One Life Read online

  Rachael and I hadn’t communicated much during her first semester in Portland, and that continued when I joined her in January. We hung out, but I think we both needed a little time to settle in on our own. I fell in love with the place instantly—the city, the team, the soccer field, which was beautiful, surrounded by trees and with wooded mountains in the distance. And then, a few weeks into my first semester, I looked up during practice one day and realized something extraordinary: I had a crush on one of my teammates.

  It wasn’t like, oh, suddenly I’m gay. It took a second to figure out what was going on. But while it was happening, it didn’t feel negative. It was just . . . normal. For the first time, I was attracted to someone, and the discovery thrilled me. No more limbo, no more weird asexual dates. All those years of missing out, of not feeling what everyone else seemed to be feeling and having no idea why, were over, and any regret I might have experienced about those feelings being for a woman were overwhelmed by a sheer sense of relief. Two things struck me. Number one: Duh, fucking clearly I’m gay and why didn’t anyone tell me? And number two: This is awesome.

  The speed at which I embraced this new knowledge about myself is, I guess, unusual. It’s not as though my parents had a ton—or any—gay friends; and although they weren’t homophobes, they weren’t super liberal. Growing up, the only out person on TV was Ellen DeGeneres, and we were surrounded by everyday homophobia. If it was normal to trash someone by using “gay” as an epithet—“You’re wearing a visor, that’s so gay”—that doesn’t mean it wasn’t homophobic.

  And yet I had absolutely no qualms about accepting the fact I was gay. I think some of what I was feeling had to do with Brian. I know plenty of people who, when they come out to their parents, worry they are “letting them down.” Brian hadn’t let my parents down—he was a person in pain—but given how much time they’d spent worrying about him, I wasn’t going to beat myself up for “disappointing” them by being gay. Plus, I didn’t honestly think it was going to be a problem. My parents were conventional, but they were never narrow-minded. My mom is a deeply moral person, and she’s not judgmental; the same goes for my dad. “Your journey, your choice,” she had said when I’d stopped going to church, and she felt that way about everything. My mom is someone who, after a rough start in life, had chosen to be happy, and without even realizing it I had learned from her example. I was so over the moon, so drunk on self-knowledge after so many years of self-doubt, that it was impossible for me to think of being gay as anything but good.

  Suddenly, everything fell into place. Since kindergarten, when I’d cut my hair and dressed like my brother, I’d had no decisive instincts about personal style. At nineteen, my look was—oh, dear. With no better ideas, I had defaulted to the classic, upper-middle-class, white soccer-player look, a dishwater blond ponytail, held off my face by—Jesus Christ—a headband. I immediately cut my hair. I abandoned all interest in girls’ clothing. I felt free to look like and do precisely what I wanted. A few weeks later, a girl on the college basketball team emailed me over the internal messaging system to say, Hi, wanna go out? My entire life began.

  Immediately after my realization, I ran to find Rachael. She and I had drifted apart when it came to religion. I had given it up years earlier, but like our mom, Rachael was still a practicing Christian, which made what happened next much harder for her. When I told her I was gay, she said calmly, “Oh, me too.” She’d even dated someone during her first semester, while I was in Thailand. It was almost impossible for us to surprise each other—of course my twin was gay; how could she not have been?—but I was taken aback that she hadn’t told me.

  I didn’t dwell on it for long; I was too busy being delighted with myself. But looking back, Rachael had a much rougher journey than I did. The church she went to was one of those supposedly liberal ones that pretends to be accepting but actually preaches “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” Which is, of course, motherfucking-ass homophobic. It’s so much worse than regular homophobia, because these people don’t think they’re homophobic. You’re homophobic! And you’re hiding behind Christianity! She would be twenty-four before she shook off the last of this thinking and fully embraced her identity as a gay woman.

  * * *

  —

  Our mom was coming to visit and I was going to tell her I was gay. This was not, I was sure, going to be a big deal. “Honestly,” I said to Rachael, who remained skeptical of my thinking, “she’s going to be totally fine. There is no one gayer than me! She probably already knows.”

  A few days later, I turned up at my mom’s hotel room. After some small talk about the family, I nonchalantly told her, “I’m gay.” She looked totally shocked. Then I was totally shocked. “What?!” I said, and burst out laughing. “This is crazy! Hello?! How could you not realize this?” When my mom finally found her voice, she said something like “No, you’re not,” and that’s when I flew off the handle. “My whole life makes sense now. I’m fucking ready to roll, and you can either get on board or get the fuck out.” Or words to that effect.

