rejoining the owners. She whispered something to O’Donnell. They both stared at Hara for a second then went back to their nation-building conversation.
“Anybody who is not a friend to Madeline is a friend of mine,” Tina said loudly to Hara, uncaring that the assistant could hear her. A number of other women chimed in, grumbling in agreement, though most of them wisely kept their comments out of earshot.
Hara nodded her thanks.
The next hour was stressful. As Madeline stared daggers at Hara’s back, the game remained tight, back and forth. In the last portion of the fourth quarter, the Fishers were up, but only by two points. Tempers ran high. Hara had stopped writing down most of what the owners had to say, it not being fit for public consumption.
Then, with only three minutes left, Charles did something shocking.
The floor general shoved his own teammate out of the way to get to the ball. Derek had just rebounded the ball and was stepping back for a shot when Charles used one hand to push him to the side, hard, and plucked the ball from his hands before driving back to the basket, swarmed by the opposition. The foul whistle blew.
Hara thought maybe Charles was called for jumping his own man, but instead, the foul was called on the other team. How did the refs not see that? Maybe they couldn’t believe it, either. Charles, who should have been penalized, instead set up at the free-throw line while Derek slowly took his place at the bottom of the key, glowering; Hara could feel the heat on the top floor.
“Whoa. That was crazy,” the woman in Juicy pink said.
Tina snorted. “What? You mean big Charles hogging the ball? Not surprising.”
Everyone around them grew quiet.
“Come on. It’s no shocker Charles got a problem with loyalty. When shit gets real, it’s all about him.” Tina sucked her teeth. “That’s why he needs me, to keep him focused.”
Hara took Tina’s critique with a grain of salt. His move on Derek looked purposeful, but there had to be more to the story. She didn’t believe Charles would do something like that unless there was a good reason.
The six-foot-seven point guard wiped the sweat from his forehead and toed the line at the top of the key, his arm going up for a shot when, suddenly, the lights flickered.
Then, the lights went out.
A silence descended with the darkness.
CHAPTER 12
Do not give way to useless alarm …
—Pride and Prejudice
The dark, heavy air crashed in on her. Screams from below broke the initial hush and swelled. Women and men in the room with Hara yelped and cursed in alarm. She sucked the cloying blackness into her lungs, and let out a distressed grunt.
What if this was a terrorist attack? Her mind went into gibberish mode as she clenched the armrest of her chair. Should she get under it? Would she fit? She felt her hair turning white.
Hara forced her head back and breathed in deep. Breathed out. Taking another shaky breath, she realized the power outage was most likely due to the big storm. No more catastrophizing, Hara Isari.
“What the fuck?” shouted a teenage boy behind her. “I lost my last life!”
A sound like a cackle burst from Hara’s throat. She cut off the weird, nervous laugh before it could grow and become unstoppable.
She hated the dark. And it wasn’t just that she was blind—it was also that the radios and the fans and the clocks and air-conditioning and everything else electrical had shut down, creating a void, a lack of background noise that would normally be humming behind the muffled shouts and screams from below.
Was this what it was like for her daddy? Lying on his bunk at night?
The arena was in blackness at most for fifteen seconds before generators kicked in. A fifteen-second eternity. An orange glow illuminated the stadium stairwells and the doorways, and a few emergency lights cast a weak light from overhead. The huge stadium remained mostly in shadows but at least people could see now. She and others let out loud sighs. Thank God.
* * *
Derek, standing at the edge of the key, pressed his eyes shut and clenched his fists, trying to control his rage while listening to Charles dribble on the free-throw line, preparing himself for the shot.
What the hell? Charles totally dicked me on purpose.
There was a collective gasp from thousands of people around them. His eyes popped open. He found himself in a shocking blackness, thick like soup, with some