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Here's what's scary: this kid was only nine and already she knew more about guys and dating than I did. "So what'd you say?"

"I said..." Abby frowned. "I said you were a real girl, not like some girls" (see what I mean about scary? Also, what does that even mean?) "and he needed to be really nice to you."

"And
kiss
you," Gabby broke in. Which sent them right back into giggle land.

And of course right at that moment Beaner popped in looking for me, which sent all
three
of us into giggles. I couldn't help it—I mean, I'm not a giggler normally, but you can understand.

"Whassup?" he asked, looking at us like we were crazy, which he had every right to do.

"Nothing," I managed to say, which sent us off again. And then when Beaner pulled me up—actually touching my hand!—the girls almost passed out.

"Your sister's really cute," I said as we walked off, trying to ignore the racket behind us.

"She's a total pain in the butt." Beaner grinned, and shot me a look like maybe he knew what we'd been talking about, but right away I asked about his game to change the subject. Although I guess the subject didn't get changed all that much because we ended up in
his
bedroom somehow, and there was this little pause, and he leaned toward me and I leaned toward him...

Grandpa Warren—Dad's dad, who Win was named after—he had some pretty strange tastes in food. It's a wonder we like anything normal considering how much he loved pigs' feet and blood sausage and head cheese, all these strange meats that you eat when it's your own animals and you can't waste one little bit. And even though by the time I was born we weren't slaughtering anymore, Grandpa Warren still liked that sort of stuff, yuck, and a couple times a year Mom would buy him a beef tongue. Seriously. Because he liked them so much. She'd go to a special butcher because it's not like the Super Saver carries them, and bring home this huge gray
tongue
all wrapped in paper, and spend a couple days slicing it up on bread with lots of mustard while Grandpa Warren told her how great it was and us kids stood around trying not to barf. Well, the older kids did. Curtis was probably into it, he's such a freak.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about Grandpa Warren's tongue sandwiches in years, but I couldn't help it while I was making out with Beaner. Brian—why did he keep coming up all the time? I wasn't supposed to think about him anymore, ever! He was like a cut you think is healed but it just keeps reopening. I hated—
hated
—comparing him to Beaner. But it was so hard not to. Because even though Brian was the only other guy I'd kissed, I'd known right from the beginning that he was pretty good. Not that I'm going to go into detail, thank you, but he wasn't pushy, unless it was so hot and heavy that you had to be pushy, if you know what I mean. But I guess Beaner had a whole different philosophy. It was okay, don't get me wrong, but I didn't feel
on fire
like I had with Brian. I mean, I like Beaner, but still. So after a while I asked if we could go back downstairs to get a couple of pops, because that seemed fun too.

And then as I was leaving the party, he walked me out and we kissed again beside the Caravan.

"So," I asked during a breath, "why are we doing this?"

"You're not familiar with this ritual? The whole lip-locking thing?"

"That's not what I meant! Why—why, you know, me?"

Beaner laughed out loud. "You really don't know?"

"Uh, no..." Had someone had set him up? Daring him to make out with big dumb D.J.?

"Come on! All those times we hung out together after football games—getting lunch during preseason—why do you think I was there?"

"Um..." I said, wishing I had five hours to remember all the conversations we'd had at Taco Bell. On the field. Had I really not even noticed Beaner was into me?

"Because of you," he put in.

"Great."

"No, really." Beaner pulled me a little closer, and I have to say it felt awfully nice, the way our bodies fit together. Like two puzzle pieces. "Anyway, I was thinking how maybe now that you were free, you know, maybe this could work. Between us. If, you know, you wanted it to."

"Wow," I said, extremely intelligently. "Wow."

"Yeah. Wow." He gave me another kiss. Which would have lasted who knows how long, but luckily my phone started ringing, and I quick wiped off my mouth and grabbed it: Mom.

"Um, I gotta get this."

"That's cool." He shot me a grin—a boyfriend grin. "So ... see you around."

