Off Center (Varsity Girlfriends Book 2) Read online

  I looked beside me to where Andie meekly raised her right arm. It was barely above shoulder level. Hardly noticeable to normal humankind but to Veronica who was undoubtedly dying of curiosity, she might as well have been shining the bat signal.

  “Oof!” cried Mr. Barkley, rising from his seat in the corner. “I forgot we were getting a new student today. Crew this is Andie Mercantile, she’s joining us from—” Mr. Barkley quickly flipped through the scattered papers on his desk before tossing his hands in the air. “Where are you joining us from?” he asked, giving up on his quest to find her official paperwork.

  “Just outside of Portland,” she replied, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Make her feel welcome,” said Mr. Barkley, looking around the room with a stern expression before reseating himself. Sometimes I wondered if he had a book of generic teacher expressions hidden in his desk. It would explain why everything he said was so predictable.

  I returned my attention to the front of the room where Elliot was attempting to casually, and spectacularly awkwardly, recline on the edge of his desk. He missed the corner entirely knocking a stack of last year’s Gazettes to the floor. A blush crept across his cheeks as he quickly gathered the papers. I’d known Elliot Lambert since the 6th grade, and I had never seen him blush or casually recline. I had a bad feeling my pretty new friends from the bathroom wasn’t blending in as she’d hoped.

  “D-did you have an idea for a story?” Elliot stammered.

  Across the room, Veronica’s eyebrows shot up in interest. Veronica may have missed the blush, possibly even overlooked the sudden propensity for clumsiness but the stammering? You couldn’t miss that, not on prim and proper, always well spoken Elliot. I wasn’t the only one sensing a little crush action.

  “Not a story idea exactly,” answered Andie, fiddling with the metal rings along her notebook.

  “Go on,” said Elliot, leaning forward with interest.

  “Actually, I... I thought maybe it might not be such a good idea to write the cheerleading article,” she said, looking up at Elliot for the first time since she had raised her hand. I felt like I’d just been punched in the stomach. First, the guy I’d been chasing since middle school took all of about five seconds to become visibly infatuated with her, and now she wanted to harpoon my story?

  “What makes you think that?” asked Elliot, the smile he had previously worn replaced by an earnest, attentive expression. A sudden desire to puke all over his classy brown leather shoes rose within me.

  “It’s just that,” said Andie, looking apologetically in my direction. “Don’t cheerleaders already kinda get enough flack?”

  I rolled my eyes. Cheerleaders, victims? All previous conceptions that Andie and I might potentially be friends flew out the window.

  “How so?” asked Elliot. Encouraging her to go on.

  “There are just so many stereotypes about them being mean, or shallow, or dumb. Maybe we ought to subscribe to the ‘be kind’ campaign and give them a pass.”

  “I agree,” added Veronica. “You weren’t here, of course,” she said. “But two years ago a girl cut the ponytails off a line of cheerleaders during a pep rally. It was a huge deal, in school suspension, emergency haircuts the whole...”

  “That’s probably more info than she needs,” Elliot said with a smirk as he cut her off mid-sentence. “But I think you’re right Andie. Now is not the time for an article that picks on a particular group.” He smiled warmly at her. Too warmly as far as I was concerned.

  I watched in anguish as Elliot erased the asterisk by my story idea and redirected the class conversation.

  Two minutes ago, he was winking at me. Two minutes ago, he was all, good job Lane, and here is a beautiful asterisk with your name on it. If I squeezed my eyes shut, I could have tasted that holiday kiss, cinnamon and sparkling apple cider lingering on our breath as the two of us met under the mistletoe, just the way I’d always planned.

  My head was spinning. How had things turned so ugly so fast? Was Andie right? Was I being a jerk? I thought about the Mountaineers cheerleading squad. They’d never actually done anything cruel to me. Overpriced cookies were the only real fault I could place. Was the story I’d been working on for the last few weeks actually just a big fat stereotype? That punch to the gut feeling intensified.

