Pattingmy phone over the material of my bag, I thought about calling my dad to rant but then thought better of it. The bratwurst had already done enough. I didn’t want to bring him up unless I had to. My mom? Jenny? No and no. Plus, I’d have to explain everything for my predicament to make sense, and I wasn’t all about that either.
So I weighedmy options and accepted again that keeping it all to myself was the best way to go about dealing with everything.
Chapter Nine
There’sthat saying some people use: Be careful what you wish for.
My first coach when I started playing club, a select group of players that wanted more than what their local school or rec center offered, told us almost daily, “A dream is just a wish without a plan.” After you hear it enough times, it grows on you and the older you get, the more you realize how true the words are. So it wasn’t that I didn’t take wishes seriously, I just didn’t put much weight into them. There weren’t a lot of things I wanted, but I knew that if I wanted something expensive, I had to save for it by cutting out other expenses in my life.
The point was: I’d wanted to play soccer professionally most of my life, so I learned what I needed to do to make that happen. I had to practice, commit, practice some more and sacrifice in no particular order. Usually, I tried to apply that to every aspect of my life.
But once upon a time, a young Salomé Casillas had spent three birthday wishes in a row on the same thing: that one day Reiner ‘The King’ Kulti would know that I was alive… and marry me. Third on my list of wishes was that he’d teach me how to be the best.
I would have given just about anything for that to happen.Anything. I would have died of joy if he’d ever touched my freaking hand when I was twelve.
At twenty-seven, knowing what I knew about him at this point, I would have been happy living the rest of my life inconspicuously.
But sometimes fate was fickle and immature, because just a couple of days after telling Gardner about how everyone was being affected by the ex-superstar’s lack of attention, my pre-teen prayers were answered out of nowhere.
He must have either been brainwashed or had his body snatched by an alien because a new man showed up to the field after that. A man with a rigid line to his shoulders, a rod of iron through his spine, and a voice that couldn’t be misinterpreted.
How many times had I thought about how much I wanted Kulti to be the kind of coach that a player of his caliber had the potential to be? It wasn’t a secret that great players didn’t always make great coaches. But my gut, or maybe it was my inner thirteen-year-old, believed that he’d be an exception. That he could do or be whatever he wanted to.
Except I hadn’t anticipated the fact that what I thought of as ‘coach’ he apparently interpreted as ‘Gestapo.’
Those next two days were the most strenuous of my life, both mentally and physically.
Part of it was because the pressure to be perfect was right in my peripheral, pushing, pushing, pushing, and making its presence well-known, zt least to me. The main part though, was Kulti. He showed up to practice with an angry tick in his jaw and hard eyes that seemed to suddenly assess everything.
The first time he yelled, the drill most of the team had been busy executing had come to a sudden pause. I mean, it stopped. For all of two seconds, the players that had been maneuvering around obstacle courses stopped in their tracks and looked up. I was one of them. It was like the voice of God had suddenly come down on us and told a prophecy or something.
“Faster!”
One word. One word had caught us all off guard.
And then Gardner’s, “What are you doing? Come on!” brought everyone back into their right minds.
Jenny, who was busy practicing with the goalkeepers, met my eyes from across the field. And telepathically we communicated the same three words: What the hell?
We kept going.
So did he. His voice was borderline angry, determined and strong, lilting and strangely fascinating with multiple accents curbing it as he kept hurling things at the group. My stomach churned each time I heard him.
This was exactly what I’d asked for—what I’d wished for.
When I was panting with my hands on my knees because he kept yelling about how we could go faster, I smiled because I’d pushed myself.
And because this is exactly what a younger version of me would have sold ten years of her life for.
Sure, he was a dick. Sure he’d been pressured into caring by me complaining to the head coach. But when I looked around and everyone else was busting their ass on a whole new level, I figured it was worth having the bratwurst hate me.
Eventually I startedto regret ever thinking that Kulti caring was a good thing, because another segment of what I’d always dreamed of came into play and it wasn’t the magnificence I’d anticipated.
I got the attention I’d wanted. Only it wasn’t as fantastic as my dreams had told me they’d be.
“Twenty-three!”
It took me a second to react to my number being called—the day of Dad’s birthday. Eric’s birthday had been my national team number and my sister’s had been my number back when I played club soccer. I’d been using twenty-three for years, but no one ever called me by it.