I have to admit my stomach did a little flip, seeing that. Boyfriend grins are pretty special. But I was also trying to start the Caravan and answer the phone and wave goodbye, so my stomach was competing with a lot of other muscles. Plus Mom kept going on about how it was too late to call and I had to keep saying it wasn't, which when you think about it doesn't make any sense, that I should be apologizing to the person who called me. I didn't tell her I'd just left a party because she'd totally freak about me
talking on a cellphone
while
driving in the dark
after
possibly drinking
with
other teenagers.
Better that I didn't have any friends and spent all my time alone in a cave. Which is what our house is basically, so she shouldn't worry.

"Is everything all right?" I asked finally, even though I wasn't really listening to her because I was so busy thinking about Beaner. He'd said I was free.
Free
as in
available.
That meant he'd been paying attention to me and Brian.

"Oh, everything's fine. Win's asleep now, you know, so we can talk a bit, just us two."

"Oh. Okay." How did Beaner know about Brian? Besides
People,
I mean? Although now that I thought about it, Beaner had talked about him even during preseason. He knew somehow even back then that Brian worked for us! Was he thinking about me way back in August? And I hadn't even noticed?

"Win would never tell you himself—you know how he is—but we're both so grateful for all this college business. You know, you're getting him the very best possible therapy."

Wait—that got my attention. "What? I'm getting Win
therapy?
"

"Oh, yeah. You should have seen him this afternoon on the computer. I'm not sure he'd even be making the effort, getting a special keyboard and all, if it wasn't for you. Going to websites, looking at schools ... He knows more about Ibsen College now than Ibsen does, probably!"

"Super."

"Oh, D.J., it is." She took a deep breath, like she was steeling herself. "You know, don't you, how important all this is? You don't want to spend the rest of your life milking cows. You
need
college, you know—it's your ticket off the farm. Well, I've got to go now, honey, but you ... Don't forget that now, will you? Don't forget."

***

You don't want to spend the rest of your life milking cows.
Did I not know this? Of course I needed college to get out of Red Bend! I remembered it every second of the day! But I'd never realized Mom knew it too. I'd never heard her say it, say so bluntly, that I needed to
escape.
She sounded desperate...

You know what this meant? If I didn't make it—didn't get into college—I'd be totally disappointing her.

Not to mention Win. Who apparently was taking on all this occupational therapy work just for me. Which I did not ask for, thank you very much, but was now feeling ten thousand pounds of guilt about. If I didn't get in, he'd spend the rest of his life reminding me that I blew it. Maybe not with words necessarily, but he'd be thinking it. Every time we were together, he'd think it, every family reunion for the rest of my life. Mom would be disappointed, but with Win it'd be flat-out disgust.

Win would be flat-out disgusted with tonight's game, that's for sure. We'd beaten Whoopsville, yeah, but only because the rest of the team stood around while I hogged all the baskets. Whatever leadership is, I'd demonstrated just the opposite. Coach K worked and worked but I couldn't manage a single squeak, no matter how hard he tried. That college coach had said nice things about me, sure, but only because Coach K was his friend. I'd let K down, and that coach, and all the girls on the team, girls who never got a chance to play because I couldn't even manage to pass the ball. "Asset to the team"—ha. Tonight I'd been the worst kind of athlete possible.

You know who else I'd let down, let down already? Beaner. I hadn't even known he was interested in me! For months, maybe, and I hadn't noticed. What does that say about me, huh? About my abilities with guys? I don't even know what dating is. It took a nine-year-old to explain that I was even
on
one. Talk about clueless.

Thinking all these thoughts, these horrible true thoughts ... by the time I got home, I was almost puking, I was so upset. Remember way back on Monday when I was so freaked out by all that locker-decorating, we-have-a-date, D.J.-is-#1 attention? Well, guess what: my panic had turned out to be totally legitimate. All these people, Beaner and Coach K and the team and college scouts, and Mom and Win most of all, they all were focused on
me,
and expecting things from me—leadership and college scholarships and girlfriendness.

Well, leadership I'd already failed at. Scholarships I was about to. And romance ... the record was pretty clear on that one already. With romance, I was zero for life.

I already knew I was a loser. Someone who didn't measure up, not when the pressure was on. Now it was just a matter of everyone else figuring it out too.