  “Are you cool with that?” asked Elliot knocking me out of my trance.

  “Sure, no problem. Sounds great.” I replied, although I didn’t have a clue what I was agreeing to. I’d been so preoccupied mourning the loss of my article that I’d completely tuned out the rest of the class choosing assignments.

  “Awesome!” said Elliot, patting me on the back in a way that said, ‘thank you little buddy,’ most certainly not, ‘let's risk our lives and possibly give each other mono.’ “I was worried you’d think boys basketball was beneath you. I’m so glad to hear you are up to the challenge of serving as our Sports Co-Editor.”

  Wait, what?

  Chapter Two

  If I could sneak into the house and up to my bedroom without my mom noticing, just this one time I would do it. Explaining what had happened in the pitch room was going to be like telling her I got rejected for seventh-grade dance team all over again. She took these things harder than I did. I wasn’t ten steps into the foyer before she was peppering me with questions.

  “How did it go? Were they blown away? Did Elliot confess undying love right then and there?” Her eyes were positively glowing with maternal pride.

  “Not so much,” I admitted, tossing my bag on the floor and grabbing a seat at the kitchen island.

  Mom cocked her head to the side as if she found it unfathomable that another human didn’t think I was as great as she did. These were the side effects of being an only child. “Spill it!” she demanded.

  Rehashing the day’s disappointments wasn’t my idea of a fun afternoon activity, but then again Mom was the only person who knew what to say on days like this.

  “To your first point,” I began. “They were blown away, briefly, and then there was a retraction. To your second point, Elliot did confess undying love, with his eyes, to a new girl.”

  “Yikes,” said Mom. “We couldn’t have seen this plot twist coming.”

  “Tell me about it,” I pouted. “She is both nice and pretty.”

  Mom smiled sympathetically. “The worst kind.” With Mom intuition on full mode, she pulled a gallon of vanilla bean ice cream from the freezer. “Let’s take a page out of your grandmother’s book and drink away our problems shall we?”

  I nodded with approval as she retrieved milk, the immersion blender and our emergencies only stash of mini Reese's peanut butter cups.

  “If you aren’t doing the feature on cheerleaders then what are you writing about?” asked Mom, pausing to pop a Reeses into her mouth.

  I took a deep breath as if waiting to answer would make it less true. “The sports section.”

  Mom choked on her Reese’s. Like actually choked, coughing and sputtering so hard I had to jump from my seat and smack her in the back until she regained composure.

  “Say what?” she asked, her eyes red and watery.

  “Oh, you heard me correctly. You’re looking at the new Sports Editor, correction, Sports co-editor. I’m technically only responsible for boys basketball.”

  “Rosemark has a basketball team?” She asked, confusion written all over her pink puffy, post-choke face.

  “Apparently,” I grumbled. “Not a very good one.”

  Mom shook her head in disbelief. “Kid, you are facing adversity.”

  “Don’t I know it.” I scowled. “How am I supposed to write prize worthy articles about a subpar basketball team? Their greatest accomplishment is raising enough money for new uniforms.”

  Mom looked down at me from over her glasses, “I’m not sure that is your biggest problem?”

  “And what exactly is it then?” I asked, snagging a Reese’s.

  Mom put two heaping scoops of ice c
ream into an oversized metal milkshake cup. It was one of many items we’d purchased over the years while staying up way too late watching the Home Shopping Network.

  “If I were you I think I would be more worried about the fact that you know absolutely nothing about basketball.”

  I grimaced. She had a point. What I knew about the sport could be counted on one hand.

  “Well…” I said reaching for anything in my past that would be helpful. “I did watch Love and Basketball when Jillie went through that ‘I’m gonna be a tomboy stage.’

  “Somehow, I don’t think that is going to be everything you need to write a season’s worth of articles.”

  “Ugh,” I groaned lowering my head to the countertop where I repeatedly rammed my forehead into the granite.

