Practice Girl

by Estelle Laure

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance; YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

"A powerful, poignant story about a girl rewriting her story on her own terms. Jo Beckett's journey of sexual and emotional agency is at once tender, painful, hilarious, and courageous."
—Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces
 
An emotional and empowering novel about reputation and double standards, perfect for fans of Katie Cotugno and Sarah Dessen.

Jo Beckett is looking for love. She's fallen for a few boys, but for some reason, they've never fallen for her. One night, at a party she didn't even want to go to, she finds out the truth. Those boys, who are on the wrestling team she manages, consider her just a “practice girl”—the popular term for girl who’s good enough to hook up with but not to date.
 
With this crushing revelation, Jo feels so many things--heartsick, ashamed, betrayed, and angry. But she refuses to let that label define her. In piecing her life back together, Jo is forced to unpack more uncomfortable truths about all her relationships--from her best friend to the boy she likes--that help her understand her real worth. 
 
From the author of the acclaimed This Raging Light, Practice Girl is a heart-wrenching, relatable, and ultimately triumphant story about a girl who rejects her label and decides for herself who she is to the world.

Release date: May 17, 2022

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

“Frosted Flakes or Cocoa Puffs?” Ty asks, opening an extremely organized cupboard in his massive kitchen.

“Uh,” I say. I’m not hungry, but Ty seems to assume our appetites match. I am used to this type of assumption. It’s the price of having a bunch of guy friends.

“We also have some muesli. My mom says it’s healthy, but I think it tastes like ass. I don’t need pumpkin seeds in my breakfast, you know?”

I giggle. To my horror, it echoes off the quartz countertops.

This is the third afternoon in two weeks I’ve spent at Tyler’s house after school, gradually removing more and more articles of clothing until today, when it was all of them. We had naked actual sex with each other. It was pretty sweet until about thirty-seven seconds after Tyler’s completion, which is when he bounced out of the bed, claiming to be starving to death.

Now I’m sitting across the kitchen island from him while he pours us each a bowl of Frosted Flakes (note to self: I never answered him about the kind of cereal I wanted or if I even wanted any at all). He douses them in milk and I repress the desire to lecture him. Coach and I have tried so hard to get the guys on the wrestling team to care about their nutrition, even got a doctor to come in and talk to them after a kid in Denver gave himself a heart attack from dehydration and mass quantities of bodybuilding supplements. He had been using them to gain muscle, but they were not supposed to be taken by people under eighteen, especially with too much caffeine, no water, and no supervision. It doesn’t matter what we do though. I’ve seen Ty weigh a Snickers to see how it would move the needle on the scale. The guys obsess over calories and density but that’s about it. That’s how much of an impact the doc made, all told.

I try to make myself more comfortable, less self-conscious about everything that just happened between us. I definitely need to keep myself from leaping onto the countertop and yelling, “WE JUST HAD SEX. WHAT DOES IT MEAN, TYLER? ARE WE DATING NOW?”

I take a bite of cereal. It crunches loudly throughout the room and I let the spoon drop to the side of the bowl, too nervous to eat. My thighs are still warm. I can still feel him pressed against my chest.

Ty slides the box of cereal over and considers me. I’m hoping he’s thinking about how we just crossed over a new relationship threshold, maybe doing a little obsessing of his own. What I really want is to believe that the tenderness he showed me as we climbed the stairs to his room, as he held my hand, took his time removing my clothes, made appreciative noises at the sight of my nude body, is still there now that we’ve done it. I cross my arm over my chest and grip my own shoulder even though I’m not naked anymore.

He leans over and pats my free hand. My stomach plummets into my feet. This friendly patting of the hand does not bode well.

“Beckett?” he says, his eyes deep, the color of mountain earth.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?” I recognize the look he gets when he’s trying a new wrestling move—total concentration.

“Of course.” I arrange my face into its best approximation of attentive and extremely attractive.

He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Was that . . . okay?” he asks.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I mean, am I okay? Was it . . . satisfying for you? When we . . .” He tilts his head toward mine. “I just want to make sure I didn’t suck. That you weren’t like, ‘I wish he would hurry up and stop touching me like that’ or counting down the seconds until you could get away from me or something. I mean . . . when I put my finger on your—”

“No!” I cut him off.

