Teagan Kessler
The Mud Girls
I’m facedown in the mud for not the first time in my life, but for the first time, it’s my choice. It’s freshman year, first semester, and I’ve done it. I’ve escaped. My so-called “family” are far away from this muddy field behind the only college that offered me a full scholarship. But I’m not thinking about them.
I’m not thinking about the rain swirling down from a graying dirty-sock sky.
I’m not thinking about the extra weight around my waist—for once—or the slight whistle of my breath as I heave oxygen in and out of my poorly conditioned lungs.
I’m not thinking about my new roommate’s annoying habit of leaving the door unlocked when everything I own is in that tiny closet of a double room.
I’m not thinking about classes, syllabi, reading lists, or even majors. I’m thinking of the mud between my fingers and the way it smells like rotting fall leaves—but in a good way. Not like death but proof of life. I’m thinking about how I can’t—CANNOT—fall on my face when that whistle blows and this line of wet, ponytailed girls leap to their feet and charge into the drenching rain after the rugby ball.
The whistle blows.
I leap to my feet—we leap to our feet. And it’s a funny thing that shifts inside me, this transition from I to we. I never played sports in high school. Middle school softball bullies made sure of that. Now we are running, full force with the enthusiasm and painlessness that I will learn comes only in these first-weeks practices. We’re wiping our chilly gooey gross hands on any available surface of our clothes to try to get the mud off, but it’s useless. We’re covered. We’re stringing out in a staggered line determined by who is fastest, who understands the angles to get to the bouncing ball, who wants it the most.
For the first time since my first practice last week, I’m first to the ball. Even through the cold and wet and grit, I feel the nubbled texture of that ball as I scoop it up. My body is already forming muscle memory—from these practices, my own practices in my room, and a lifetime of longingly watching boys and men play football—and I pull the ball to my chest, cradling it tight but gentle, a newborn with a wobbly neck—but with other girls trying to pull it out of my arms. They arrive in a pack: a sweaty, grubby, stinking, gleeful pack.
My pack.
Of course, they’re thinking of nothing but the object of this drill: to get that ball, at all costs. The first girl hits me high, wrapping her arms around my waist and driving me a few steps backward. I’m bigger than her—an advantage rather than an embarrassment, for once—so I keep my feet and strangle the ball with a will forged in fire. It’s my goddamn ball. Goddammit. The next girl, though, she’s not new to the team, and she executes a perfect strip-tackle: her left arm wrapping me at the knees and taking me down to the muddy ground while her right arm snakes up in a hooking motion and peels my baby-ball right out of my rain-slick arms.
The three of us crash to the ground in a heap. Flat on my back, I stare up at the rain falling out of that sweaty-sweatshirt sky, droplets arcing down directly into my wide-open eyes, and I blink wildly, feeling fully alive. The second girl, who I now see is Kat, a senior who wears the same messy ponytail to class as practice, sticks out a dripping hand above me and hauls me to my feet. We start jogging back to the start line to do it all over again.
Kat flips the ball at me in a perfect sideways spiral and grins. “You got balls, Rookie.” Or maybe she just said “ball” but I like the way both sound. I catch the ball easily. “My kick?”
“Those are the rules, Rook: You catch it, you get to kick it.”
Kat lines up with the rest of the girls—my girls—but I take a place just in front of them, just to the right of the ragged, heavy-breathing, hands-onhips line. They are mud-caked warriors, ready for anything.
She calls out the words that first made me flinch but now bring only elation. “Who wants first hit?”
My girls scream back, in unison: “I do!”
I’m grinning like a psycho but concentrating hard as I hold the ball out in both hands, trying to time it perfectly so my leg swings forward and connects just as the ball drops downward. It works, mostly. It’s not the best drop kick ever, but it sends my girls off racing after it while I get to stand back and watch, catch my breath. This is our first practice with contact drills. We’ve spent almost two weeks going through slow tackles, fake tackles—tackles that wouldn’t bruise a peach. For some of these girls, it’s their first time getting hit.
Watching the organized chaos around the ball, I take stock of my body. My foot is stinging from contact with the ball through my cheap sneakers. My hip has that hard ache that foretells a spectacularly colorful bruise. My head is pounding from dehydration despite the waterfalls pouring down around me.
But for the first time, this pain is somehow more mine.
For the time, it’s my choice.
At that moment, I am addicted.
A shower never feels so good as one that’s wholly deserved.
The mud has gotten everywhere, but in just a few short minutes under the blasting spray in the communal showers on the third floor, I’m as clean as the day I was born. This always strikes me as amusing, this fact that you can be the dirtiest you’ve ever been—the nastiest any human has ever been in the history of time—and then, just like that, you can be clean again. Perfectly clean.
