The Abduction (3 page)

“Time’s running out! We need another goal to win! Gracie, it’s up to you!”

Focus, girlfriend!

Gracie’s official position was striker, but Coach had told her to play the entire field. That required extra running, but she could run the whole game. She could run all day. She was running now, to the sideline, to the ball—

—to the ground, face first, breaking her fall with her hands and elbows, hitting hard, sliding across the field, and eating dirt and grass.

“Panty check!”

A snarling voice from above. Gracie rolled over to see the snot glaring down at her. The snot had tripped her from behind, a flagrant foul and a real cheap shot, especially for a girl.

What a total hussy!

The snot ran off. Gracie spat out the gritty dirt and grass and vaulted to her feet; her teeth and fists were clenched and her entire four-foot-six-inch, eighty-pound being was filled with an overwhelming urge to chase after the snot and thrash her right there in the middle of soccer field no. 2.

“Gracie, get a goal!”

But the victory was more important than introducing the snot’s face to Ms. Fist. So Gracie chased after the ball instead, barely noticing the blood and burning on her elbows.

Sally blocked a shot at goal and cleared the ball. Gracie anticipated Sally’s kick and thigh-trapped the ball. One quick fake and she was sprinting up the sideline toward the Raiders’ goal; the referee was keeping pace down the middle of the field, and the snot, her face screwed up with anger, was closing down on Gracie.
The snot had the angle, which meant Gracie couldn’t simply outrun her. So Gracie slowed slightly, allowing the snot to catch up, then she took a big step forward, hoping the snot would think she was going hard up the sideline like she had on the previous goal. The snot went for the fake big time, taking one step that way to protect the sideline route, one step too many—and Gracie punched the ball between the snot’s open legs, spun around the snot, and recaptured the ball. The snot tried to stay with her, but she lost her balance and hit the ground hard, right on her big butt, and rolled out of bounds. Gracie glanced down at her and said, “I’m so sorry
… Not!
”

Then she raced to the goal—
a breakaway!
—only the keeper standing between her and a last-second victory for the Tornadoes and glory for Gracie Ann Brice, the next Mia Hamm. The referee put his whistle in his mouth and checked the time; only seconds remained in the game. Gracie moved into position for her patented power kick—the keeper ran out to meet her this time, leaving the goal unprotected—aimed just inside the near post, planted her left foot, timed her kick perfectly, and—

—slotted a through ball to Brenda in the goal box behind the keeper instead. Brenda kicked the ball into the open goal just before the cute referee blew his whistle to end the game.

The Tornadoes’ stands erupted in cheers!

The Raiders’ keeper was now looking at Gracie with a stunned expression on her face, as if to say,
You passed off the game-winning goal?
Gracie shrugged. She figured Brenda needed the glory more than she did. Heck, Mia Hamm was a team player.

The other girls mobbed Brenda. Gracie was about to join in when she heard a manly voice: “Number nine—you’re a player!”

The studly referee was walking past and pointing to her—and winking at her.
Oh, my God, I’m so sorry, Orlando, but I’m like, totally in love!
She stopped dead in her tracks and stared open-mouthed at the referee as he walked off the field; he was dreamy and she was dreaming of him coming to the house after the game on a Friday night like tonight and picking her up to go to a movie—of course, it would have to be rated PG because she was only ten, which might prove a bit of a problem but … she was rudely bumped back to reality by Coach Wally barreling past. His big belly was bouncing, his arms were spread wide, and he was blubbering like a baby. He scooped up Brenda and bear-hugged her like he hadn’t seen her in years. Coach Wally was Brenda’s dad.

The other dads were running onto the field and bear-hugging their daughters. But not her dad. Sometimes, like this time, Gracie wanted him to be more like a dad and less like a big brother who played Nintendo with her and took her and Sam to Krispy Kreme every Saturday morning and giggled until it hurt when Mom caught them throwing water balloons from the balcony off her bedroom at Ronnie and the other boys rollerblading down the sidewalk, and whose worst threat of punishment was to eBay her. Just once, she wanted him to be a real
father
, to scoop her up and bear-hug her like he hadn’t seen her in years—to be her grownup manly DAD, for Pete’s sake! She looked for him.

