Crazy in Love by Dandi Daley Mackall

home team benches. Alex is Red’s boyfriend. She’s the one who signed the three-way-virgin pact with Alicia and me right before they started high school. Red dubbed us Abstinence in Action, which was pretty funny, since the whole point was no action. She and Alex started dating three weeks later.
    I watch Alex with Chris, Red’s brother and the Dragons’ ace scorer. Alex is so good with the kids. “Hey, Alex!” I call.
    He pats Chris on the back, then jogs over to me. “Thought you might be here,” he says. “Sandy looks good. She been healthy?”
    I nod. “How about Chris?”
    He grins. “I’d say Chris thinks Sandy looks good, too.”
    I punch his arm. I do not want to think of Sandy ever going through what I’m going through. “So where’s Red?” Red is the Dragons’ biggest, or at least most vocal, fan. She almost refused to take a scholarship to a great private school upstate, just because she never wanted to miss any of Chris’s games. That, and the fact that she and Alex are mad crazy in love, and he’s staying in town and getting an engineering degree from Tri-Community College.
    “Red couldn’t get home. I had to promise to call her every time Chris scores. She’ll be here for the Galion game, though.”
    “Cool.”
    “Mary Jane!” Mom’s calling me from the top of the six-row bleachers.
    I wave up at her. “I better get a seat. Later.” Then I start climbing the bleachers. I would never acknowledge my parents at an Attila game, much less sit with them. But the rules of high school don’t apply here. This life, these kids, it’s all a world inside a world, set apart from everything else. We sit with moms at Roy Dale, and nobody cares.
    “Where’s Dad?” I ask as I settle next to Mom. She’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that advertises her real estate company. The main office gave HOUSE HUNTERS shirts away at open houses last year. Oddly enough, we have a dozen of them in every color.
    “He’s running late, but he said he’ll get here as soon as he can.”
    We watch as the green and purple starting teams gather in the middle of the court. And the game is on.
    Nobody scores until the last minute of the first period, when Chris puts one in from the side. Cheers break out—on both sides. Everybody on the court congratulates Chris, even a couple of guys from the green team. I see Alex holding up his cell to catch the crowd noise, and I know Red’s on the other end, screaming just as loud. There is something very right about those two.
    Jeff, our last coach, used to make sure everybody on the team got a chance to play and usually in the first period. Not Michelle. She keeps the good players in as long as possible.
    Sandy gets to play in the second period, and Dad shows up just as she’s walking onto the court. Her eyes are searching the gym for him as she strolls out. When she spots him, she waves and yells, “Hi, Daddy! I get to play!” Then she holds her shorts like she did for me and shouts, “Purple!”
    Dad waves and shouts back, “Go, Dragons!” because Sandy has told us we can’t say “Go, Sandy,” only “Go, Dragons!” Then he bounds up in the stands and sits with Mom and me.
    “So we’re winning,” he says, grinning at our 2-0 rout.
    Michelle yells at Sandy to move on the court. For the next ten minutes, Sandy thunders back and forth with her team, but she never touches the ball. Nobody passes it to her. And she’s too polite to fight for it.
    One of the green players, number 11, a skeleton of a boy, with knees as knobby as baseballs and a shaved head, keeps watching Sandy. Whenever he catches her attention, he breaks into a big smile. Sandy smiles back, and it’s almost more than the kid can handle. It’s like he can’t take his eyes off her.
    But Sandy is focused on that ball. She runs up and down the court with everybody else and holds out her arms. The two best Dragon players, Chris and Matt, hog the ball, as usual, passing it back and forth, both of