“I haven’t played in two years.” Ayanna held a strip of orange peel in her hands. “Feels like a lot of pressure.”

“The other team calls itself the Fighting Grandmas. I don’t know how many more ways I can tell you they’re terrible.”

“I don’t know if this is right for me.”

Olivia would’ve laughed at her for saying that. She would’ve said, You are one of the most competitive people alive. You don’t like yoga because there’s nothing to win.

“Their defenders have scored more goals than their striker.”

Ayanna shut her eyes. She tried to lose herself in the warm sun and gorging herself on orange slices.

“If we lose, we lose,” Jane said.

But they didn’t. By the end of the first half, Goal x Hunting x Association was up by two. A brace scored by Ayanna. The thrill of trapping the ball on her chest, the pain of it, but still the control of moving her body through the air and risking falling or slipping or miscalculating where the ball would hit. It was still hard; the way Ayanna approached the ball was as if she had spent the last few years of her life crying and occasionally smoking, and not lifting weights. Yet she knew that night she would lie awake thinking about the goal she’d scored on a breakaway where she breezed past the guy who cared too much and slammed the ball into the top corner. The way it felt to trust herself took Ayanna’s breath away.

“You are our Messi,” one of Ayanna’s new teammates said.

“He’s a winger,” Ayanna replied, but was sure no one heard her, as most of them were hugging and yelling like she had just won them the World Cup.

“Offsides, offsides,” the boy who cared too much yelled, but everyone ignored him. He was clearly wrong and furious.

At different points during the match, he’d kept yelling “offsides” at Ayanna. He received a yellow card from the referee for pretending to give out his own yellow. The boy who cared too much was furious that Jane was wearing cat ears still while keeping goal. He felt it was disrespectful and dangerous. She should get a yellow too.