Chapter Eleven

ELEVEN

My job is easier when we play well, so January is a challenging month. In the first two weeks of the year, the team serves up two steaming losses and two anemic wins. Our opponents roll over us in the paint, and we look lost on offense, clanging desperate three-pointers off the rim. There's no rhythm, no magic. Even Eric looks subdued on the sidelines.

Quincy misses an easy layup and the ESPN broadcast catches him yelling something profane at himself. At home somewhere, a parent covers a kid's ears and writes an angry letter.

January taunts me: Now show me what you can do with that. The day after the first loss, I put together a "happy birthday" highlight reel for a former Ardwyn power forward who now plays professionally in Montenegro. It's all I've got because there's nothing worth posting about the game. Even the cheerleaders' halftime dance was out of sync.

We go all the way to Omaha and lose again. After the game, I wait down the hall from the locker room so I can follow the team back to the bus. The postgame debrief is taking longer than usual. I'm cold, grumpy, and aching for my own bed, a thousand miles away.

Tonight, the budget cuts feel hopelessly unavoidable.

Someone flings open the door to the pressroom, a guy talking to somebody else over his shoulder. "See you tomorrow. Rise and grind, bro!" I spin around to face the wall.

"Mizzz Radford," he says in a singsong voice, like the little brother I never had and don't want.

JJ Jones works for ESPN and covers some of Ardwyn's games. He has low straight eyebrows and a big chin, and he dresses like his mother bought his wardrobe with the proceeds of his father's Ponzi scheme. He believes himself to be everyone's best friend and vice versa, and without prompting he spits out phrases that belong on a free poster that comes with a two-pack of hypermasculine deodorant.

"Tough game," he says. "That lineup isn't working for you."

"I think we're all aware." I offer a perfunctory smile to punctuate the conversation.

"Can't be fun going all the way to Nebraska to lose. Cornhusker State! Omaha, man."

"Definitely not." I look at the locker room door, willing it to open.

"Gotta get right back into it at practice tomorrow. Hey, let me tell you something Chuck once said to me."

He shifts from foot to foot, watching me. Probably aware that I'm looking to escape. Now that I've met JJ a handful of times, I can see the eagerness for validation below the surface. "By Chuck, I mean Charles Barkley," he clarifies.

I sigh. "What did Charles Barkley say?"

He relaxes and grins. "Earn it and learn it. Earn it. And. Learn it." And then he's gone, someone else catching his eye like a piece of glitter.

Practice back at home the next day is light. I'm not filming, but I watch the last fifteen minutes anyway, trying to discern the mood. It's not great. Quincy is still in a funk and everyone else is feeling it. Coach Thomas is as composed as ever, but he must be frustrated.

Afterward, Quincy sits on the bench and pulls the hem of his shirt up over his head to cover his face. He should go back to his dorm room and play video games until he can't see straight. I almost pull him aside to suggest it, but then Thomas sits down next to him, speaking in hushed, calm tones through the fabric of his shirt for a long time. Team captain Jamar Gregg-Edwards joins them, putting an arm around Quincy and guiding him toward the locker room.

That night I work on a hype video for next week. It needs to be good. We're playing Blake, our conference rival, and a fourth loss in one month would be demoralizing.

We saw a modest increase in our social media following and engagement levels at the beginning of the season, when I started making videos. Same with ticket sales. Recently, though, everything has plateaued. So far, I have no tangible evidence that I'm making an impact. That I deserve to stick around. If our lackluster gameplay continues, I'm doomed. I need to find a way to drum up enthusiasm no matter how we're playing. And now that I've gotten to know these players, I'm convinced they deserve more enthusiasm and support.

The irony of this being my job is not lost on me. That I, more than anyone else, am responsible for selling Ardwyn basketball to the world. But I've allowed myself to forget that. If I try to tell the story of this team, these individuals, it's not so bad.

I start with a song they've been listening to a lot when they stretch at the beginning of practice. I pull clips from previous games against Blake, recent ones plus old fuzzy ones transferred from VHS tapes. The voice-over came in a few hours ago, from an Ardwyn alumnus who won a Tony a few years ago.

