Dropping the Ball: a Holiday Rom-Com
Dropping the Ball: Chapter 7

“Micah was a punk back then,” I say as I finish laying out the story of how we got off on the wrong foot and stayed there. Maybe that will be enough, and I can avoid the most embarrassing part of the story. “Basically, the first time Micah Croft decides to talk to me, it’s to jump in and paddle with the douche canoes.”

“It’s hard to imagine Micah that way,” Madison says. “He’s so laidback, and he’s one of those people who works hard because he needs to be happy with it, you know? He doesn’t seem like he’d ever try to impress other people.”

Tension creeps into my lower back, and I force myself not to stiffen in my seat. “I’m sure he’s fine now. I’m telling you how he was then.”

“Katie.” Madison darts a look at me. “I believe you. In a lot of ways, you and I are different from how we were then too.” She shakes her head, smiling. “Those boys are very lucky you weren’t the Kaitlyn you are now.”

“If I’d been the Kaitlyn I am now, they wouldn’t have been making fun of me in the first place.” Eventually I got around to a glow up. And a backbone.

“That was a hard year,” she says. “And I was so wrapped up in why it was hard for me that I abandoned you, huh?”

“You did what you could with what you had,” I say. “We both did.”

“You are giving me too much grace, but thank you.” She watches the road for a minute, but I get the feeling her attention is only half on her driving. Finally, she sighs. “Maybe if I’d been less wrapped up in my own martyr act, I could have set Drake straight, kept Micah from ruining your life, and things could have gone differently for you.”

“I’ve never blamed you for any of that.” I don’t want her pregnancy hormones burying her in unnecessary regret. “We both made it out of the mean streets of Hillview alive.”

Madison frowns. “But if I’d stepped in back then you could have graduated with honors, gone to college, gotten into an elite sorority, gone on to law school, inherited millions, bought your own house, and then run a super amazing nonprofit organization.”

Her lips are twitching, and I snort at her list of things I’ve actually done. “You’re right. This is on you.”

“Your amazing life is on me? Fine, I’ll take the credit,” she says. “So how did Micah ruin your life again? Because if that is the whole story, my next question is how much longer until we can forgive Micah for saying you have nice hair?”

Oh, this is rich. “Is the queen of holding grudges asking me when I want to let my grudge go?”

She shifts in her seat as much as her pregnant belly and the steering wheel allow her to. “That’s fair. But knowing you, there’s more to the Micah story. Let’s hear it.”

“Or we could not talk about it?” I say in a voice full of empty hope.

“So you’re saying this part is as juicy as a Fredericksburg peach. Yesss.”

I drop my head against the headrest with a muffled thump.

“Oh, I’m living for this now,” Madison crows. “Spill.”

I groan but straighten. Might as well get the stupidest part over with. “I mostly ignored him and that whole group for the rest of the year. Sophomore year, I only had two classes with Micah, and it was easy to avoid being in a group with him. By junior year, the company wasn’t in the news as much, and I was building up my resume for college, so I tried being more . . . social, I guess?”

To get strong letters of recommendation, I’d had to step it up. I was going to apply to a few Ivies. I didn’t want to go. Dad had loved the idea of me telling Yale “no” so I could dump them for his beloved UT. Grades weren’t enough. I’d needed to be in clubs, get elected to a couple of things.

“By that point, I was indifferent to Micah.” It had started out true that year, anyway. “He had this annoying habit of acting like he was above it all—but he’d quit trying to talk to me, so I didn’t care. We ended up getting grouped together for a project in our econ class in the spring, and he was all right. Did his part. Had good ideas. Didn’t say anything mean.”

“But you still don’t want to forgive him?”

“I did,” I say. “Way back in our freshman year. I was over it.”

“But you didn’t want to be friends?”

“We almost were. Right around then, I found out that he was ranked second in our class. It turned into a semi-friendly rivalry. My day could be made or broken depending on whether I outscored him on a test, even if it was by a point.”

“Can we look at it like the competition was a good thing? Maybe it helped each of you be better than you would have been without the other.”

I turn to look at her. “You really want me to like Micah, don’t you?”

“It’s selfish, but yes.” She glances at me. “I don’t want to worry that I’m forcing you to work with someone who causes you massive stress while I’m cooing at my baby.”

A pang of guilt ripples through my chest. “Definitely don’t worry. Our competition was healthy. It did push me to do better. I already knew that back then.”

“I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t still be mad.”

“I wouldn’t be if he hadn’t ruined everything with two weeks left to go until graduation. You know how I said we were almost friends by then? We’d choose each other for group projects, and sometimes we ate lunch together in the library.”

“Stop. You’re embarrassing me with the spicy details.”

“It wasn’t like that, dummy.”

“But why not?” she demands. “Was he not hot yet?”

I squirm. “He was cute. But I didn’t have the bandwidth for that. I was focused on school.”