“No? No, that was not good?” He leans forward, spoon in hand. Little droplets of milk hang at its edges. I would not be surprised if he produced a notebook from his pocket and started taking notes.

I put my hand over his to reassure him. “Yeah, Ty. It’s good. You’re good. Great.”

Ty’s face relaxes. “Okay, cool,” he says. “It’s hard to know, you know?” He resumes eating. Vigorously.

I want to tell him that it’s actually not hard to know, but I decide there’ll be time for that later.

Looking at him now with his pinked-up cheeks and shifty eyes, I’m pretty sure Tyler Martinez is actually into me, and what I had mistaken for ambivalence has been insecurity all along. It can’t be easy to be a guy. They’ve had to put themselves out there and risk rejection for as long as our social norms have been in place.

Now his face transforms from grave concern to his usual confidence. “I mean, I thought you liked it.” Ty chews on a huge, happy bite of cereal. “But you could have been faking or something.”

“Faking?” I mean, I was faking a little, adding some extra drama.

“I heard girls do that. I don’t know! I’ve only ever been with one other person and it was a couple years ago.” He points to my bowl. “You’re not eating.”

“You’re great, really.” I take a soggy bite. I hope more reassurance will take us out of the sex-talk zone, which is all full of skin and bodily fluids, and into the other one, where I find out where we actually stand. I know these are conversations that should happen before, but it’s like I forget or something.

“I’m so glad we’re friends,” he says after gulping down his sugar milk. “I want you to know that. Sincerely. You’re the coolest girl I know.”

I’m almost positive all the blood drains out of my face.

Friends?

“But I’ve been thinking . . .” he says as he goes to the sink and rinses his bowl. “Maybe we should stop this before it gets awkward. It’s been amazing, but it feels like the right time, don’t you think?”

Wait, what?

Less than ten minutes ago we were breathing hard, the closest two people can be to each other. The world wobbles itself upright again as I realize what’s happening here.

“Wait. Did you say, ‘before it gets awkward’?” Because on the topic of awkwardness, literally everything is already awkward. This couldn’t get any more awkward if this entire afternoon went viral in the form of a dubstep remix. That is how awkward everything already is.

“I mean, you’re one of the team managers and everything.” He’s still talking, but now has come around the island and is close enough I can smell his milky breath. He lays a hand on my shoulder. “We’re together so much of the time, and I don’t think Coach would be into it.

And we’re friends. I mean, our friendship is important to me, and it’s, like, if we do this again—”

“No, totally,” I say with a high-pitched laugh that makes me want to choke myself. I edge myself off the stool, which makes an ugly squeak as it rakes the floor. “If we keep on doing this . . .” I can’t finish the sentence. I can’t make any more words come out. He definitely didn’t seem to give a crap what Coach thought when we were in his room, or any of the other times we’ve hooked up. My brain needs a disinfectant shower. So does my body. Did I override all the red flags and unstable feelings I had about all of it? Did I just tell myself lies so I could justify doing what Ty wanted me to do, what I wanted to do? Or what my body wanted, anyway.

“Hey, are you okay?” Tyler seems to have finally noticed I’m not exactly in the same mood I was in two minutes ago.

“Of course I’m okay, Tyler,” I snap.

“Okay. I didn’t mean—”

“What?”

“Um. Nothing.”

Two minutes ago I was completely detached from reality and the flood of truth, and now I’m not and it’s making me dizzy. I’m not going to be Tyler’s girlfriend. We have just done the most physically intimate thing two human beings can do, and Tyler Martinez is already ensuring he won’t ever have to deal with me again. And maybe, maybe if this were the first time this has happened, I wouldn’t feel like I’m losing my mind.

But it isn’t the first time.

Bowling? Movies? All those fantasies about meeting his parents and going to parties together. Oh my gosh, Jo. You are a complete idiot.

I get to his mudroom at just short of a run, before the dam at the edge of my eyelids breaks. I grab my backpack, trying not to remember how I dropped it when he slid his hand under my jacket and kissed me against this very doorway, how he could barely wait because of how much he wanted me. Ty stumbles along behind me with panic splayed over his blessed good looks, his eyes wide and wondering.

“Beck, are you mad?” He sounds flummoxed. “Please don’t be. It’s for the best, really.”

“I understand, okay?” I grab my big red overcoat from his arms and fling open the back door. “Can we please not talk about it ever again? Literally forget this ever happened.” I’m talking to myself as much as to him.

