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1
It’s ironic: she was always going to leave Stanford this year. But instead of everything beginning for her, Tashi retreats to her childhood bedroom.
On her first night back, the first thing she realises is that her mom has taken all the tennis stuff she could find in the room, and hidden it away somewhere. The missing rackets and bags cast invisible shadows over the random magazine posters and painted furniture.
The second thing Tashi realises is that the pink-purple wardrobe that looms over her bed is also tennis stuff: they'd bought it to replace a rail with the money she got after winning her first youth tournament. Tashi had worn the pajamas left folded ready on the bed the night before winning the Australian Junior Open. The bags and boxes from Stanford, ferried upstairs by everyone except her, that's tennis stuff too. Tashi sits on the edge of her single bed, and takes off her knee brace (tennis stuff), and brushes her scar (tennis stuff, forever). Then she falls back onto the mattress, and gives herself the summer.
One summer without tennis. By fall, she'll find a job. She could do anything now. But realistically, she'll get a spot on someone's coaching team. She knows tennis is the only thing she knows. An up-and-coming player will hire her, she'll be excellent support, and she'll watch them go far. But she can't think about that too much: right now, the idea makes her so angry that she wants to kick her knee worse. She wants every tennis player to shatter like it did. She hates them all, with their cliques and country clubs and stupid confidence. She hates tennis, and her tennisless room, and herself.
"Relax," her first physical therapist had said, shrugging, when she'd asked what she could do to speed recovery. "Take a break." In his cold hospital office, Tashi had wanted to claw his eyes out. But right now, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on a child's ceiling, she feels a vindictive satisfaction at the idea of doing something so completely unlike her. Fuck the her who filled her life with tennis stuff.
Which doesn't mean it isn't fucking awful.
Until now, she'd been kept busy with medical examinations and school ones, bracing her life with deadlines and to-do lists and paperwork. Without that support, she buckles. For the first week, she mostly stays in bed. Pain freezes up her unstretched leg. Her mom comes and stands above her, looking worried. Says she thinks Tashi's visit would be more fun if she got out of the house. But Tashi taps her knee and says stuff about the doctors, about resting, like there's still some hope, and her mom can't argue with that.
Eventually, though, Tashi can't stand anymore of ceiling stars, her brothers' TV picks, and walls. She walks slowly, as fast as her limp will let her, around the flat hot tarmac of suburban cul-de-sacs with her headphones in and her music all the way up. She does the stretch routine a doctor told her do, never wavering from the easy exercises. Her dad drops her off at the indoor pool, and she swims length after low impact length, pulling herself endlessly, her only goal to feel some kind of ache, to bridge the pain from her knee and the numbness of everything else. She goes round and round, up and down, and she lies in the sun instead of her room. A sprinkler is always fizzing somewhere.
It's funny. It's not. But it's only now she's dropped out that she feels like a proper college student for the first time. She's not had a summer vacation in years. She wears denim shorts, reads Twilight and half of the sequel, leans on her elbow and watches fireflies blink into being in the evening heat. She never had time for that before. She's relaxing.
Her mom smiles at her, at her progress, but it doesn't reach her eyes, and Tashi sort of smiles back, except it barely even reaches her mouth.
The summer stretches ahead.
Then, one day, hot and empty like all the others, she's waiting outside the pool for her lift home, and a strange voice calls her name. Tashi blinks.
There's a blonde girl coming up the concrete steps from the parking lot, and her face splits into teeth when their eyes meet. She says Tashi’s name again. She’s called Lizzie. They were in middle school together.
Lizzie was nice, Tashi thinks. They'd been proper friends for a while, birthday sleepover invite level. There'd been a group of five or so of them, besties 4eva, or at least until tennis got too much and Tashi could no longer make trips to the mall or learn their dances. By high school, she'd fallen away without really noticing.
Tashi barely notices now. She nods as Lizzie talks at her, catching her up on a life Tashi doesn’t care about. She keeps one eye on the parking lot, looking for her dad. Then, mid-question about tennis, Stanford — “my mom met your mom” — Lizzie clearly remembers something else she's heard, and her gaze falls to Tashi’s knee.
