Part 1

FRESHMAN

They were the only vegetarians, a fact that was highlighted every game day when the other girls loaded up on chicken sandwiches or steak fajitas while Yoon and Carmen ate salads of iceberg lettuce and shredded cheese, forgoing the ranch that came in rectangular packets, which they agreed was disgusting. They ate ironically, offering a round of applause whenever one found an actual cherry tomato. “Sustenance!” they cheered, stabbing the tomato ceremoniously before clinking sporks. Such surface similarities, at the age of fourteen, seemed indicative of a deeper likeness.

“Why are y’all on the ground?” asked Roxy, the Jewels’ captain, a senior.

They weren’t sure how long she’d been standing there, her shadow spilling across their laps, or if she’d seen their tomato toast. They hadn’t realized they were cross-legged on the gymnasium floor while the rest of the team was seated at long tables covered in sheets of butcher paper that had been scrawled on by members of the band, Magic Marker notes like “Good luck Jewels!” or “Bobby loves Margot,” from the trumpet player who was dating their second lieutenant. At some point after spraying each other’s hair, they must have found their food (theirs was always labeled) and sat down, though they could recall no action in isolation, only that they’d moved from one moment to the next together.

“I-dunno,” Carmen replied. She looked at Yoon, who looked at Roxy then back at Carmen then back at Roxy, panicked that all the looking hadn’t generated any ideas.

“Carry on, hippies,” the captain said with a smirk. “Be one with the earth.”

They stared at her letterman jacket as she walked away. The words Class of 2006 protruded in thick cursive fluff. Sewn underneath was a patch depicting a dancer in arabesque, the Jewels’ crest, which they would be eligible for once they became upperclassmen. Yoon was vegetarian to spite her mother; for Carmen it was a way to eat less without arousing people’s suspicions. They had confided these truths at line camp, a two-week training period that prepared the Jewels for the upcoming season and at the conclusion of which every rookie was gifted her very own set of poms. Roxy’s joke had mostly gone over their heads, but when they faced one another this time, they knew they were both thinking the same thing. A girl who seemed older and prettier than they could ever be, and who stood in her white uniform at the fifty-yard line for every formation, had noticed them and acknowledged them as a unit, validating what each had been thinking to herself for a while now, since freshman year started, but had been too afraid to say out loud. They had what every high school girl wants more than anything in the world: a best friend.

—

The Oak Park Jaguars had an okay season that year, winning half their games but losing the most important ones to their biggest rivals, Lake Vista (the wealthiest high school in the district) and Stony Ridge (the grittiest). Players’ parents blamed Coach Stout, who’d been the head coach since the school was built in 1948, which was also the last year a jaguar had been spotted in the state of Texas. Coach Stout was approaching eighty, though some speculated that he was older. He’d been well proportioned as a young man—above-average height, built, a linebacker—but slowly over the years his body came to resemble his name. No one cared anymore that he’d once played for SMU or that he’d led the Jaguars to the state championship in 1967 and again in 1980. It was 2006. The new millennium had arrived, and it was time to abandon certain traditions, many members of the Oak Park community believed, though they would not say this to the old man’s face. Coach Stout had grown up in East Texas back when playgrounds were little more than loose dirt and was raised there on the virtues of seniority. The older you were, the more perks you got. This was fair, because everyone would get their turn to be the oldest eventually. Yet whenever spring rolled around and the school board raised the question of his retirement—gently; many of them had been his players—the coach refused to step down, saying he still had another good year in him.

Local papers agreed the most underutilized player that season was Gabriel Nuñez, a freshman who could kick a ball through the uprights with the aim of a rattlesnake. He’d been courted by college scouts since his youth league days. Wherever he was, men with clipboards were never far. The soccer team begged him to play for them, promising to put his good feet to better use, but he preferred to use the offseason to train with the boys he’d grown close with, the ones he now called brothers.

He didn’t mind spending most of the season on the bench. He trusted Coach Stout, because no matter what people said about him, that he was old-fashioned or stubborn or beginning to decline, the man had principles. Whether those principles benefited him mattered little to Gabe, coming from a home where there seemed to be no principles at all. He was the middle child, born seven years apart from each of his two sisters. His mother and father loved one another wildly, which meant they also hated each other, and the mood of the house and its physical state swung on this axis. When murmurings around town about the coach’s questionable
firmity reached Gabe, days after they’d lost their final game to Hyde Springs, a game in which he hadn’t touched the field once, he respected the man even more for standing his ground. Fair was fair, and order was order. Tradition was tradition. Like Coach said, feelings be damned.

