--------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to the Church of The Reverend Cotton Mather.  This story is
the sole property of the author, and may not be copied or downloaded 
for the intent of profit. Permission is freely given for anyone to 
download or copy for their personal pleasure or use, as long as 
there is no intent to charge money or barter for the privilege of 
acquiring this material.

   (Copyright 2002, revisions c. 2007, R.C. Mather)

E-Mail all comments to RevCottonMather at hotmail dot com
Don't be shy!  I enjoy hearing from you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------


PLAYING THE GAME

A Novel

by R.C. Mather



- 4 -

THE TREE



The next morning, I was scheduled to referee an under-eight boy's
game. All during the preparations for the game, I kept on thinking of
my morning with Kayla. It wasn't until kickoff that I was able to
even begin to get my mind on the game. During the game, I felt a
little disconnected from things, and afterward I almost went over to
the two coaches and apologized. The game had ended in a 2-2 tie, so
both coaches and all the players were happy. I opted to leave well
enough alone, and ended up not saying anything to them.

Right after the game, I had to hustle over to the high school for
team tryouts.  I had played on the junior varsity soccer team my
freshman year, and I had dreams of moving up to play varsity.  It was
a long shot, because our head coach usually only chose one freshman
and a couple of sophomores for the varsity team, but I was determined
to give it my best shot.

It seemed like there were about a hundred guys milling about on the
practice field when I got there.  I walked over to join a group of my
fellow JV players, who were congregated near one post of the goal on
the field, waiting for tryouts to begin.

The coaches and the seniors on the varsity team divided everybody up
into groups of five.  There were circles of cones set up all around
the field, and we had to work crossing passes in a star pattern among
our circle of five.  At the same time, we were to move counter-
clockwise around the cones.  The coaches were watching to see how we
used our feet, both to move laterally and to trap and pass the ball. 
It was a fairly easy exercise for my buddies and me, but there were
some kids who struggled.  I could see, out of the corner of my eye,
the coaches marking down comments on their clipboards.  I
concentrated on the ball, making sure it settled against my instep
before I passed it off.  I really wanted to make a good impression.

After that, the coaches put us through some conditioning tests,
making us run the width of the field and back while dribbling a ball.
Speed was a great advantage on the field, but speed without control
was no good.  We were being judged on our ball-handling skills as
well as our speed and conditioning.

The last test they put us through was a shooting skill drill.  Using
both goals, they lined us up about twenty meters out from the nets. 
We were to make a crossing pass, leading the guy opposite us in line.
That player, in turn, was to pass it back to us as we advanced toward
the goal, using either a one-touch or a two-touch pass.  Once we
received the ball back, we were to take a shot on goal.  We then
rotated to the end of the other line, and waited our turn to go again.

I had three more days of tryouts before the first cut.  We wouldn't
find out the coaches' decisions concerning team makeup for a couple
of days after that.  By the time I was walking back to my bike after
that first day, I was feeling confident I had done the best I could.

As I was bicycling home from the tryouts, I decided to ride by Jake
and
Kayla's house to see if anybody was home. Jake was bouncing a tennis
ball against his garage door, playing an imaginary baseball game.

"Hey," I said as I rode up his driveway.

"Hey," he replied as he whipped through a double-play, shortstop to
second to first, against the garage door. "How was the soccer game?"

"Two-two tie," I said. I caught his liner off the panel of the door
and spun it back toward him off the same panel. "How's Kay feeling?"

"Leg's pretty good, I guess. Better now than when she got up this
morning. I think she's downstairs now, anyway, watching TV with
Jaimie."

He threw the ball back at the garage door for me to catch. "Want to
do something?" he asked.

"I guess," I answered. "What did you have in mind?"

"Come on, I'll show you something," he said. He reached for the
ball, and put the ball and his baseball mitt into the basket on his
bike, then climbed on. "Follow me. I found out something that I think
you'll really like."

It sounded mysterious enough that he got my interest, so we pedaled
off into the field behind his house, into the woods on the other
side. We dropped our bikes down onto the ground, and he led the way
along one of the many paths that kids of a dozen generations have
made through the small patch of woods. He branched off the path and
headed off toward the edge of the woods on the other side. Moving
slowly through the woods, he came to a tree that had slats of wood
nailed to it to make a crude ladder. Warning me to be quiet, he
climbed easily up the tree trunk, and then used branches to climb a
little further up. He motioned me up, so I clambered up until I was
on a branch opposite the trunk from the one he was perched upon. He
pointed in the direction of a house about thirty yards away, and
leaned toward me around the trunk of the tree.

"What do you see?" he whispered.

I looked, trying to figure out what it was he was showing me, but I
was stumped.

"Ummm... a house?" I asked.

"Yeah, idiot, a house. Whose house?"

