The Last Whistle Read online

  “That’s a word that should never be used in regard to clothing!” she informed me. “I can hardly breathe right now, and my feet hurt so much that I want to scream. But look!” She turned in a circle, and she was beautiful. “It’s worth it,” she assured me, and thrust the Christmas party top into my hands. “Go put this on! I’ll find some shoes.”

  Oh, was she in for a disappointment. I didn’t own anything like the green, sparkly sandals she was wearing.

  “Brown pumps?” I heard her say disconsolately as I went into the bathroom to change. But she found a pair that met her general approval. In only a little while, we were on our way to the Silver Dollar with me wearing the tight top that she had sworn was perfect on me. “Gorge!” was the term she’d used.

  “Last summer, I ran into a few of the Woodsmen at the Dollar,” she said, and looked down the dirt road towards my neighbor’s house. “Any additional sightings of Gunnar Christensen, by the way?”

  “No,” I lied. I didn’t feel like sharing that I had smacked him in the face in the lake and then ogled him like a pervert. “I’m sure he’s busy with football, right? Are they playing now?”

  “I thought you said you were going to study the team!” Gaby scolded. “No, the season hasn’t started yet. The first preseason game is next week, though, so they’re all back here in Michigan training together.”

  She went on about how close they’d been to a championship last season, and how she thought they’d pull it off this year, talking all through our drive to Traverse City. I listened, trying to interest myself in what she said about football. The sport had always seemed pointless and silly to me, and I’d never really understood why everyone revered the Woodsmen players. Really, all they did was run smack into each other and then fall down. I could run into people and fall, too (and I often did, by mistake), but no one watched me on TV and gave me millions of dollars for it. I hurt myself and others completely for free.

  “Bianca! Holland! Torie! Caroline! Sima!” Gaby squealed when we got past the bouncer and into the Silver Dollar bar, which had become the place to see and be seen in northern Michigan while I was away in Chicago. I followed behind her, watching as heads turned and stared at her slim, curvy figure moving through the crowd, her glossy, honey-brown hair wafting around her shoulders. Her friends got huge smiles and beckoned wildly for her to hurry so they could hug her. They did, and admired her outfit, her shoes, her purse. They were thrilled that she was there.

  “Hi,” they told me, much more sedately.

  “It’s Hallie, right?” Caroline asked, and I nodded. We had been in gym class together freshman year, when I’d had a bit of a problem with tripping on a badminton shuttle and getting my hair caught in the net. The teacher had to cut me free. “Are you home visiting?”

  “No, I moved back here last winter,” I said.

  “Hallie’s dad was really sick,” Gaby explained. She opened her mouth to say more, but thankfully, a waitress came, and thankfully, her tray was empty, so I stayed dry for the time being. And by the time everyone ordered, they had forgotten about my dad and me moving home and had gone on to talk about their days at work, their other friends, their boyfriends or lack thereof. Gradually, the rest of the group showed up until we were the largest posse of women at the bar, and with their pretty smiles, perfect hair, and general attractiveness, we were the most popular people there.

  I said “we,” but I wasn’t kidding myself about truly belonging. I had grabbed a chair next to Gaby’s when we’d come in and I stayed there, as unobtrusive as I could be, sipping my screwdriver and watching and listening. I had to admit, it was kind of fun to sit at the popular table, even if I knew I didn’t actually fit in. I had mocked these women in high school and I had told myself I hated most of them besides Gaby. But even though I had hidden it, I had been just as entranced by them back then as I was now, so I sipped and studied them and learned.

  “Don’t look! Nobody look at the door!” Selena Gravenstein suddenly hissed.

  Eight women turned to see who had just walked in, me included. “Gunnar,” I said, but none of them heard me because Selena was berating them loudly for looking when she’d said not to.

  “You guys are the worst!” she said. “Don’t you think the Woodsmen have women all over them all day long? We have to pretend like we don’t even see them!”

  Most of the women at our huge table followed her advice, but I didn’t feel constrained by it. I fully gawked at Gunnar and the other large men he’d come in with, who I assumed were also football players. The crowd hushed and parted as they moved through the Silver Dollar, watching their every step.

