Vanishing Acts

Chapter 15

The Outcast

All of the starters gave Madison the cold shoulder on the ride back to The Grove. To Madison’s relief, Gail didn’t protest when Madison sat with her again on the trip back to school. The other alternates were influenced by the starters and would not meet Madison’s eye. When the bus stopped, Madison waited until everyone was gone before she got off. She was so embarrassed that she didn’t want to be around the other players. As soon as her feet hit the ground, she headed for her father’s law office.

Traffic was heavy because the people who worked downtown were driving home, but Madison was walking with her head down and she didn’t notice. It was starting to get dark, and a chilly rain fell on her. She made no attempt to shield herself from the large, wet drops that soaked her hair and dripped down her face. The gloomy weather fit her mood perfectly. She couldn’t believe she’d muffed her first chance to play for The Grove in such spectacular fashion. She wouldn’t be surprised if the coach never played her again. Was it possible that her middle school soccer career had ended before it had a chance to begin?

As Madison reran the awful moments of her disgrace in her mind, she couldn’t stop thinking about why she’d tripped over the ball. Was the person in the trees Ann Beck or had her imagination played tricks on her? Had she convinced herself that Ann was the girl in the woods because she missed Ann so much? She wanted that girl to be Ann because it would bring her a step closer to solving the mystery surrounding her friend’s disappearance and make her humiliation on the soccer field a little more bearable. If the girl wasn’t Ann, Madison had destroyed her soccer career for wishful thinking.

The waiting room at Kincaid and Kirk was empty when Madison walked in. It was late, and most of the employees and attorneys had left. Peggy looked up from her work when the door opened. She started to smile but stopped when she saw how dejected Madison looked.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Dropping her duffel bag, Madison slumped on a chair across from Peggy’s desk.

“I just made a complete fool of myself in our scrimmage at Prescott-Mather. The coach will probably keep me on the bench forever.”

“I can’t imagine anything that happened in a single game being that catastrophic, let alone in a scrimmage,” Peggy said.

“You didn’t see what I did,” Madison replied gloomily.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Peggy listened carefully while Madison told her about tripping over the ball and falling flat on her face at the most crucial point in the game.

“You’re not the only player on your team who didn’t break that tie, Madison,” Peggy said firmly when Madison was finished relating her tale of woe. “The other girls had the whole game to score a second goal.”

“That’s true, but I’m the only one who looked like a clown. On the ride back everyone treated me like I had a horrible disease.”

“Don’t make too much of one bad moment.”

“You don’t know Coach Davis. Beating Prescott-Mather is a big deal for her.”

“Tell me about Ann,” Peggy asked, obviously trying to get Madison’s mind off her misery. “Are you sure she’s the person you saw?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was Ann, but she was far enough away so I couldn’t make out her features for sure.”

“And you lost her in the woods?”

“Yes. Whoever I saw must have been a student because the trail I followed ended at the school buildings.”

“Can you think of a reason Ann would transfer to Prescott-Mather without telling you?”

“No, I can’t think of any reason she’d switch schools. If she transferred, we couldn’t play together. We vowed to be teammates forever and she’d know how disappointed I’d be.” Madison felt her face scrunch up. “Besides, why wouldn’t she tell me if she transferred? That’s the kind of thing you would tell your best friend.”

“Oh, honey.”

Madison didn’t want to cry in front of Peggy. Taking a deep breath, she straightened up.

“Why don’t you put your mind to finding out if the girl you saw was really Ann?” Peggy suggested. “If she was and you find her, you’ll get the answers to all your questions.”

Madison perked up. “You’re right. That’s what I’ll do.”

An idea occurred to Madison and made her think about something else she wanted to discuss with Peggy. It was something embarrassing, but Peggy was the only woman she knew to whom she could open up about stuff that was personal.

“Peggy, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“Sure, anything,” Peggy said.

Just thinking about what she was going to ask Peggy made Madison blush and look at the floor. It was times like these when Madison especially missed having a mother.

“How do you know if someone is your boyfriend instead of just a friend?”

“You’re good at math, aren’t you?” Peggy asked.

Madison nodded, a little confused by the question since it didn’t appear to have anything to do with what she’d asked.

“In math, there are sure answers,” Peggy said. “Four is always the answer to what is two plus two. Well, there’s no formula when it comes to a boyfriend. It’s something you feel. When you’re around a boy or girl who is just your friend, you feel happy. When there’s romance in the air, your heart soars and you feel giddy. And the two of you tend to act silly, but you don’t care.” Peggy smiled. “Is that any help?”

Madison’s brow furrowed. She was definitely happy when Jake was around and she missed him when he wasn’t, but she wasn’t the type of person who acted silly or felt giddy. She was more the serious type. She decided that she was still uncertain about whether Jake was her boyfriend.

D D D

Twenty minutes later, Hamilton knocked on Madison’s office door. It was late, so they ate dinner at a small Thai restaurant near the office. During the walk to the restaurant, Madison thought about the game at Prescott-Mather and memories of her humiliating experience came flooding back. She was depressed by the time they sat down and ordered.

When the food came, Madison picked at it. Hamilton made small talk, but Madison responded with grunts. For once, her dad seemed to notice that something was amiss. Hamilton Kincaid was Oregon’s best cross-examiner, and he finally pried her sad tale out of her.

When she finished, Hamilton started to laugh. Madison fumed, furious that her father wasn’t taking her tragic situation seriously. At times like this Madison really missed having a mom. A mother would never laugh at something so awful.

“It’s not funny, Dad!”

“Yes, it is. I can imagine how you looked flying through the air and landing on your nose. You just can’t see the humor because you’re too close to what happened. But let me tell you something. If I had a penny for every time I made a fool of myself when I was a young lawyer, I’d be a rich man. And I still make a fool of myself every once in a while. I just don’t broadcast that fact.

“I can promise you that worse things than what happened to you today are going to happen. Screwing up is part of life. It’s how you deal with the screwups that define you. You can either crawl in a hole and say, ‘Woe is me,’ or you can laugh at yourself, dust yourself off, learn from your mistakes, and forge on. This is a big deal for you now, but I’ll bet most of the girls have already forgotten what you did because they’re thinking about what they failed to do to win that game.”

“You don’t know some of the girls. They’re really mean, and they’ll never let me forget.”

“Those girls are losers, Maddy. People who have to make fun of other people to feel good usually don’t feel that good about themselves. You can put this behind you if you see the humor in what happened and learn from your mistake.”

Hamilton’s words didn’t cheer up Madison at first, but the more she thought about what he’d said, the more sense it made. She remembered when she’d scored the goal against her own team in the championship game last summer. She almost never thought about that now, and what she’d done then was far worse than what had happened at Prescott-Mather. In fact, she took great satisfaction from the way she’d blocked out the wrong-way goal and sucked it up to help win the game. For the first time since the scrimmage, Madison smiled.