Forget this ever happened, Jo. Forget this ever happened.

He nods, squints. The wind is blowing its October Colorado self right into his nice warm house and all over him. For me, it’s a welcome relief from my own stinging red cheeks, the curse of white English skin. I can never really hide distress.

I flee into Charly, the old Ford Bronco I inherited from my dad, and as I start it up the Patsy Cline I was listening to on the way here, following behind Ty’s BMW, blasts out of the speakers. I slam the stereo knob to silence her wail.

Ty, who is still watching me from the doorway, raises his hand in a wave. It takes all my willpower not to flip him off. I reverse, trying not to screech out of the cul-de-sac.

I don’t know how I could have been stupid enough to think Ty would be different. It’s not going to be different, because the problem isn’t him. It’s me. It’s always me. Because I want to know what it’s like to fall into someone and have them fall back with equal intensity, I fall absolutely everywhere.

When I fantasize, it’s not about steamy sex, close breaths, skin on skin—it’s about lying side by side in a field of wildflowers, holding hands, and looking at the sky; or petting puppies together; or leaning on a shoulder in a movie theater. I have never understood what I’m supposed to do to get there, but so far everything I’ve tried has been a serious failure. I’m not the kind of girl guys want to introduce to their parents. I’m the kind of girl they want to introduce to the back seats of their cars.

I pull out onto the highway and attempt to gather myself, let the slate mountains, sherbet sunset, and snow guide me away from Ty, but I’m caught in Josephine Beckett’s House of Romantic Horrors.

First there was Joost, a white Dutch exchange student who sent me texts during wrestling practice when I was a sophomore about how it was hard to focus with me around, about how he couldn’t take his eyes off my elf ears and cute, small feet.

No one had ever told me I had elf ears or cute feet, especially with an accent.

I was practically planning our wedding. We would run away together, eat Dutch pancakes and broodje kroket, and vacation in Aruba. Everyone would think we were foolish, but we would finish high school and go on to do great things . . . together, always together. Joost and I had sex everywhere: under the stars by the river, in an actual closet at a party, even once below the stage in the orchestra pit at school. It felt like love.

It took me a few weeks to realize he only came near me in the dark, away from everyone else, and that everything he liked about me had to do with my body. It wasn’t that he didn’t want anyone to know because of me managing the wrestling team, which is what I thought at 

first. He had never asked me about myself, about who I hoped to be or who I had been up until then. My little sister, Tiffany, had been having all these tantrums, and when I said something about having a toddler in the house, he yawned. Yawned.

When I stopped texting him to see if he would notice or text me first, he never asked me about it. Within two weeks he was on to Delilah Vargas. In the daylight. I was so relieved when he graduated and went back to Holland. It was like I had another chance.

But then there was Lucas. Another guy from the team. A lot happens when you’re a wrestling manager and you spend twenty-hour weeks with a bunch of sweaty dudes. Also, Lucas, who is half Japanese, has black hair and cheekbones that could cut a diamond. He looks like a character from an epic fantasy novel. I love epic fantasy novels and so I can’t be held responsible for my actions.

Mrs. Luke Fender.

Mrs. Josephine Beckett Fender.

He spent weeks asking me out before I said yes, because this time was going to be different. I was going to do it right, and isn’t there some rule about how much time you should play hard to get, at what rate kisses should occur, and when those kisses should naturally progress to the next step?

After a few dates, and prompted by various hinting gestures on his part, I gave him a blow job in the movie theater and then told him I had real feelings for him, which in hindsight was not the most brilliant sequence of events.

He spoke earnestly, face cloudy with concern when he said, “I think there may have been a misunderstanding. I’m sorry.”

I don’t know why they apologize. Like it’s going to make anything better. It makes me feel damaged, like I’ve taken another hit and have to get back up again in spite of the fact that I am already so, so tired.

Because in the midst of all the rest of it, I am also the girl whose father died. The wrestling coach, the school’s favorite person, my most beloved guy, the legend who brought everything good and warm and understanding into my life.

Without him, there are no more pizza nights watching bad TV, there’s no more throwing on loud music and raging against the machine in the living room, no more random road trips to odd corners of the United States for dinners in hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Without him, I am unseen.

There’s that, always that.