  If I could go back and do it again, I would probably extend more grace to my mom. On the other hand, I don’t think you have to extend grace to people who don’t have accepting views. My mom had no moral qualms about homosexuality. It was a protective instinct, premised on the idea that being gay would make my life harder, and if I’d been planning on spending the next forty years in a small, conservative town like Redding, she would probably have been right. Nevertheless, it was annoying, and as we began to talk about it and the conversation got increasingly tense, I created a diversion by looping in Rachael. “Oh, and by the way, she’s gay, too,” I said. When I left, I called Rach and said, “Hey, I just outed you to Mom.” “You really shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  My mom now says she just needed a minute. (To which Rachael says dryly, “Try six years. Water under the bridge, but—”) She needed to process it, she says. “My girls are gay, OK. It’s going to take a moment for that to sink in.” I don’t remember my dad reacting one way or another beyond saying, “OK, whatever, I love you guys,” but for my mom it was a bigger deal. She worried it would impact our success, and she worried what her coworkers would say. “I don’t want the world to be hard for you, or for people to be negative toward you, or for this to affect you or hurt you in any way.” That was how her thinking went, so we finally got to the point where I said, “What exactly is the problem here? Your coworkers have their own lives going on, and if they give it any thought at all, it’ll be to think your daughters are in college, playing sports, and doing great, which by the way is completely correct.”

  I mean, I get it, too. People have hopes and dreams for their kids and it’s not even necessarily about being gay; it’s about being different from what they had planned. To my mom’s credit, she took steps to inform herself. She told me later that she went away and read lots of books about people coming out in their twenties and the feelings they had when they were younger. She also told me she read a bunch of books about homosexuality from a Christian standpoint, “And I didn’t agree with any of them.”

  None of this made it easier for Rachael, whose ambivalence allowed my parents to consider she might just be going through a phase. There was no question of them saying that to me. Rachael and I had switched places again, and for the next few years I was the more confident of the two of us. “The only one who has a fucking problem with this is you,” I said to my mom that day. “The only one who cares is you. The only one saying anything crazy is you.” We’re so similar, my mom and I. We say what we think and then we move on. What I said to her that day is what I say to everyone who thinks it might be better not to be gay: You need to get over it.

  6

  DOWN

  There is no crowd in the world like the college sports crowd. The day before I made my debut for the Portland Pilots, it was as if the whole university was anticipating the game with the same feverish exci
tement that we were. I heard the drum squad practicing across campus; everywhere you looked, people were in purple and white. The following night, we played Stanford in the opening game of the 2005 season before a crowd the size of the entire student body—3,400 people—who went berserk when we won 3–0. I’m not susceptible to impostor syndrome, but getting in two goals—my first in the opening five minutes, and my second, a header, flicked in at the far post in the thirty-third minute—was a relief. Phew, I had justified my scholarship.

  Portland has outstanding records in cross country and baseball, but soccer is the big crowd-pleaser—specifically, women’s soccer. In the college’s then 115-year history, the men’s team had twice made it to the final rounds of the NCAA championship, while two years before I started at Portland, the women’s team had actually won it. In 2002, Clive Charles, the renowned coach and architect of the soccer program at Portland, had taken the Pilots all the way to a 2–1 win in the final round over Santa Clara, a moment of glory the team was desperately trying to repeat. But the last few years had been rough. Charles, a former professional player for West Ham, the English Premier League club, who had coached the US Olympic and Women’s National teams, had died of cancer in 2003, and two years later the team was still in flux. The year I joined, the question was whether we could return to the golden age.

  I thought we had a good shot. When I looked around the locker room, all I saw were Youth National Team players, including Stephanie Lopez, my old teammate from Elk Grove; Natalie Budge; and Angie Woznuk. By far the best player among us was Christine Sinclair, a senior when I joined the team, in her fifth year of playing for the Pilots and already a regular on the Canadian Women’s National Team. She was only two years older than me—twenty-two to my twenty—but her experience so outflanked mine and everyone else’s on the team, she was like a woman among girls, and just watching her improved our performance. Christine was a monster that year, scoring something like forty goals over the course of the season—five alone in our second game, against Oregon. After that, we beat San Diego State 3–0, Pacific 2–0, Wisconsin 5–1, West Virginia 2–0, and with the exception of a 1–1 tie with Pepperdine in October, went undefeated the entire season, until we reached the NCAA first round in November.

  Those early games I played for the Pilots were thrilling. In some ways, playing for a college team is more intense than playing for a regional or even a national team, because the entire community shares in your fortunes. During a big tournament like the NCAA Women’s Soccer Championship, the whole campus lives and breathes soccer in a way I wouldn’t experience again until the mania of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in France. A year earlier, the Pilots had been knocked out by Notre Dame in the quarterfinals, and the year before that, lost the tournament title in the third round to Santa Clara. This year was particularly exciting, because we had gone undefeated all season and it felt like a comeback. Finally, we were back on track. All we had to do was hold our nerve.

  Easier said than done. In the early rounds, we ground Iowa State into the dust with a 5–0 victory and won a straightforward game against Arizona, in which I scored twice. But once we reached the quarterfinals against Notre Dame, we—particularly the older players—had to work to stay calm. This was when we’d lost to Notre Dame last year. In the team’s previous four meetings with Notre Dame, the most successful team in the country after North Carolina, they had won every time. It was hard to not get the jitters.

  And the expectations at Portland were running wild. I had played in bigger games in my life, and before bigger crowds, but this was different. There was so much buzz around campus that the game sold out in five minutes. That Friday night in November, when we ran onto the field, it was to cheers so loud, the capacity crowd of five thousand sounded three times that size.