"I actually just dropped out," Tashi tells her flatly.
"Oh," Lizzie is bambi-eyed with concern, and Tashi is momentarily reminded of Art Donaldson. She's not thought about him since getting back, not clearly, his whole face forming in her mind. Now, she sees him, distinct and pale against the last dark months. The association, she realises, after the rush of recognition, is that stupid pitying care. Lizzie is clearly struggling to find a way to give her condolences without making Tashi sad by reminding her that there are condolences to give. That’s so Art. Right up to the last time she saw him, Art was always obviously aware of precisely how wrong everything was, always holding himself taut, ready to release and carry Tashi away at her first sign of weakness. But never before: touch was reserved for rescue, and until then, his hands hovered, hopeful and helpless. And yet, he still seemed to think that somehow, if he just didn’t do the wrong thing, Tashi might not realise there was anything wrong herself.
Everything he did was wrong, though.
Especially this: he'd ended up going pro when she was supposed to. (Instead of her, whispers some insane, convincing voice at the back of her head). They'd left at the same time. With no career to get to, Tashi had seen out the year at Stanford, and he'd been spotted at a tournament, and there was some talk about sponsorship, and some coach, and the timing just worked out, apparently.
He'd come to her room the day before he left, asking his way through her dorm. They'd talked in the doorway. He'd obviously wanted to come in, and wanted her to hug him, but she'd pretended not to notice. They'd said their goodbyes. Then, he'd left her, and she'd watched him walk away, all the way down the low, windowless hall she'd lived on, until he'd opened the door at the end and gone, leaving Tashi still standing in her doorway.
Anyway. Tashi sees her dad's car, and nods to it. “I’ve gotta go,” she tells Lizzie.
Lizzie nods, then says, in an uncanny Art-echo, “Can I have your number?” Tashi waits for a reason. “I’m having, like, a thing this weekend, and you should come, if you’re free. I’ll text you the info.”
“Sure,” says Tashi. Lizzie's nothing like Art, not really. He never got her number at all. She puts her information into Lizzie’s pink flip phone, and waves behind her as she joins her dad in his car. Another day ends, another night hides the neighbourhood, the earth spins on its heels.
2
Four more repetitive days and nights rotate past. But on Saturday night, Tashi straightens her hair for the first time in a long time, enjoying the way her motion produces an expected, distinct result, ignoring the tempting burning sound. She has a clutch with lipgloss in it, a sparkly cami which she’d found left for useless on the floor after her perfunctory unpacking. She also digs out an out-of-fashion long skirt to hide her brace.
Lizzie had texted, and once Tashi had got over the weird, unfixed disappointment that it was only her, messaging from the other end of their hometown, she’d said, k.
Her mom drops her off, tells her to have fun. Tashi pulls a face.
“I’m glad you’re meeting new people,” her mom says.
“I know,” Tashi replies, shutting the car door behind her before the conversation can escalate. She’s already vaguely mad: her parents had never let her go to drinking parties before, and she hates seeing them okay with it now.
She lets herself in the side gate, walks along the side of Lizzie's big ass house. At the back, she finds a gaggle of girls, a couple of jock-type guys, sitting on the deck beside a hot tub, uncovered but off. Lights shift restlessly on its surface: the submerged lines of curves and steps look like they’re shivering under the water. It’s getting dark.
“Tashi!” calls Lizzie, standing and waving. “Some of you must remember Tashi, right?”
“Tennis Tashi,” murmurs a girl Tashi swears she’s never seen before. She ignores it, sits where she’s directed, between Lizzie and a guy who looks her slowly up and down. Tashi pretends to ignore that too.
“Hi,” she says to the group at large. Lizzie passes her a cup with something sticky-smelling in it.
“I’m Guy,” says the guy next to her. He sticks out a hand for her to shake.
She looks down at it, leaves a skeptical pause, but does take it in the end. “Tashi.”
“Yeah, I heard. And you play tennis? Are you any good?”
The question is like a blow to the fucking head. She glances away for a beat and a breath, clenches her fists, tries not to think about how these are the same motions she would do to calm herself when a match started getting away from her.
