by Ginger Scott
“Now bend the knees, but only a little.”
He follows my direction, his arms still out to his sides like he’s trapped on a wooden beam and searching for balance. I stand and reach for his wrists, shaking them lightly.
“Loosen up,” I say, and he immediately goes limp. A laugh echoes from my chest. “Not that loose, more like when you’re swimming.”
I sway a little, side to side, my hands out like a hula dancer. My friend does the same, and we move like this while facing each other for about a half a minute. He starts to smile when I nod in praise, so I crouch down again, urging him to keep going. I pick up his ball and bring it up slowly to his hand. He watches it the entire way as I move it to his fingertips then back down, repeating the motion of a dribble over and over.
“What’s your name?” My question brings his eyes to me, but I keep moving the ball while he’s not thinking about it, and his hand automatically flexes in anticipation for every time it returns.
“Jaden,” he says, blinking when he realizes what’s happening. His first instinct is to look down, but I flinch before he can.
“Uh uh, eyes on me,” I say with a grin. “Jaden, I’m Riley. I’m new here, and I need friends to play basketball with. Think maybe me and you can play sometimes?”
Jaden’s lips stretch until all I see are teeth stained blue from some sort of candy clicking around behind them. He nods, and I hold his ball still. Then I stand and hand it to him.
“Let’s warm up.” With the tip of my toe, I roll my ball with enough spin to kick it up into a bounce.
“I wanna learn that,” Jaden says, and I lean my head back to laugh.
“That’s soccer.” I giggle.
“You play two sports?” His eyes are wide, and I’m so in love with the enamored twinkle in his eyes that I can’t bring myself to crush him and admit that the only soccer move I know I developed because I’m too lazy to bend over.
“I play lots,” I say, lifting my chin confidently.
I move toward the hoop, and Jaden follows me, losing his dribble several times, but always forcing himself to take his eyes off his hand. I admire his tenacity. He reminds me of me.
We mostly dribble together, and we start to practice shooting when a few guys I don’t recognize from yesterday show up and begin to shoot around us. They don’t ask us to leave, not directly, at least. But there are subtle things they do to try to force us to get the point, like pushing our balls to the side when they rebound from the hoop or playing one-on-one in front of us as if we don’t exist. Jaden steps back eventually, hugging his ball in front of his body, but the more they puff their chests, the more I want to deflate them.
A few more guys show up, along with Lauren, and Jaden walks to the center of the court to pick up his socks and shoes and eventually takes a spot on the top of the bleachers.
“Smells like pussy.”
There’s a snickering sound, muffled by a hand, coming from over by the hoop. Another one of the guys holds out a palm for his friend to slap. They glance at me and laugh a little harder, but I keep my reaction in check.
The comment doesn’t shock me. It doesn’t even offend me, really. I’ve heard worse on every court I’ve ever played on. Hell, my friends from my old…old…neighborhood treated me like one of the guys, and the trash talk was legit. I dished it, and I could give it right back now if I really wanted to. I could tell them it smells like tiny dick to me, or a dozen other just as vulgar comments. But I’ll just let my shots talk for me.
My hater steps up to the top of the key and sinks a jump shot, so the second he runs forward to grab his ball, I stand just where he was and drain the same shot. It takes him three or four more to realize what I’m doing—that I’m matching him—and after I sink my seventh, his friends start to notice, too. Eventually, we’re in a standoff of three-pointers. We’ve both made four in a row, our balls following one another through the hoop, and his friends, and even Lauren, are getting loud.
“Ohhhh!” They chant after every single made shot. My opponent hasn’t missed, and I’m starting to feel like I’m getting a little bit lucky with my streak when the ultimate distraction dribbles up next to me and shoots from the three-point line while his eyes are on me. Tristan’s shot clanks off the metal rim and his eyes blink slowly as he chews at the inside of his lip, never once glancing at his ball. He doesn’t care if he made it. Making it wasn’t the point. Interrupting me was.