"The O'Toole house," I said. 'Why is he asking me whose house this
is? He knows as well as I do whose house it was.'

He looked at me as if I was the village dunce. "And who lives in the
O'Toole house?" he asked, speaking slowly as if to a very dim child.

"Josh lives there," I said. Josh was another of our neighborhood
gang, a good guy we both had been friends with since about the second
grade.

"And?" Now Jake was getting just plain annoying.

"And..." The light bulb went on, and I felt just as dumb as Jake was
thinking I was just then. "And Heather and Molly," we said together.

Of course. Heather and Molly were Josh's sisters. Heather was going
to be a senior, seventeen years old and drop-dead gorgeous. She was a
cheerleader, and one of the most popular girls at school. Molly,
Josh's twin sister, was fifteen, just like us, and was a slightly
younger version of Heather. I figured that Josh had to have been
walking around his house with a perpetual boner for about the past
three years, living with those two. He claimed, however, that they
were just sisters to him, just as annoying as typical sisters were.

"So what are we looking at here?" I said to Jake.

"You see the window on the far left? That's Heather's room. The
window on the right is Molly's. That window in between, the one you
can see the mirror in, that's the bathroom they share."

"Yeah?" I said to him. "So what? The bedroom curtains are closed.
How do you know?"

"Josh and I peeked into their rooms a couple of weeks ago," he said.
"And just because the curtains are closed now doesn't mean they are
always closed. Understand?"

I stared at him disbelievingly.

"It gets better," he whispered. "They never close the curtains in
the bathroom. And the mirror you see just happens to be positioned
advantageously in respect to the very branches in which we are
perched," he finished with a smug little smile.

"Jake old pal," I said, "you are my new best friend."

"I thought I was your best friend already," he said.

"Well, you were, but you've just confirmed my good taste in best
friends," I replied.

We made plans to meet later that night to check out the windows, and
headed back to Jake's house. As we were riding back across the field
from the woods, I couldn't help but notice (now that Jake had got me
to thinking about windows and curtains) that Jaimie and Tara's
bedrooms were at the back of their house, and they lived in a ranch
house, so their windows were all on the ground floor.

The possibilities were staggering to a typical fifteen-year-old
hormonally charged boy such as me.

Sometime after nine that night, Jake and I made our way back through
the woods to the tree behind the O'Toole house. As quietly as we
could, we climbed up the slats to the branches we had perched in that
afternoon.

"Damn!" I heard Jake softly swear. "I meant to bring a pair of
binoculars."

"That's okay, we're close enough for now," I said. I had to admit,
though, binoculars would have been a great idea.

The mosquitoes were out in abundance, and Jake and I were getting
bitten up sitting in the tree. There still was no activity in the
windows we were watching. After about an hour, we both had had enough
of branch sitting, and mosquito swatting, and dark house watching, so
we gave it up and climbed back down. On the way back out of the
woods, it occurred to us that maybe we should have called Josh to
make sure they were home.

"Oh, well, so I'll call him tomorrow," said Jake.

We walked back across the field, and I glanced at Jaimie's house.

"Look!" I stopped Jake and pointed. Tara's curtain was drawn across
the window, but there was a gap in Jaimie's. We quietly crept up
closer to try to see into her room.

Jackpot! Jaimie was there, sitting on her bed, brushing her hair. We
could hear the faint sound of a record playing, and she was nodding
her head in time to the music. She was wearing only a bra and
panties, and her boobs stretched taut as she raised her arms to brush
her hair.

"Oh, man, sweet!" Jake exclaimed. "Boy, would I like to get some of
that."

"Why not ask her out, then?" I asked.

"I don't know," he whispered. "Maybe she's just too tight with my
sister. I can't think that anything good could come of that."

"Aw, your sister's okay," I said.

"Easy for you to say, she's not your sister," he replied. I heard
him sigh as he finally admitted, "I guess she's not so bad, but she's
still a sister, you know?"

"Yeah, I guess," I said. Actually, I didn't know, since I only had
brothers, but it was easier to just agree with him.

We watched as Jaimie got up and put on a robe, then left her room.
When she came back in a few minutes later and hung up her robe, we
could see she had changed into her nightie. She pulled back the
bedspread and got in her bed, then turned out her light.

"Show's over," Jake said, and we started back toward his house.

"Hey, Jake, you want me to see if I can talk to Jaimie? Maybe I can
see if she likes you, and then maybe you can get together with her."

"That's okay," he said. "I'll think about it. I don't know. Christ,
why is this all so difficult? Oh, well, see you tomorrow." He headed
into his house, head hanging down.

'Yeah, Jake,' I thought to myself, 'sometimes we really make it tough
on ourselves.'




(Continued in Chapter 5)


  
PTG04