“I’m apparently famous for it,” she says, coolly. “So what do you think.”
“Yeah?” Guy stretches the word out confusedly. She can just imagine him retelling this story and looping a finger round his ear a couple of times: I asked this crazy girl about tennis and she got so mad, she basically started crying. “Unless the nickname is some kind of esoteric joke.”
“It basically is now,” she says, snappily. He waits, an uneasy smile playing across his lips. She takes a deep, yoga-class-style breath in, then lets it out in a huge, unserious sigh. “I’m retired.”
“Huh. Retired. Well,” he says, and there’s suddenly a familiar note in his voice. “You’re looking really good for your age then.”
She looks at him, and he winks, and she feels this rush of relief: at least I still have this. She smiles back, almost shyly, entirely coyly, then downs half her cup.
The rest of the evening, the girls, the party games, mostly falls out of focus after that. Tashi lets herself become occupied by Guy, like it’s just the two of them facing off. They exchange quick, hard glances: she tries to set the pace. She’s mindful of her footwork, her stance, placing herself carefully when she goes to get another drink or sits back down across the group. She feels somehow newly embodied, as she reaches and shifts and is watched: her body has a purpose and a strength again, beyond conveying her through another day. She feels so aware of it that each movement almost becomes external, like there are ghost hands echoing the pull of her muscles just above her skin, an invisible finger guiding the turn of her head, tracing the minuscule strain down her neck.
Guy seems fine. He’s symmetrically hot, blandly intelligent, goes to a good school. He golfs, he jogs. There’s a complacent assurance about him, which does nothing for Tashi: he’s under-practiced in genuinely competing for something, so has become naively confident that he can win anything. Tashi doesn’t mind right now. No one’s looked at her like that since Patrick turned and left her behind, on the day of her injury.
That is one thing about the injury. Compared to losing tennis, breaking up with Patrick barely fucking figures.
Her mom has asked about him a couple of times since Tashi got back. She hadn’t liked him much but she’s been so worried about Tashi that she’d apparently even let Patrick slide, along with drinking parties and languor. Maybe she thought Patrick would shake Tashi awake. Tashi had doubted it. She’s hardly thought about him. He'd relentlessly texted her for a bit, but he’s gone quiet lately. Fucking other people, she expects. Moving on. Sometimes she gets a message, but it's always late, desperate, lonely: she always imagines him sending them after getting stood up or striking out. She’d not cared.
She doesn’t care. She’s moving on too. She’s reminded of him constantly throughout the evening.
They play Truth or Dare, and someone gives her a softball question: best first date. The asker's neighbour nudges her chastisingly, rolling her eyes. Missed opportunity to ask about all those hot athletes.
The alcohol is beginning to soak through Tashi by then: she giggles, tells them something about sneaking out of her own party to hang out with her ex for the first time. Doesn’t say anything more than she has to. Subconsciously, she kind of thrills at calling Patrick her ex, putting him in his place from afar, but she pictures him smiling up at her from a beach chair all the same.
“Your own party? You must have been really good,” Guy breathes into her ear.
She’s thinking of the blue beach, the afterparty. Eyes following her across the room, the court, the day, maybe the most beautiful she's had or will have. Without really hearing Guy, she smiles back. If she drinks more, maybe she’ll start seeing double.
Later, they move onto Never Have I Ever, and the alcohol curdles Tashi's usual apathy into frustration: everyone keeps saying all this normal person shit she can’t drink for. She’s never had time for crushes, for sneaking out, fooling around. She was number one in the world at something, but she’s never even been so drunk she puked. She feels like a prude.
Then someone says, “threesome,” and there’s an awkward laugh when nobody moves.
Fuck it, Tashi thinks, I got close enough. She drinks, and someone oohs. I could have done, if I’d wanted to. Guy looks at her appreciatively. Like Patrick did, once he knew he was in the game, and thought he’d won her.
