Mysteries and Mistakes

[Olive Delaney]

When you only have a couple friends, you get inventive with your excessive amount of free time. In Olive’s case, it wasn’t for a lack of trying; she just had an over the top personality that few people could handle for prolonged periods of time.

Olive decided that her weekend hours should at least be spent doing something useful; though the problem with that was she had a serious lack of life skills and talents. All she really had going for her was a vast knowledge of trashy detective novels. That’s when it dawned on her. From all her years of reading mysteries, she should easily be able to solve a few real life ones. She just needed her ‘big break’, then it would be smooth sailing from there.

Just last night she had overheard another Hammel graduate talking about their alma mater. Apparently some of the soccer team was trying to create a ‘kickstarter’ to get new uniforms.

Now Olive had no idea what a ‘kickstarter’ was, but she was pretty sure it was illegal, and probably had something to do with organized crime or loan sharks. It was up to her to get to the bottom of it before they ended up with cement shoes and swimming with the fishes. Lives were at stake!

All that led to this moment. Olive smoothed out her dress while standing to the side of the soccer field, listening to the team practice. She had asked the lady at the thrift shop to help her pick out something ‘youthful’ looking so she would blend right in, to get inside information. What she failed to take into consideration was that youthful can mean a lot of things. As a result she was now unknowingly wearing a dress covered in images of teenage mutant ninja turtles with the text ‘totally radical’ printed in bright neon letters across the front.

What Olive also didn’t realize was that she wasn’t actually standing off to the side of the field, instead she was several feet within the boundaries, and being blind, she wasn’t able to dodge the soccer ball that then hit her in the face, sending her falling back into the grass with a squeal.

“I’m okay!” She called out, pinching her nose to try and stop the bleeding.

[Damien & Darcy Rittley]

Though Damien and Darcy still had every intention of getting an adult soccer team put together with people from around Pilot Ridge, for the moment they had to content themselves with joining in on the students' recreational games. They meant to ask Chase or the other soccer coach if they could help out with real practice sometime, but for now, this worked well enough. As long as they got to play the game! And anyway, it was fun having hangout time with some of the students outside of the classroom and outside of coach work. It felt weird that they had been students themselves just eight years ago...

But the place still definitely felt home-ish. During a break to retrieve the ball, which had been over-enthusiastically kicked out of bounds by one of the students, Damien nudged Darcy and nodded to the woman who'd arrived not long ago, and seemed to be watching the game. It also seemed like she was a little bit... well, not out of boundaries. However, neither of them knew for sure, they were too far away at the moment, and the student had returned with the ball.

Darcy and Damien quickly returned their attention to the game, Darcy giving a shouted, "All right, let's go, team!" as thoughts of the watching woman disappeared into the heat of the game.

He and Damien had, of course, joined different sides. It was weird to be competing against each other, really weird, but it wouldn't have been fair for both of them to be on the same side. As it was, they pretty much cancelled each other out. And anyway, they were holding back some to keep from knocking any of the kids over, or leaving them in the dust. They had, of course, decided on the holding back thing well before asking the kids to join in their game.

Thump!

"There it goes again!" Darcy called, almost laughing.

"Uh..."

"Oh." Darcy winced as he and his twin saw the ball collide with the woman's face.

"We'll get it!" Damien called, shortly before bolting across the training field, in pace with Darcy. "Hey, are you okay? Sorry about that..." He came to a stop as the girl called out that she was, in fact, okay. That was a relief.

Ohh, but she was bleeding. The twins winced in sync, and Darcy pulled a few napkins from his pocket-- saved from an ice cream cone he'd gotten with Damien earlier. For once his enjoyment of pocketing random free things paid off. "Here," he said, holding out the jumble of napkins. "Keep your nose pinched and lean your head back."

"Or forward. That's better," Damien added.

Darcy nodded in acknowledgement. "But you can use these to clean up, at least..."

[ Just so you know, in case you haven't seen yet, the teams at Hammel are intermural, they don't play other schools. ^.^ I didn't know that at first, so I just wanted to let you know! Also, sorry it took so long to reply-- things've been a little crazy. =) ]