“You know we go to the same church,” Carmen said one night, months after the season had ended. The girls were lying face-to-face with their eyes closed in Carmen’s bed, resisting sleep, a quilted blanket pulled tight across them both. The ceiling fan made the baby hairs on their heads move solemnly, like switchgrass in a breeze. It was dress rehearsal week for the Jewels’ spring show, and Yoon’s parents had agreed to let her stay at Carmen’s when rehearsal ran late. Even when it didn’t run late, Yoon told them it did.

“What’s he like at church?” Yoon asked.

At school Gabe was always surrounded by cheerleaders. Walking past him required circumventing a phalanx of high ponytails, through the gaps of which one might glimpse Gabe, smiling shyly in an effort to downsize himself. The senior guys tousled his hair and heckled him in the hallways—affectionately. They didn’t talk to other freshmen.

“Less obnoxious, I guess,” said Carmen. “Our parents are friendly.”

“Do you think he’s cute?”

“Ew, no,” Carmen replied, scrunching her face. “Do you?”

Outside, a car turned past the house. Its headlights sprayed across the room, lighting up the posters on Carmen’s wall. Yoon waited until it was dark again.

“Yeah,” she said. “In that conventional, almost boring way. Like Brad Pitt. He’s so pretty it makes you want to yawn.”

She’d never admitted out loud that she was capable of feeling attraction, having prided herself for so long on being a prude, making big displays of disgust whenever she saw two people kissing. Yoon’s parents never kissed, at least not in front of her. Embarrassed and thrilled by her own admission, she felt inclined to move closer to Carmen in the bed. Already they could feel each other’s breathing.

“I didn’t think he would be your type.”

“What’s my type?” asked Yoon.

“I-dunno.” Carmen smiled and opened her eyes. Yoon pretended to keep hers closed. “I guess someone like me, except a boy.” Then she added, “And maybe not a Catholic.”

Part II

SENIORS

Break a leg tonight <33
I’ll be in the stands

Yoon saw Carmen’s texts and snapped her phone shut. Facing the locker room mirror, she removed a bobby pin from her lips and inserted it, blades parted, into the side of her head. She grabbed a bottle of hair spray and squeezed her eyes tight. Keeping them closed, she shook the hair that had been twisted into a low bun left and right and up and down. If it wobbled, or if a strand got loose, she repeated the process, adding another bobby pin, another layer of spray, until her hair and her head moved in one piece.

She was surprised Carmen was coming, though she guessed she could expect the whole school to be there to witness the third state championship in Oak Park history. They were about to graduate, finally, and a Black man had just been elected president, infecting everyone, even those who’d been against him, with that yes-we-can attitude. Lil Wayne bumped from the cars at every tailgate alongside George Strait. Win or lose, it was to be the head coach’s last game. He’d suffered a severe stroke mid-season and had had to be wheeled onto the field ever since, his chair decorated by cheerleaders in orange and navy-blue ribbons, the school’s colors, with flashes of sharp silver tinsel.

The same people who’d complained about Coach Stout now praised his foresight. All along, they said, the man was making those boys wait until they were old enough, men enough, to understand the true lesson behind every team sport, that it was not about being a star but about forming a constellation. Gabe had become a well-rounded player thanks to his offseason training. He was officially the team’s kicker but stepped in to play defense now and then alongside Dillon and Tyler Garvey, fraternal twins who’d grown more than a foot between them over the summer and could get into bars on Sixth Street without having to show ID. The offense was studded with boys strong in all positions, showcasing different skills that proved useful depending on the play, confusing the opposition.

The breakout that no one expected, that no one had even heard of, was Stanley Popov. He’d played JV his sophomore and junior years, which was why the coach hadn’t noticed him until being a senior automatically placed him on varsity. The only son of Russian immigrants, Stanley was quiet and ran cross-country. He played to appease his pap, who fetishized football like he fetishized McDonald’s, as being uniquely American, and for that reason Stanley had never made any effort to assert himself in the sport, feeling that it did not belong to him.