She’s not ever been the kind of person who exaggerates or compensates. She’d prided herself on being straightforward, without realising that it was a kind of privilege to live a life where honesty was enough. Lying is so Patrick — still annoyed, she coldly remembers him pretending there was no girlfriend, no reason for losing. I’ll only do it for one night, she tells herself. One summer, and never to herself. She won’t let lying become a habit.
“Do you smoke?” she asks Guy later.
“Nah,” he says. She pulls a mock sad face, not one she’d ever usually use. “I mean, sometimes. Do you?”
“Sometimes,” she lies. “Tonight, definitely. But Lizzie probably doesn’t want ash all over the deck.”
She waits for him to get it, and when he does, he scrambles off to beg a couple of cigarettes and a lighter off someone.
“Let’s walk,” he says, and they head directly into the darkness of the unlit garden. The sticky stuff Lizzie kept offering her seems to have oiled Tashi‘s knee: it feels like it’s working almost right. Guy lights her cigarette for her, and she blows smoke out, and smiles at him through it. At the same time, in answer, excitement wafts hot through her stomach. Guy’s nice, but it’s for smoking. For so long, she’d forbidden it, beyond a few daring drags on Patrick’s cigarettes. Tonight, though, she’ll smoke a whole one herself.
They find a castaway bench which faces back towards the deck, now a narrow slot of light, voices and tendrils of music drifting meaninglessly from it. It looks very far away, and that feels right to Tashi, almost alone with her cigarette in the dark.
After a moment, of course, Guy shifts across into her, and starts weirdly kissing at the side of her mouth. She shoves him off with her shoulder, pins him with a stern look she hopes he can make out.
“Let me finish,” she says, although she turns to face him, so they’re both sitting sideways on the bench. In the darkness, he’s made up of shadows, and the dull slithers of light between them. He looks interesting, deep. He’s given up his pretence of smoking, abandoned his cigarette out in the garden; he’s looking keenly at her.
“You’re really hot,” he tells her.
It makes her want to laugh, which doesn’t really fit with the femme fatale thing that having a cigarette carefully poised between two fingers has her aspiring too. So she just smiles a smile which feels long and knowing, and shrugs. Taps ash away. He watches, straining. He won’t move until she wants him to. It’s her serve, but she already knows she’s won the rally.
The cigarette’s getting short and hot around her fingers before she tosses it away, and says, “Come on then.” And he does, fingers at her waist and lips at her mouth. He’s not a bad kisser, and she responds, enjoying feeling it.
But then she thinks of Patrick again, and how he would have probably been so into this: her, cut off from tennis, and silently content with what he’s offering right now, and she’s mad at the thought; but then again, he’s not here, he won’t ever get that from her, and the idea she has something he wants but can’t have makes her vindictively happy, and she pushes into Guy and bites at his lips a little. He moans.
But then he starts kissing her neck, and she closes her eyes and lets him, trying to keep her breathing steady. The air feels blue and she’s on the beach and in the hotel room all at once, and that means Patrick is there, but Art too, both of them, and she sees them, hair and skin and teeth, and feels them, teeth and skin and hair, and she watches them with each other, and a tennis ball flashes between them, across her eyelids, and she knows they’re not there, what she’s feeling is only half a shadow, but it’s nice, it’s nice.
But then Guy’s back at her mouth and she’s suddenly sobering, and wants to cough. She’s not watching anything. There’s nothing to see here, only some ordinary entanglement on the edge of a normal night. It’s actually embarrassing for her, now she’s thinking about it. Once, two boys who knew what it meant to lose fought for her so bravely they fell a little more in love themselves. Now, she’s trying to pretend it means anything that she got with the first guy — one so average that that’s literally his name! — to flirt with her at a party. Fuck! She wishes she’d let the cigarette burn down a little more. She’s suddenly exhausted.
“Okay,” she says, and Guy sits up straight. “I think I’m done for today.”
In the distance, there’s a splash, like a wet, weak exclamation point. Someone’s flopped back into the cold hot tub. There’s a pause, then chatter surges up again.
