Never Leave Again

camp

Relentless.

He is relentless. He does not falter; he does not let his lips part from his whistle except to say 'de nuevo'.

The pitch is empty, save for the red cones marking out the metres on the lawn that I have run over and over again. A ball, last used thirty seconds ago, rolls past me as I watch the fine-cut grass and imagine what it would feel like to keel over onto it.

Alexia will probably be checking her watch, knuckles held against the door of my hotel room, counting down the minutes until she knows she must knock – the agreed time she would check on me, as she promised both our mothers.

But Jorge Vilda is relentless, and we play Costa Rica in two days.

"I do not believe that you wish to start the game," he says as I breathe in deeply. I stick my foot out to the side, stopping the rolling ball and bringing it towards my body with a flick of my ankle. "I refuse to see you as the Talia Segura who wants to be the best in the world."

"We have been going for an hour," I huff between strangled gasps for air.

He shakes his head, disappointed with my response. I await the inevitable. "You will go for an hour more." The whistle shrieks and it is another sixty minutes until I stretch my legs on the way to dinner with the team.

"Not impressed," murmurs Alexia as I slide into my seat, saved next to her so that she can keep both her eyes on me. I have decided that she has two pairs of them, and keeps one set glued to what I am doing and the other to her phone, just in case a certain someone messages her.

"He's just harsh," I reply, following my words with a huge gulp of water from Jenni's glass opposite me. The forward protests loudly, but it is not enough to distract Alexia.

"You're going to get injured." I want to start. I want to be named in the XI for my first ever World Cup. "Take it easy tonight. Call your girlfriend; she's missing you." The jab is a small prod at a bubbling distance that we can both feel growing. It's one thing being so far away at this very moment, but I have left Barcelona and Sevilla, and, on top of that, I have undermined something she is still standing up for.

"Why don't you go and call yours?" I retort childishly, hoping to move the topic to something else. If I bring this up, maybe someone else will input their own teasing and we can forget about why I have not yet had time to shower.

Alexia sighs. I pick up my fork and pretend I am not about to devour anything put on my plate. "You are so annoying," she says, almost fondly. We have gotten closer. Mamá is not moving to Barcelona, but she is no longer hiding from the family we have there. "Come on, get some food in you. We've got a big thing ahead of us, and I don't want you to become a skeleton."

━━━━━━━

For all of Jorge's intense coaching, I actually do earn a starting position in our first match. Salma and I roll around on the floor of my hotel room, both of us equally ecstatic. We are the youngest here, yet we are earning minutes over people with years more experience. It's nice to get a little 'well done'.

Alexia must be frustrated about her knee, but she makes no effort to say anything to me. Instead, she seems to either be on the phone or wrapped in Jenni's arms, and always with a moody frown. I avoid her a little bit, but it isn't because I don't care.

She's just so right. About everything. She warned me earlier, before we left, that Jorge's promise to make me the captain by twenty-five, or to win me every accolade a footballer can get, would come with a price. It has, and it's hard. He's hard. He won't leave me alone, and I hate that I should have listened to my cousin.