One Life Read online

  We didn’t talk about Brian’s problems as part of a larger picture. We didn’t need to; we understood without having to articulate it. I didn’t learn about the broken prison system, or racism in the criminal justice system, or how the races are pitted against one another by people in power in a political theory class or by reading about it in the newspaper—although much later, in my twenties, I would go out of my way to educate myself. But at a critical point in my adolescence, it was in my home, day in, day out: the reality of how a broken system fails the most vulnerable, and how once you’re in it, it can be almost impossible to get out.

  We weren’t always sympathetic. My brother continued to be in and out of prison and to go through cycles of sobriety and relapse, and while, as young kids, Rachael and I had felt scared and sorry for him, as we got older, we got mad at all the pain he was causing. I went to visit him a couple of times when he was in Shasta County Jail, but I wouldn’t travel farther; and once he was in Susanville and Pelican Bay, both miles away from anywhere and involving a whole complex process of visitation, that was it; I was done. My parents didn’t visit him much, either. They told him, We’ll always love you, talk to you, and send you money, but beyond a certain point we’re done with your fucking antics, besides which, hello, we’re actually busy raising your child. Austin was born when Brian was twenty-one and we were sophomores in high school, to a mom who, like our brother, had a history of drug abuse. My parents stepped in immediately. Austin, who is nineteen now and a firefighter, has never known any other parental figures.

  The irony is that because of Brian, Rachael and I were probably much better behaved than we might otherwise have been. Anytime we were tempted to rebel, we’d both think, Jesus Christ, Brian was a drug addict at fifteen and then in jail. OK, we’re not going to do that. We weren’t big drinkers in our teens and we didn’t stay out late, partly because we always had practice the next day and partly because we’d seen our parents go through enough with our brother. Rachael once hid in the trunk of a car to sneak out of school in the middle of the day and was put in detention (“Good,” said our mom), and as far as I can recall, that was it.

  And we were busy. A year after our brother came out of prison, Rachael and I went to Foothill High School, where Brian had gone and was still fondly remembered. We did drama and were on the student council. We played lots of sports besides soccer. We were lucky—we had found something we were good at and loved at a very early age, and it basically carried us through adolescence. But we also understood that to go forward we would have to be good at other things, too. I wasn’t top of the class, but I was always on the honor roll and mindful about keeping up my academic average; I wasn’t going to get Cs and Ds and blow my chances of what seemed, at the time, like the furthest my soccer career might take me: a scholarship to college.

  This heady prospect became a lot more real when, at fourteen, Rachael and I were scouted by the Olympic Development Program, a national youth training organization that exposed us to better coaches and players. Soon after that, we began playing for Elk Grove and ferrying back and forth to Sacramento. Elk Grove wasn’t the biggest or best team. In fact, a few years later, when we started playing in college scouting tournaments, we were often the underdogs and our coach was as excited by the talent scouts as we were. (“They’re all lined up!” he’d say breathlessly, looking at the guys with clipboards standing under the floodlights on the sidelines.) Slowly, however, we started making our way up the national rankings. In 2003, we came second in the Girls’ Under-18 US Youth Soccer National Championships, losing to the Peachtree City Lazers in the final game, in which I scored the equalizing goal. And we watched as players a little older than us won full soccer scholarships.

  One day when I was sixteen, the phone rang. It was a representative from the US Under-17 Women’s National Team, inviting me to play for an international youth game in France. A few weeks later, a huge parcel arrived in the mail, addressed to me and overflowing with USA-branded loot: shin pads, sweatshirts, T-shirts, polo shirts, cleats, the whole nine yards. A few weeks after that, I was in France, pulling on the USA shirt for the first time, a series of events so implausible I could hardly process them: the call-up, the free stuff, the application for my first passport, followed by the plane ride to France and the game—I’d never experienced anything like it.

  Still, I didn’t think it would lead to anything. Being picked for the youth side was a huge deal, but it didn’t guarantee or even raise much of a hope of anything more. The national youth sides drew from a huge pool of young players, most of whom would never play nationally again, and I didn’t know anyone who’d made a career out of soccer. The furthest Rachael and I could see was still college. We might wildly dream of one day playing in the Olympics, but it was hard to square with the reality of our mostly smallish league games in California.

  And we still lost a lot, something I didn’t always handle that well. My brother Michael came to watch us play in a tournament in San Diego one time. Like the rest of us, he’s super competitive with an amped-up personality. He’s also big into sports. After fighting really hard, we lost the game, and when we came off the field, we were bummed. So was my brother. As Rachael and I sat on the ground drinking water and commiserating with the coach, Michael started mouthing off. “I can’t believe you lost!” he said. “You had that game! I can’t believe it!”

  My mom considers me the most chill of all her kids, and it’s true that since my early temper tantrums had died down, I was generally pretty relaxed. But when I lose it, I lose it, and I was already mad with myself for blowing the game. I looked up at my brother. A week earlier, he’d had a front tooth knocked out in a fight and it hadn’t been fixed yet. “You think you could do better, you toothless, inbred, backwoods degenerate?” I said. I didn’t yell, but I was vicious, and everyone stopped talking and stared. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but when I’m attacked, I can sometimes retaliate too hard. Though on that occasion, I still think he deserved it.

