The Nine Girls in the Old Gym

Eight. Eight girls had come, and Lily made nine, and I think that may be the best arithmetic of my life.

Hailey Bauer was the tallest. She had been told by a coach two seasons earlier that her feet were too slow for the travel level, and she had been carrying that sentence around ever since. She said hello to the floor.

Sadie Ortiz had a basketball held together with duct tape. Bree Pickett wore her older brother’s T-shirt down to her knees. Olivia, Morgan, Yvonne, and Autumn were all the kind of girls who get picked last for kickball and know it.

No two shirts matched. They wore plain tees in white, gray and black, none of them the right size, and one girl wore a sweatshirt that said Garber Bobcats Class of 1998, which Pat had pulled out of a donation box for her.

I blew the whistle. It was louder than I expected, and every girl jumped, and then every girl laughed, and that was the best thing that could have happened, because after that nobody was scared of me.

“Okay,” I said. “Here is how this works. I am not your friend. I am your point guard, and I am going to teach you to see the floor.

Everybody gets the ball. Everybody takes a shot. If you don’t know a word I use, ask.”

Hailey raised her hand. “What’s a point guard?”

“The one who gets the ball to the girl who’s open.”

“Is that you?”

“It was,” I said. “Now it’s all of you.”

What the cold did

The heat in that gym ran on a timer, and the timer ran out sometime before five.

By the end of every practice the temperature had settled at fifty-five degrees, and the girls ran layup lines in their coats until they were warm and then took the coats off one at a time.

We had one ball rack, borrowed from the Pruitt elementary school, which lent it to us on a clipboard sign-out sheet and a handshake.

The janitor, a man named Keith, wheeled it out to my truck himself and told me not to let it get wet.

Fingers cracked. Noses ran. Sadie’s duct-taped ball finally gave up on the Thursday before Thanksgiving, with a long hiss, and she sat on the floor holding the deflated thing in her lap like a pet.

My father got up from his scorer’s table, which I had never seen him do mid-practice, and went out to his truck.

He came back with a new leather ball still in its box, forty-two dollars at the sporting goods store in Marlow, and handed it to her without a word.

“It’s too much,” Sadie said.

“It’s a ball,” my father said. “Dribble it.”

Lily ran the hardest of all of them. I noticed it and did not say it out loud. She ran every line first, she stayed to rebound for girls who were still shooting, and she never once, in those first weeks, said Greg’s name.

But I watched her at the end of the second week. She was standing alone at the foul line while the others drank from the water fountain, and she was shooting free throws in the quiet with her shoulders very square.

She made seven in a row. She went for eight and missed, and her whole body went still, the way a deer’s does. I thought about a man with a spiral notebook, and I did not trust myself to speak.