I make my way back down to the second floor where I live, where the showers are pathetically weak, and enter my room. The door is unlocked, of course, and Ciara is nowhere to be found, of course. My roommate is a rich girl. If her iPhone gets stolen, her daddy will just buy her another. She’ll order a new case from Amazon, the new one different from the old but likely just as pink and sparkly. I would ask for a new room, if her damn eyes didn’t sparkle just as bright, if her music choices didn’t line up so exactly with mine. She doesn’t know I’m bi, and I don’t know what she is, but I have this thing with possibilities. I can’t crush them without knowing for certain they’re going to get crushed anyway.
I’m halfway dressed when the sudden banging on my door makes my heart squeeze hard up into my throat, and I realize with a flash of disappointment that I’m still me. My family is geographically a thousand miles away, but even after the thrill of leaving, two weeks isn’t enough to escape a lifetime of terror.
“Bitch, you had better be dressed and ready and shiny and pretty,” Kat calls through the door.
It’s not the first time I’ve been called bitch, but for the first time, the word is warm and wraps me up like a hug. I finish tugging my pantyhose up over my belly and for once don’t think about how it’s cutting into my doughy body. The silky sheer material sucks me in in all the right places, and I’m grateful that despite hose being hopelessly out of style, we all wear them. They hide the inevitable purple-then-green-then-yellow bruises on our legs.
“I’m almost—”
Kat opens the door anyway, because apparently I’ve forgotten how to lock it, too.
“Dear lord, you suck at makeup,” she says.
I’m not offended. I do.
Ten minutes later, I tear my eyes away from my now-foreign face in the mirror, thanking Kat too many times and asking where she learned to wield brushes and powders and mascara wands with such skill.
“My friends,” she says, giving me a funny little sideways look. “Growing up, we did it all the time.”
I duck my head in a half-nod. “So can you tell me why everyone’s being so secretive about tonight?”
“If I told you,” she says, waving a hand.
We ride to the secret location in Kat’s car, an ancient Dodge Dynasty, and when she pronounces it Dy-NASTY I fall in love with her a little more. I guess I’m in love with everyone these days—or maybe that’s what happens when you finally escape a house full of hate. Anyone who isn’t actively hurting you is instantly attractive. The location turns out to be the men’s rugby house, a place we rookies have heard of but never been to because it’s forbidden for us “fresh meat” in these first few weeks.
But tonight is different.
Tonight we are not muddy gross girls in muddy gross clothes—everything from my thrift-store sweats to Haylee’s lululemon leggings—but we are glamorous, some of us girlie, some more like goddesses. Being college students, all above eighteen, I know I should call us “women” but I feel too young for that just yet. Kat and Haylee, however, are undoubtedly women, dressed to the nines in their sleek cocktail attire and strappy shoes. I blink away from them, trying not to stare. Feeling the heavy mascara on my usually naked lashes makes me feel like a kid playing dress-up. My dress is brandsparkling-new, bought unwisely with my very first credit card, but I feel not a hint of regret even while the cheap silver sequins dig into my armpit.
“Ladies,” Haylee says, drawing all the liner-laden eyes in the room to her lovely face. She grins, bright white teeth gleaming in the dim halffinished basement that only slightly ruins the mood with its perma-stink of young men who play rough sports. “Tonight, as is tradition on the eve of the third week of practice, we’d like to officially welcome our rookies to the St. Bernadette University Women’s Rugby Team!”
As is tradition, whenever the team name is mentioned, we put our hands into the circle’s center and scream: “We’re the Bernie bitches, who the fuck are you?”
Old Saint Bernie would probably drop dead at our language, but I’m beginning to learn that Catholics are an interesting breed. And not all of us are even Catholic. This is a tiny school in a tiny town, and we’re all here for different reasons.
Haylee continues, “Tonight, you’ll receive your Big Sister/Little Sister assignments, so let’s start with that.”
She reads out names in pairs, each rookie matched with an experienced player, usually a senior. I’m wholly unsurprised when my Big Sister is announced as Kat—why else would she come pick me up tonight?—but I’m also fucking thrilled. The prospect of being her friend scares me a little because she’s so chill and fun and pretty and smiley, and I’m so none of those things. But for the first time, I start to wonder if maybe I could be.
