Sawed Off Soccer Cleats

On being in love with Mia Hamm, surviving a pack of rural gentry carpet emporium heiress bullies, and being a feral teen gargoyle alone in the woods

I held the serrated knife in my hand, flat against the sole of a used baseball cleat pulled from Port Angeles High School’s lost and found. Flecks of grass and mud caked the seams. I hoped this would work. I had gotten a job as a referee. I had made the cut for the Roughriders soccer team. I had been kicked out by my mom for being gay.

Squeezing the cleat between my knees, I angled the knife away, chiseling at the ziggurated toe. I needed this to work. Refereeing kids’ weekend games in baseball cleats was fine so long as I ran fast enough that no snobby soccer moms noticed my decrepit footwear. But for the season’s first game, I needed baseball shoes that could pass as soccer cleats.

The two shoe designs are very similar, their differences shaped by each sport’s respective ball. A game for hands, baseball cleats are harder, stiffer, and a little higher off the ground to avoid heavy, compact, hurtling groundballs that could break all the bones in your feet. The top toe cleat there to aid baseball players’ traction as they run around the bases on a line drawn in the dirt, is not so necessary for soccer fields’…