  “Whoa now,” said Mom sliding a milkshake in my direction. “Brain freeze yes, concussion no.” She was right of course. A concussion probably wasn’t the best method for conquering writer’s block.

  “What do you do?” I asked. “When you’re writing a character who is outside of your comfort zone.”

  Mom smiled, “See now you are thinking like a writer. Hmm, what do I do? Ooh! I try to find an expert. Like in my third book, Romancing the Rancher I’d never spent any time around cattle, but I knew some people who did. I asked a lot of questions.” Mom shifted uncomfortably, taking a massive gulp of her own shake. “You could always call your father,” she said through a mouthful.

  “No!” I cried, “Absolutely not.”

  “He did play in college.”

  “For a bible school!” I wailed.

  “Still,”

  “No still,” I said, forming little air quotation marks with my fingers. “You know the rules. All conversations involving Dad are reserved for the Sunday after Thanksgiving when I return from a weekend full of pain and anguish, a direct result of attempting to bond with him while replacement me and replacement you observe from an uncomfortably close distance.”

  Mom paused, “Alright then, I move to strike the suggestion from the record.”

  “Motion granted,” I hollered slamming an invisible gavel on the countertop. One too many Law and Order marathons made moments like these all too common in our house.

  Per usual, talking to Mom made me feel better about the whole situation. I definitely wasn’t taking her up on her idea to call Dad, but maybe she was onto something when it came to finding an expert. What I needed was an insider on the team, and I fully planned to find one, just as soon as I figured out who the team was.

  Chapter Three

  Dear Jillie,

  It is with great disappointment that I inform you all of my plans have been utterly destroyed. I am now the sports co-editor for the Gazette. You read that correctly, sports, and not just any sport—basketball. You may recall that I did not fare well on the basketball court during my brief but memorable stint with “the little ballers” club in third grade. And why? Why have I been banished to the hollow halls of Rosemark sports? Because Elliot Lambert has a crush, and it is not on me! Her name is Andie, and she will be living out all my dreams for the next two months. Okay so I am being a little melodramatic, but he did assign her news, and you can guess how I feel about that.

  I am, however, done pouting about it. I’ve given this some thought and, just because no one has ever won the American High School Journalist of the year award covering team sports before doesn’t mean that I cannot pave the way. Look out world, sports reporting is about to become very serious!

  I have a strategy. I’ll learn everything I can about basketball and then find an angle that makes reading about it not suck. That’s real journalism, right? Taking the boring and making it interesting? I mean seriously, there are reporters out there right now who write exclusively about agriculture. If they make butternut squash a topic of conversation, then surely I can make the Mountaineers headline worthy.

  Last night I conducted a preliminary Google search. Here is what I learned. There is an acronym in basketball — the G.O.A.T., which stands for The Greatest of All Time. Everyone wants to be the G.O.A.T. Although there is much controversy over who the G.O.A.T. actually is. Is it LeBron James or is it Michael Jordan, Jillie? I hope you have the answer because the whole of the internet does not. I do not know who the G.O.A.T. is yet, but I think forming an opinion on the subject would be an excellent first step toward understanding what people like about basketball.

  Rosemark doesn’t have a G.O.A.T. Who are we kidding? Rosemark doesn’t have a chance, which means I am going to have to slant my writing to feature less game and more human. Like one of those cute video montages that help you forget about the real plot for one magical musical moment.

  I was surprised to discover that most of the real-time buzz on basketball occurs over Twitter. Apparently, it is the players’ and commentators’ social media of choice. For this reason, I too have joined the Twitter. What’s my handle you ask? Babygirl5. Just kidding, though I considered something corny like that since Lane.Crawford was already taken. Damn my parents for naming me something so ordinary. We can’t all be Jillies can we? Alright enough with the suspense. I named myself @RosietheReporter, like Rosie the Riveter. Get it? Probably not. Because it isn’t that funny.

  Anyway, I joined the Twitter to stalk players. And even though there are some hilarious people in the NBA, I quickly discovered I wasn’t going to get much use out of the thing if I didn’t actually follow Rosemark players. A task easier accomplished if I knew who they were.

