Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

She was shocked as much by her own words as she’d been by Justin’s. She’d never spoken to him like this before, had never spoken to anyone like this before. What the hell had gotten into her?

“Sorry,” she immediately apologized. “Like I said, I’m tired. But if it makes you feel any better, Larry’s playing a gig tonight, and I don’t….”

She trailed off when she realized she was speaking to dead air. Justin had hung up on her. She started to call him back, then thought better of it. They could both use the rest of the night to cool off before they talked to each other again. Still, she didn’t want to leave things the way they were, so she sent Justin a quick text.

I didn’t mean to snap. I’ll be more pleasant after a good night’s sleep. She hesitated a moment, and then added, Love you. Not I love you. Love you was something you said to friends and relations. I love you was a commitment, one she wasn’t ready to make yet.

She sent the text, then turned off her phone’s ringer and placed it on her nightstand. If there were going to be any emergencies tonight, the world would just have to get along without her.

She turned off her nightstand lamp, rolled onto her left side – her preferred sleeping position – and closed her eyes. Given everything that had happened since she’d left work tonight, she expected she’d be too wound up to fall asleep immediately, and she was right. She tossed and turned for a while, but eventually sleep did find her. Later, she would wish it hadn’t.

* * *

“That’s it, Lori! Take it all the way to the goal!”

Lori barely registered Coach Anderson’s words. She was in the Zone, and being in the Zone felt damn good. It was like everyone else in the world had ceased to exist, like she was the only person left. It was just her and the sun and the breeze and the grass and the ball. And, of course, the goal. She knew there was a goalie protecting it – Aashrita Dhawan, her best friend in all the world – but she didn’t actually see her. Aashrita wasn’t invisible to her, not exactly. But then again, she kind of was. The rest of the girls on their team were on the field, wearing their blue jerseys and black shorts, but half also wore green vests so they could be identified as the opposing team for this afternoon’s practice. But all of them, Aashrita included, existed on the periphery of Lori’s awareness, present but not important. All that mattered was her, the ball, and the goal.

Lori was seventeen. She’d started playing recreational league soccer in grade school, and she’d kept at it, eventually winning a place on the high school girls’ team when she was a freshman. She loved the game, loved pushing her body to its limit and beyond, loved the excitement of competition, loved the emotional high of victory, and she loved supporting her teammates and being supported by them in turn. Losing wasn’t much fun, naturally, but even then she still loved the game. She’d seen a bumper sticker once on an old battered pickup: My worst day fishing was better than my best day doing anything else. Replace fishing with soccer, and that’s exactly how she felt about the sport. She hoped to continue playing in college, but when she’d shared this ambition with Coach Anderson, she’d said that if Lori really wanted to play at college level, she needed to be more aggressive on the field, take more chances, give her all on each and every play. You’re a good player, Coach Anderson had told her, but if you want to make it in college, you’ve got to be great. So heeding her coach’s advice, she’d stolen the ball from Ashley Boone – which, to be honest, hadn’t been all that difficult – and now she was charging toward the other team’s goal, and while this was only practice and her opponents were in truth her teammates, she intended to show them no mercy. Mercy is for the weak, her father had told her on numerous occasions, and Lori knew that if she wanted to be college soccer material, she had to avoid being weak in any way. No fear, no mercy, no pity, she thought.

Her blood sang in her ears as she ran, her body operating like a superbly maintained high-performance machine, arms and legs pumping, controlling the ball as she drove toward the goal, almost as if the ball was part of her. She’d read about people having tunnel vision, where they hyper-focused on something to the exclusion of all else, but she’d never experienced it before now.

When she had closed to within fifteen feet of the goal, she lined up her shot – high and to the left, toward the one area of the goal that Aashrita always had trouble covering. She was about to make her kick, would’ve done so in another second, two at the most, when suddenly an East Indian girl wearing a green vest appeared in her vision. It was as if Aashrita had materialized out of thin air. She was way outside of the goal and charging just as hard toward Lori as Lori was charging toward her. Lori had time for a single thought – This is going to hurt like a bitch – and then she and Aashrita collided.

When she thought back on this moment in the years to come – which wasn’t often – she had no memory of actually striking Aashrita. One instant she saw her friend only inches from her face, Aashrita’s expression one of fierce determination, and the next Lori was looking up at blue sky and clouds and wondering why her ears were ringing so bad. Then the pain hit her and she heard a scream split the air. It was a moment before she realized the scream had