“Stupid, stupid rat creatures! Lou, you tell those brain-damaged bagbiters I’ll take my IPO and go home!”

A shrill whistle interrupted John R. Brice’s rant. He glanced over to see the girls formatting themselves in a linear sequence in the middle of the field while the parents were forming parallel lines and joining hands overhead to configure an arch.
Cripes,
the victory arch, a post-game protocol that required social engineering, interpersonal contact with the other parents. John was thinking,
Maybe I’ll give it a miss this week,
when he spotted Gracie giving him the eye and gesturing for him to get out there!
Beam me up, Scotty.
He much preferred interfacing with AI systems over liveware, not that he was antisocial in the extreme; he was just uncomfortable (Elizabeth would say inept) when exchanging content in an offline mode, like most hackers who had spent the vast majority of their lives interacting with a cathode ray tube rather than with human beings. Part of the firmware.

He sighed and said to the phone, “Time out, Lou … the arch thing.”

John jogged over and joined camcorders and cell phones overhead with a GQ dude who was everything John was not: tall, handsome, Hollywood hair, athletic build, wearing a starched white shirt, a stylish tie knotted like he knew how, and a beeper clipped to his belt—a college jock upgraded to real estate, no doubt. Another football dad.

“Great game, huh?” the dude said through outstretched arms.

“Yeah, great.”

“Who’s your girl?”

John sighed again. He never missed Gracie’s games, and he couldn’t help but enjoy himself, his daughter the star player, particularly since he had never been much of an athlete himself. Fact is, he was so lame at sports that back in grade school the girls were picked for the recess teams before he was.
Little Johnny Brice.
He was ten years old before he realized
Little
wasn’t his first name. Fast forward twenty-seven years and now Little Johnny Brice was standing in the middle of a soccer field across a victory arch from one of those guys who was picked first for every recess team and the dude’s asking him who his daughter is and his daughter is the best athlete on the field but he doesn’t want to tell this room-temperature-IQ lamer that because he knew all too well what was coming next. John braced himself.

“Number nine,” he said.

“
Gracie?
”

The dude’s thick eyebrows shot up, and he looked John up and down with that familiar bemused smile.

“Gracie’s
your
daughter?”

It wasn’t the first time John had suffered that bemused smile at one of Gracie’s games. Point of fact, it had become an every game thing ever since the football dads started attending the girls’ soccer games. Five years ago when Gracie had first started playing soccer, John had been the only dad at the games, the football dads no doubt thinking,
What’s the point if the girls can’t even hit each other?
But now, Elizabeth had informed him, federal law required gender equality in college sports, so girls were getting scholarships to play soccer, softball, volleyball, and just about every sport but football. And that had brought the football dads to their girls’ soccer games like sleazeware to cyberspace: Suzie might not be able to play middle linebacker at the University of Texas, but if her soccer skills could save dear old daddy tuition and room and board for four years, he’d dang sure make her games.

Problem was, these high-testosterone dads brought their football instincts with them to the soccer field, yelling and screaming and getting into fistfights with other dads whose daughters were trying to steal Suzie’s scholarship. The quest for college scholarships had turned youth soccer into a ruthless competition among the parents. So John always stayed to himself down the sideline and never commingled with the other dads, except for the post-game victory arch and the inevitable bemused smile. After next week’s game, John R. Brice would throw his narrow shoulders back, look the dude straight in the eye, and say,
Dang right, she’s my daughter! And I’m a freaking billionaire!
—a response guaranteed to wipe that bemused smile off his smug face.
But this week Little Johnny Brice just shrugged.

“Yeah.”

The dude shook his head as if pondering one of the great mysteries of the universe. “I played college ball at Penn State, but my girl’s not in the same league as Gracie. Guess you never know where it comes from.”

“eBay.”

“What?”

“I bought her on eBay.”

The girls filed past the other team, exchanging low fives like they were afraid of getting cooties, as Gracie would say, then raced through the arch as their parents cheered insanely.