Guy follows her back across the lawn, talking at her. Her skin prickles and tingles where it was touched. Fear, strangely, roils inside her. But it’s all white noise. The sensations chorus into a sort of realisation. Yeah, she’s been numb for weeks, but it could be worse. Losing tennis is the worst she's ever going to feel, and even if she feels nothing for the rest of her life, that's okay, because at least she won't have to feel it again. And at least. At least she felt it, all of it, the love and the loss, at least she got to be extraordinary, got to be the best, and now she can be normal and empty.
3
Guy continues to hang around. Tashi lets herself be courted during daylight hours. They go on a couple of official dates: he drives her out of town, and she watches suburb replace suburb, until they reach the old style movie theatre he was aiming for, or the park with a duck pond. She thinks this is probably what normal retirement, the old person type, must be like. Guy's nervous of moving too fast, after she called things off so abruptly that first night, but sometimes he parks his car on the side of a side road, and they make out, touching but chastely focused on already visible skin. Even this makes her think of Patrick, who would have taken it further, and Art too, who might not have, but how would she know.
Once, they’re just walking slowly around her neighbourhood — her mom waved them off from the porch — and Guy says, “I watched you play.” Pause for applause. Pause for explanation. “I found clips of you playing tennis, online. You looked really good. Gracef—”
“What the fuck,” says Tashi. Anger rises hot and sickly inside her, up her throat, and for a moment she’s choked, and can’t say anything more. In the moment, she doesn't know what she's so mad at, just that there’s a great mass of it, but later she pulls out individual strands: the idea he can know anything about her tennis after it’s over; the way he thinks she’ll be impressed by so little; the blasé voice he says it in, the trust fund one. The fact he can watch tennis. She still won’t. She still can’t.
“What?” he says, surprised, rather than ‘sorry’.
Still unsure why she reacted like that, she wants to apologise instead, if only as an act of self-flagellation. Instead, she lets herself ice over. “I told you, I’m retired. My career doesn’t matter anymore.”
And later, he kisses her, and she kisses back, and it’s like she’s not even there. And she can’t help but think about tennis, always tennis, because everything she has is tennis: and kissing Guy, she thinks, is like watching someone else’s match. It’s sometimes dull and sometimes fun, but it can’t compare to a game she’s actually a part of. She watches herself from inside herself, and wishes she could choose to sit back, but instead she just follows his lead.
And later, she says, “I want to end this.”
Guy looks at her, his dark eyes filling with light, and says, “Tashi, I really like you.”
“Really?” she asks, because she genuinely thought they were just having a summer fling: he would go back to college in September, and leave her thoughtlessly. She wouldn’t care, because she feels nothing towards him.
“Of course! And I thought you liked me too. You’re so aloof, it's hard to tell, but still. We’ve met each other’s parents.”
“Yeah, ‘cos we live with them.”
He makes a funny little moaning sound. “Tashi—”
“Guy. Listen.” She almost says something about how fucked up she is, decides he doesn’t need to know. Looks at him properly, maybe for the first time: the thick, combed hair, the clear shave, the rigid fold on the collar of his branded polo. He smells good. “You need to find a nice girl, who’ll lay the table and iron your shorts, and dream of being your wife. That’s not me.”
“I’d marry you,” he says desperately.
Her face contorts with disbelief and a little disgust. It’s probably too mean, but who cares.
Guy cares. “You’ve got to marry someone, someday,” he bursts out. “What else will you do?”
She leaves then, turning and limping ungracefully away, back to her parent's home. He could catch up with her easily, but he doesn’t. She doesn’t look back: she’s already forgetting him, and is thinking about herself: fighting off images of her head pasted above a fat white gown. She’s never thought about it before. White was for playing at Wimbledon one day.
For a week afterward, Tashi doesn’t miss Guy, but she misses kissing. At night, she closes her eyes to the plastic stars, and pictures the peeling ceiling of her hotel room in Flushing, which she’d looked up at in the early morning, lying on the itchy sheets shivering and grinning, and imagining Art and Patrick still above her, against their identically shitty ceiling. It still thrills her. That memory’s overlaid by moments with Patrick: elbows dangling over the edge of single beds, and teeth meeting earlobes, and the way they'd talk until their lips were so close together that both comebacks and distance would disappear in one synchronous instant. Remembering that stuff is only sometimes ruined by the words Tashi Zweig announcing themselves in her mind, making her turn away.
