Sawed Off Soccer Cleats
On being in love with Mia Hamm, surviving a pack of rural gentry carpet emporium heiress bullies, and being a feral teen gargoyle alone in the woods
I held the serrated knife in my hand, flat against the sole of a used baseball cleat pulled from Port Angeles High School’s lost and found. Flecks of grass and mud caked the seams. I hoped this would work. I had gotten a job as a referee. I had made the cut for the Roughriders soccer team. I had been kicked out by my mom for being gay.
Squeezing the cleat between my knees, I angled the knife away, chiseling at the ziggurated toe. I needed this to work. Refereeing kids’ weekend games in baseball cleats was fine so long as I ran fast enough that no snobby soccer moms noticed my decrepit footwear. But for the season’s first game, I needed baseball shoes that could pass as soccer cleats.
The two shoe designs are very similar, their differences shaped by each sport’s respective ball. A game for hands, baseball cleats are harder, stiffer, and a little higher off the ground to avoid heavy, compact, hurtling groundballs that could break all the bones in your feet. The top toe cleat there to aid baseball players’ traction as they run around the bases on a line drawn in the dirt, is not so necessary for soccer fields’ grassy turf. Softer, flexible soccer cleats allow your foot to bind with the airy sphere of hexagons in a way that feels almost magic. The absence of a lone spike on the tip of a soccer cleat also helps to prevent injuries with the game’s toe-to-toe, hamstring-to-hamstring combat style.
I scrubbed away the dirt remnants and fibrous threads of dried grass and admired my work. If I held my toe at just the right angle, the referee wouldn’t be able to tell. It felt a little strange as a referee, myself, to try and break the very same rules I was paid to uphold. But I had no choice. I had given my mom all the money I earned landscaping and cleaning houses before she kicked me out for being gay.
I slept that night on the roof of the high school auditorium so I wouldn’t be late to class. A giant neon crucifix glowed bright, hovering over the football field. I pulled my Roughriders hoodie close and dreamed of Mia Hamm. I dreamed I was Mia Hamm’s defense. I dreamed we went on a date. I dreamed that I dreamed in a warm bed and slept indoors.
Waking to the sound of chatter below my feral teenage gargoyle perch, I watched the cliques gather in swarms. The Evangelical Christians, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the cheerleaders and the nerds. I crept toward the edge near my English classroom and dropped to the concrete when the coast was clear.
I hadn’t expected to make the team. But I hustled at tryouts. Whatever the word is for that viscerally metaphysical memory –– muscles firing instinctually with the precision of practice, fueled by a love so deep for a game that it feels silly.
I hadn’t played on a team in several years. Before we ran away from my dad, I played for select teams with girls four years older, some two feet taller. Being short, fast, and no sense of physical pain was an advantage among the taller, older girls whose swinging elbows I could dodge underneath as I raced past them. Before we were homeless, my coach nicknamed me Evil Knievel (a reference I wouldn’t understand until years later). Soccer and a lot of other things ended when we were intermittently homeless in my middle school years. Then Mom kicked me out when we finally regained some stability.
Sometimes I slept on the roof of the school, other times I slept in a cave above the Elwha River. And some nights I slept at a hippie commune on a Christmas tree farm run by anarchists who hated Christmas, but whose livelihood depended on the people who love Christmas so much that they’ll drive over an hour to drink hot chocolate and pick the perfect tree.
When the second school bell rang, I headed to English class with my favorite teacher, KJ. I sat down at my desk and opened a book. The daughter (we’ll call her Mary) of the owners of Cafe Garden, the restaurant where my mom waited tables, towered over me. Mary slapped a paper on my desk.
“You need to do my homework for me,” she hissed. “Your family is my family’s slaves.”