“Great game, girls!”

“Way to go!”

“Yeah, Tornadoes!”

The final girl ran through, the arch broke up, the mothers embraced each other, the dads swapped hard high fives like they had just won the freaking Super Bowl, and John R. Brice stood there in the middle of a dang soccer field holding a camcorder and cell phone and feeling like a lurker in a porn chat room, as he always felt when male bonding broke out. So he said, “I’m outta here,” hit the Esc key, and exited this app.

Gracie got her concession ticket from the team mom then waited for Brenda and Sally. When they arrived, Brenda leaned in close and whispered, “Thanks for giving me the goal.”

Gracie gave her a little hug. “I gotta tell my dad we’re going to the concession stand.”

They walked over to dadrnerd@we_be_geeks.com; he was yelling at the phone and filming his shoes now, God bless him.

“Harvey doesn’t have the brainwidth to understand the value of the technology! Lou, this is the next big thing, dude!”

He ran the phone and his hand through his curly black hair—it was now standing on end—and he stood out like a, well, like a geek among grownups. The other fathers wore suits and ties and starched white shirts and looked like the lawyers and doctors they were. Her dad looked like the college kid who lived next door. The other girls choked back giggles. Dad noticed her and smiled and aimed the camcorder directly at her face.
Gracie reached up and switched the camcorder off then pointed to the concession stand and whispered, “Snow cones.”

“Hi, honey,” Dad said. Then, into the phone: “No, not you, Lou, my daughter. Hold on a minute.”

John R. Brice squatted, wrapped his arms around his daughter, and embraced her; he inhaled her sweaty scent. A thin glaze of moisture glistened on her flushed face, her short blonde hair was damp and stuck to the sides of her head, and her blue eyes sparkled like a multimedia LCD monitor. He placed the camcorder on the grass, flicked a drop of sweat from her cheek with his finger, and admired her. She was swell.

Dad was looking at her like she was a brand new eight-hundred-gigabyte hard drive just out of the box.

“Gracie version ten-point-oh,” he said. “Best of breed.”

Gracie said to the other girls, “I’m the applet of his eye.” With her index finger she pushed the glasses up on her father’s face. “And he’s my favorite propellerhead in the whole W-W-W.”

Dad grinned like he was embarrassed. “Your shoe’s untied,” he said. She held her foot out like Cinderella trying on the glass slipper. He reached down for the white laces but grabbed his blue shirtsleeve instead. It was stained. He looked from his sleeve to her arms.

“Hey, you’re bleeding!”

Gracie examined her hands and arms. She
was
bleeding, from both elbows, where she had hit the ground when the snot tripped her—which reminded her. She looked across the field to the Raiders’ sideline and spotted the snot standing next to her father, the big butthead. Their eyes met; the snot raised her hand. Gracie thought she was going to wave, ready to put their hard-fought athletic competition behind them; instead, the snot stuck her tongue out and gave Gracie the finger. Gracie’s face flashed hot, as if she had just stuck her head in the convection oven—she wanted the snot alone, like way bad. But it wasn’t going to happen here and now. She turned back to her dad.

“No big deal,” she said. She glanced over at the parking lot. “Guess Mom’s trial didn’t end. Oh, well, maybe she’ll make the playoffs. You want to get a snow cone with us?”

Dad held the phone up. “I gotta talk to Lou.”

“Hi, Lou!” Gracie shouted at the phone.

John R. Brice watched the girls skip off and merge into the stream of colorful bodies flowing toward the distant concession stand set back against the thick woods. He filled his shallow chest with the smell of popcorn riding out on the breeze and smiled. Ph.D.’s in the Algorithms Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Sciences aren’t given to emotion, as a general rule. Emotion had no place in the virtual world, where logical, ruthless intellect prevailed. In fact, the closest hackers came to emotion was emoticons, using ASCII characters to configure facial expressions in online communications. Virtual emotion. Real emotion belonged in that other world, that nonvirtual arena of pain and shame and smart-ass-ex-college-jocks-upgraded-to-real-estate that John Brice visited (like today) but did not inhabit.