  “Darius Reiser, Gunnar Christensen, Freddy Uchida, and the new running back, Karim Becker. He’s right out of college,” Gaby explained in an undertone. Somehow she was able to see them without turning either her head or even her eyes in their direction. And she was barely moving her lips to talk to me, so it was all very impressive.

  I twisted around like a pretzel to watch them walk across the floor. “I’m surprised they’re not coming over to meet you guys,” I commented. Every other man in the bar had been over already. It was like these women bathed in pheromones or something.

  “Oh, they’ll come,” Lauren Fournier told me, her mouth closed, and tossing back her blonde hair. She didn’t hit a waiter with it, I noticed.

  “I get why you’re not staring, but why is everyone not talking, too?” I asked Gaby. I tried to also speak without using my lips, so it came out a little garbled and she turned to me questioningly.

  “Huh?” But then her eyes lit up. “Hallie, you know one of them! You know Gunnar!” she said, and although she hadn’t said it very loudly and she had done it like a ventriloquist, the rest of the women at the table swiveled to stare at me.

  “You know Gunnar Christensen?” Holland Mordarski asked doubtfully. She had been the meanest girl in the whole high school, in my opinion, but she’d tolerated me because we’d had AP English Lit together and I’d summarized the books for her. Those days were done. She was staring at me now like I was some kind of slug who had slimed my way up to their table.

  “Sure, I know Gunnar,” I said breezily. “We swim together.”

  Gaby’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t tell me that!” she accused. “You saw him with his shirt off? You guys are hanging out?”

  “Well…” I started to hedge, but Holland’s eyes had narrowed.

  “You should go talk to him, Hallie,” she told me. “Since you’re such good friends. Go talk to Gunnar Christensen.” She might as well have added, “I dare you.”

  “You totally should!” Gaby agreed, but with none of the malice. “It’s so exciting!”

  They all stared at me. “Ok, I will,” I said with assurance that I wasn’t actually feeling. I wasn’t at all certain about how he would react, since the last time we had seen each other, I had hit him in the face. I got up and tugged down the hem of my top over my stomach, but that made it dip lower in front, so I then had to yank on the neckline. “Ok, see you guys in a sec,” I announced, and I threw my shoulders back with confidence, which only increased my chest’s prominence in the tight top. I had to put my shoulders forward again, so that I now looked less confident, but also less busty, and I was ready. I walked across the bar, carefully and slowly.

  It really felt like everyone in the room was watching me as I approached the Woodsmen table. Everyone, maybe, except the four men seated there, who seemed to have eyes for no one but each other. Not in a romantic way, but it was like they had completely blocked out everyone else in the Silver Dollar. That included me, and now that I was standing here in front of them and they were totally ignoring me, it was extremely uncomfortable. Worse than my interview shoes.

  I cleared my throat, loudly. “Gunnar. Gunnar Christensen!”

  He looked up at me and I immediately winced. “Oh, your eye looks terrible!” I burst out. “I can’t believe I left such a bruise—I didn’t hit you that hard. Your skin must be reall
y delicate!”

  The three other football players gaped at Gunnar and then burst out laughing, so hard that one of them spilled his beer and another put his head down on the table. “Delicate?” that one gasped.

  I stood there and made myself not turn around and look toward the table of women I had just left. There had to be an emergency exit somewhere in the back of this bar, and I would find that and use it. Or a window—I could climb out of a window. This wasn’t high school and I didn’t have to stand here while they laughed at me. I would emerge from this with some dignity, even if I did have to do some climbing.

  But as I started to leave, one of the guys held up his hand to me. “Sorry,” he gasped. “Sorry. Gunnar had just given us some long story about getting hit in the eye learning capoeira. Which did sound far-fetched, learning Brazilian martial arts just before our first preseason game, but we were giving him the benefit of the doubt. But actually, he got bested in a fight by you.” The man wiped his face with a cocktail napkin. “How did you come to give our boy Gunnar a black eye?”