I was confused. I started to tell her that I didn’t want to break the rules but she interrupted. “Your mom works for my parents. You’re my slave.” I wondered if she would care that my mom had kicked me out. I didn’t really know if I had a family anymore. But I knew these nuances would be lost on someone who believed she owned the children of the parents that her family’s restaurant employed. A faux-chic restaurant in Port Angeles where staff were forced to recycle half-eaten dinner rolls as croutons for the next day, and where mice enjoyed their defrosted bourgeois diner fare. Flavorless, tasteless, classless –– with the exception of the class wars bubbling just beneath Port Angeles’s surface.
Mary’s friends laughed like characters in a teen comedy. I doubted this story would end with me getting a cute makeover and going to prom. Resigned, I tucked her homework in my backpack and wondered when I’d have time to type Mary’s paper at the library.
When the bell rang, I headed to the locker room to change for soccer practice. I trailed behind Mary, the mediocre restaurant princess, her friend Taylor of the famed carpet millionaire family, and the rest of their rural gentry heiress crew, in line to inherit dowries of car dealerships, tourist traps, and deceptively lucrative dive bars where impoverished millworkers leaned their kids’ pink bikes against the salty, sooty brick wall because they’d gotten one too many DUIs on the way home from making paper or painting custom yachts for billionaires in the Bahamas.
A few months earlier in class, Taylor gave a presentation on how she got her pilot’s license so she could fly her family’s plane to go shopping in Seattle on the weekends. Most kids in Port Angeles could barely afford clothes from Walmart or Swain’s General Store, much less fly a private plane for a luxury shopping excursion in the city.
The economic disparity of Port Angeles High School was very visible once you realized that every poor, but not homeless student, was wearing the same t-shirt from Walmart.
I arrived at soccer practice with Mary’s homework finished. She took it from me without a word. Then turned back to talking with her friends.
I sat in the grass with the team. But no one spoke to me. It was worse than being invisible. I felt my anxiety rising, but reminded myself that I was here to play soccer as hard and as fast as I could, not to convince Mary and her friends to like me. I’d be a good teammate on the field, and off the field. Off the field, I’d do Mary’s homework for reasons I didn’t understand.
When the coaches arrived, they told us to change into sneakers. I didn’t have any so I waited for everyone else. One of the coaches asked me what was wrong, I lied out of embarrassment. “I forgot mine at home,” I said, knowing my home was only a few yards away from where we sat. And there were no shoes there.
When they told us we were trail running, I knew traversing several miles through the woods in my soccer-cleats-formerly-known-as-baseball-cleats was not going to go well. I sometimes slept in the ferns off the trail where we were about to run. Winding through a valley with a lush creek at the bottom, the path was woven together by gnarled roots that stretched like claws holding a ball of clay. It was beautiful. And it was also a perfect scenario for my cleats to snag a bramble, vine, or root that would send me flying down the little canyon.
I set my mind to picking up my feet, determined not to trip and fall. After all, that would be humiliating to injure myself before the season even started. Especially if Mary and her friends gleefully witnessed my fall.
I lagged behind the pack. Because of asthma, I wasn’t a sprinter or a cross country runner. I usually played midfield or defense. Completely disinterested in winning the race, focused on my feet, watching them rise and fall beneath me until I no longer heard the stampede of other girls ahead of me. In the silence I hear birds chirping and the gurgling creek below.
As I descended into the canyon, I heard a stick snap. A hand jettisoned out from behind a tree. I heard their laughter. I felt the hand planted firmly on my shoulder. I tumbled through the bramble. Thorns tearing my shorts. I stopped only when I hit a tree. Not hard enough to break any bones, but hard enough to be bruised all over, covered in tiny scratches.
I limped back. I was very late. “What happened?” the assistant coach asked. The others were doing drills, expertly guiding balls around tiny orange cones.
“I fell,” I said, pulling another cedar leaf from my hair. “I’m ok,” I reassured her concerned face. I grabbed a ball from a nearby bag and fell in with the line of girls. I didn’t know which two had pushed me. And it didn’t matter. As far as I was concerned, it was the entire team. None of them would talk to me, their own teammate.
