Chapter Two

TWO

When I enter the athletic department office, the front desk is empty. Someone is talking nearby, out of sight, over the drip of the coffee maker and the clinking of spoons.

After a moment, the receptionist appears, mug in hand, walking with the telltale lurch of decades of desk work. She's got short gray hair and an Ardwyn A pin on her sweater. I stare at the pin. I can't help it. Eric and I once made a pact to get that exact A tattooed on our bodies after I graduated. The official team color, the official font. Mine was going to be on the side of my rib cage. Neither of us ended up doing it.

The receptionist leads me to an empty conference room, instructing me to take a seat in a thin, disinterested voice. I check my phone and find a text from Eric: HELLO COWORKER! Got pulled into another meeting, see ya this afternoon!!

Awesome. I planned to cling to Eric like a security blanket until I got acclimated, but he's already abandoned me.

Two young women arrive a few minutes later. The first strides in carrying a nylon satchel and an open laptop, sits down, and hunches over the screen. As her auburn hair falls into her line of sight, she absently gathers it on one side and twists it into a long spiral away from her face.

The second ambles into the room like it takes all the effort in the world. Her laptop clatters as she drops it on the table a little too roughly, and she plops into a chair and exhales loudly. She rubs her eyes under her thick glasses. A slouchy beanie droops on her forehead.

"Hi, I'm Jess." Somehow she manages to sigh after every word.

The other woman looks up, fingers hovering above the keyboard. "Wow, missed you there. I'm Taylor. You're Annie?"

I nod. "Nice to meet you."

Taylor smiles and pets her hair spiral. "We're on the media team. We run the athletic department social accounts."

Jess twists around in her chair. "Is there food at this meeting?"

I take out a notebook and pen. Not a bad idea to look like I'm making an effort. "I didn't see any. I don't think I qualify for the continental breakfast treatment."

"Not even fruit salad?" Jess despairs.

"If anything, I'm probably more on the stale-bagel level."

Jess snorts. "The future belongs to those who believe they deserve an omelet bar. Eleanor Roosevelt."

Taylor pounds at the keyboard with a frown. "I told you to eat before we came. You get weird when your blood sugar is low." She presses one final button and turns her full attention to me, her mouth curving upward. "You know, you're a legend around here."

I blink. "Me?" Surely not.

"Don't get too excited. There are only, like, five of us in the department. But we've always wondered who made those old basketball videos. They're so good."

"Really good," Jess adds. "You obviously had a shit camera, but you did awesome work."

"Wow. Thank you," I say, my face growing warm. "It was a shit camera. I think I found it in a closet. Our budget was zero dollars."

Taylor leans forward and rests her chin on her hand. "Did you graduate a semester early? We always wondered why the videos stopped in December instead of at the end of the season."

"Ah." I shift in my seat. "Yeah, I had enough AP credits from high school, so I couldn't justify another semester of tuition." Not the full truth, but I did meet the requirements to claim my diploma—barely—and head for the hills when I needed to, after the holiday tournament in Florida.

Thankfully, Taylor can't ask any follow-up questions, because a broad-chested man in a blazer and khakis enters the room. He has gray side-parted hair that sweeps across his forehead like the bristles of a broom.

"Ted!" Jess and Taylor say at the same time.

"How's everybody doing this morning?" He's got an open face, an unguarded smile. He turns to me. "Ted Horvath, assistant athletics director," he says with a firm handshake. "Welcome back to the Ardwyn Family."

The Ardwyn Family. Three words, an ambush, a homing beacon's signal activating inside me. An expression so familiar, the cadence, each syllable, like sliding into an ancient pair of shoes from the back of the closet, or remembering all the words to a song from long ago. My heart rate kicks up a notch and the faint stirrings of nausea rise in my gut as I note my symptoms from a distance like I'm my own doctor. Diagnosis: severe allergy to school spirit.

The Ardwyn Family is a family whose former patriarch—a coaching prodigy, a campus hero—got away with being a manipulative, power-abusing narcissist. Forgive me if it doesn't warm my heart.

"No breakfast, Ted?" Jess asks.

Taylor hoists her bag onto the table. It lands with a thud. "Jess is hangry," she explains, digging around inside. "Peanut butter or cranberry almond?"

"Peanut butter, please." Jess holds out a hand until Taylor finds a granola bar and passes it to her. "And do you have my laptop charger?"

She does. I fight a smile. It's like a diaper bag. She's probably got her water bottle and wallet and allergy medication too.

"What's ‘hangry'?" Ted leans forward on his elbows.

Before anyone can answer, the door opens one last time, and a man walks through it.

"Coach!" Ted bellows.

Taylor's shoulder blades snap together. Jess rips off her hat and slides her granola bar to the side. The energy in the room evaporates, like when a teacher enters an unsupervised classroom full of chattering students.

Assistant head coach Travis Williams is tall, closer to seven feet than six. I need to get used to that, otherwise it's going to be a long day of noticing everyone's heights. I'm back in basketball, for shit's sake.

Williams is fair-complexioned with fine blond hair, and his skin has the withered texture of an overripe bell pepper. "Morning," he says. His eyes are the darkest part of his face, which gives him a severe look. He doesn't smile, not even in a perfunctory way. Nobody tells him Jess is hangry.

He sits directly across from me at the table and folds his hands. He puts nothing in front of him, not a notebook or cell phone or coffee cup.

Apparently he's the last person we were waiting for, because Ted starts the meeting. Sort of. "So, Annie, how was your move to Ardwyn?"

Williams rubs a hand across his forehead.