“No heart-poundy feelings for Micah. Got it.” I hesitate so long that she reaches over and pinches my arm. “Katie-Kat, yes to heart-poundy feelings?”

“Kind of,” I mumble. Around the last two months of school, I’d realized that it meant something to me when Micah complimented a score I got or gave me a nod when he agreed with a point I’d made in a class discussion. Maybe it was realizing that Micah knew better than anyone how hard I worked, and I liked being seen by him. “I had a crush on him our last semester.”

It’s such a weak word to describe how consumed I was with him. Completely, utterly obsessed. When we were in the same room, every single one of my senses was tuned to him. I knew where he was at every point of the day on campus. I studied everything he wore, looking for silent clues or messages about his feelings in the details. Did he switch from his checkered Vans to his black ones because they were nicer and he wanted to impress me? I caught a whiff of his cologne one day in our Chinese 4 class and wondered if he’d worn it because he knew we would work in pairs that day.

As soon as I’d realized that was my hope, I’d also started worrying that he’d see how much I liked his attention. How much I watched him. What that said about how I . . . felt.

I’d spend calculus staring at the back of his head, daydreaming about how he might ask me to prom. Then I’d feel giddy and avoid my friends at lunch—where they would talk about prom as obsessively as I daydreamed about going with Micah. If the subject of dates came up, my face would have given me away and they would try to pry out of me who my blush was all about. If they succeeded, they’d do something well-intentioned but humiliating to get him to ask me, so I’d hidden in the library instead, but sometimes Micah found me there and settled in beside me to eat and study. Then I’d end up with my heart pounding too hard and out of rhythm. I’d last as long as I could with my cheeks flaming. When I couldn’t take it—sure he’d hear my loud heartbeat—I’d mumble an excuse about checking in with a teacher and leave.

That was a rough two months. I touch my cheek, remembering. It’s a miracle I don’t have burn scars from the pining. All that pining that never mattered. He hadn’t asked me to prom. I’d gone with Megan and Lulu. Micah didn’t go at all.

“You had a crush, but now you hate him.” Madison’s tone makes it sound like she’s studying the medical file of a mysterious case. She pauses for a moment, then gasps. “Oh, Kaitlyn, did he reject you?”

“No! Settle down. I don’t think he knew. Not at first. I didn’t get the feeling he thought of me that way at all.”

“Why? Did he say something?”

I make a noncommittal sound. “My insides experienced electrical shorts anytime he was near me, but he acted the same as always, so . . .”

“It wasn’t mutual,” she says.

“I don’t think so. Avoiding him worked pretty well until about a week before finals. But then I stayed late after school one afternoon, and I had to walk by the soccer pitch to get to my car. I wasn’t paying attention, thinking about the chapter test in calculus the next day, and this kid shouts, ‘Hey, Micah, isn’t that the Kaitlyn chick who’s super into you?’”

Madison boos. “We hate that kid.”

I smile even as I remember the flood of humiliation as soon as the kid had said it. “I haven’t stayed in touch.”

“Did Micah act like a complete tool?”

“He didn’t do anything, but when I looked over, he was shirtless.” I remember the hitch in my breath and how my palms broke out in a sweat, which had never happened before.

“Ohhh. Shirtless boys are devastating when you’re seventeen,” she says.

“This was catastrophic. I think I went blind for a few seconds? It was partially panic, like How did this kid know? Is it because Micah knew and told him? Then add in the devastating shirtlessness, and yeah. He had a really nice chest.”

Madison gives a soft laugh of understanding. “Don’t know why you said that in the past tense.”

“But my blackout or whatever . . .” I squeeze my eyes shut for a split second, helpless against the worst part of the memory. “I walked right into a pole.”

“Oh no. Is this when—?”

“I broke my nose,” I confirm. “I broke it walking into a pole while looking at a shirtless boy I had a crush on—in front of him. And no, that isn’t why I was mad at him.”

I’ve read that the human brain can’t recreate the sensation of a pain you remember in the body. But right now, I’d argue with science. I remember the excruciating jolt as I slammed into the pole and my vision went white. That’s the color of pain. Searing white. My nose hurt right away, but my brain wasn’t far behind, throbbing within seconds from the impact.

“I remember dropping straight to the ground, hunched over because I thought I was going to puke. Micah and his friend ran over, yelling my name, and I wanted them to stop. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, but it also sounded like they were in a tunnel. Micah was trying to get me to look up, and I did but only to tell him to go away because I wanted him to be quiet. His friend started yelling about blood, and I looked down to see it all over my shirt and my hands.” The memory is becoming more vivid as I relive it.

“Micah told him to calm down, that it was only a bloody nose, and to go to the locker room and get paper towels. He told me it was fine, he’d had a bloody nose before, and said to tip back my head and pinch the bridge of my nose. Meanwhile, I wanted to die, and not even from embarrassment. It hurt so bad.” I give a faint sniff. “My eyes are stinging just thinking about it.”