“Let’s split up and get a game on,” he says. He’s looking at me, but he’s speaking to everybody else. This actually bothers me more than the under-the-breath pussy comment from earlier.
I sense there are natural divisions on this court, Lauren’s brother and cousin taking one side and Tristan and his friend Paul on another. The few other guys gravitate to sides, and I can quickly tell the sides aren’t even. I step in on Tristan’s team and catch him draw his lips in tight and breathe in deeply. His eyes hover on mine for a few seconds, and his mouth stays in that rigid, straight line.
“I got point,” he says, finally looking away and taking a pass from Paul.
I roll my ball over to the bleachers and catch Lauren’s attention. She picks it up and tucks it under the first bench, sitting one row above it and resting her elbows on her knees, ready for the show.
Time to break some freezing-cold ice.
Tristan takes the ball to center court and points out to both corners, shouting at Paul to cut before passing to some other guy whose name I didn’t get. He didn’t tell me. Nobody told me anything, other than the first hater who I shot with before Tristan came. He told me “all right” and he said it once, after my third three-pointer.
Paul catches the ball under the hoop eventually and lays it in. They all slap hands; only Paul slaps mine.
We split up defense, and I take the only guy left unguarded. He’s not very good, and he only gets a pass or two before eventually turning the ball over to Tristan, who comes out and hits a jump shot with nobody even close.
They all slap hands.
I watch.
The game goes on like this for almost twenty minutes—boys throwing around words, shirts coming off, and strong arms shoving into one another just to gain a few more inches on the court. I hold my own on defense, but I’m not really in their game. I’m guarding a guy named Danny, I’ve figured out. He doesn’t get to play often. I know how he feels.
My hater’s name is RJ. He sinks a jump shot over Tristan to tie the game before Paul holds up his hand and calls time for a water break. I watch Tristan run over to the fountain and I open my mouth to warn him about the footbath information I possess, but then I stop and instead just smile. I don’t know how dirty Jaden’s feet were, but I hope they were disgusting.
I stay in the center of the court, dribbling the ball I didn’t get to touch a single time during play. I pass it through my legs a few times and remind myself that things are always like this in the beginning. Every court is the same—everywhere I’ve lived.
Only something here is just different. That wall I’m used to climbing over feels bigger somehow. And every time I think I have my hands on the top, Tristan lays a new row of bricks for me to climb.
“Yo, Zach. Jump in on this. We’re tied up,” Tristan shouts to someone behind me. I turn to see a guy dressed in black shorts that sag on his hips, socks pulled up to cover his legs and basketball shoes that barely have laces. If this guy runs, he’s going to fly out of those shoes.
“You can have the next game, Zach,” I say.
The new guy stops somewhere between the bleachers and me, wrinkles on his forehead, and a glare in his eyes.
“This is the next game. We’re done,” Tristan says, and my chest lights on fire.
“Bullshit, we’re tied!” I slam the ball down hard, letting it bounce off to the side. Lauren coughs through a laugh several feet to my side.
This is not the nice guy who helped me unload boxes and move my weights. Tristan has officially risen to the rank of biggest asshole
I’ve dealt with…ever. He’s securing that title more and more with each passing second he stares at me, too, letting me stand here with my hands fisted at my sides and my breath too ragged for not having run in several minutes.
I tilt my head to the side in a silent gesture that conveys “come on, stop it.” The tip of his tongue peeks through his tight lips, bit by his front teeth, and his jaw flexes like he’s fighting the urge to either really dig in and fight me over this or to just give in and finish our dumb game.
“Zach, you’re with me,” he says, a jerk to his head that seems to order Zach to keep moving and dump his things from his pockets on the end of the bleachers.
I breathe out and roll my eyes, the back of my throat clicking as I turn to the side. My skin is tingling with anger and frustration, and my eyes focus on Lauren and her hands cupped over her mouth, poorly hiding her shock.
