“That’s my girl.”

I only just barely won the fight to not call him a sadistic asshole for making me do something that almost made me break out in hives. “I can’t promise that I won’t stutter my way through the entire interview or throw up on the first row, but I’ll do my best.”

Then I was going to punch Eric in the fucking kidney the first chance I got, damn it.

* * *

You can do this, Sal. You can do it.

When I was a little and my dad would ask me to do something I didn’t want to, which usually only happened if it was something I was horrified by—example, trying to kill those gigantic flying roaches that snuck into our house—he’d point his finger at me and tell me in Spanish, “Si puedes!” You can. Then, even if I cried as I went into the room housing the creature from the bowels of hell with a shoe as a weapon, I did whatever it was that I didn’t want to.

‘I can and I will,’ had been the motto I held closest to my heart at all times. I didn’t like people telling me I couldn’t do something, even if I didn’t want to do it. This was how Coach Gardner had gotten me to say I’d do the interview.

I could do it. I could be in the same room as Reiner Kulti. Sit a couple seats down from him for the first time ever in front of several television networks. No biggie.

On the inside, I crumpled into a ball like a dead spider and asked myself to please dissolve into dust sooner than later. This terror, this phobia of mine, was that unreasonable. No one ever says that fear is logical, because it isn’t. It’s stupid and irrational and on a scale of one to ten it sucked about a fifty.

“You ready?” Coach Gardner asked as we waited for the beginning of the press conference. The journalists and reporters were so loud in the other room it was making me sick. How the hell had this even happened? I was usually third down the chain of players that got requested for these publicity events, and that was for a reason.

I could play in front of thousands of people, but the instant cameras got within ten feet of me, I just shut down. I was like the Ricky Bobby of the WPL. I was sure there was a video of me making awful hand gestures throughout an interview somewhere. The three S’s came down to make me look like an idiot—stuttering, sweating and shaking. All at once.

My hands felt like I’d just rubbed them all over my lower back after a long run, my armpits were sweaty… and my leg was shaking. Both my legs were shaking. I knew shit was about to get real when my leg shook.

But instead of admitting that I was nervous, I stuck my hands in my pockets, thanked the lord above that the sweat pants I’d put on that morning were baggy enough so that no one could tell my legs had a mind of their own, and forced a smile on my face. “Ready,” I lied through my teeth.

And unfortunately, he knew me well enough to recognize the fact I was lying out of my ass because Gardner laughed loud. A hand came down on my shoulder and he gave me a shake. “You’re a wreck. It’ll be fine.”

One of the public relations people for the organization peeped around the corner of the hallway and frowned for a second before disappearing again.

I couldn’t do this.

I could do this.

One hacking cough later, I told myself: I could do this. I really could.

My leg only shook harder as someone came over a microphone in the other room, “We need a minute, please.”

Oh God.

“I think I just threw up in my mouth a little,” I muttered more to myself than to Gardner.

“It’ll be fine,” he assured me with a sympathetic smile.

I cleared my throat and nodded at him, begging myself to calm down. I took a couple of quick inhales and exhales before sucking in one deep breath and holding it, like I did when I was too amped up before a game.