When I put a video together, I can physically feel when it's good. Some part of me recognizes that what I've got on my computer matches what I've got in my head. My chest burns and my hands tingle. It's addictive; it's what I chase every time, the closest thing I've ever felt to a religious experience. It's happening now.

I'm watching it all the way through again when someone taps my shoulder. I whip my head around and swivel in my chair.

It's Quincy, standing above me in sweat-soaked practice clothes. "What are you doing here?" I ask, sliding off my headphones.

" A -Rad. A- Rad. " He laughs, and there's beer on his breath. "I'm so glad you're here. I need your help."

"What's wrong?" I humor him. If he's too drunk to operate the DoorDash app on his own, I'm adding a side of fries to his order for my troubles.

He heads toward the free chair opposite my desk. No—hobbles toward it. "Ouch. Fuck."

The air in my lungs ceases to exist. "You hurt yourself?"

He drops into the chair with an oof and rests his gym bag on the floor. "I don't know what to do. I had a bad practice and needed to clear my head. I didn't mean for this to happen."

I lean forward. Oh, shit. He's sitting with one foot flat and the other sticking up, heel grazing the floor, trying to keep his weight off it. He makes a tentative attempt to flex it and winces. It's the bad ankle, the one he tweaked last month, the one he injured in high school.

"What happened?" I ask.

"Nothing good," he singsongs.

"Wow, okay." I cross the room to grab the water bottle he always keeps in the outside pocket of his bag.

It's then that I see the skateboard. A ringing sound fills my ears.

I uncap the bottle and hand it to him. "Drink. How did you hurt yourself?"

He rubs his mouth. "It's a complicated story."

"Always a great start."

He lets out a heavy breath as he shifts in the chair, struggling to get comfortable. "I went to a party. I shouldn't have, but I was in a bad mood, and I thought it would help. I drank a lot, and then I had this idea…When I want to get my mind off things, I imagine the shots I'd take in the NBA dunk contest for fun. Sometimes I need that reminder that this is a game, you know? When everyone online is telling me I suck. Did you see the comments on that video the other night?"

"Never read the comments," I urge.

"I'm not amazing on a skateboard, but I'm all right. I thought I could skate to the basket, jump up, and dunk it. So I went to the gym."

He must regret it now, but there's still a hint of childlike amusement in his voice as he imagines the shot. He's young, so young. He's a kid who loves to play. But he's also a man for whom massive expectations have been set. The great hope of Ardwyn, the next big NBA star, the pride of his community, his family's future. How could anyone be equipped for that responsibility? And with the media, fans, and critics watching, waiting for something to happen. They want to be entertained, by either transcendent performance or calamitous failure. They don't really care which.

If this gets out, the pundits will sink their teeth in and let his blood drip down their chins. It will fit their laziest narrative: He's reckless, all physical talent and no brains. Can an NBA team trust him? Does he even take this seriously? It could affect his draft slot, cost him unfathomable amounts of money. Salaries are high no matter what, but the average NBA career lasts fewer than five years. There are no guarantees.

Dad was one of Quincy's first mentors, teaching him the fundamentals of the game, helping him focus as the hype about his future ratcheted up. Dad is gone, but I'm here.

The question comes like a train charging in at top speed from the part of my brain where all my most reckless thoughts originate: Why does anyone need to know?

He's a good kid. He needs more time to adjust, mature. Who would it hurt, if the press never found out?

But that means no one here can find out either.

Ben. Shit. The realization crashes into me, that he's still here. Close enough that every morning, I know whether he's starting the day with iced coffee or hot, because when it's iced I can hear the cubes rattling in his cup. In an instant I'm at the door, closing it as delicately as I can so he doesn't hear it click shut.

"Why did you come to me?" I ask Quincy.

He shrugs like the answer is obvious. "I couldn't go to anyone else. I trust you. You have hours of tape of that mustache I was trying to grow when I was fifteen and you've never shown anyone."

I offer a weak smile. "I'm saving it for a special occasion."

"I don't know what to do. I screwed up, and now it's only going to make things worse," he says. And then more carefully: "Are there cameras in the practice gym?"

Our eyes meet. I'm relieved that he said it out loud before I did. "I don't know. I don't think so."