“They had you playing cornerback?” Coach Stout rasped after the first practice, where he historically made the boys do every drill—ball punch, gap block, fast feet, bleachers—for hours, a ritual that many assumed had to do with toughness and a setting of tone, the boys puking and crying against their wills, when really it was a matter of inventory, making sure nothing had been overlooked.

Stanley shrugged, swatting away a bee.

“You play receiver now,” said the coach. His cheeks and neck moved like Jell-O when he spoke.

Yoon texted Carmen back Thx.

That summer they had drifted apart. Carmen quit the Jewels midway through junior year after her father was laid off and could no longer afford the fees. Another girl’s parents offered to help, but Carmen couldn’t bear being viewed as a charity case, so she handed in her poms before Christmas and took a job at the pizza place in Oak Park where all the stoners hung out. By the time line camp started again, she’d become one of them.

Yoon emerged from the dim locker room into the cold white lights of the practice gym.

“Hey-JEWELS!” she yelled.

The girls responded in unison, “Hey-YEAH!” and a loud hush descended. Yoon glanced at herself and her teammates doubled in the mirrors.

“Fifteen minutes till we load the bus.”

“Yes, MA’AM!”

The girls scrambled in different directions, filling water bottles, clearing away trash. The sound of zippers could be heard above the general noise of rummaging, everyone checking their duffels one last time to make sure they weren’t forgetting something. Those who’d waited until the last minute to do their hair formed a hair train, each girl sitting cross-legged behind another in a circle. Yoon was reminded of the salad she hadn’t touched. She chucked the container labeled “V.” into her bag in case she got hungry later.

What was different about Yoon: Her uniform was white. The rest of the team wore orange with a navy-blue belt that cinched the waist, the same uniform she and Carmen had donned the past three seasons. She’d acquired her first boyfriend, Stanley, who sat next to her in AP chem and had asked her too many times to explain the difference between covalent and ionic bonds before he finally just asked her out. What was different about Carmen: After quitting the team, she’d taken up playing the guitar. Through this she’d acquired something too, though she couldn’t say what it was, because she couldn’t touch it, which made it hard for her to explain to people why she preferred to be alone all the time now. At night, after coming home from work, smelling of grease but too tired to shower and still a little high, she broke out her guitar, having taught herself chords off YouTube. She wrote songs, then poems, and she showed these to no one, not even Yoon, especially not Yoon, for she was protective of this new relationship with herself and burrowed into it to forget about her parents, whom she loved, and who’d been fighting constantly since her father was let go from the DMV. Her mother suggested he bag groceries at the H-E-B for extra money, but he refused. Instead, he stayed in the house moping, making droopy sandwiches, refreshing job boards, insisting that God had a plan.

“Trees tremble / listless in the wind,” Carmen sang softly, strumming a new progression. Her eyes flitted from her fingers back down to her notebook. “What moves somebody? / Is it fate or is it money?” She thought this was her unique superpower, that she had found a way to make pain feel good.

—

The Jaguars were up in the first half. The band played the fight song so often that eventually the Jewels stayed standing in the bleachers, ruffling their poms and jumping up and down to keep warm as they waited for the intro to start up again, jolting them into their touchdown routine like a match striking.

At halftime, Yoon counted off in her head, then whistled the girls onto the field. “Give My Regards to Broadway” began, and the officers, followed by the rest of the team, sashayed to their opening formation. At the point of the pyramid, Yoon stood with her chest high, head down, her right foot in a dig next to her left, waiting. Seeing her at the fifty-yard line, Carmen swelled with pride and something else. She’d never imagined that when Yoon made captain, she would be watching it from the stands. “Go Yooo-oon!” she screamed as loud as she could, her breath spurting into the brisk December air, forming a cloud in front of her face. The snare drums started, a four-count of paradiddles, followed by a blast from the brass section.

Yoon lifted her head on one. The dance was their oldest legacy routine, choreographed in 1954, the first year Oak Park had a drill team. It was a simple routine, technically speaking, but filled with contagions that made the crowd go wild. They performed it at every homecoming and decided it was fitting for the final game, a tribute not only to the coach and his lifetime of devotion to Oak Park but to the school itself, the student body as well as parents, faculty, alumni, staff, every person in town who’d known better days before the recession started and was hoping for better ones again, now that the Jaguars were on a historic winning streak.