Resolved, I reminded myself again why I was here, and my love for the game. I wasn’t here to make the rich girls like me. I was here to be a good defender. There wasn’t much I was good at, but I knew I was a good defender. I had won awards. I had made the team. I had been scouted when I was 7 years old. Soccer, botany, and books were the only things I could rely on. I didn’t need friends. Soccer, botany, and books were my friends.
The end of practice was a scrimmage. I pulled a smelly nylon jersey over my head, holding my breath against the stench. I stretched my quads and hamstrings, ready to prove that I was a good teammate regardless of how much Mary and the others hated me.
Jumping onto the field, I was ready. Practice up to this point had been excruciating. But scrimmage was what I lived for. I blocked out the pain of the bruises and rising welts from the canyon. Unlike an official game, the stakes in a scrimmage were pure joy to me.
“Square!” I called out, hopping and waving to a girl who was fighting off two opposing players. “I’m open!” I shouted louder. She looked at me, then back down at the ball. She passed to Mary who was surrounded. An opposing player intersected the pass and scored a goal within seconds. This scenario repeated so many times that the coaches paused the game and told everyone to pass to me because I was open. Still, no one passed to me. For a moment, I considered stealing the ball from my own teammates, but decided against it. My first practice ended without me so much as touching the ball. Walking toward the locker room dejected, I called out to a girl who seemed like she might be nicer. I was limping again, now that the adrenaline of the game and my fall was wearing off.
“Hey,” I said. She slowed to wait for me. “Why didn’t anyone pass to me? Was I not open? I mean, I thought I was.” I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and assumed that maybe I had missed something.
She glanced up at the locker room. The sun was setting and the air had turned cold. I shivered from the sweat that dotted my arms beneath the smelly, borrowed jersey. “Do you swear you won’t tell anyone?” she whispered. I nodded. “Mary made us not pass to you.” I felt overwhelmed with shame. I didn’t know what I had done wrong. I had done Mary’s homework for her. I had never said a word to her. I didn’t understand her belief that my family was her family’s slaves. But apparently that meant the entire soccer team wasn’t allowed to pass the ball to me.
The silence of my shock and embarrassment grew around us like a prickly, painful bubble. The girl continued on to the locker room. I turned around and headed back to the canyon to sleep alone in the woods. There was no way I was going into that locker room. For all I knew, Mary and her brethren were waiting in the showers to jump me, kill me, or worse. I wasn’t willing to take my chances in that brick building. I’d bathe in the darkness in the creek and hope no creepy men saw me.
We had a game that Saturday. I decided I’d do my best, even if no one on my team would pass the ball.
The morning of our first game, I lined up with all the other girls, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mary. The ref, a tall man in his 40s, asked us to turn around and show our cleats for inspection. I tried to hide the end of my toe so he might not see that I’d sawed off the last baseball spike on the tip with a knife. He called out my number. “Those aren’t soccer cleats,” he said sternly. He threatened to give me a yellow card before the game had even started. I had never gotten carded before. Mary and the other girls whispered in a hushed swarm, laughing and pointing. My coaches looked confused and tried to reason with the referee, but he threatened to penalize them too and lectured us all about safety. I felt like I might die from embarrassment, if that was a real thing. I thanked the referee — for what, I didn’t know. I turned to my coaches and thanked them for the opportunity to play on the team, but I needed to quit.
I don’t know whether the Roughriders won that game without me. But Mary never demanded I do her homework for her again, so that felt like a win. I walked to my favorite place to watch the waves at the end of a sandspit. The seafoam crashed, sweeping away my anger, hurt, and fear.
Someday I hoped I wouldn’t be in high school. Someday I hoped I wouldn’t live in this town. I gazed across the water at Canada’s flickering lights, wishing I was there. I curled up on the craggy rocks, the waves lulling me to sleep. Maybe, I dreamed, someday I would meet Mia Hamm.