Red, Blue, Me, and You

Real Life

As I get in the car after training my mother looks most unhappy.
"What took you so long? I've left your brothers at home by themselves, because Dad got held up at work. We need to get back to them quickly," she almost shouts.
"Liam's 19 years old," I reply, "he's capable of looking after Ben for an hour."
She gives me that look mums give their children which warns them not to talk back. "That's not the point Geo. I already give up my time to drive you to football training, and then you mucking around with your friends afterwards just wastes more of it."
I'm unwise and argue back more. "I'm not mucking around. It was hard coming into a team where everyone at least knew someone else, and I knew no one. After training is when I become better friends with my teammates."
"If you want friends on your team, join a club closer to home," she says, and I know that's the final word on this topic.

We sit in silence until we pull into the driveway, and Mum choses now to drop something unexpected on me. "I invited Leah and her mother around for dinner."
"What?" I say, completely confused as to why.
"Georgia don't be rude. An 'excuse me?' would sound so much nicer in place of 'what?'. I invited Leah and her mother around for tea. I want to talk to her mother as we're both raising teenage girls who want to be 'footballers'," she holds up her hands to make quotation marks as if footballers is a made up word, "and I want to how she manages it."
"Manages it?" I ask.
"Yes," Mum replies, not at all explaining what she means by this. "Why are you so concerned? I thought Leah and you were friends?"
"We are-" I begin to speak but she cuts me off.
"Then everything's fine. You two can study in your room while we speak, but first we'll have food."

As predicted, Liam and Benjamin are both still in one piece, and Liam even kept an eye on the potatoes as well. My mum always expects the worst, even though she is one half of the couple that raised my older brother, and taught him how to cook and care for other people. I instantly leave the kitchen, and go to the garage to put my boots and shin guards there before Mum tells me off for 'leaving them around for someone to trip over'. Then I rush to my room to sort out the mess that it is.

To actually properly tidy my room, it'd take me a couple of hours, but I don't have that amount of time before Leah will be here. I manage to shove all the clean clothes on the ground into my wardrobe, and all the dirty ones into the laundry basket in the bathroom. It makes a significant difference to the state of my floor. I figure picking up the dirty dishes, that aren't supposed to be in my room, because I'm not allowed to eat in here, is the best next step, and then, if there's anymore time, random rubbish that's scattered throughout needs to go. I'm just finished taking the rubbish to the kitchen bin when I hear a car pull into the driveway.

"Dad!" Ben shouts, and runs towards the door to find that Dad is not in fact standing there. "Who are you?"
"Benjamin. Be nice to our guests!" Mum calls out to him from the kitchen, where she's chopping up vegetables.
"I'm Leah," Leah smiles at my brother, "Georgia's friend. Nice to meet you."
"Oh. You're the one who plays for Arsenal?" he asks, and as she nods his face lights up. "Okay well that's good, because I support Arsenal, well I also support Man City, but Man City is only because my favourite players play there. I mean we live in North London, so I must support a team from here, right? Unlike some people in this household. Arsenal is better than Tottenham. But, I don't know any of the girl players, just the boys, because I don't think I've ever seen a girls game ever. Not on the TV, or not in real life. One time Dad took me to a real life boys football game, and it was amazing."

While he's been rambling about football teams, Leah and her mum have taken off their shoes, and followed us through into the dinning room. 
"If you want to know some of the women's team players, start with Emma Byrne. She's the goal keeper. And then one of their defenders is Alex Scott," Leah tells him. I can see by the look on my younger brother's face that he's trying to remember the names so that Dad and him can search them up later.
"Emma Byrne, Alex Scott, Emma Byrne, Alex Scott," he repeats a few times, before walking away from Leah. This gives me the opportunity to go stand next to her.