The Right Kind of Normal

Chapter 1: Sports Day

The sun had decided to show up, which Mr Pearce seemed to take as a personal victory.

He strode across the field with the particular energy of a PE teacher on his best day, clipboard tucked under one arm, whistle bouncing against his chest. The field had been divided and conquered – the sprinters were already warming up on the far track, a cluster of girls from Year 10 were stretching near the rounders pitch, and somewhere behind the main building, Jamie could hear the distant thwack of a tennis ball finding nobody’s racket.

Jamie stood with his hands in his hoodie pocket and watched all of it from a careful distance.

He wasn’t avoiding anything, exactly. He’d just learned over the years that if you positioned yourself at the edge of things – not quite absent, not quite present – people tended to leave you to it. It was a skill, like any other. Just not one that appeared on any fixture list.

“Oi. You three.”

Mr Pearce was pointing. The clipboard swung like a compass needle and landed, unerringly, on Jamie, on Mark who was sitting on the grass scrolling on his phone, and on Holly’s brother Chris who had been attempting to become invisible behind a very small tree.

“You’re not just standing around on my sports day. Come on.”

“Sir, I’ve got a note...” Mark began.

“From last year, yes, I’ve seen it, it doesn’t cover this year.” Mr Pearce was already walking. “Netball court. The basket frames are up. Mrs Osler needs bodies.”

Chris emerged from behind the tree with the expression of someone being led to something unpleasant.

“Netball’s a girls’ game,” Mark said, though quietly enough that it was more observation than protest.

Jamie said nothing. He pulled his hoodie sleeves down over his hands and followed Mr Pearce across the grass, and if there was something shifting quietly in his chest – something that felt, strangely, less like dread than its opposite – he kept that entirely to himself.

The court was already half-full. A loose game had started up, girls moving easily between positions, the ball arcing up and snapping through the net with a sound Jamie found, without knowing why, deeply satisfying. Mrs Osler was a tall woman who coached with an air of calm that suggested she had seen everything and been surprised by none of it.

She looked at the three boys arriving at the edge of her court.

“Good,” she said simply. “We’re uneven. Do any of you know the rules?”

Silence.

“That’s fine, they’re simple. No walking with the ball. No contact. You pass, you move, you think.” She looked at each of them in turn. “The thinking is the part most people struggle with.”

Mark and Chris exchanged a look that meant this is beneath us and communicated it so loudly they might as well have said it aloud.

Jamie looked at the court. At the lines, chalked clean and white on the tarmac. At the ball, which was sitting at Mrs Osler’s feet, bright as something newly made.

“I’ll try,” he said.

It came out more earnest than he’d intended. One of the girls – Amy, he thought, from his English class – glanced over at him with an expression that wasn’t unkind. A small assessing look, then a small nod. Like a door being left slightly ajar.

Mrs Osler handed him the ball.

It was lighter than he expected.

The first ten minutes were chaos.

Mark had decided, within approximately thirty seconds, that the best approach to netball was the same as his approach to most things – be loud about it, take up space, and hope confidence covered the gaps. He’d intercepted two passes that weren’t meant for him, argued a contact call, and been gently but firmly repositioned by Mrs Osler three times.

Chris had retreated into a kind of strategic uselessness, drifting just far enough from the action that the ball never quite reached him, which he seemed to consider a result.

Jamie was trying to actually learn the game.

This was, he would reflect later, probably what gave him away.

He watched where people moved before they moved. He noticed that Amy always cut left after a pass, that the girl with the red scrunchie, he didn’t know her name yet, had a throw that went high and slightly wide, and that the space nobody was standing in was usually where the ball needed to go next. He filed all of this away without quite deciding to, the way you sometimes absorb things that interest you before you’ve admitted to yourself that they do.

When the ball came to him the third time, he caught it cleanly, turned, and found Amy already where he’d expected her to be.

He passed. She shot. It went in.

A small sound went up from the girls around him, not quite a cheer, more like a collective note of surprise. Amy turned and pointed at him, grinning.

“Okay,” she said. “He can stay.”

By the halfway point, Mark had wandered off to find someone to complain to, and Chris had discovered a sudden and urgent need to visit the water station that he never quite returned from. Jamie didn’t notice either of them leave.

He was too busy thinking about left, and wide, and the space nobody was standing in.

Mrs Osler called a pause and gathered them loosely at the centre of the court. She was talking about positioning, about how netball was less about pace than people assumed and more about reading – reading the court, reading your teammates, being somewhere useful before you were needed there. Jamie listened in a way he rarely listened to teachers. Not politely. Actually.

“You’ve played before,” Mrs Osler said, and it took Jamie a moment to realise she was talking to him.

“No,” he said.

She studied him briefly with the same calm, unshockable expression. “Well,” she said. “You think like someone who has.”

She moved on. Amy caught his eye and raised her eyebrows in a way that meant told you.

Jamie looked down at his trainers. He could feel something warm in his face that he hoped wasn’t visible.

In the last twenty minutes, they played a proper game.

Mrs Osler put Jamie at centre, which he hadn’t expected and wasn’t sure he deserved, and for a while he was too aware of himself – too conscious of his arms, his feet, the way he was standing – to do much of anything. But the ball has a way of pulling you out of your own head when it needs to, and somewhere in the fourth or fifth passage of play he stopped thinking about Jamie-on-a-netball-court and started just thinking about the game.

He scored once. A short range shot that he almost didn’t take, that dropped through the net so cleanly it barely moved it. The sound it made, that small, clean swish, went through him like something tuning.

The girls around him made noise. Someone clapped him on the shoulder. He couldn’t have said exactly what the feeling was, standing in the middle of that court in the afternoon sun with people moving around him and the ball back in play – but it was not a feeling he recognised from the rest of his life.

It felt, he thought vaguely, right.

Afterwards, when they were drifting back towards the main field and the rest of sports day was breaking up around them, Amy fell into step beside him.

“You’re good,” she said, without any preamble. “Like actually good, not just for someone who’s never played.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do. I’ve been playing since Year 5.” She said it without arrogance, just as fact. “You think about where to be. Most people don’t, they just chase the ball.” She paused. “We train Tuesday and Thursday lunchtimes. And there’s a proper session Saturday morning.”

Jamie kept walking. Ahead of him, Mark was performing a loud and detailed account of how the whole thing had been beneath him, for an audience of two who weren’t particularly listening.

“I don’t know if...” Jamie started.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Amy said easily. “I’m just letting you know.”

She peeled off towards a group of her friends, and that was that.

Jamie walked back across the field. The sun was still high in the sky. Mr Pearce was still striding. Everything looked the same as it had an hour ago.

Jamie put his hands in his hoodie pocket.

Tuesday, he thought. Lunchtime.