Tristan’s sliding steps move closer and I begin to shake my head, turning to look him square in the eyes before his mouth can make a sound. I hold up a finger to point at his chest, then curl my hand into a fist as my eyes dim on his. He draws in a heavy breath through his nose and his lips pinch at the corners. I can almost see him trying to work out what to say, like some sort of struggle happening in the pools of black centered in his deep brown eyes. I save him the speech.
“Okay,” I nod. I move backward, toward my things, the bleachers, and the open gate to the sidewalk home. “I see how this is…how this place is. I see you, Tristan. Oh…I see you.”
His eyes flicker, then draw in, shutting out everything around us so he can tell me some secret. It’s patronizing.
“You don’t belong here,” he says, his voice rough but low. A few of the guys near us still hear him, though. He’s trying to be intimidating. I see it in the heat of his eyes and feel it in his growl. “This court is not for nice little girls. Go home and play with your hair…paint your nails. I don’t care. Just get out of here.”
He shrugs out the words, shaking his head like all of that is just some sort of assumed thing I must enjoy more than being out here. He couldn’t be more wrong. I shake out a laugh, my chest lifting and my eyes flaring on him. He doesn’t think I see him at all, but he’s vulnerable. I see that for sure. This front he puts up here for some alpha neighborhood bullshit is fragile as hell, and he doesn’t intimidate me. He only drives me to knock him down.
I leave him standing in the center of the court, and when I reach the bleachers I finally hear him start to talk to his friends. The game picks up. The only eyes on me are those of the girls watching today and my new pal Jaden. His mouth is hung open, and I feel like I let him down somehow, so after I pick up my things, I reach out a fist for him to pound. He does, but his eyes still look worried.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, winking.
Lauren laughs under her breath, amused by me I guess. I’ll need her help.
“Got a few minutes?” I widen my eyes in a plea for her to come with me.
She smirks with a short breath, then glances to the court and back to me before nodding and stepping down from the bleachers. I pick up my ball and lead her through the gate and down the street toward my house. My pace is deliberate, and I can hear her breathing pick up after the first block. She’s not running on the same pissed-off fuels I am, and she’s in jeans and heels, so I slow down just enough for her shoulder to meet up with mine.
“That was seriously the best thing I’ve seen in a long time out there,” she says, still panting a little.
“Uh huh.” My mind can’t form a response bigger than that; it’s too busy playing out arguments with Tristan, exchanging words and dreaming up his jerk-face responses. I’m not sure what changed between the time we first met and now…other than the day of the week and his personality. I feel sick in my gut that a part of me actually thought he was cute. I feel sicker because a part of me still does.
What does that say about me? The fact that a guy can push me around like that and I can still find him appealing speaks to a flaw I need to stomp out like a roach. My hands are shaking and dying to form fists, I’m so mad. I’m so angry that tears are threatening to form. I’m embarrassed, and I don’t like being humiliated. I belong where I say I belong, and my dad would want me to stand up for myself.
I’m not a sweet little girl. I’m a girl who wants to get to do the one thing she loves in this place she has to live. I have no choice but to be here, and there is no fucking way some cocky boy is going to be the thing that makes me doubt myself. I’m a girl who is going to get her way. I’m a woman! And if I have to get rid of the distractions so the little baby-ass boys on my court can move past the bullshit and realize what I’m here for, then that’s what I’ll do.
“Those guys aren’t all bad…Tristan, he’s…”
I cut her off when we reach my driveway.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” I fill in the rest.
Her laugh echoes behind me as I lift open my garage door.
“Watch your step. I still have to unpack a lot of this stuff,” I say weaving around the stacks of weights, boxes of kitchen supplies, and some tools, until I get to the door to the house. I push it open and lean my hip into it waiting for Lauren to follow me.
“You don’t lock that shit?” She points to my door handle as she steps up the small concrete lip into my house.
I glance around at our things—my weights the only real items with value that I can’t carry with me at all times.