  “We weren’t fighting. He came up in the water next to me and scared me,” I explained, shooting questioning glances at Gunnar, who was shooting looks of death and evil back at me. “It was an accident. I’m sorry,” I apologized to him again, but now I was also sorry for exposing his incredibly stupid lie and also maybe suggesting that he was delicate, which I now remembered was probably not a good thing in their profession.

  “She’s violent. She threw a rock at me, too,” Gunnar told the table in his defense.

  This only made his friends start to laugh again, and I stood there frozen yet burning with embarrassment. The bar was fairly quiet as the other patrons watched the three Woodsmen collapsed in hilarity, ostensibly directed at me.

  “I heard him sneaking around in my yard and I thought he was a raccoon,” I said angrily. “I’m certainly not violent!” And I had reached my tolerance level for humiliation for one evening. Even if they weren’t laughing directly at me, it sure didn’t feel good. I wasn’t in on the joke and I wasn’t part of their crowd. I spun around to go find that emergency exit or perhaps window in the back, and I slammed into a server who was passing right behind me through the crowded tables. And, of course…

  “I’ll get you some napkins!” the waiter said as I stood dripping, and probably with an incipient black eye of my own. My face was throbbing from where it had caught the edge of his tray, or maybe one of the lowball glasses had beaned me there before it crashed to the floor along with the rest of the ten or so other drinks he had been carrying. The waiter applied some thin cocktail napkins to my chest area, which had taken the worst of the spill, so that my décolletage and Christmas party shirt were soaked with liquor and there was a wedge of lemon between my breasts. When the guy started to pat around that area, I swatted his hand, and my purse fell off my shoulder and into the puddle of drinks and glass on the ground.

  “No, thank you!” I said, and removed the sopping rag from my left breast, and the lemon twist from my cleavage. “I’m fine. Really,” I told him firmly, when he opened his mouth again. It was long past time for my exit, so I grabbed my sopping purse and headed straight for the door.

  As I walked past the table of women, Gaby grabbed my arm. She looked stricken. “No, I’m good,” I told her, as she started to get up to accompany me. “You stay here. Please, I want to be alone,” I continued when she opened her mouth to argue.

  She looked at my soaked shirt. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come and help you…wring out?”

  “Positive. I don’t need any help,” I said firmly. “Bye.” I nodded imperiously to the other ladies, and walked out of the Silver Dollar. It had probably never been quite so quiet in there.

  I stopped only briefly when I went outside, to squeeze my shirt onto the sidewalk, and then I started briskly walking down the block. Fortunately, it was a beautiful night, so the…what was I covered in? I sniffed. It smelled like rum and Coke had been the drink of choice for whatever table that waiter had been headed to and I also got a whiff of gin, which explained the lemon. But fortunately, due to the pleasant temperature, I was wet and sticky, but not cold. Wet, sticky, embarrassed, humiliated. Yes, all of the above.

  It was one of those times that it was really, really hard to keep my chin up. I raised it a little to look at the sky, keeping in the tears again and also thinking about my dad. He would have told me that what other people thought didn’t matter, and that I was just right, just as I was. Even if I was covered in mixed drinks.

  I walked and tried to make myself believe that, but I should have lowered my chin as I did. I totally didn’t see the bench that was right in front of me, and that was a real shame, because I didn’t need another accident to close out the night.

  I had one anyway.

  Chapter 3

  Ow. Darn it!

  “Hallie! Hallie Holliday.”

  I looked up from the pavement at the sound of my name and saw Gunnar walking toward me. I quickly clambered to my feet and brushed off my knees. “Go ahead and say it,” I called to him.

  He slowed his steps, staring at me. “Yeah, ok, why were you on the ground?”

  “No, not that!” I responded irritably. “I mean that you should go ahead and apologize,” I explained, and then waited. “Isn’t that why you followed me out here?” I prompted him.

  “I’m here because you dropped your wallet and your phone next to our table.” He held them out to me, both of them wet from the rum and Coke puddle. “It looks like your screen broke,” he said, gingerly touching the shattered glass behind the tape. “Or maybe that’s not new.”