  We missed out on a lot because of our playing schedule. There were no weekend sleepovers, hardly any parties, and I think I went to one prom and one formal dance throughout high school. We did have limits, though. The conventional path for a player with talent at that age is to graduate to playing for your state team. Rachael and I both made the cut. But after going to a couple of regional training camps and touring the country with the California team for a few months, we decided it involved too much travel and quit. We actually had a life at high school. Of the two of us, Rachael was still the more socially dynamic—after school, I would generally be on the couch, watching sports, and yelling to her, “What are we doing later?” while she ran around making plans—but things had settled down since middle school and I had good friends. We weren’t alphas, but we had earned respect, particularly when I helped win competitions for our entire grade. Rachael and I didn’t play soccer for our high school team, which was too small for us by then, but in our junior year we played in the school’s annual powder puff football game, a hugely competitive tradition in which the junior girls played the seniors, and every year the seniors won—except the year Rachael and I played, when the juniors won 65–10.

  Still, in spite of our OK social lives and all the hours on the field, the people we spent the most time with in our teens were our parents. It’s an overlooked aspect of being a soccer mom or dad that you will probably hang out with your adolescents more than you did when they were toddlers. At an age when most of our friends were off partying, we were with our parents in the minivan. After all the drama with Brian, it felt healing to hang with them, and we were also stupendously grateful. It’s not a characteristic generally associated with teenagers, but we would have to have been stupid not to appreciate what they did for us—not just the getting up so early every Saturday, but all the money they spent on travel as well as tournament and coaching fees, when their finances were already strained.

  They still watched us li
ke hawks. My mom is prone to worrying, and after Brian, she was in a constant spin cycle of terror that one of us would go the same way he did. We would always hear from her about “the dangers of binge drinking,” or she’d tell us, “Don’t drink and drive,” or “If you’re walking across a deserted parking lot at night, put your keys in your hand.” When we went to college, she would send us endless dire clippings from the newspaper, not just about drugs, but about rape, robbery, and anything else bad that could happen. Rachael had a staph infection in her knee once—just a topical thing—and my mom sent her the story of a girl in college who lost her leg after a similar infection. She’s such an alarmist that we’d have to tell her, that’s crazy, relax, it’s not happening to us. But we understood it, too. She and my dad had been so burned by what happened with Brian.

  5

  OUT

  The University of Portland wasn’t our first choice; in fact, Rachael and I didn’t even want to visit. The city was too cold, too rainy, and the college was too small—only three thousand kids, which we thought was super lame—and too close to Redding, a mere four hundred miles north of home. Our mom put her foot down: before making a decision, we had to see every college that was offering us a scholarship, which is to say every college that saw us play. (The exception was North Carolina, which only gives full scholarships to national team players and had an attitude like, We’re the talent and you can come here or not, to which we politely said: not.) We thought we wanted to be near the beach, somewhere like Santa Barbara, or Santa Clara, where the soccer coach was so keen on recruiting us he picked us up from the airport. But after visiting those schools, we had second thoughts; they seemed like party colleges trying too hard to be cool. Rachael and I didn’t know what we wanted exactly, but we knew that wasn’t us.

  At eighteen, we still thought this way—as a single unit. For a second, we had considered applying to different universities, but had just as quickly abandoned the idea. We had such similar tastes we’d probably end up choosing the same college anyway, and why make life harder by depriving ourselves of each other? We couldn’t see it at the time, but in fact our lives had already started moving apart. To get to the highest level in soccer, you really have to want it—not just the playing but the lifestyle: the travel, the brutal physical demands, the uncertain career path. In our last year of high school, Rachael was starting to broaden her interests. She still loved to play, but as we looked toward college, she began to be interested in other things, among them medicine and business. Meanwhile, I was still thinking only of soccer.

  One weekend in the fall of 2003, we went on a recruitment visit to the University of Portland. It’s a private Catholic university with a tuition of forty thousand dollars, and they had offered Rachael and me full scholarships. A year earlier, our friend Stephanie Lopez, a teammate at Elk Grove, had won a similar scholarship and told us it was amazing, but we weren’t entirely convinced. We knew Portland had a good soccer team, but that’s all we knew. Looking back, I find this funny. A city so achingly liberal it has become a kind of joke—of course we belonged there. And on that first visit, we both lost our minds. Shrewdly, the university had invited us while it was hosting a big Nike soccer tournament, and on a beautiful fall day when the campus looked stunning. After watching the tournament, we called our mom. “Oh my god, this is it, we love it,” we said. The soccer team was cool, the field was amazing, Portland was perfect, and the college vibe jibed with what we were looking for—somewhere that wasn’t trying to be anything other than what it was. We were in.

