Beyond the Point

by Claire Gibson

  “No . . . ,” Avery said slowly. She laughed. “I assumed you’re playing basketball because you’re in the women’s locker room before basketball practice.”

  Dani smiled like Avery had just passed a test she hadn’t signed up to take. “That’s good detective work. Good attention to detail.”

  “I guess that means you’re a plebe too.”

  “I consider slitting my wrists most nights, so yes.”

  They laughed, then dressed in silence for a while. But soon, Avery could no longer handle the quiet. It was hard to admit, but she knew it was true. After nearly ten weeks at West Point, Avery was desperate for a friend.

  “So what position do you play?”

  “Point guard. You?”

  In that moment, it felt as though a hot knife had sliced through Avery’s gut. She busied herself fixing her ponytail, hoping that Dani wouldn’t notice her disappointment.

  “What?” Dani asked.

  But Avery didn’t answer, because right at that moment, another group of women flooded through the doors, and Avery took that opportunity to exit into the gymnasium.

  It’s all right, Avery thought, trying to coach herself as she walked out onto the court and started to stretch. So what? So Coach Jankovich recruited two point guards. Who’s to say she’s any good?

  THREE MINUTES INTO their “optional” practice, Dani had made it abundantly clear to everyone in the gymnasium that the team was only going to need one point guard. Time and time again, when they went after the same ball, Avery ended up on the floor, while Dani sprinted upcourt for an easy layup. The girl was fast and nimble. She dribbled the ball like it was tied to the center of her palm with an invisible string. Dani couldn’t have been taller than five foot four, but somehow, even her petite frame worked to her advantage. She kept her center of gravity low, fooling even the most seasoned defenders. Worst of all, the girl was obnoxiously confident, quickly aligning herself with Sarah Goodrich and the other Firsties, throwing high fives and patting butts, as if they’d all known each other for years.

  “What’s her deal?” Avery said breathlessly to a new teammate, Hannah, when they’d both taken a moment to get water. Hannah Speer was also a plebe, and impossibly tall. When she looked at Avery like she didn’t know what she meant, Avery jutted her chin out in Dani’s general direction. “McNalley. She’s been showing off this whole time.”

  Hannah just shrugged. “Everyone wants to make a good first impression. Can’t blame her for that.”

  Avery found herself retreating to the bench for water more often than normal, simply to gather the emotional wherewithal to continue. There’s nothing worse than believing you’re talented, only to encounter a greater talent. And as the practice went on, Avery grew more and more despondent. Her performance went from lackluster to awkward, from awkward to embarrassing. And just when she thought things couldn’t get worse, she looked up into the stands to see a thin woman sitting in the shadows.

  Even from so far away, Avery could see the whites of the coach’s eyes, trained on the court. Her long and slender fingers, wrapped around a pencil, were writing on a page on her clipboard.

  The NCAA had strict rules about preseason practices—coaches weren’t supposed to be at practices until the regular season started. That’s why Sarah Goodrich had organized the practice instead of the coaches, and why she’d strategically added the word optional in the e-mail. But staring up at the coach in the stands, Avery’s ears turned red with frustration. So it was an ambush. This “optional” practice was, in fact, an exhibition.

  AFTER PRACTICE, THE locker room filled with steam. The black and gold striped carpet hid years of sweat and smelled dank with age. Maybe the girls were tired, or, Avery thought, maybe they’d noticed Coach Jankovich in the stands, too, because other than the sound of water spraying out of the showerheads, it was quiet. Surely the coach would take into account the fact they’d been at Basic Training all summer—naturally, they were all a little rusty. Avery had nearly convinced herself that everything would be okay—that she would have another chance to prove her skill—when the locker room door creaked open.

  Coach Jankovich walked in, wearing a navy pantsuit and black high heels. A rush of cold air entered the locker room with her. Without speaking a word, she taped two white pieces of paper to the cinder-block wall by the door, and then left the way she came—in silence.

  THE GIRLS STOOD like statues, each afraid to be the first to speak.