Also, I may have cursed myself when I lost my virginity. I don’t like to think of such things, but I have to consider the possibility that that may be true.

Because before Joost and before Lucas, there was Sam.

I groan out loud even though it’s just Charly and me. I like to keep these thoughts nice and repressed and I hate when one makes it past my inner gate.

Sam and I have been best friends forever. We’d gone to the same school for years, but it wasn’t until he joined my dad’s Little Wrestlers program in fifth grade that I realized he was as self-conscious and nerdy as me. He was this compact white kid who was more outgoing than me, but also liked watching cartoons. We both obsessed over Marvel, loved graphic novels, and had seen every Star Wars there was (including all of The Clone Wars, twice), so we were a perfect match.

Since then, Sam and I have been together every day. One post-season spring afternoon, we were watching Wolverine and he laughed at something random and the whole world lit up and I saw him like he was a different person. He was the only one who had been by my side through everything. He was . . . beautiful. Magical. I remember taking him by the hand and leading him to his bedroom, him looking at me so surprised, so pleased. I said we should practice with each other so someday when we did it with other people we would be ready.

So that’s what we did. He was so careful, he held on to me until I was ready to let go. It was gawky and fumbly, but we got through it and I guess it was sweet in its own cringy way.

A couple of weeks later Jennifer Evans got moved into our English class and Sam opened up like a flower, turned to face her like she was the sun every time she walked by. I didn’t really care, thought it was kind of cute.

I can’t say I regret losing my virginity to Sam. I can’t say I would take it back even if I could. Joost and Lucas—that was my bad, making assumptions that sex meant we would be in relationships. But with Sam it was different. An innocent little pocket. And I get to keep him for life.

But I still think I might have cursed myself. What happened with Sam was a planned, one-time thing, and I’ve been having unplanned endings ever since.

Any therapist would tell me my search for romance is all about my daddy issues, about having a dad one day and having him gone the next, about hearing a thud and running into the living room to find him facedown on the striped rug he’d bought from Target to decorate the apartment he’d just rented a couple weeks earlier over Bailey’s Furniture in the town center. Any therapist would tell me it’s perfectly natural to go looking for unconditional love in the arms of boys. I mean, they have . . . Therapists have told me that.

But even though I know all those things and accept they may be true, I also know it would be so nice to hold someone’s hand, to have someone walk down the hall with me, out where everyone could see it. I want a giant teddy bear and cheap chocolates for Valentine’s Day. I want dinners with the family and to plan our weekends together and to get mad when he’s tapping his toes and I’m trying to get ready to go out. I know it’s basic or whatever but I want . . . everything, and I don’t think wanting that should equal being pathetic. I always thought that’s what high school was supposed to be: romance good enough to make me forget everything else. Turns out high school is mostly about homework and stress.

It takes me ten minutes to get from Ty’s gated community, Willowshade Heights, to my own subdivision in the Liberty Township, Coyote Valley. I’m supposed to go meet Sam for dinner at 66, the restaurant where I work a few nights a week, but I don’t think I can face him right now. He would know there was something wrong and he would ask questions. So many questions. So I drive past his house and pull around my cul-de-sac and into my driveway just as I’m actually about to consume myself. I pause to make sure my hair isn’t too messed up and that my clothes are all on straight, and mostly that utter misery can’t be read in my eyes, then I take a deep breath and go inside.

Kevin Keller’s house has been my house for the last five years, ever since he married my mother and then impregnated her in unreasonably rapid succession. I still call it exactly what it is: “Kevin’s House.” It is essentially a two-story rectangle with an entryway, living room, kitchen, dining room, laundry room, and pantry, and upstairs is my room with its own bathroom and door leading outside to a little balcony, down a long hall from the three of them. It’s impeccably clean at all times and always feels empty to me. Home with my dad looked really different, filled with color and personality. Kevin said it was lucky this house came with a room separate from the rest of them, so I could have some privacy. I think he meant well when he said that.

The house is decorated with prints of famous paintings and coffee mug inspo. LIVE LAUGH LOVE. That sort of thing. It’s entirely taupe, because Mom says taupe is soothing, neutral in a chaotic world. Sometimes I can’t believe she was ever with Dad. Dad made messes and didn’t tidy up. He had Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses posters on his wall, even in his new apartment , and a row of shot glasses on his counter. ...