We sit in silence. I cover my nose and mouth with my hands and let out a slow breath through them, trying to regain control of my heartbeat.

He trusts me. That's what he said. He's watching me expectantly, waiting for me to tell him the plan with more patience than most people would have while their throbbing ankle goes untreated.

"Here's what we're going to do," I say, standing, because he's in pain and we need to decide on something. "You're going to sober up. We're going to call the trainer and tell him you were shooting around, as you regularly do, and your ankle gave out. If there's any hint of suspicion from anyone, I was there, grabbing a jacket I left this morning. I saw the whole thing happen. I'll go over in a few minutes and make sure there are no cameras. Stay here and wait for me and keep drinking water. I'm going to put this skateboard somewhere." My car would be best. Quincy isn't even supposed to own a skateboard.

"Okay," he says.

I give him a sharp nod, like a confident decision maker might do. Then I quietly open the door and shut it behind me.

When I turn around, Ben is standing in the dark hallway with his arms crossed.

I jump back. "Jesus. What are you doing?" I don't know why I ask. The fact that he's standing here like this means Quincy and I were, in fact, talking louder than an iced coffee, and therefore, we're screwed. I bring my arm around my back to hide the skateboard anyway.

"You cannot be serious right now," he hisses. "You should've called the trainer as soon as he told you he was hurt. Instead you're, what? Creeping around, hiding evidence?"

I drag him by the wrist into his office and shut the door. "Okay, Callahan. Calm down. Think about it. What good is going to come of this if people find out? You know the press is going to jump on him. And you know how stressed he's been. He made a mistake."

He plants his hands on the desk, spring-loaded with tension, the sharp outline of his forearm muscles straining. "Don't you think he needs to take responsibility for his mistakes? Learn from them? Seriously, have you never seen what being coddled does to an athlete? He needs to deal with the consequences here."

Only a golden boy like Ben, who's never been treated unfairly in his life, could be that sanctimonious.

He takes out his cell phone. "I'm going to call Coach Thomas."

"Wait," I say, lunging forward and plucking it from his hands. "Let's talk about this first."

"Hey," he protests. "Give that back." And because I am twelve, I hide it behind my back and raise my chin.

"Ugh," he says, and moves toward me, reaching one arm behind me and hunting for the phone. He tries not to touch me at first, plucking hesitantly at the space behind me instead. "Radford—what are you—come on—"

Fighting fair is overrated. I swivel from side to side so he can't reach. With each twist he gets closer, until he's near enough that I inhale a concentrated lungful of his addictive soapy smell. I press one shoulder against his torso and angle the rest of my body away, buying myself enough time and distance to slip the phone into my back pocket.

I remember too late that these pants don't have pockets. Fuck the patriarchy.

Now my face is buried in his warm chest. My body is impossibly contorted, legs in one direction, shoulders in the other, and I lose my balance. Before I topple over, he anchors one hand on my hip, and I squeak in surprise. His grip is careful, but firmer and more confident than I ever would've expected from a Goody-Two-shoes like him, and everything goes fuzzy except that exact spot on my body. The warmth of his palm, the grasp of his fingers, all imprinting on my brain, distracting me.

Focus. To get the leverage I need to push off, I lean into his hand instead of away from it. Until his other hand catches my other hip, and then he's turning me around, his hand closing around mine on the phone. He's going to wrestle it from me.

I drop it.

The phone hits the floor. The element of surprise is on my side, so I react faster. I pick it up and shove it down my shirt, into the left cup of my bra, and give him a triumphant look that says I dare you.

He does not accept the challenge. My pulse skitters uneasily around my chest like a handful of party poppers thrown on the sidewalk. He gives me a long, dark look and exhales a frustrated breath.

"Listen," I say. "You know how it'll be if the press finds out. Bullshit. Racist bullshit. They'll say he's not smart, that it's a sign of his character. That he can't be trusted with his own talent. If he were white, they'd say he has some maturing to do. Don't you agree with that?"

He exhales again and his shoulders drop. "Yes, of course I do, and it's not fair at all—"

"Then why subject him to it? He may be seriously injured, don't you think that's bad enough? Don't you think he'll learn his lesson from that?"

