Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.
She was undersized. There was no question about that. She stood just over 5'1" with her cleats on, and weighed less than 100 pounds. She was quick, yes, but not immensely so. But she was good. Damn good. She was a freshman playing on the varsity squad, because even at 14 years old, she possessed an instinct for the game that few could match. She could see... she could feel the game flowing around her. Her anticipation was flawless-- she always knew exactly where to be and where to run to. If there was a hole in the defense, she would find it, and set a teammate loose with a precisely delivered pass. Those watching the girl with the brown ponytail play likened her style to a surgeon: cold, efficient, methodical, precise. But she preferred to think of herself as a butcher. She hated losing, and she hated the girls who wad the nerve to wear a different colored uniform, to dare to try to subject her to the humiliation of losing. And she rarely lost... until the day she lost everything.
The game had started innocently enough. About 3 minutes in, Karen had the ball at her feet and was surveying the situation... The opposing defenders were all over her teammates, but were leaving her some room. They were no doubt trying to close her passing lanes and induce her into trying to force a bad pass through the defense. Their coach had done her homework. So that's how it's going to be. Karen held the ball... circled... waited... and then she saw it. The window was just big enough. She exploded out of her easy jog and made for the goal. The defense was caught flat-footed. She would take it in and do the job herself if they weren't going to mark her. In no time she was behind the startled defenders. Nobody could touch her now. Nobody did. It was a 100 percent self-induced injury. Her foot must have hit a bump or a dip in the grass. All Karen knew was that her right leg just stopped working. She hit the ground hard. The pain was excruciating. Her mind raced... Oh God please don't let it be...
But it was. A complete ACL tear. The medical precedence put the recovery time at 12-18 months after surgery, but every soccer player knows it's a career ender. If you do manage to come back from it, you're never the same. Over the next three days, Karen's mother spent hours leaned over her daughter's hospital bed so that Karen could sit forward, bury her face in her mother's shoulder, and cry. More than once, Mrs. Filippelli felt her daughter's tears soaking clear though her blouse and running messily down her armpit and side.
She had never touched a soccer ball again. To this day she rarely let herself, or anyone else for that matter, see her right knee. Just the sight of that orderly, thick, 3 inch scar could trigger painful memories. She didn't want to think about it, and she certainly didn't want to tell the story to a curious acquaintance or co-worker. They wouldn't understand the magnitude of her disappointment, because Karen did not have the words to accurately describe it. She slept in comfortable, ankle length pajama pants. The few times she did wear a knee-bearing dress, she always wore dark nylons to hide the scar. She rarely went swimming. She had told Jim she hurt her knee and quit soccer when she was young, but she had never filled him in on the gory details, and he had never asked. He had seen her naked often enough, but always in dim light, and, given that there were better things to look at, his eyes had apparently never made it that far down.
Karen snapped out of her little daydream. The years had softened her resentment. She was not a bitter person by any means. Lately she had even been quite happy. As she looked around, though, slowly surveying the office around her, she couldn't help but think there was a world out there where she didn't slog through each workday, where she didn't sell paper... where she wouldn't allow herself to love a man who didn't wholeheartedly welcome her affections. A world she had lost sight of over fifteen years ago, on a rectangular patch of grass in suburban Connecticut.