Yoon knew the routine so well she could do it with her eyes closed. Instead, the whole time she was scanning the rows for Carmen.

—

This life was coming to an end.

That was what Yoon felt as she hit her final pose, and what Carmen had sensed, too, watching her friend take center stage. Years from now, in front of a room full of sweating, passionate young people, Carmen would be struck again by this premature nostalgia, a disassociation that foretold the start of something new and made her long for what was right in front of her.

The crowd erupted in applause. Somewhere someone was abusing a cowbell. A group of boys stood against the chain-link fence that jutted over the track, obviously wasted, and whipped their shirts above their heads to reveal a letter painted on each one’s stomach: O P H S. Yoon whistled the Jewels back to the sidelines, wondering how those boys weren’t freezing to death given the temperature in the low forties.

Carmen turned past the concession stand and found the Jewels huddled beneath the bleachers. “Hey,” she muttered to Yoon, who was wearing her letterman jacket over a pristine all-white uniform, looking almost identical to Roxy. The Jewels’ crest was sewn to her sleeve.

For a moment Yoon forgot about Carmen’s negligence, which had been insistent: the dropped calls, the flakiness when it came to plans, always excusing herself for being busy. Even at school Yoon caught only glimpses of Carmen, who avoided the entrance nearest the dance gym. They weren’t in any of the same classes. Yoon was alone in the rituals they’d created over the years, spending Saturdays at Barnes & Noble or walking to the Wag-A-Bag from her house for the pint of ice cream they used to finish on the walk back, passing one spoon between them. Yoon made herself sick eating for two. In the bleachers’ shadow, they collapsed in a swaying embrace, drawing the attention of the rest of the team.

“Carmen!” other girls shrieked when they saw who it was.

“Car-car!”

“Carmellini!”

“Caratoga!”

The rookies stood off to the side while the upperclassmen gathered around their old teammate, fondling her hair and face and arms as though she’d died and come back to life. It made Carmen feel bad for belittling school spirit in front of her new crew at the pizza joint, who found glory lame and had nicknamed her “Cheerleader,” even though she’d been a dancer. Yoon asked Patty, the first lieutenant, to lead the Jewels to their section in the stands. When they were alone, she asked Carmen where she had been, noticing that her style had changed—her clothes were huge—and she was practically bones.

Her dad was still looking for work. When Carmen wasn’t dicking around with her coworkers at Mushroom Head, she was babysitting her brothers so her mom could take extra shifts at the nursing home. This was all true, but she failed to mention the fighting or the guitar, the words and melodies that were constantly buzzing in her head these days, creating a new grid through which she viewed the world.

“I’ll apply to college next year,” she said as two men walked past, one of them wearing a shirt that said I LOVE BEER. Her plan was to work at the nursing home the moment she turned eighteen. She would take community college classes in the meantime, she added sheepishly.

“How’s your wela doing?” Yoon asked.

“She’s good. She asks about you. Calls you my elma gemela. Soul twin.”

“Why have you been ignoring me?” Yoon asked to get it over with, the pitch in her voice rising. The confusion she’d felt for months was back, only now it felt like anger. “Why are you here now?”

Staring at the ground, Carmen scuffed her shoe on a piece of dried gum. “I-
dunno,” she said. “It’s our senior year . . .” She trailed off, hoping her friend would accept this as an apology, the sentiment summoning a time, still so recent, when their attentions were fixed on what lay ahead, whereas now, already, they were peering back.

“I was embarrassed, okay?” She tucked some hair behind her ear and revealed new piercings. “I felt like I was letting you down, letting us down, by quitting the team and becoming poor. I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

“You’re not poor,” said Yoon, who heard the false innocence in her voice immediately and wished she could retract it, but Carmen only smiled, a smile so faint and patient that it seized Yoon’s heart. For minutes the two of them stood there under the bleachers, not realizing they were holding hands. Carmen’s fingers were like icicles, hard and cold, the nail beds bitten down. If Yoon paid closer attention she would have noticed calluses at the tips, but she was too busy trying to pin what was altered about her friend, aside from everything on the outside. “Come to Pluckers with us after the game,” she said at last, finding it difficult to hold a grudge when Carmen was right in front of her, looking so small and so the opposite of Yoon. “You saw how excited everyone was to see you.”