After the Bigs and Littles clasp hands and coo and grin and do linkedarm SoCo shots—but only if you want to drink, Haylee says, we don’t haze here—the whole group comes back together for a game. On rugby teams, you’re more likely to know someone’s nickname than their actual name, and we’ve spent two weeks hearing Jenn called “Flapjacks” and Annie is “Spoons” and Amber is “Barbie” and Becky is Becky but her nickname has become her last name so while there’s only one Becky on the team she’s always referred to as Becky Paddles. The game is simple: Each rookie must name as many nicknames as possible, with extra points for matching the correct name to the correct player. Only the rookie being quizzed is in the basement, so the rest of us rookies are led upstairs by one of the guys on the men’s team. I imagine he lives in the house, but I don’t think even all the guys know who actually lives in the two-story puke-green place with so many obvious additions I wonder how much the rent per room is.
There are five rookies this year—a large crop, I’m told—so while Maddy is downstairs naming nicknames, I stand with the others in the kitchen.
“This house of boys is less gross than I’d imagine,” Samara says, eyeing the sink that’s only half-full of crusty dishes.
Elizabeth—who quaintly goes by Betty and has giant glasses with clear frames—nods along with me, but the other Elizabeth—who goes by Liz—sniffs the air and wrinkles her nose in a way that makes me not like her. I almost tell her I grew up in a smelly old house not too unlike this, but I’m trying to be a new person so I wrinkle my nose, too.
“Cute dress,” says Marcus, the guy whose job it is to hang out with us rookies.
He hands me a red solo cup cold with beer fresh from the tapped keg in the rust-stained utility sink by the back door. I can’t tell if he’s mocking my cheap dress, my less-than-perfect body, or if he’s being genuine, so I smile weakly, mumble a thanks, and guzzle half the beer. I didn’t really drink much in high school—that usually requires having friends with access—but I find I don’t mind the taste that Liz complains about. The beer is cold and crisp, and I can feel Marcus’s eyes on me in a way that grates my instincts. I guzzle the other half and hold the empty cup, hoping no one has noticed it’s gone.
Maddy comes back up the stairs looking like she just failed a midterm and points at Liz. “You’re up,” she says, accepting a beer from Marcus and gulping it down so fast I don’t even feel weird asking for a refill, too, when she does.
We chat and file downstairs and up, and when it’s my turn, I wobble a little going down for my turn. I blame the rickety staircase with its DIY rail of weathered gray wood, and I blame my inexperience with high heels when I should be blaming the three beers and the shot I’ve had. Considering my family tree was watered in alcohol, I know I should slow down, but the drinks have settled a pleasant gossamer haze over my usually sharp senses. Instead of being acutely aware of everyone’s movements—always afraid of an incoming strike—I’m finding myself gliding comfortably through the crowd of girls. My girls.
I have an excellent memory and breeze through the quiz, having to take only one shot for reversing Janelle’s and Jamie’s nicknames—it’s only water shots, says Haylee, because we don’t haze here—and by the time I go back up to collect my fellow rookies, I’m grinning and practically floating. Being told I’ve won the contest and get to be captain of one of the flip-cup teams would have terrified sober-me because I overthink everything and would be afraid of choosing wrong or upsetting someone or seeming dumb or something, but drunk-me just picks out five other girls who have been nice to me during or before or after practice.
We win the first game, lose the second, sit out the third, and suddenly I’m doing boat races on the floor, realizing why we were told to wear the bike shorts we usually wear under our rugby shorts under our dresses. It’s a warm evening so we’re out of the basement at this point, in a backyard that’s mostly fenced, minus a few splintered boards here and there. It’s private enough that I don’t even worry about getting caught drinking underage even though I know we’re not being quiet in that way that you know you’re drunk-talking too loud but can’t really help it. The boat races take place in the grass and I do worry for a second about my credit-card purchased dress, but in the end I plop my sequined ass down in the dirt and link my legs over my teammate’s and let Janelle kick my blossoming bruise and laugh instead of cry and there’s a moment when I look up into the black sky and feel grateful for the full moon in a way I never have before.
“Ready, GO!”
Oh shit, I got caught not paying attention and Janelle is poking my back and laugh-yelling at me to GO GO GO so I do. I untangle myself from her and stand and chug and sit down so hard I wonder if my tailbone is broken but it’s weirdly hilarious so I only gasp when Janelle stands and tries to chug and ends up pouring half her beer down her chin and onto my head and knees me in the kidneys when she flops back down behind me. We lose, badly, but mostly because our entire boat can’t stop laughing.
When the game ends, someone pulls out a field hockey stick and suggests dizzy bats next, but Kat screams, “Why be a chick with a stick when you can a bitch with balls?!”