“It sounds horrible,” Madison says.

“It was. And I hated the fuss.” I don’t like being the center of attention. I can hold my own if I have to do public speaking, but Madison is very much a dance-on-the-tables kind of girl, and I’m very much a don’t-even-go-to-the-club kind of girl. “I told him I would go home and ice it, but he was worried that it wasn’t clotting. Then he asked me if I had any tampons.”

She gasps. “No. No, he didn’t do the . . .”

“She’s the Man thing and shove it up my nose? Yeah.”

She clears her throat. “Okay. Well.” Another throat clearing. “It was a bonding experience that should have made you closer.”

She’s trying to keep a straight face, and it wins a small laugh from me. “It’s true I’ve never shared that same level of intimacy with another guy since.”

She breaks down and laughs too. “I’m sorry. That’s pretty bad.”

“I know. Then he made it worse by forcing me to go to the infirmary.” About half of Hillview’s students were residential. Boarding school, basically. The campus had a small clinic with a full-time nurse practitioner. “I absolutely didn’t want to go because they would call Mom.”

Madison sucks air through her teeth and nods but says nothing.

“I explained it would worry her and she would overreact, that I’d just drive home and take it easy, but he wouldn’t listen. He was already calling the front office to tell them we were on the way for a bloody nose.”

“He didn’t know,” Madison says.

“I told him,” I repeat. “I told him Mom would make a bigger deal out of it than it needed to be. I told him I needed time to go home and study for calculus, but it didn’t matter. Once the infirmary called Mom, it was all over.” Mom is a hypochondriac, and sometimes, growing up, it almost felt like it spilled into Munchausen’s-by-proxy. She obsessed over every sniffle or bruise we got, and we learned never to show it if we felt even a little bit gross or it would become a production.

“How high did she go?” Madison asks.

“The nurse told her to give me ibuprofen and wait for the swelling to go down before worrying about x-rays—”

“Whoops.”

“Exactly.” Suggesting I had something worth an x-ray had unleashed Cynthia Armstrong’s neuroticism, and there was no damming the flow. “By the time Mom was done, she had me at St. David’s and made them call in the chief of surgery—who wasn’t even on call—then she made him call in the chief of plastics. And every single one of them said the same thing. It probably was broken but not severely enough that it would need to be reset, and they wouldn’t be able to do much until the swelling went down. I didn’t get home until almost midnight. Mom gave me ibuprofen, except she didn’t tell me it had sleepy stuff in it. I couldn’t study. I still had to take the calculus test the next day. Want to guess what subject Micah was better at than I was?”

“Calculus.”

“I got a C on that test. It dropped my grade in that class to a ninety-two, and he got a ninety-seven for the semester. When they did the final calculations for the year, he won valedictorian by an eighth of a point. An eighth. All because of our calculus grades, and all because he wouldn’t listen to me when I told him to back off.”

By now, we’ve reached my neighborhood, and Madison is quiet as she turns into it and then into my driveway two blocks later. She puts the car in park and turns toward me. Or tries to. It’s about a three-degree turn because of her belly. Her eyes are soft when she meets mine.

“Kaitlyn,” she says, reaching over to take my hand. “That’s really stupid.”

I stare at her in shock for a full five seconds. And then we both burst out laughing.

When we finally stop, I smile. “It didn’t sound stupid until I said it out loud.”

“It’s not really the kind of thing epic feuds are built on.”

“You can’t take this away from me,” I say. “I feel lost without a nemesis.”

“Oh, you still have one. But it’s that pole, not Micah.”

“The pole,” I repeat, like I’m taking this seriously. “Hmm. Less interesting nemesis.”

“It’s a very worthy nemesis,” she says. “Iron will.”

“Well, steel, probably.”

“Fair point. Will of steel. Unchanging. Unbending. Relentless.”

“In that case, I’m a badass. Thanks, Madi. I feel better.”

“Good. But also, permission to practice therapy without a license?”

I raise my eyebrows. “You’ll do it either way.”

“Correct,” she says happily. “I want to make sure you understand you were never mad at Micah about the grades. Not even about the valedictorian thing. You were mad because when you walked into the pole, he saw how you felt when you didn’t mean for him to.”

I don’t love this take, maybe because when a statement like that makes me uncomfortable, it has a nasty habit of being true. “Is there a medium ground between your unlicensed therapy and never suggesting I’m wrong about anything?”

She grins. “Get out and go make a plan for being nice to Micah.”

I roll my eyes and climb out of her car but circle around to tap on her window. When she lowers it I say, “I’m only going in to choose a new nemesis.”

“Good, because it was never Micah.”

When she reverses out of my driveway like a Formula One driver, I swear she’s cackling.