Still. She misses something beyond tennis.
“You seem better,” says her mom, stroking Tashi’s hair.
Her days are just as boring, but they feel more like things she’s doing, rather than losing. She enjoys the water when she swims. She meets Lizzie for a coffee. She pays attention to her knee and what it needs.
And then, one morning, after a blond dream, she wakes up and pulls her laptop to her, and searches for ‘Art Donaldson’. Before the results have loaded, she opens another tab, searches for Patrick, then switches back to Art.
She spends a morning reading through match reports and stats. Looking between tabs, a result on one opening some other thing to check on the other. She ends up on a fan forum, scrolling through a thread discussing Art’s debut, the fact he and Patrick played in the US Open Boys Final, wondering if they’d match up again. Fire versus ice. Tashi finds herself hoping so, finds herself disappointed they haven’t yet.
The websites are mostly text-based, the individual letters like faces in a crowded stand, coming together to form some bigger image. She doesn’t need videos or even photos, she realises, because she remembers how Art and Patrick play. From the tersest summaries, she can imagine how they would have moved, anticipate how they would have reacted to their opponents, not just in one rally or another, but long term; she finds herself picturing the arcs and pits of their careers, two timelines, lives, bodies, twisting around each other and away into the future.
Then she finds a clip of Art, embedded in a website, and presses play, and there it is: tennis. Watching him move at 480p, broken into blurry pixels, feels more real than her summer, more real than Guy, more real than the injury that can’t have really happened.
She opens Youtube, and types in Patrick’s name, and watches him through the window of the screen, considering his movement with a clarity which, since the injury, has largely been reserved for pain: the sharp, snapping hurt when she steps wrong, the repeating surges when she wakes up, like a distinct bolt of lightning striking over and over just below her knee, and then, the rest of the time, the translucent ache which the rest of her life has been filtered through.
Suddenly, Tashi wants to take notes. Wants to text Patrick and chastise him (and watch him wiggle that into flirting). Wants to tell Art to chase more: he can catch balls up, if he reaches. It still hurts to watch, and maybe that pain is why she’s thinking so clearly, but she doesn’t think so. It’s more like she’s finally using her brain for what it was made for.
She watches a set of Patrick’s, two of Art’s, another of Patrick’s, clicking ahead when the game halts and the camera lingers on their opponents. There’s no obvious order to what she picks, but she chooses carefully, and it builds into a sort of sense of what they’ve both been doing, since she left.
Then she finds part of their Junior US Open Finals. She opens it, and immediately regrets it: In the sidebar, one of the suggested videos is her match the day before, and there she is in the thumbnail, slick and mean with all her tennis stuff. She fullscreens Art and Patrick’s video, hiding her other self, although she catches her reflection in the black screen before the video loads, bed-headed but flushed and sharp-eyed.
And then the screen lights up, and there she is again, in the past, watching Art and Patrick’s match. She’s not in the video much, but she knows where she was sat, right in the middle of the stands, and she can see how both boys position themselves on the court, looking at each other, but angled towards her too. It’s subtle, but it's there if you're looking for it. And Tashi looks.
She skips ahead, finding Patrick’s bow (Art’s slump) exactly where she remembered. They’re so stupid, acting as though her watching is the only thing worth wanting. And now, here she is, doing the exact same thing, and they don’t have a clue. She could know everything (how they’ve been playing, what they could do to improve, the fact she’s been watching, and thinking about and kissing about, them) and they can only dream.
That’s kind of fun, she thinks. Like she’s looking through a peephole, like her ear’s pressed to a door. She won’t tell them, won’t text Patrick back. Won’t let him have that and tennis. She has to take what she can get, take the upper hand when it’s extended to her. So, she’ll understand everything about them.
As she watches Patrick win and Art lose, she finds herself drawn to the spot, just off screen, where she had sat, too. Off-court, but in the game.
She stretches, showers, dresses, ignores her brothers, finds her mom.
“Don’t be weird about it,” Tashi says, “but I’m going to find some tennis to watch this morning.”