kicking the crate toward us.
We all look at it.
“I don’t think we’ll all fit,” Beth says.
Coach, face blank as the backboard above her, looks at Beth.
The moment is long, and Beth’s fingers squeak on her phone’s pearl flip.
Coach does not blink.
The phones, they drop, all of them. RiRi’s, Emily’s, Brinnie Cox’s, the rest. Beth’s last of all. Candy-colored, one by one into the crate. Click, clack, clatter, a chirping jangle of bells, birdcalls, disco pulses, silencing at last upon itself.
After, there’s a look on Beth’s face. Already I see how it will go for her.
“Colette French,” she smirks. “Sounds like a porn star, a classy one who won’t do anal.”
“I heard about her,” Emily says, still giddy-breathless from the last set of motion drills. All our legs are shaking. “She took the squad at Fall Wood all the way to state Semis.”
“Semis. Semi. Fucking. Epic,” Beth drones. “Be the dream.”
Emily’s shoulders sink.
None of us really cheer for glory, prizes, tourneys. None of us, maybe, know why we do it at all, except it is like a rampart against the routine and groaning afflictions of the school day. You wear that jacket, like so much armor, game days, the flipping skirts. Who could touch you? Nobody could.
My question is this:
The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators?
3
WEEK ONE
It isn’t immediate. No head-knocking conversion.
But with each day that week, the New Coach continues to hold our interest—a feat.
We let her drill us, we run tumbles. We show her all our routines and we keep our claps tight and our roundoffs smooth.
Then we show her our most heralded routine, the one we ended last basketball season with, lots of chorus line flips and toe touches and a big finish where we all pop Beth up into a straddle sit, her arms V-split above her head.
Coach seems almost to be watching, her foot perched on top of the crunking boom box.
Then she asks us what else we got.
“But everyone loved that number,” peeps Brinnie Cox. “They had us do it again at graduation.”
We all want Brinnie to shut up.
Coach, she’s just tighter, fleeter than we’d expected, and that first week, we take notice. Planted in front of us, her body held so lightly but so surely.
We can’t fluster her, and we are surprised.
We can fluster everyone, not just Fish but the endless sad parade of straw-man subs, dusty-shouldered geometry teachers and crepey-skinned guidance counselors.
Let’s face it, we’re the only animation in the whole drop-ceiling, glass-bricked tomb of a school. We’re the only thing moving, breathing, popping.
And we know it. You can feel that knowingness on us.
Look at them, that’s what we can hear them—everyone—say when, Game Day, we stride the hallways, pack-like, our ponytails rocking, our skirts like diamonds.
Who do they think they are?
But we know just who we are.
Just like Coach knows who she is. It’s in the click and tap of both her aloofness and nerve. So unconcerned with our nonsense. Bored with it. A boredom we know.
Right off, she won something there, even if—or because—she didn’t ask for it, care about it. Not because she’s bored but because we’re not interesting enough for her.
Not yet, at least.
The second day, she takes a piece of Emily’s flab in her fingers. Pixie-eyed, apple-breasted Emily lifts her arms languorously above her head in an epic yawn. Oh, we know this routine, this routine which so provokes Mrs. Dieterle and makes Mr. Callahan turn red and cross his legs.
Coach’s hand appears out of nowhere and reaches for the spot laid bare by Emily’s tank top lifted high. She plucks the baby fat there and twists it, hard. So hard Emily’s mouth gives a little pop. The gasp, like a squeeze toy.
“Fix it,” Coach says, eyes lifting from the skin between her fingers to Emily’s stricken eyes.
Fix it. Just like that.
Fix it? Fix it? Emily, sobbing in the locker room after, and Beth rolling her eyes, her head, her neck in annoyed circles.
“She can’t say things like that, can she?” Emily wails.
Emily whose balloony