I don’t have the fire, Coach B tells me. I forget the score of the tennis match, I never bobby-pin my bangs back to see the ball, I sound like a church kid reciting liturgy during group chants. She ticks each offense off on her fingers, eyes gumball-big as she searches my face for the determination of a Wimbledon-contender. This is high school, I tell her. Coach B puts me on the bubble. AKA above JV, below varsity, in limbo. When applied to salvation, the if-you-ain’t-first-you-last philosophy means if you ain’t in Heaven, you in Hell. 

The bubble is a magical place that earns me the flashy letterman jacket I want, but it doesn’t expect me to show up to team dinners and slurp spaghetti while making small talk with Patti and Linda and other tennis moms. The bubble is also a party of one. On bus rides through cornfields and cow pastures, I prop my knees against pleather seats with the stuffing gurgling out, plug my headphones in to muffle my teammates’ laughter. 

I am too churchgirl for the friends who smoke blunts and give blow jobs. I am too pink hair and nihilistic grunge album for my youth group peers. Mom thinks I’m going through a phase when I meet the Hawaiian skater-punk at Glen Park past dinnertime. She doesn’t remember the books she read me, the ones with texture and scratch and sniff. I tell her his upper lip feels like tennis ball fuzz and he smells like Axe body spray. I tell her I am learning. 

If we beat the other school, the bus returns home smelling like Subway mayo and raisin cookies – Coach B’s treat to us champs. If we lose, the bus smells like tennis bags that haven’t been washed in two years, clotted with fruit-snack wrappers (used) and Carefree pads (unused, typically.) My mind is trained in reward and punishment. I pay attention to the sermon and Grandma Betty’s breast cancer goes poof. I kiss the skater punk and Mom threatens Dad with divorce. 

I want to be Raych: sprayed orange skin, bleached white hair, an eating disorder glamorized by the way she makes a Spandex uniform look baggy. Though she’s team captain, Raych pops in late to practice one day. She hooks her thumbs in her sports bra, drags it up to reveal her fresh-pierced nipples. Don’t tell Coach B, she says. It hurts to run. We stay late after practicing overhead smashes with water balloons. Drenched and shivering, we rehearse for The Sports Show, another popularity opportunity for varsity athletes. They offer bubble-girl a pity-invite to join the back row of the choreographed dance. The Friday of the show, Raych makes us ass-shake and cat-back on the gym floor to Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot. Patti and Linda and Mom watch from the bleachers, horrified. After graduation, Raych will cage dance for a club called Honey. I’ll recognize her when I stumble onto the dancefloor, the synthesized base that makes her body writhe vibrating in my chest.

*

Four years later, Snoop Dogg performs his new gospel album at my Baptist-rooted university. Alumni threaten to withhold funds. They label his conversion a hoax. The student body debates on the destined whereabouts of Snoop’s soul. 

My theology professor quizes us on theories of Hell: 

1. Predestination (the game is over before it starts)

2. Free will (the ball is in our court)

3. Salvation after death (overtime) 

I don’t yet have the words to write D. None of the above. I circle an answer at random, just like I circled the track when Coach B made me run laps after I forgot the score. Take notes on your opponents, she barked from the sidelines. Remember their weaknesses. I took notes on the way Talia’s eyes looked like butterscotch candies from the other side of the net. 

When I tell my mom I don’t believe in Hell, she asks what about justice. What about the years I’ve sacrificed married to your father. What about all those people who took the easy out, split up. I ask her: Is their punishment your reward? I try to imagine Raych and Snoop and millions in a boiling vat with a timer set to eternity, but I don’t have the fire for it. 

*

In tennis scoring, zero is called love. After that, the points are arbitrary. 

*

The origin of the phrase on the bubble is undetermined. Some trace its first use to the Indy 500 in the 70s. A driver dropped in ranking when someone beat his time and kicked him out of qualifying. As he waited on the cusp of making it, one journalist wrote, his bubble burst. I imagine a sweat-greased man sitting behind his wheel, hope dropping like his speedometer at the end of a race. It would be less excruciating to finish last. 

*

When my mom and I play tennis now, we don’t keep score. We see how many hits we can get before the net traps the ball, and out of breath after forty minutes, we head home. Dad snores to a Twins game on the sofa and Mom cooks dinner. She lets me boil the water for the potatoes, but makes Dad mash them. He needs to get his anger out, she tells me. Has too much pent up from when the nuns used to hit him. I watch the water boil in the saucepan.

*

What I don’t know: when baptizing became synonymous with scorching. What I do know: Bubbles go up, not down – unless, of course, they’re dropping it like it’s hot. 

Jamie Hudalla grew up in a one-tractor town in Wisconsin, where she had dreams of becoming a vendor who sold popcorn and peanuts at Minnesota Twins games. She now lives in Roanoke, VA, where she has two new dreams: Finish her creative writing MFA at Hollins University, and hike every mountain before she returns to the land of cornfields.