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the ball into the goal. I managed to avoid the line of girls who were supposed to do something with the ball, and spent the afternoon sort of lurching down the field, hoping not to fall into ditches. When I watched Noel descend upon the unmanned goal and miss it by a good three feet, I knew that neither of us would make JV. Rather than humiliate ourselves by being the only upperclassmen on third team, we decided to pursue independent walking as our sport—something I was pretty sure Noel had made up on the spot. She said someone named Ms. Sjursen would sign off on it for us.
    “Will that count?”
    She thought a moment. “I think so. She’s a little bit senile, but she’s good with lists. She runs the equipment center and just sits there marking stuff in and out all day. She can just mark us in and out as well. Plus she likes me. I bring her cookies sometimes.”
    We were walking by the varsity field on the way back to the dorm when I first met the disaster I would come to know as Pigeon. She was sitting on the bench, picking at her nails and biting her lower lip, when she saw us and waved. She jumped up and ran over, faster than I’ve ever run.
    “Oh my God, are you Calista?” she yelped when she reached us.
    She was lithe and bronze with huge brown eyes and darkhair pulled back in a tight ponytail. There was something a little off about her. She wore her lacrosse kilt buttoned high and tight at her waist when the other girls wore theirs slung down around their hips. And she was unattractively thin, all her edges firmly demarcated as if she were perpetually posing as an awkward nude.
    “She goes by Cally,” Noel sighed.
    “Did you guys make JV?” Pigeon asked with a soft lisp, looking me up and down in a way that I could describe only as impolite.
    “We decided to do independent walking instead,” Noel said, smiling at her like she was a benighted child.
    “Oh my God, what, like just walking around?” She laughed too loudly and made a face at my shorts. “Where did you get those shorts? They’re enormous. Are you being, like, ironic or something, because I don’t get it. So walking around? Just walking around? That’s not even a sport. Did you get it okayed with someone?”
    I backed away from the sheer force of her, though she was so small I feared a light wind might topple her.
    “Pigeon, you’re in,” an exasperated girl called from the field.
    Pigeon jerked her head around to the girl, shrugged, gave my shorts one more pained look, and loped back to the field.
    “Wow,” I said, finally exhaling. “So that was Pigeon, huh?”
    “Yeah,” Noel said as we continued on. “That was Pigeon.”
    “She’s kind of like an eight-year-old on crack.”
    “Oh, just you wait.”
    “Where’s she from?”
    “Spain. Her parents are descended from Spanish royalty orsomething. It’s not that she’s a bad person or anything, but ten minutes alone with her and you will want to kill yourself.”
    “And she’s a sophomore?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So why do you guys hang out with her?”
    “Helen loves her. She thinks she’s hilarious. She just showed up to lunch one day dragging Pigeon along and insisted we integrate her. We all thought it was some kind of elaborate joke. I mean, you never know with Helen. My sister eats Sno Balls for dinner and I still don’t know if she’s just being eccentric. But she was adamant about Pigeon and, well, here we are.”
    “They still make Sno Balls?”
    “Yeah. She’s so weird.”
    Noel headed off to her dorm, and I took the long way back to mine, skirting the edge of the woods, listening to the whistle of the wind in the pines.
    Walking around St. Bede’s, I couldn’t help thinking of Clare. With every step I took, I wondered if the ground beneath me had been touched by her feet, so big back then in her pink Keds and her purple socks, turned tiny with time. I imagined that now I would be able to hold one of them in my hand. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Big