We fled into the county fair, trying to lose ourselves in the crowd. I was shaking and furious. Like Marcus, she had sliced into my tender spot, and my instinct was to fight back as hard as I could.
The fallout was huge. Her parents wanted to press charges. I spent every morning in the counselor’s office for weeks when we got back to school in the fall. Her parents also called my mom, who—in her blunt way—asked if they knew why I had punched their little darling.
Just another incident for the Solo family file.
Liz Duncan was my other best friend. Cheryl and I had been children when we became friends, but Liz and I had a friendship that had grown out of mutual interests. She was a year older than me and also played both basketball and soccer. Liz was also an amazing track athlete. She was fiercely competitive but dorky and funny off the court. She was beautiful and dated the best football player at our high school, but like me she wasn’t locked into the popular group. I looked up to her and was happy when she went out of her way to befriend me.
Liz was a midfielder and assisted on many of my goals. Off the field, we were a team as well—two jocks dating football players that all the popular girls wanted. We were both nominated every year for Homecoming princess but seemed destined to never win. It was our standby joke—we thought the hoopla and banquets were stupid—we’d rather have been running suicide drills at practice than parading around in plastic tiaras. But, her senior year, Liz won. A year later, I did too.
Cheryl and Liz and I weren’t angels. We did regular teenage stuff. I sneaked out with my mom’s car before I got my driver’s license. We would party down by the river—often with my mother’s horrible vodka. But we weren’t troublemakers, and I was just as happy kicking the ball around with Cheryl on a Saturday night or shooting hoops with Liz as going to the in-crowd party.
Cheryl and I went to soccer tournaments together. Mary and Dick drove us to Colorado for one and to Long Beach, California, for another. In Long Beach, Cheryl and I went for a walk in search of Snoop Dogg—we knew he was from Long Beach and that the “Gin and Juice” video was filmed there, so we wanted to find the house. We found ourselves in the ghetto, and Mary and Dick were not pleased when we came back to the hotel escorted by the police, who had let us know we were in the wrong place. As usual, I was blamed for orchestrating the outing. “You are the fake angel,” I told Cheryl. “You do everything I do, but you never get caught.”
Our high school soccer team had become a force. We made it to the state championships twice, losing in the semifinals my sophomore year and winning it all my senior year. I finished my high school soccer career with 109 goals, 38 scored in my senior year. As our soccer team became more successful, our games became events. The parents and players helped construct a new soccer field next to Richland High, so we didn’t have to travel across town to play. The football players dragged couches from Goodwill out to the field and sat on them, wearing matching yellow shirts, proclaiming themselves the Bleacher Bums. When we made it to the state finals, it seemed that our whole town drove over the mountains to Seattle to attend, caravanning in buses and cars. Students were allowed to miss school for those two days.
In basketball, Richland went from having a losing program to being a regional contender while I was playing. We had a two-story gym—with that mushroom cloud painted on the middle of the court—and our games were packed with fans, some hanging over the top balcony. We made it to the state semifinals my junior year—and I had my nose broken in the process. I was an aggressive basketball player, stealing the ball at will and snatching rebounds.
All the state semifinals and championships were played on the other side of the mountains, just outside Seattle. My father came to those games. Marcus picked him up in downtown Seattle, drove him to the games, and then dropped him back off on the streets afterward.
IV.
In the winter of my junior year, I was named a Parade magazine All-American as a goalkeeper. I made the under-seventeen national team, which was coached by April Heinrichs. She had been a national team assistant coach when the United States won gold in Atlanta. I went to train with the team in Chula Vista, California, and played a tournament in Florida. April told me I was the top goalkeeper in camp. All around the country, coaches were noticing me: the up-and-coming goalkeeper who only trained at the position half the time.
The recruiting letters started to get serious. And I was beginning to understand that goalkeeping was going to be my ticket. Some coaches promised I could also be a field player, and others dangled playing basketball as an incentive as well. But it was clear that my major selling point was my ability in the net.
I didn’t know what I wanted out of college. When asked by local reporters, one day I would say, “It’s been a lifelong dream to go to Portland or North Carolina.” Another day, I’d say, “It’s my dream to play at Stanford, but Santa Clara is very interested.” What did I know? I just wanted to go to college: somewhere—anywhere—far away. All I knew about North Carolina was that it was really good at women’s soccer: the Tar Heels had won fourteen national championships, and the school put players like Mia Hamm on the national team.
Other schools were interested in me. Portland was a perennially good team that was the pride