"It went pretty smoothly," I say. "It's nice to be back. Although I was sad to see my favorite ice cream place is gone." I hesitate to add more, looking back and forth between Ted and Williams and fiddling with my necklace. Ted clearly loves small talk. Williams seems like a guy who would roll his eyes if you tried to wish him a happy birthday.

It would be nice to know who I'm supposed to try to please here. Jess and Taylor are no help. They're both engrossed in their laptops, and based on the dueling-pianos rhythm of their typing, I'm pretty sure they're messaging each other.

I used to understand the politics of this place, but there's a lot of turnover in college sports, and everything is different now. The year after I quit, Coach Maynard got a new job making big-time public school money at Arizona Tech and took most of his staff with him. His replacement, Coach Marshall Thomas, brought in his own assistants, including Williams and Eric.

Ted is still going. "Do you have a lot of friends in the area?"

"Um. A few." My hand is on my necklace again. Stop that, I chide myself.

"How long has it been since you graduated?"

"Eight years." I force a smile and widen my eyes like I can't believe so much time has passed. Here's an approach to satisfy everyone: I'll answer his questions in as few words as possible, like I'm paying for them by the syllable, but with my friendliest facial expression.

Ted launches into a story about Jess's first day on the job, and that's Williams's breaking point. He shifts in his seat and clears his throat. "I have to leave for the airport in a half hour, so we need to get started."

Recruiting trip? I had him pegged as an Xs and Os coach, not a schmoozer.

He leans forward on his elbows. "Please explain to me why we need someone like you on our team."

Ted laughs, a ho-ho chuckle from deep in his belly. "She just got here, Coach!"

Williams gives him a dead-eyed look.

"Um, I'm not sure I understand what you mean," I say. "Wasn't I hired because you thought you needed someone like me? You, or—someone."

He's silent for a moment. I uncross my legs and recross them in the other direction. Taylor's typing is feverish.

"I'm asking what you do, on a basic level. I don't spend much time on the Internet."

"Oh. Well, I used to do this type of work for the team when I was a student, as Eric probably told you? I'm sure the role will be a little different this time around. But generally, I'll produce videos for social media. Behind-the-scenes stuff, interviews? And hype videos."

"Hype videos," he repeats blankly, his face giving nothing away.

"Like movie trailers, but for basketball games?" I clear my throat, trying to knock the upspeak out of my voice.

Williams makes a steeple with his hands, each fingertip pressed against its counterpart on the other hand. He looks up, talking to the ceiling. "When I heard Coach Thomas was creating a new position for a video person—to me it didn't seem like a good use of our limited resources. " He emphasizes the last two words carefully, like they have a secret meaning I'm not meant to understand. "I'm old-school, so maybe that makes me biased. But our director of analytics is a modern guy, and he agreed with me. We made our opinions clear to Coach Thomas."

Ted opens his mouth and then thinks better of it.

Williams's eyes drop from the ceiling to me. "But now you're here."

I want to laugh. What an ass. I didn't even seek out this job. Why should I sell him on it? Talk to the people who did the hiring. Talk to Eric, especially.

Speaking of Eric, I should've given him a lump of fucking coal as a wedding gift instead of a fancy Dutch oven. He told me Coach Thomas is desperate to top the innovative ways other schools use video. He neglected to mention that others on the coaching staff adamantly disagree.

He's lucky I love him. I bite back a rising wave of sarcasm. I can handle a guy like Williams, because he's like a lot of coaches I've known. He only cares about winning, and he believes that mindset excuses any number of offenses. His belief is reinforced by the fact that thousands of people stand in the background and cheer while he does his job. All I need to do is tell him what he wants to hear.

I paste on a mild smile. "Let me tell you about how video can help with recruiting."

Thirty painful minutes later, I leave the meeting with clammy, shaking hands. Three years of this. I have a long way to go. I wish I could say I'm not going to worry about earning anyone's acceptance here, but I don't have that luxury.

After that shit show, I need to hustle over to the Church. I'm supposed to meet Donna the admin to fill out HR paperwork and get my ID card at ten thirty, and I'm cutting it close. By the time I get there, halfway across campus, I'm breathing heavily. Sweat dampens the armpits of the white top I'm wearing under my blazer.

It's a new blazer, in bitchy brick red. I wanted to channel a power suit vibe for my first day—without buying something boring. Mom yanked it from the rack at Aritzia with a gasp. "It's exactly your color."

When we shop, she reminds me that I'm a True Autumn. I have hazel eyes, a dusting of freckles across my nose, and what my grandma used to call "a misleadingly dainty mouth." My wavy brown hair grazes my shoulders, the evidence of last year's Great Christmas Bangs Debacle thankfully just a memory now. The memory involves my sister, Kat, wielding a pair of scissors after too many cranberry mojitos, telling me, "It'll look French!"

I can't blame her. Mom, Kat, and I spent our first Christmas after Dad's heart attack at home, eating the same turkey we always ate, decorating the tree with the ornaments Kat and I made as kids, playing the board games we'd played every holiday for years. We were miserable. Apples to Apples sucks when you only have three players. The next Christmas we overcorrected, fleeing all our familiar traditions for a rental in Florida, where we were equally miserable but drunker. Hence the bangs.

According to the rules of seasonal color analysis, I'm not supposed to wear pastels (valid), black (unreasonable), or anything close to Ardwyn Blue (just another sign from the universe). Mom believes self-categorization is the key to self-understanding. She's right about the blazer, though.

There should be music playing, I think as I look up at the Church. The Jaws theme, maybe. I could stand outside and reflect on old times and turn this into a whole thing, but there's no way in hell I'm going to be late for Donna.

Okay. I take one deep, fortifying breath. Let's get this over with.