“What would someone steal?” I shrug and meet her eyes.
Her lips crinkle as her chest shakes with a silent laugh.
“Girl, until you’ve lived here more than a week, just take my advice, okay?” She points to the bolt on my door then looks me in the eyes. “Lock your damn door.”
Sometimes I don’t like carrying keys, and my truck is really hard to start unless you know just the right things to do, so I’m not really worried about someone jacking it while I’m gone, even if they did find my keys in the house. My dad has never locked our house—any house—when we’re gone. Sometimes we forget to lock it up at night. I shrug, mostly to humor Lauren as she walks inside, then I lock the door behind us just to make her feel like I’ve learned something.
I toss my ball into a pile of towels that still need to be put away, then drop my phone on the kitchen counter before moving toward the drawer we affectionately call the “man drawer.” It’s super sexist, but the things in there are all manly, I guess, which is why my dad has always called it that. I pull out the scissors he used for breaking down our moving boxes, and before Lauren has a chance to realize what I’m doing, I twist about a quarter of my hair in my hand, tugging it to the side in its ponytail, and I cut it off.
“What the fu…”
I turn to see Lauren’s mouth hung open, and her eyes wider than I thought they could go.
“I can’t shave it unless it’s short,” I say, reaching down with my hair-filled hand to swing open the cabinet that the trash can is hidden in. I drop the heavy strands and tug the rest of my hair free from my hairband, grabbing another section and chopping it off just the same way.
“Oh my God, I can’t. I can’t watch you do this, Riley! Riley, stop…” Lauren is pacing, pausing just in front of me and reaching toward the scissors, then recoiling and holding her fingertips to her temples as she paces again.
“It’s just hair. It took me, like a year, maybe a year and a half to grow that,” I say, chopping away at more loose pieces.
“Yeah, a year is a long time! And some of us have to pay for long hair like that.” She holds her hands out toward me in a choking motion, and it makes me snicker.
“You can have my hair, if you want it. Seriously, take it. It’s free,” I say, running my fingers through the various lengths I have left.
“Riley, nobody wants hair that looks like that,” she says, pointing to the nest I’ve left in the trashcan.
I wrap my fingers around a thick amount left on the right side of my head and twist to lo
ok at the pile of hair.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I say as I cut through the shorter stuff left behind, getting it closer to my head.
“Gah! Just…just give me the scissors.” Lauren holds her palm open and I lift my right brow as I look at her.
“Just cut it close. We’ll get the rest with my dad’s clippers,” I say, handing over the scissors and turning my body so my back is to her.
Her first few cuts are tentative, not taking enough, and I can tell she’s trying to salvage what I’ve done.
“Lauren?” I wait while she nips at a few more pieces.
“Yeah.” There’s a sigh mixed with her response.
“My hair really isn’t important to me. I won’t regret any of this, I swear. What I will regret is not proving to those guys out there that I’m just as good as they are; that I belong.”
I tilt my head and look up and to the side to catch her eyes. She pulls the scissors down and rests them on my shoulder, and we have a silent conversation that lasts only two or three seconds. She nods. She doesn’t smile, in fact, she still looks a little sick, but she nods anyway. She gets it.
“A’right, then. Let’s do this,” she says, sheering off big chunks at a time until sprinkles of hair dust my shirt and fall down on my legs and the floor. She cuts until my hair is a very messy boy-cut length, then we move to my dad’s bathroom and plug in his clippers to take it down the rest of the way. I leave about a quarter of an inch, and my scalp only shows through a little. It’s bright white underneath, but my head isn’t so bad.
I pull my T-shirt off and use it to wipe up the stray hairs on the counter then rub my hands over my soft head a few times to shake loose anything that remains.
“You’re oddly good at this. Shave your head often?” Lauren asks, and I think she’s joking, but I’m not sure because she still hasn’t smiled or laughed. Nothing about this is amusing to her. It might not be to me later, but right now, I’m operating in prime-directive mode.