  “Well I’ll look,” said Avery. Ignoring the growing dread in her stomach, she walked to the wall as if she didn’t give a damn and stared at the papers, covered in Coach Jankovich’s barely legible handwriting. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “What?” asked Hannah.

  At that moment, Dani walked out of the shower wrapped in a towel, surrounded by a cloud of steam. She wiped the inside of her ear with her pointer finger. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “They’re . . .” Hannah had walked up behind Avery and was staring at the pages, her voice full of shock. “. . . rosters.”

  Avery laughed sardonically, turned to grab her gym bag, and shook her head at Dani, who stood stunned in the middle of the room.

  “Glad to know I survived Beast for this shit.”

  The two pages fluttered as Avery blew past them and out the door. The first page had “JV” written at the top, and below it, a long column of names. The other page said “Varsity” and listed only one.

  BY EARLY OCTOBER, the trees on campus had turned from green to orange, like the whole place had been lit up in flames. At breakfast, Avery took her seat at her table and stabbed at her eggs with murderous rage.

  “Someone piss in your pancakes, princess?”

  The upperclassman at the head of the table, John Collins, offered her a wide smile. A Spanish major with green eyes and wavy black hair, Collins was handsome, funny, and extremely bored it seemed, since he was surrounded by a table of plebes who weren’t allowed to talk.

  “No excuse, sir.” Avery faked a smile, took an oversized bite of eggs.

  But she did have an excuse. She had a million excuses.

  After the first few varsity basketball games, Dani McNalley had become something of a celebrity on campus. Avery didn’t need a crystal ball to predict how her career as an NCAA athlete was going to unfold. Dani was going to secure every possible minute of playing time for the season—maybe even all four years. Avery would ride the bench.

  She felt trapped, like Coach Jankovich had promised her a place on the team, only to abandon her to the sidelines. In light of her rejection, everything about West Point chafed against her. She had to check the hall for upperclassmen before darting from her dorm room. Plebes were forced to walk like Pac-Man, in straight lines, only taking right-angled turns. You could spot plebes at West Point, walking along the perimeter of the hallways, squaring off with their eyes straight ahead, trying not to be noticed. By contrast, upperclassmen walked wherever they wanted and spoke freely among themselves. It was enough to drive Avery crazy, watching them flaunt their freedom. Every time someone yelled at her, the voice inside Avery’s head repeated their instructions with an added layer of sarcasm.

  “Adams, move to the wall!”

  You move to the wall, she would rant in her inner dialogue.

  “New Cadet, stop right there and recite the ‘Alma Mater.’”

  You recite the fucking alma mater!

  Instead, she’d bite her tongue and do as she was told, allowing the anger to boil inside of her, unsure of when it might explode.

  Avery placed her fork on her plate.

  “Okay,” Collins announced suddenly, breaking the silence. “New rules. As long as you use your radio, you can talk. New Cadet Willis,” Collins said, addressing the plebe who sat across from Avery midbite. “Your call sign is Trojan, because you’ll never need one.”

  Avery fought back a laugh. He went down the table, assigning nicknames. When he got to Avery, he stopped, looked her up and down
. “Adams. Your name is About-Face, because all you ever do is sulk, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get you to smile.”

  “Chhhhhh—ah, Eagle for About-Face. Come in, About-Face,” he started, pretending to hold a radio in his hand. “What’s your twenty?”

  Avery rolled her eyes.

  “Chhhh—sorry, About-Face, I’m not getting that. Check your radio.”

  With her hand curled around an imaginary radio, Avery decided to play along.

  “Chhhh—roger that, Eagle, I’m downwind of Trojan. Smells like he’s looking for a place to defecate, sir. Over and out.”

  The table erupted in laughter, Trojan included. Satisfied, Avery offered a flirtatious wink to Collins, then picked up her fork and kept eating.