  Or at least Rachael was. We accepted the offers in early 2004, and were due to start at Portland the following September. In February, however, I received an astonishing phone call: it was a coach on the US Women’s National Team, offering me a spot to play in the FIFA Under-19 Women’s World Championship in Thailand later that year. A year earlier, when I’d played for the U-17 team in France, it had felt very much like a one-off. Now a pattern was emerging, and I was so stunned I could hardly relay the information to my parents. Then I looked at the dates. The competition was due to take place over three weeks in November. I would have to defer entry to college until January 2005.

  I’m not exactly modest. I knew I was good, and I thought I deserved my place—it’s not as if I were running around after the phone call thinking, Oh, it’ll just be an honor to be there. And yet winning a spot on the national team came as a huge surprise. I’d never been the best player on my team. And I hadn’t taken the conventional path. A lot of the other national team members had come up through their state teams and had been playing for the national side for years, on the Under-14 through Under-18 teams. Compared to them, I was a late developer who had shot out of relative obscurity. And while Rachael and I had been single-minded about soccer, our parents had worked hard to give our lives balance. To be chosen as one of the eleven best players in the country was a very big deal. I couldn’t quite believe I was here.

  For the first time, Rachael and I would be playing apart, on different sides of the world and for different teams. It was an odd feeling. We had been neck and neck in soccer for so long, and now one of us was pulling ahead. The fact that it was me came as no surprise—Rachael was an incredible athlete, but during the last few years I had become the stronger one. Plus, soccer had already given us everything we wanted: a ticket out of Redding. Years of traveling the country for games had broadened our horizons, and for a while now we’d been desperate to get out.

  Still, one of us being chosen while the other wasn’t could have harmed our relationship. I think the reason it didn’t comes down to how we are with each other. During high school, when Rachael excelled socially, it made my life easier, not harder. We’d always been competitive for rather than with each other, seeing ourselves reflected in each other’s performance; if one of us was happy, it was half the battle. We were also so frank with each other that rivalry—not the camp drama of teen girls fighting, but real, seething resentment—had no air to breathe. Part of why I have such an honest assessment of myself is that I’ve always had Rachael in my peripheral vision; it’s impossible to hide from the kind of mirror that shouts abuse when you’re not up to scratch. When I got the call from the national team, there was no weird jealousy. She was as excited as I was.

  The rest of the 2004 season went by in a blur. Every Saturday morning, we got in the van as usual—now with Austin, a toddler, in the back with us—and drove to play with Elk Grove. In June we graduated high school. Rachael and I were psyched to move on, but also grateful for all the support we’d been given and wrote thank-you notes to some of our teachers. I think our parents breathed a sigh of relief, too. We’d gotten through adolescence unscathed, and after all their hard work and sacrifice, things were starting to pay off. When September came, Rachael went to Portland and I started training in earnest with the national team.

  It was a good squad, full of future stars. Becky Sauerbrunn, my future national teammate and ally in litigation, was on the team, as were Stephanie Lopez and Amy Rodriguez. And goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris was a prodigy. The Under-19 Women’s World Championship wasn’t a highly publicized event—if adult women’s soccer struggled for attention, the teenagers weren’t making any headlines. But it was an amazing experience. There were twelve countries in the tournament, and we played across four venues in three cities—Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Phuket. I had traveled abroad for a few games before—after that first game in France, to Mexico, and once to China—but this was different: three weeks of games with an average crowd size of eleven thousand, rising in the quarterfinals to a crowd twice that size.

  I performed pretty well and scored three goals over the course of the tournament, though I remember more about the spectacle than about the soccer itself. Our highest-scoring game was against Russia in the qualifying round, which we won 4–0, before being knocked out by Brazil in the quarters. (Germany won the tournament, beating China 2–0 in the final.) Our team was given the fair play
award, which is a bit like getting a perfect attendance record in school, but it didn’t matter. The whole experience was mind-blowing: playing at that level, in front of an international crowd, and while wearing a USA shirt was beyond anything I’d dreamed of. We were in Thailand for a month, and you can imagine, a nineteen-year-old hanging out in Bangkok and on the beach in Phuket—it was wild.

  If this was life as a pro soccer player, I was in, and in my excitement, the opportunities looked endless. Just over the horizon were the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup and the 2008 Olympics. I wasn’t one for advance planning, and had no real sense of what a “career” in soccer might look like, but it didn’t seem ludicrous to assume this was the beginning of everything.

  * * *

  —

  It’s a new world when you go to college. Life is cool and different and you can do whatever you like—stay up late, drink, change your mind about everything. Portland’s a small city, but compared to Redding it seemed like a metropolis, and to Rachael and me, the liberal vibe felt like jumping into water after crawling across a desert. I became instantly, massively obnoxious. When I went home, I lectured my parents about conserving energy and recycling (my dad told me wearily he’d been doing both for twenty years). I had voted for George W. Bush in 2004, because that’s how everyone else I knew voted, and frankly I’d thought voting at all at that age was highly commendable. But in college, after studying sociology with a minor in political science, I understood for the first time what Democrats and Republicans really were, and that there was no way I was a Republican. Believe me, I let my parents know about the errors in their thinking. The liberal wing of the family, consisting of me, Rach, and our aunt Melanie, started to get under way.