that, what else did she have the stomach for? They didn’t want to find out.
* * *
Elsewhere, another audience held its breath for an entirely different reason. Omar Ng had advanced to the finals, and Amira Wahid was only one point away from finishing off her opponent. Normally, this would have elicited cheers. But they held their breaths because Amira was about to score that last basket.
She was in the air, clearly on her way to dunk.
Her defender, a member of the boys’ team named Ping Xe, still had his feet planted firmly on the ground. He wasn’t even looking up at Amira, but rather at the space Amira had occupied a moment before. She’d planted her left foot down and lifted off so quickly that for weeks later Ping would look at video footage taken from the crowds to make sure she hadn’t merely disappeared from sight and reappeared on the rim.
No one knew Amira could dunk. That was by her design, though she’d meant to show off the skill earlier in the competition. She wanted this exact breathlessness from the very start, just hadn’t found the opportunity. Forget building up to a climax; Amira wanted it known as soon as possible, long before the final whistle of the decathlon, she was the superior athlete.
The most popular sports at CIS were soccer and rugby, so they garnered the attention of the best athletes. Basketball was a distant third, so few of the players in CIS history had ever been capable of dunking. Basketball wasn’t a very popular sport locally, either, and the competition was likewise mediocre. Few dunks had ever been witnessed in that decades-old gymnasium. Certainly, no one had heard of a female dunker.
Which, of course, Amira knew. She knew the psychological impact that would ripple through her opponents as soon as she slammed the ball through. As momentous as it was for everyone else, it was now routine for Amira; it had been months since the act had lost its sheen of newness.
It was within her body’s capabilities, and since her body was entirely in her command, it now felt second nature to her. What she was still getting used to, though, were the angry images that flashed through her mind when she dunked.
Mostly, the thoughts were of her mother. It was as if every dunk represented an opportunity to scream at her mom. To yell, “Yes, girls can,” since Rifta Wahid was the person who most often told Amira they couldn’t. Not even that girls should not be athletic, muscular, competitive, but that by sheer fact of their chromosomes the ability was beyond their efforts. Her mother never yelled it, but the repetition was loud enough.
It was only at her father’s gentle insistence that Amira was allowed to join the track and field team at school, thus giving her the excuse to sneak away to train for everything else. But her mother had been skeptical of Amira’s interest in sport, saying it was unbecoming for a girl, and she kept a close eye to make sure it did not distract from more important things.
Amira dunked with one hand. Not her nicest, flashiest dunk ever. She didn’t even hang on. But it was unequivocally a dunk, her hand pulling down on the rim just long enough for it to snap viciously back to place, the sound like a bone breaking, like jaws dropping to the floor. It was deeply satisfying, and her desire to have her mom witness what she was capable of was matched only by a deep gratitude that her mother was not in the audience.
Amira’s sneakers squeaked slightly when she landed, and that was the only sound in the gym. She didn’t even look at the crowd, who, despite their posters cheering her on, despite the sheer noise they were prepared to make on her behalf, despite their adjusted expectations for what she could do, could not believe what she had just done.
Amira walked over to Ping and grabbed his limp-wristed hand to shake “good game.”
Before the crowd could erupt into the cheers building up within them through the shock, three teachers (Mr. Jankowski, Mrs. Wu, Mr. Sanchez) jogged across the court. Their dress shoes clacked on the hardwood, a jarring contrast to the heavy silence. It was rare enough to see anyone but the PE teachers jogging, unless it was for some special student-teacher match, or in the wee hours of the morning, when the fanatics came in to exercise before their classes.