“Heard y

ou have a new boo,” said Carmen, swinging Yoon’s hand in mock flirtation. She’d learned from Patty that the guy was a jock, but of a less confrontational variety. He ran for hours in loose shorts. She asked, smiling for real this time, “Is he anything like me?”

Carmen’s face was sallow. Her left cheek dimpled harshly. Yoon looked down at their interlaced fingers.

“That depends,” she said, tempted by this invitation to fall back into an old cadence. “Tell me what you’re like now.”

Carmen was getting ready to share her secret when the stadium got quiet. The whole time they were talking the game had been going on. The East High Yellowjackets returned in the second half with an appetite for blood; for every yard the Jaguars gained they lost more. East High’s coach was new, and young, from Arizona. He’d noticed that while the other team was fast and ran clever plays, his guys were generally bigger. He told them to think less, let their heft take the game to its inevitable end.

“Looks like we’ve got an injured player,” the announcer bellowed. His words hung like smoke in the air, dispersing in echoes. It took him ages to say who it was. “Number twenty-three.”

Yoon dropped Carmen’s hand. The boys had taken a knee with their helmets across their chests. Stanley was being escorted by two medics off the field, where a stretcher was waiting for him.

“Looks like he’ll be okay,” the announcer said tentatively to scattered applause. “But the Jaguars just lost their star wide receiver.”

Their side groaned while the other side began preemptively celebrating. Yoon followed the medics across the parking lot to the field house, but they wouldn’t let her inside.

“That’s my boyfriend,” she tried.

“Hey, Yoony Tunes,” Stanley crooned from the elevated table where they’d set him down. He rose onto his elbows and twisted his whole upper body to look at her, wincing when his foot moved an inch. “Just a badly twisted ankle,” he said. “Did you see me catch that pass?”

“I saw it,” she lied. She hated football and Stanley knew it. For some reason she felt like crying.

“I got the first down. It was worth it.”

He reached out to touch her, and the medics stepped aside. Behind Yoon the sky was dark. The stadium lights vanquished any chance of seeing stars.

“Don’t worry about me. Go back out there and watch us take state.”

—

Things with Yoon’s mother, which had never been great, took a turn the summer following junior year, when Chouyi asked carelessly, with food in her mouth, why Yoon wouldn’t just quit the Jewels now that her friend was gone. The question came from a person who, as a teenager, had stood in line for her family’s rations of flour and eggs and whose exposure to dance consisted of the steps she was forced to do in her school courtyard, to songs that praised the red sun in the sky. Chouyi hadn’t told her daughter any of this, thinking it was irrelevant, belonging to a life that had ended when she came to the States and that she had no interest in resurrecting. When she finally did tell Yoon (much, much later) she would add that her mother hadn’t been perfect either. She was lucky if she was ignored, she said, and unlucky if she was beaten.

At least in this house there was always food on the table, plenty of meat that Yoon wouldn’t touch. At least Yoon’s father came home every night, whereas Chouyi had lost years with her father to the countryside where he’d been sent by the communists to be reeducated. What did Yoon have to complain about? And why was she so obsessed with making her mother understand?

By the time Yoon understood her mother (not in any phenomenal way but in the usual way, by becoming a mother herself), she had no one to tell, no one around her able to connect the then with the now, accounting for all the time in between, stringing together the pieces of her. In that life, which so far she’d heard referred to only as the future, she would be in a city far away, in a world that did not include Carmen or Stanley or any of the girls she’d danced with, dance being part of what had ended after they lost the state championship.

The Jaguars were down three in the fourth quarter with fifteen seconds left. The assistant coaches wanted to put in Vernon Watts, a sophomore tight end who didn’t have Stanley’s sticky hands but could juke. The other team would be expecting a field goal, but with 45 yards being hardly a gimme, a pass play seemed like a better risk.

“Vernon, you’re up!” Coach Sanchez barked, lifting his cap and tugging it back down. He stalked over to the bench, where Vernon hadn’t moved. “What are you waiting for, a sign from God? Get up, son, let’s go!”