"Yeah, but there's an entire injury protocol we're supposed to follow that I don't even fully understand, and I doubt you do either—insurance hoops to jump through, reporting requirements. Lying about it could make this worse in the end if people find out."

Ben sits down in his chair and hunches forward, eyes closed, probably envisioning the fifty-seventh page of some handbook I never read. We're on two different existential planes, shouting into two different voids. "Why the hell are we talking about insurance?" I cry.

"Are we supposed to keep it from Coach Thomas? You think he wouldn't want to know?"

I roll my eyes. "He has to say he wants to know about things like this, but I bet he'd rather not." This is starting to slip out of my control. I sit in the chair across from him and lean forward with my elbows on the desk, mimicking his posture. My eyes are level with his. "Look, you don't have to be a part of this. I'm not asking you to lie, I'm just asking you to pretend you weren't here."

He buries his hands in his hair and squeezes like he's going to rip it out. "Is there a difference? What's going to happen if he finds out? We could both get fired. That would help with the budget. Maybe Kyle will get a raise."

I should care about my job security. It's what we've been fighting over for months, and I'm screwed if we get caught. But I can't sit back and watch Quincy suffer.

"I don't care if I get fired," I say.

A bitter look crosses his face. "That's great for you, but I can't afford to be unemployed."

"Neither can I! But it's not the most important consideration right now."

"Family money, then?" he asks knowingly. "Must be nice."

"Ha. No. My dad didn't exactly rake it in coaching and teaching," I say. "You're one to talk, anyway. Isn't your family loaded?"

He laughs at that. "I came here on an academic scholarship. I grew up with nothing."

I have nothing to say to this. It's entirely at odds with everything I thought I knew about him. He went to an expensive private high school, and his girlfriend wore those big pearl stud earrings. He was Main Line wealthy. Wasn't he? Everything in his life came easy to him, that's what I always thought.

"What about the Range Rover?" I ask weakly.

"The what?"

"Didn't you use to drive one, sometimes…?" My voice trails off.

"I can't believe you remember that." He shakes his head. "It was my ex-girlfriend's."

Processing this information is like watching a familiar scene from a new camera angle. He must've been on scholarship at his high school too, a place where anyone could meet a girl who wore expensive jewelry and had a fancy car.

And at college, so many differences flatten out into nothing temporarily. Everyone lives in the same dorm rooms and eats in the same dining halls and drinks the same cheap beer. Everyone on the basketball team is issued the same logoed sportswear. If you don't look too hard, it's easy not to notice who came from less.

Which maybe proves his point about my privilege.

My mouth opens and freezes that way, because I don't know what to say. He presses further. "If your family isn't well-off, how can you be so cavalier about keeping a good job? I'm guessing you have no student loans?"

Another blow to my sense of moral superiority. My face heats, throbbing with embarrassment at the depth of my ignorance. "I did have help with school," I admit. "But it's not how it sounds." My parents were middle-class. They put aside everything they could for our educations, driving modest cars and keeping their old '80s kitchen long after most of their friends had renovated. Still, I was going to be stuck with a pile of student debt, but then multiple schools offered Kat basketball scholarships. Her half got reallocated to me, with a cheerfully morbid promise from my mother: "Kat gets a little extra in the will!"

Annoyingly, that means I have my sister to thank for my financial freedom.

"I'm sure." His voice is cold.

I wince. Cavalier, he called me. A perfect word for my attitude toward all the jobs I've had until now. They never made me happy, and I didn't want to be happy making videos about dishwashers or debit cards anyway, and I was too afraid to do the one thing I found fulfilling. So I quit, and quit, and quit. And it's true, my financial situation enabled me to make those choices. "Sorry, you're right. I shouldn't have assumed. And I wasn't thinking about what would happen if we got caught. I'm afraid this is going to break him."

I can hear him swallow. "He was crying after practice today," he says.

"Yeah."

He puts his head in his hands and groans. Looks back up at me, blinking, worn out. Opens his mouth to speak, and then groans again.

Finally he sighs and sits back in his chair. The wheels squeak. "I don't think there are cameras in the practice gym. But there are cameras outside the practice gym, and records of who swipes into the building. You can't say you were there."

"Do we need to worry about that? The FBI isn't going to investigate."

