Settle the Score Read Free

left. I can help you.”
    â€œThanks, Devin,” Steven said, giving me the sweetest smile, and my heart did a little flip-flop. For the next ten minutes I didn’t think about soccer at all, just ancient trade routes and how when the sun hit Steven’s eyes, it looked like they were flecked with gold. Those ten minutes went really fast!

“Faster! Faster! You’ll never be champions at this pace!”
    I furiously dribbled the ball down the field, zigzagging between the cones set up for practice. Even though I had my hair pulled back into a ponytail, sweat was starting to pour down my forehead and run into my eyes. I hated when that happened!
    A few hours before, I had worried that Coach Darby wasn’t making us work hard enough. But boy, was I wrong. She was in full Demolition Darby mode. We’d been drilling at a breakneck pace for almost an hour now.
    â€œEverybody drop where you are and give me twenty!” she called out, and we all fell to our knees as quickly as we could. My arms strained from the sixty push-ups we had already done today, but I gritted my teeth and did twenty more. I could hear a couple of the girls groaning, but I kept quiet. If Coach Darby even suspected you were weak, she would keep you on the bench. I had been benched by Darby before, and I was done with that. I wanted to play.
    â€œEight laps around the track!” Darby barked, and some of the groans got louder. This was the hardest she’d ever pushed us.
    I jogged to the track, and one of my teammates, Katie, accidentally bumped into me from behind.
    â€œSorry!” she said, and she was smiling. “Darby’s on fire today, right?”
    â€œYeah,” I said, smiling back.
    â€œShe’s burning up,” said Mirabelle, jogging up behind me. “But so are we!”
    She held up her hand, and we high-fived. Then the other girls started high-fiving one another as they jogged. Darby was being supertough, but nobody was giving in.
    I couldn’t believe it. When I’d first joined the Griffons, we’d had no team spirit. Everybody had been really competitive—it had been every player for herself. That was why we had lost our first game. Then Jessi and I had started doing some team building exercises, and once Coach Darby had seen that we played better as a result, she’d let us keep doing them.
    It had kind of felt like a miracle. After all, we were on a team with Mirabelle, who was a member of the Pinewood team, the Kicks’ biggest rival. We’d had some issues with Mirabelle before, but now she was someone I could call a friend. Not a close friend, but a friend.
    But things weren’t perfect. There was one teammate who didn’t want anything to do with team building, or even being nice: Jamie of the Riverdale Rams. During the Kicks’ regular season she had actually tried to sabotage the Kicks so that we would lose! Jessi and I had been pretty upset when we’d ended up on a winter league team with Jamie. Even though we had put the sabotage behind us, it was hard to be on a team with someone who had no team spirit and hogged the ball whenever she could.
    Even as we jogged around the track, Jamie didn’t participate in the spontaneous high-fiving. She kept her eyes straight ahead. Her blond hair bounced in a ponytail against her neck as she ran, barely breaking a sweat.
    There must be ice running through her veins, I thought, which felt a little mean, but it was a pretty honest description of Jamie. I had even tried being nice to her, but she hadn’t warmed up to me at all.
    By the time I finished the eighth lap, my legs were starting to feel like jelly. It was a relief when Coach Darby blew her whistle.
    â€œGather round!” she called out.
    All eighteen Griffons jogged up to Coach Darby. The last rays of the afternoon sun cast an orange glow on her spiky blond hair.
    â€œI want to see everyone here at noon on Saturday,” she said.