  “Oh. Thanks,” I said, and dropped both items into my bag. “So, you aren’t going to say sorry?”

  “Sorry for what?” he asked. Now he sounded irritated, like he had the freshly bloodied knees instead of me. This sidewalk was extremely abrasive. “Why should I be sorry?” he continued. “You came over to our table and announced to everyone that you had beaten me up. Then you caused a big scene—”

  “Not on purpose! Neither of those things was on purpose. Your eye does look really bad,” I said. “It surprised me. I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

  Gunnar rolled his eyes, even the hurt one, but then he started to smile. “I guess not. You put a lot into that little fist.” He actually laughed.

  “Does it really hurt?” I asked. He seemed to be taking this pretty well, but his eye looked terrible.

  He shrugged it off. “It bruised up a lot because of the scuba mask. I’ve taken worse shots,” he told me. “You have…” He pointed at my chest.

  “Breasts?” I bristled. “Yes, I do!”

  “I meant that you have something stuck to you there.”

  “Oh.” I peeled off a strip of soggy bar napkin, a souvenir from when the waiter had mopped at me. “Thank you. And you don’t have to apologize.”

  His eyebrows raised. “I wasn’t going to. Again, why would I?”

  “I guess what happened wasn’t your fault,” I conceded. “I was more looking for a general apology from the universe, because I got really embarrassed standing there with your friends laughing like that, and then the whole tray thing,” I said, and looked down at the wad of alcohol-soaked paper in my hand. “That was pretty awful.”

  There was a very awkward silence which Gunnar broke. “Are you headed home?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “I just was realizing that I came here with my friend Gaby, but I’m not going back into the Silver Dollar to remind her of that. I should find out if she can drive me.” I fished out my phone and tried to open it to text her, but I saw liquid under the tape that held the screen together. Nothing happened when I pushed any of the buttons. “It’s not working,” I announced. Darn it! I shook the phone hard, and rum and Coke and probably some gin dripped out. “Maybe if I stick it in some rice…” I’d have to buy some rice. I massaged my temple with the heel of my hand.

  “I’m leaving now,” Gunnar said. “I ca
n give you a lift.”

  “You just got here,” I pointed out. “Why do you want to leave? Oh,” I said, realizing. “Were you totally emasculated when your friends saw that a woman half your size had incapacitated you, and you’re too embarrassed to stay? Did word already get around the bar?”

  He blew out a long, slow breath. “Do you want a ride home?” he asked, saying each word distinctly and slowly.

  “Yes, please.” We walked together down the street. Together, sort of, but I maintained a slight distance because literally every few steps, some person either yelled or actually approached him.

  “Gunnar! I love you!” a woman plaintively called. He acted like he hadn’t heard that.

  “Go Woodsmen! GO WOODSMEN!” another shrieked from across the street, and he waved a little.

  “Can you take a picture with me?” a man asked, approaching shyly. Gunnar paused and smiled obligingly at the guy’s phone while I hid in the doorway of an art gallery.

  “Hope this season you can hold the right side of the line better than you did in the divisional finals!” a teenage voice called from a car that drove slowly past and then quickly sped away. Gunnar ignored that comment, but nodded and said thanks to the woman who told him not to listen to idiots.

  “What happened last year in the divisional finals?” I asked as we walked past her. “Did the Woodsmen lose? I guess so, because my friend Gaby told me that you guys didn’t make the championship last year.”

  “Yes, we lost,” he said shortly.

  “And you play on the right side of the line that didn’t hold? What didn’t you hold, exactly? I don’t know much about football. What happened?”

  Gunnar paused for a moment on the sidewalk and sighed before he kept walking. “Let’s talk about you,” he told me, rather than answering my questions. “You said your great-grandparents built the house where you live, so I’m guessing you grew up around here.”

  “They built the original house, but it was just two rooms,” I corrected. “No insulation and only a fireplace to stay warm in the winter. My grandparents and parents added on a lot. I grew up in my cottage and I lived there until I left for college in the city.”