Most of the team joins her before she’s done shouting. I immediately commit the words to memory so I can join in next time. It turns out I’m memorizing a lot tonight because we move from games into rugby songs—vile, disgusting, hilariously overly sexual songs that would make ol’ Saint Bernie roll in her saintly grave. There are too many songs and too many verses for my beer-hazed brain, but I find myself catching on to one chorus in particular.
Haylee shouts: “Are all the ruggers happy?”
We shout back: “You bet your ass we are!”
Then comes a silly wordless “dee dee lee dee dee dee dee do” part while we put our red solo cups on a teammate’s head and spin in dizzy little circles. Normally I’d be embarrassed but I’ve never felt more free. I also learn that the signal that you want to sing the next verse is putting your cup to your forehead, and I’m feeling brave enough to sing solo so I press my less-cold cup to the flawless foundation on my forehead. Thanks Kat. The beer is less good now that it’s warm and I’m feeling slightly sick to my stomach, but I chalk it up to nerves. It never occurs to me that I’m willingly making myself the center of attention.
Because we’re learning, we’re allowed to repeat verses during this session. I had been concentrating like a kid learning a nursery rhyme while Kat sang her verse, and I’m determined to make my Big Sister proud. As is tradition, the signal that my cup to the forehead has been acknowledged and I’m next up is everyone pointing their elbows at me, their arms up, fists next to dangly earrings.
We all sing the chorus: “I used to work in Chicago, at an old department store. I used to work in Chicago, I don’t work there no more.”
I breathe deep, ignoring the sequins poking my side boob, and belt out: “A man came into the store for a hammer.”
All: “A hammer from the store?”
Me, grinning like an idiot: “A hammer he wanted, NAILED he got.”
All of us idiots: “Ohhhhh, you don’t work there no more!”
I’m so excited to have not fucked up the verse I forget to point my elbow at Becky Paddles. Then she fucks up and is a little too drunk to not slur her verse and because she’s not a rookie, she has to shoot the boot.
This is when I learn about shooting the boot. In order to shoot a boot, someone produces a shoe—at a social immediately following a rugby game, the shoe is often a cleat. A dirty, stinking, game-used cleat. Tonight, however, because one cannot pour cheap warm beer into tall strappy sandals, one of the men’s cleats is produced. A murmur goes through the crowd, but rules are rules. Becky Paddles has fucked up her verse. A boot she must shoot.
She does.
It’s disgusting and awful and hilarious and I laugh and cringe and shriek and laugh along with my girls. It’s so gross that the singing ends shortly thereafter and we begin to break up into smaller groups. Some of the older girls leave, some off to one of the three bars in the tiny downtown where their fake IDs will get them past friendly doormen, some off to bed, some off with players from the men’s team. I see Samara disappear upstairs with one of the men’s rookies, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to do something. I’m a rookie in girl code, too, so while I know she’s drunk, I’m drunker so I don’t say anything because I don’t want to be the bad friend or the tattletale or the whatever.
I find myself standing with Kat and Becky Paddles (who just returned from an epic post-boot puke and rally and isn’t afraid to share) and Jenn, who I ask how she got the nickname “Flapjacks.” I’m proud of myself for remembering that it’s bad rugby etiquette to ask anyone but the player herself how she got her nickname. Hopefully no one noticed I started to ask Kat but turned slightly toward Jenn at the end of my question.
“Let’s sit,” Kat says, taking my elbow and steering me to a ripped armchair that reeks of the unmistakable scent of weed. The smell catches me off-guard and transports me out of the happy party and into the past, but I breathe through my mouth a few times and again hope no one has noticed.
“Well,” Jenn says, pushing aside never-cracked textbooks and sitting on the coffee table. “You know coach’s nickname, right?”
I know we have a part-time coach, and I know his name is Rob, and I know he looks at me sometimes in ways that make me as queasy as I am sitting here now. I shake my head in the negative.
“Oh,” Jenn says, “it’s kind of a funny story but not really and not really all that surprising. He was at a tournament once, at breakfast with his team, and of course some dude dared him to chug a bottle of maple syrup and of course he did.”
I remember now hearing someone call him Maple. So much for my amazing memory. I want to call Jenn out for violating the nickname rule, but I’m not that brave. So I say, dumbly, “What does maple have to do with Flapjacks.”
Jenn laughs. “I’m Flapjacks, ’cause coach is syrup and he’s always all over me.”
Kat laughs, too, and I try to, but my face isn’t cooperating. I can’t laugh. I can’t even fake a polite smile. Coach is easily in his thirties—practically ancient compared to sophomore Jenn and freshman me, and I suddenly feel cold and hot and shaky but also deadly calm.
