up for your team where instead you backed away, I still wanted to end on a hopeful note tonight.”
Coach shakes his head and crumples his entire speech up in a ball.
Even if Luci hadn’t gotten the heads-up about how Coach’s speeches typically go, it would still be obvious this is uncharted territory. The entire team glances around at one another, uneasy.
“But after what I’ve seen on the field this week? What I’ve seen tonight? I don’t feel hopeful. I feel betrayed.”
Coach leans over to one of the candles flickering on a nearby table and drops the wadded-up speech onto the flame. For the quiet seconds it takes for it to catch fire, Luci can’t seem to breathe.
Coach, on the other hand, has gotten a second wind. His restless energy from earlier dissipates into an unsettling calm. “You girls may have managed to fool yourselves. You may have managed to fool each other. But you haven’t fooled me.” He flashes a cold smile. “My team didn’t just lose a championship. You girls also lost what it means to be Wildcats.”
With that, Coach walks back inside Mel’s house.
Until this moment, Luci has mostly felt spared from Coach’s ire. Now she feels nakedly complicit, remembering how she so hungrily lapped up all Coach’s compliments at his desk this afternoon. Yes, he clearly believes Luci can be something. But right now? She’s nothing. Completely untested.
Luci feels woozy. And she’s not alone. All the girls seem off-kilter. Even Mel has her hand fanned out and pressed against her chest, as if to keep herself from teetering over.
It takes a few seconds before anyone speaks.
Phoebe is the first. “Looks like someone’s on his period.”
No one laughs.
“Not helping,” Mel chides her, and Phoebe hangs her head. But the joke does seem to break the spell. Mel steps out of the line and briefly occupies the space Coach just left. “That could have been a lot worse,” she tells the rest of the girls, her voice as steady and sure as she seems to be walking in her high-heeled sandals. “Coach almost didn’t come back.”
As a newbie, it’s hard for Luci to wring much comfort from this caveat, though her teammates seem to do so. Instead, she latches onto Mel’s certainty. It’s not a huge leap to think Mel knows Coach better than anyone else here tonight. Coach may be having doubts about his team, but Mel doesn’t seem to doubt him. So why should Luci?
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26
7:45 P.M.
MEL
Mel replenishes her platter with cupcakes, selecting only the most perfect ones that remain in the cardboard bakery box—ones with the icing curls at the top like tiny ocean waves—and arranging them so they look worthy of a cookbook cover.
Shortly after Coach’s speech, Mel followed him into her house, hoping that she could keep him from leaving but without any idea of how she might get him to stay. Thankfully, her mother had already intercepted him and, holding this same platter, insisted he stay for dessert. Coach offered a polite excuse, but then her father came over and selected a cupcake for Coach and one for himself, making it clear that Coach would be sticking around a while longer. Coach forced a smile and took a bite. His furrowed eyebrows lifted after a few chews. The cupcakes were that good.
Which is why Mel now swirls from room to room, interrupting conversations to gently but firmly push them on her teammates. Everyone must eat a cupcake. Sugar helps the medicine go down.
Of course Mel bristled at the things Coach said. But as the minutes tick on, she feels more and more at peace with it. His words came straight from his heart. He wouldn’t be so passionate if he didn’t care.
And Mel knows her teammates care too. Deeply.
At the very least, that puts everyone on the same page. Though small, Mel still counts this as a victory. Hopefully the first of many for the Wildcats this season. But for now, it’s more than enough to keep Mel afloat as the Psych-Up begins to shift from Coach’s portion to hers.
Mel feels her phone vibrate and sets down the platter.
COACH: Save me
This is the first text Coach has sent her in nearly a month.
She bends down and fiddles with the strap on her sandal, shielding herself from anyone who might see her blushing.
This is a secret that Mel’s never told anyone, not even her best friend. It almost wasn’t a secret to begin with. But when Mel realized, midway through her freshman