Oh, wouldn't that be fun.

W
ELL, IF YOU THOUGHT
I got hit by a disaster on Friday night, check out the weekend. Because Saturday I drove to Ibsen College. With
Dad
of all people, who actually drove two whole hours away from his cows after I promised we'd be back for evening milking. I'd been planning on going by myself, but at breakfast he volunteered to come along. Maybe Mom had put the screws in him, who knows—it's certainly not the sort of thing he does normally. As soon as he spoke up, I started thinking up all the ways he could embarrass me, bragging about his cows or asking if anyone knew about organic farming or scratching himself in a weird way; with Dad the list is pretty much endless. But there wasn't much I could do but say yes. And bite my tongue not to warn him to behave, because that'd just make him worse.

At least he let me drive, which was nice of him, although Dad's a big fan of napping in cars, and if you got up at five a.m. every day you probably would be too. So after we chatted about milk prices and his new organic co-op Internet buddies, and Bill's chances of going pro, which if nothing else reminded me that I wasn't the only one dealing with long-shot lottery tickets, Dad put his seat back and dozed off while I thought some more about college.

I wasn't completely uninformed on the subject, I hope you know. I'd visited the University of Minnesota, after all, and seen Tyrona's dorm room—she's on the hoops team and super cool—and even eaten in the team cafeteria, which was pretty wild, seeing all that food and knowing athletes could have whatever they wanted. And I'd spent a bunch of hours walking around and looking at the U of M students and the buildings too, pretending I was one of them—the students, I mean, not the buildings—and being very into the whole college experience. Although maybe it was different at Ibsen. But I hoped not.

Here's the thing: Ibsen is very different from the U of M, in every possible way.

First of all, it's tiny in comparison to the University of Minnesota, which has a huge hospital and buildings with tubes coming out of them and fifty thousand students. Ibsen has less than a thousand students, and their whole campus could fit in one block of the U of M, probably. And their gym—well, their gym is about the size of Red Bend High School's. Even with the new floor.

We didn't have any trouble parking—Dad said students were probably gone for the weekend. And the gym just had a student sitting at the entrance who didn't even let Dad finish his sentence before waving us through. So you can see how tight security was.

And then when we got to the basketball court there was hardly anyone there. Red Bend's JV games get about three times the turnout. Maybe it was just because it was a girls' game—I mean a
women's
game, which is so hard for me to remember to say it like that—or everyone goes home on Saturday, or maybe the team wasn't having much of a season. But we found seats right near the center line without any trouble at all.

And then the two teams came out and, well, some of the players looked a lot like Ashley Erdel, on both teams, and none of the players looked like me. They didn't play like me, either. I hate to sound so stuck up, but it's the truth, I won't lie. Jerry Knudsen was right there in the thick of it of course, being the coach, though he waved to us and kept looking back to check on me. Gave me a thumbs-up when one of his players landed a three-pointer.

So we watched the game, which was about like a Red Bend game—well, like a Red Bend game if I wasn't playing. Again, to be honest. And if Kari wasn't playing either. Dad didn't say too much except for cheering the good shots, the good Ibsen shots. The score was pretty close, actually, and Ibsen was within four at halftime. Then the teams went into their locker rooms and some girls—women—came out to do this dance routine with a pep band that only had about four musicians, and Dad settled back a little and looked around the gym.

"Not much of a crowd, is it?"

"Nope," I said.

"I went to a Badgers"—meaning the University of Wisconsin–Madison—"game once. I'd never seen that many people before all in one place." He laughed to himself. "I thought for a minute the roof was going to fall in, we were making so much noise. That was a night, all right." He glanced over at me. "You could play like that, you know."

"You mean worrying about the roof?" But I grinned when I said it.

"This isn't your league, sport. You come here and you'd be the whole team."

He had a point. This was awfully small potatoes compared to Big Ten basketball. Granted, that had been a men's game Dad went to; he'd never watch a women's game if he didn't have a daughter. But you know, the University of Minnesota arena
sells out
for women's games—that's how much folks in Minneapolis care about women's hoops. It sells out almost as much for women as it does for men. Which is pretty awesome to think about.