“Are you okay?” Kat asks, and I realize Jenn has left us alone.
“I’m great!” I say too loudly.
I can see her trying to decide if she should press it or not, and she chooses not to, and I’m grateful and sad at the same time. Sometimes I just wish I could say how shitty my childhood was and why things some people find funny make me sick, but I can’t and I don’t.
“Let’s go talk to Maddy and Janelle,” Kat says, holding out her hands. I see her nails are chipped, and I find myself wishing I could walk around with chipped nails and not care.
We slide in and out of different conversations, and time skips forward in that magical way that only alcohol can induce, and suddenly I realize I’ve puked down the front of the party dress I couldn’t afford. I’m cowering in the corner of the yard like a beaten dog on a chain. I’m alone. I hear laughter. I cower some more, trying to remember how far from my dorm we are and knowing from the ride in Kat’s car that I can’t walk back. Not in these shoes I also can’t afford.
I close my eyes, and when I open them, I’m being held by the arms by Kat and someone else I can’t see clearly. I keep having to close one eye to stop seeing double but even that isn’t working and I suddenly have to pee and I try to tell them but they aren’t hearing me or aren’t understanding me.
“Ungh,” I moan, stopping dead and they let me sink to my knees in what I realize is the dorm parking lot. I have no idea how we got here.
“Is she, um?”
I don’t recognize the voice, but Kat answers, “She’s so not okay. I hope we don’t get caught.”
“I know she’s not okay, but, like, is she peeing?”
I’m horrified to realize I am. The warm wetness gushes from me, spreading over my lap because I’m on my knees and I feel the piss soaking into that pantyhose that’s covering my bruises and I feel sequins digging into my armpits and the dress is ruined because now I’ve both puked and peed on it.
“Oh my god, look at her leg.”
Kat says, “Okay, yeah, it’s gross but we’ve all been drunk. Don’t be so judgy.”
“Not that. Look at her thigh.”
A flash of memory sears through my throbbing skull. The nail on the broken fence. The nail in my hand. The nail digging into my skin.
“Shit,” Kat says, quietly.
“I can’t really deal with this tonight,” the voice says.
It might be Haylee but I’m not sure and I refuse to look up. The flood between my legs has stopped and while I feel physical relief I didn’t realize I needed, the shame is too much.
“Let’s just get her upstairs. I have her purse and keys.”
I blink awake hours later, in bed, still dark out. It takes me a minute to realize I’m wearing pajama shorts but no underwear and I’m almost glad I can’t remember Kat and whoever getting me into bed. I sleep on and off, guilt kicking me awake every time I slip toward sweet oblivion. I give up when the sun comes up and blasts through the blinds I didn’t close before bed like usual. I’m too sick and exhausted to go up to the good third-floor showers so I trudge into the second-floor communal bathroom, having to stop and hold on to the sink while a spin of sickness swirls through my stomach. Finally I crawl into the shower with my cute little basket of toiletries spilling onto the cold tile floor beside me. I remember the joy of buying the little blue basket and knowing what it represented. College. Freedoms. Showers without fear.
I puke into the drain just as someone opens a shower curtain across the room. That sssshhhhinnggg of metal rings on metal bars is unmistakable, and so is Samara’s voice, even though I can tell she’s trying to whisper.
“God, Liz, sounds like someone had a rough night.”
I hear my other fellow rookie snicker. Liz says, “Kinda like…” I can’t hear her say my name, but I know she’s talking about me. I lie on the freezing floor, shaking, and finally press up enough to turn on the faucet so I don’t have to hear them recount my night. The water is cold as it rains weakly down on me, and I stare up into the spray, thinking about the rain as it fell on the field, how soothing it was, how far from soothed I am now. It’s all my fault, but I wonder if it really is. I was having a great night until I wasn’t.
Memories flicker through my foggy brain as I try to sober up and figure out how to go on from here. I don’t really want to. I’ve ruined everything.
A line from a song comes back to me as I lie shivering under the cooling spray.
Are all the ruggers happy?
I think about Samara and Liz, my happily gossiping fellow rookies.
Are all the ruggers happy?
I think about the disgust in maybe-Haylee’s voice when she saw my self-inflicted wounds. I vaguely remember her relief when she told Kat she was leaving and going home after taking care of me.
Are all the ruggers happy?
They are. I am not.
I no longer long to be a part of them. I’m surprised and not to find that I want to destroy them, along with their collective happiness. I will never be like them, never one of them. I’m too damaged. I touch the broken strap on my cheap toiletry basket and think about practice on Monday.
Who wants first hit?
I do.