to see first if her own shot was in and after that what the redhead would do with it. Mikey moved on up to the net, too far to the center, in hopes that the redhead would try to go down the line. The girl obliged, a low-percentage shot that Mikey would have gotten to easily and put away if the ball hadn’t gone wide.