It was then that Coach Stout, whose chair had been turned to the game, reached up and yanked Coach Dougherty’s sleeve. Ever since the stroke, his assistants had been running practice and determining plays, making sure the boys’ grades were above passing. Between the two of them they discussed not being able to tell how lucid Coach was, the way his sodden gaze fell softly over the field. His head moved vaguely with the action, though, which had to mean some part of him was still there. Now he was trying to say something.

“Ayy,” he managed to get out. His body was stiff. He was gripping the sides of his chair.

Dougherty called Sanchez over.

“What are you trying to tell us, Coach?”

Sanchez bent down the way one does when speaking to a child.

“Ayy,” said the coach.

“Play?” said Dougherty.

“Ayy!” The old man concentrated on the muscles of his tongue and mouth until doing so brought him physical pain. “Ayy-vff!”

Sanchez took a step back.

“I think he’s trying to say Gabe. ”

Gabe backed up, flexing his fingers against the cold. On the sideline, he’d done a few practice kicks, focusing on what Coach had reminded him so many times over the years: form first, then power. But as every athlete knows, the quality of one’s skills can change the moment that it counts. Alone on the field, with his teammates and all of Oak Park depending on him, he may as well have been kicking a ball for the first time in his life.

“YOU GOT THIS, BABY! WE LOVE YOU!”

His mother’s voice reached him like a missile through the noise, Oak Park chanting Gabe, Gabe, East High stomping the bleachers in bleak anticipation. The band was silent. Instruments sagged. Cheerleaders kept motioning to the crowd, as though it needed any help getting riled up. Gabe’s sisters held on tightly to their mother’s arms, making sure she didn’t pitch over the riser. Behind them, Gabe’s father made the sign of the cross. He said in his heart what he had trouble saying out loud: You got this, baby. I love you.

His shoe made contact and the ball flew. It somersaulted through the air. A collective gasp could be heard all the way from the field house, where Stanley was having his ankle wrapped. Later that night, on the silent bus ride home, Gabe would post “It’s over . . .” on Facebook. The post received hundreds of likes, everyone commenting with clichés about the journey, not the destination, and how proud Coach Stout would have been. The boys stewed in their loss, thinking it was the most miserable they would ever be, only to learn after other losses that this one, early on, was not without an element of bliss. Monday at school was somber, filled with a significance that no one knew how to adequately acknowledge, the fact that their winning streak had ended with the death of Oak Park’s longtime football coach, as though it were this loss that had killed him. Even the teachers who complained that too much of the school’s funding went to sports felt sympathy. They went easy on tests and homework until Christmas.

Carmen hadn’t been there when the paramedics arrived, when the commotion from the game, a simulacrum of life and death, was overcome by the real thing, and the announcer asked everyone to please find the nearest exit as quickly as possible. While everyone was still reeling from the missed kick, one of her coworkers texted Cheerleader where u at? and she’d left to go smoke behind the Mushroom Head, thinking she could still meet up with Yoon later. Yoon didn’t go to Pluckers that night; nobody did. She left the stadium with Stanley, who would never run the same again but whose injury his father would turn into the stuff of legend, bragging to anyone who would listen that his son, Stanislav Popov, was a real American athlete. She texted Carmen Let’s hang soon, knowing that they wouldn’t, that their lives were already on separate tracks. She was resolved to leave Oak Park, to make whatever this was the past no matter what, even if that meant leaving behind Carmen, who (she reminded herself whenever she felt guilty) had left her once already.

While the ball was still in midair, Coach Stout closed his eyes. The faces of his boys flashed before him one by one: Jimmy, Tony, Arna, Reed, Devon, DeShawn, Maxfield, Zeek, Beef, Mikey . . . and of course Gabe, whose defining characteristic was never football, he just hadn’t been alive long enough yet to see it. Each had had at least one important year, a year they’d been promised and earned. While many have described natural death as something slow, for Coach it had the effect of a stadium shutting down, the floodlights—those bulbs that took minutes to fire up—going dark in an instant, leaving behind a dull orange afterglow that extinguished like the end of a cigarette when a smoker has just finished inhaling.

A moment of sensory deprivation. Then the eyes adjusted.

Austin native Ada Zhang recently won a Whiting Award for fiction. Her debut collection of short stories, The Sorrows of Others, was published in 2023.

This story was published in collaboration with Texas Monthly.