Paper Airplane

7

Chapter Seven

 

 

                I had been a fool to think that I’d somehow worm my way out of playing football with my brother and One Direction.  Because I’m a girl, it didn’t matter which team I was on.  And because I’m a nonathletic girl, I really made no difference.

                Except when they gave me the ball and told me to run.

                “Go, Lexie, go!” Brady shouted at me now. 

                I sprinted as fast as I could down the length of the field, holding onto the stupid football for dear life as, instead of tackling me, Niall and Liam worked to swat the thing out of my hands to fumble it.  Needless to say, the most impressive thing I’ve managed so far today was not tripping over the tangle of legs and feet that surrounded mine almost the whole time.

                Eventually, Louis gave up waiting for the other two boys to fumble the ball, so he dove for my legs from behind, effectively planting my face into the ground.  Brady assured them all beforehand not to worry about going easy on me, that I’d been through worse with him growing up.  And he might be right, but that didn’t stop my chin and jaw from throbbing every time I rose from a successful tackle and had to spit grass out of my mouth.

                The teams were split so that there were four on one, three on the other.  I was the fourth player on the team made up of my brother, Zayn, and Harry.  Louis, Niall, and Liam made up the other team.  At first, we played where I was the sub in for both teams in case someone grew winded.  But when that never happened, Brady ever so kindly offered to let me join his team and play the whole time.  Neither Harry nor Zayn minded.  Unfortunately for me.

                As I dug a small stone out of the back of my mouth, I jogged over to the huddle my team had formed.  They were discussing their next play.  My run had gotten us pretty close to the end zone, but I was not to be trusted with a passing play.  They figured this out when out of seven pass attempts, I couldn’t catch a single one.

                Brady, our quarterback, pointed at me.  “You guard Niall.  Think you can hold him back?”

                My eyes widened a bit.  I’d never seen someone so small move so fast, and I was confident I couldn’t guard him.  But Brady didn’t let me respond.

                “Zayn, you get open.  And Harry, take Liam and Louis.  Are we good?”

                Harry and Zayn nodded silently, both putting a hand in.  Brady’s hand covered theirs.  Then they all looked at me.

                “Lex?” my brother asked, still huffing and puffing from earlier.

                I said nothing.  But I put my hand in.

                “Alright.  Two, three – “

                “Break!” we all shouted.

                I lined up between my brother and Harry while Zayn took his place on Brady’s other side.  Since we started playing, I haven’t really had a chance to consider how weird this was, playing American football with One Direction.  I was mostly always worried about not making a complete fool of myself and/or injuring myself and/or others.  But in the few seconds before my brother shouted “Hut!” at the beginning of every play, my mind instantly reminded itself that just the other night I’d dumped a smoothie down one of the band’s members’ fancy shirt, and I should be awkwardly avoiding him or at least trying to apologize.  I was doing neither, because of course, he was on my team and we had no time to talk about anything other than the game at hand anyway.