  So, if you will forgive me, I will now cut this email short so that I can get to school early enough to do a little research on our starting five. Did you catch that? I used a basketball term.

  Starting Five:

  (Lane Crawford Definition)

  A name for the five players who begin the game.

  See you when I see you.

  Love,

  Lane

  P.S. Can we both take a minute and just acknowledge how dumb Elliot was to assign me sports and give Andie the news segment?

  There is a certain rivalry that exists between the staff of the yearbook and the newspaper. The main issue? Room capacity. Everything is easy peasy until it’s time to get ready to send to the printers. Then it becomes a battle royale in our joint classroom. Yearbook scrambles to finish layout, the paper scrambles to get out the new edition, and the classroom’s only three computers become Helen of Troy, creating war where peace once existed. This could all be solved if the school would invest in a few more computers but according to Principal Richards, “the funding stream does not allow”.

  Given these circumstances, Principal Richards really can’t blame us for doing whatever it takes to get the job done. I, for example, have on more than one occasion lured a yearbook staffer out of the classroom under false pretenses just to steal their computer access. It’s nothing personal. The people that created the yearbook were as nice as anyone else; however, lines have been drawn.

  For this reason, I never buy a yearbook which is why to look at last year’s basketball photo, I had to arrive at school a good thirty minutes early. I couldn’t help but feel like a traitor pulling the Rosemark in Review from the back shelf of the newsroom. Luckily there was only one yearbook student in the classroom this morning. Hunter Mackey, a very tall dude of whom I only knew one thing about. He insisted on being referred to by his last name only. If my last name sounded like a hardened detective from a murder mystery, I would probably go that route as well.

  Sliding past Mackey, I grabbed a seat in the back of the room and flipped open the yearbook to the index. There was just one page devoted to the Rosemark boys basketball team. The girl's team, who had a few winning seasons in its past, got far more coverage. Luckily, though I hadn’t been assigned basketball as a whole. As my co-editor, Veronica had graciously volunteered herself to handle the girl's team. I had a sneaking suspicion she was motivated by some, not so secret drama between the players, but I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t want to spend multiple nights a w
eek at games. One home game was plenty.

  I pulled my notebook from my back pocket and prepared to jot down the names of last years top players. Four of the starters were returning. Preston Royce, Anderson Webb, Jeremiah Keller, and Hunter Mackey, interesting.

  I snuck a peek at Mackey through the corner of my eye. He had all the markings of a jock—tall, fit, clean cut. Probably rich too if the stereotypes held true. I knew most girls dreamed about boys just like him, but I had a soft spot for the quiet type. It was sensible cardigans that caught my eye, not jerseys. I shifted my attention from Mackey back to the yearbook.

  With four returners there would be just one open spot in the starting five. The rest of the bench would have to fight it out in tryouts. I scanned the sidebar for the team's record. Five wins, to 20 losses. Ouch!

  “Who knew you were into basketball?” asked Mackey, causing my butt to go flying out of my chair. For a guy that big, he was surprisingly good at sneaking up on a person.

  “I’m not,” I declared, my heart rate slowly returning to normal, “Not yet anyway.”

  “You in love with one of my teammates or something?” he asked, cocking his head to the side to view the yearbook page with his team photo spread open on my desk.

  I could feel my ears turning a flaming red, even though I had absolutely nothing to be embarrassed by.

  “This is official newspaper business,” I answered. “I promise all stalking is conducted in a far more discreet location.”

  Mackey chuckled. “I’m glad to hear you keep your weird factor on the down low. But if you don’t mind me asking. How is ogling the team photo newspaper related?”

  I forced a smile. “If you must know, you’re looking at the new sports editor for the Gazette.” I tried to sound enthusiastic, but it was a hard sell, especially to a stranger who two seconds ago thought I was preparing to draw sharpie hearts around one of his teammates.