  Notre Dame came out strong and in the first twelve minutes completely dominated play. All we could do was ramp up the aggression. In the fourteenth minute, I took an outside shot, smashed from 23 yards, and caught the Notre Dame goalkeeper by surprise. Her hands shot out and she got her fingers to the ball, but it was too late; the ball slammed into the back of the net. Five minutes later, I sent a ball across the goal mouth, forcing the goalkeeper to dive to dismiss it, at which point it found Lindsey Huie, who smacked it in from 15 yards.

  Ten minutes later, Notre Dame scored after a corner kick and we went into halftime with the score at 2–1, not nearly a comfortable enough margin. We were a confident team, but it was clear the game could go either way. Three minutes into the second half, my old friend Stephanie Lopez found me with a perfect pass to the left side of the penalty area, and I made a clean shot: one touch of my right foot, lifting the ball straight over the goalkeeper’s head and down into the back of the net: 3–1. It was my second goal of the night, and my thirteenth since my debut in August. A few days later, we would win the semifinal against Penn State on penalties, and a few days after that, the entire tournament, with a 4–0 win against UCLA. Both those games were played at College Station in Texas, and while we were jubilant about winning them and recapturing the title, neither could compare to the game with Notre Dame, played before an ecstatic home crowd.

  I knew that night that I loved the drama of the high-stakes game. I knew I had a big-moment gene that allowed me to feed off the energy of the crowd and enjoy the attention; and I knew that I played my best when the pressure was on. When we won 3–1 that night at Merlo Field, we were so over the moon you would think we had won the World Cup.

  * * *

  —

  I had made a big splash during my freshman year. In the college sports press, I was referred to as a wunderkind who had “wowed the crowd.” ESPN called me a “star” and “world-class talent.” My goal tally was almost unprecedented for a freshman, so when I returned as a sophomore, it would be as the leading goal scorer at Portland. (Christine Sinclair, the previous record holder, had graduated that summer and signed with Chelsea, in England, after making generous remarks about me to a reporter: “However she does, the team is going to do,” she said. “I think she’s that important to them.”) At twenty, with that kind of first season under my belt, you can imagine what I was like: head swelled, feeling great, going into my second season pretty much thinking, I’m awesome. And then Greg Ryan, the USWNT coach, called to invite me onto the national team.

  If anything could bring me down to size, it was walking into the national team locker room as the youngest and least experienced player. In May 2006, I joined the senior team at a residential training camp in LA, and felt like I was stepping into a dream. There was Kate Markgraf, veteran World Cup player. There was Aly Wagner, a national team veteran. The person I was most wowed by was Kristine Lilly, a complete legend who by the end of her playing career in 2010 would be the most capped player—clocking 354 games for the US team—in the history of the sport. She and Kate had both played in the 1999 FIFA World Cup–winning team, which meant that as a teenager I had spent hours staring at their faces on my wall. I couldn’t quite believe I was here.

  Kristine was a particular inspiration to me. She was cool, kind, and unpretentious, but what most thrilled me about her was the fact that she was only five foot four. That someone so slight had risen to the top of the game—through skills rather than brute strength—was hugely encouraging to me, as was her reputation for being an unselfish player.

  Two months later, I was put on the roster for my first national team game, a friendly against Ireland in San Diego, and if training camp had been exciting, this was momentous. I’m low-key about most things. When I play, it’s with the attitude that it’s great to win and OK to lose. Suddenly, however, I was nervous. Losing my first national game would suck. The history of pro soccer is littered with national team tryouts who played one game and were never invited back, and I definitely didn’t want to be one of those. In early July, I downscaled my twenty-first birthday celebrations because I had practice the next day, canceled everything else in my c
alendar to focus on training, and three weeks later, walked out onto the field.

  When you’re surrounded by players who are much, much better than you, your performance improves. It’s easy to be good when everyone around you is good. There are no bad passes, no missed shots. Every opportunity you’re given is golden. Playing on a less talented team can actually be a better test of your skill, when you’re doing the work of three people. But as a young player, working for the first time in tandem with the best players in the world felt like being in a different game altogether.

  That day in San Diego, I ran out alongside titans of the game, including Abby Wambach, Heather O’Reilly, and Christie Welsh. They treated me the way I try to treat younger players now, which was with kindness and seriousness, and not too much fussing. No one can hand-hold you into a great performance, and you want young players to be free and wild. At the same time, you want them to understand they are entering an established professional culture, where the older players set the standard. On the field, the veterans looked me in the eye and, without saying anything explicit, let me know this was another level and I had to hit the ground running. Along with Carli Lloyd and Stephanie Lopez, the other new players, I watched their intensity and commitment, and set about copying them.

  The US battered Ireland 5–0 that day, and while I didn’t score, I played well enough to be immediately reselected for a friendly a few weeks later against Canada, and then for the penultimate friendly of the season, a game in LA against Chinese Taipei. Finally, I scored my first goal for the national team: two, in fact, contributing to a 10–0 win (Carli scored her first international goal in that game, too) over our rivals. It was October 2006, almost a year to the day before the 2007 FIFA World Cup was due to take place, and in November the team would fly to South Korea for the qualifying rounds. I felt sure I had a shot at being included.