"Probably not, but it's, like, a four-million-dollar ankle. So who knows?"

He's giving in. The tension keeping my shoulders stiff and my fists balled subsides, but I try not to move. I don't want to do anything that might cause him to change his mind.

"I was in the weight room earlier," he says. "There'll be a record of me swiping into the building. If anyone questions anything, Quincy should say I heard it happen."

"No, come on. That's not—I don't want you to have to do that."

He shakes his head. "You're right about the pressure. It's a lot for him. It would be a lot for anyone, let alone an eighteen-year-old."

He's playing you, a voice whispers in my ear. He'll let it happen, rat you out, and boom, you're done. But he sounds sincere. And I know he cares about these kids. I have to trust him.

It'll be fine. It has to be. "Are you sure?" I ask.

"No. But I don't see any other way."

I swallow. "Thank you." My voice is shaky with relief as I reach into my bra for his phone. His eyes dart to my hand and then away. Which is good, because I need to wipe the boob sweat off the screen before I hand it back to him.

Ben and I give Quincy a slice of reheated pizza and a half hour to sober up before making sure he stays upright as he limps to the training room. Then we retreat to Ben's office. The plan is in motion, and there's no going back now.

Ben shuts the door and begins pacing along an invisible path from wall to wall behind his desk. I wander the rest of the room unfocused and impatient, half looking at the pictures on the walls the same way I look at the diagrams of the female reproductive system hanging in the gynecologist's office while I wait for my Pap smear.

"I'm freaking out." I peel off my outermost layer, a thick, bottle-green sweater, and roll up the sleeves on my striped button-down. "It's making me sweat. I can't even think straight."

"You're sweating because it's hot in here." He diverts from his path to unlock the window and crank it open.

I cross the room and rest my forehead against the screen, closing my eyes to savor the bracing air. "Yeah, it is hot in here. I thought it was just me."

He snorts.

"I didn't mean it like that." I turn around and lift my ponytail to cool the back of my neck. His eyes follow my hands. If I concentrate on how refreshing the cold air feels, maybe I'll forget about the vision in my head: the trainer declaring Quincy's injury serious, season-ending. A rare type of ankle break he's only seen at the X Games, one caused exclusively by falls from wheeled objects.

"What did you expect?" he asks. "You crank the heat up to seventy-five degrees every day." He picks up a rubber ball and tosses it one-handed through the miniature basketball hoop hanging from the back of the door.

Only because you turn it down to sixty-two, I almost say. Actually, sixty-two sounds pretty good right now.

"Oh," I say. "Oh! Your office is hot." Every time I've gone to his office and left feeling overheated—I thought it was because he made me angry. But it was because of the temperature.

He doesn't turn the heat down to spite me, after all.

"Yes," he says slowly, picking up the ball.

"My office is cold." I resist the urge to shake him by the shoulders. "Freezing, actually. That's why I turn the heat up."

"What? Oh, that explains the cape."

"What ca—No, that's a blanket."

"It has a hood."

"It's a wearable blanket. Shut up. You're as bad as Eric."

A smile spreads across his face, and it's contagious. He has a nice smile. I can admit that now. It's sweet and boyish but the corners are lazy, turning up a beat after the rest. "I thought you were messing with the thermostat to torture me. I thought you stole my string cheese too."

He tosses me the ball and I catch it. "I don't even like string cheese." It's the truth. Part of the truth, because I don't care much for rubbery mozzarella, but I ate his anyway. Not that he needs to know that.

Ben shakes his head like he doesn't believe me but also doesn't mind.

This is what it feels like to get along with each other. For the first time, I think, Too bad we can't both stay. "What would it take to avoid the budget cuts completely?"

His response is immediate. "A national championship."

I laugh, but he doesn't. "You're serious?"

Winning a national championship is about more than skill and strategy. It's also about luck. Who gets the most advantageous matchups, who gets hot at the right time, who gets one favorable call in one close game. That's why it's difficult for even the best teams to do.

I step away from the window. "Let's go win a national championship, then." I chuck the ball toward the basket, and it bounces off the rim twice before going in.

Like I said, it's about luck. But somebody gets to be the lucky one. Why not us?