  MIDTERMS SWALLOWED WHOLE weeks of October. Cadets attended nonstop review sessions and banged out sixteen-page research papers, and a chemistry exam nearly flattened Avery with its intensity. When she wasn’t at basketball practice with the JV team, Avery was buried beneath her books, trying desperately to stay afloat. Her GPA was a sorry 3.2, and with that, Avery was happy. Then all the leaves detached from their branches, glittering through the air like falling gold. They’d gathered in rotting piles on the ground before Avery could appreciate the beauty of their death.

  After that, campus went gray. People had warned her about this: during the winter, West Point was a depressing palette of black and white. Charcoal river, stone buildings and roads, slate uniforms, cloudy skies. Barren and lifeless, the whole place felt like Siberia, and the thin wool coat Avery had been issued over the summer suddenly didn’t stand a chance against the wind chill.

  “Attention all cadets . . . there are four minutes . . .”

  “Today’s uniform . . . is battle dress uniform . . .”

  As the weeks passed, Avery’s life fell into a rhythm that, if not enjoyable, was at least predictable. At practice, Dani McNalley barely spoke to Avery. Instead, that girl spoke exclusively to upperclassmen—as though if she separated herself from the plebes, she would no longer be one. Sarah Goodrich and her friends adopted Dani into their fold, and had even invited Dani to some Bible study they attended, an invitation Avery would never receive, but would have liked to turn down.

  She tried her best to ignore her growing jealousy by taking long runs around campus whenever she had a spare thirty minutes. The only reprieve from the madness had become her twice-daily meals with Collins and his imaginary radio. West Point explicitly prohibited plebes from dating upperclassmen, but somehow, the fact that he was off-limits made Collins that much more attractive. By mid-November, she’d moved to the seat directly next to his, letting her leg brush up against his under the table. That went on for a few days, until he responded, clutching his hand around her upper thigh. She felt her eyes roll back in her head at the warmth of his touch.

  It was innocent, she told herself. A game she knew she could win.

  ON THE SECOND Tuesday in November, the day before they left for Thanksgiving break, Avery sat on a cold metal chair outside of Coach Jankovich’s office, waiting her turn. The coach had scheduled one-on-one meetings with her players, called “MSTEs,” short for “midseason team evaluations,” which made Avery roll her eyes so hard, she thought they might disconnect from her brain. It was clear that Jankovich had worked hard to create an acronym of her own, as if West Point hadn’t already filled their lives with an alphabet soup of abbreviations.

  Fifteen minutes after Avery’s scheduled MSTE, Coach Jankovich’s office door opened, and out came Dani McNalley, holding a folded piece of paper. She made eye contact with Avery, her eyes full and intense—like two headlights on the front of a car, barreling through the night. Avery couldn’t quite decipher whether Dani was angry or sad. It didn’t matter.

  “Adams,” Coach Jankovich barked from inside her office. “You’re up.”

  Inside, the office felt cold and lifeless. Empty plastic water bottles and stacks of paperwork covered her desk, unattended and unorganized. No way this place would pass inspection, Avery thought. It was a wonder Coach Jankovich still had a job at a place like West Point. Her players had to keep their beds made with hospital corners, their mirrors devoid of a single speck of dust, and yet, her office looked like a tornado had just passed through.

  “Take a seat,” the coach said. Her dark brown hair, streaked with white, gave her the appearance of a skunk, and for some reason, Avery suddenly felt on edge, like Coach Jankovich had caught her doing something illegal and couldn’t wait to show off all of her evidence. Shifting in her seat, Avery opened her mouth, but was cut off before she could say a word.

  “This is your midseason report. You can see here, you’re fifty-two percent at the line. Not great. You’ve outpaced Hannah Speer and Lisa Johnson with your defensive rebounds, which isn’t bad. But I think we both know you’re not where you need to be. You had great stats in high school, but here, you’ve haven’t exactly reached the right level of play.”

  Avery’s body filled with heat, and she struggled to breathe, like a heavy cloud had formed in her chest.

  “When I compare your stats with varsity, I mean . . . it’s just impossible to compare.” Coach Jankovich focused on the page in front of her, avoiding the eyes of her player. “For example, Dani McNalley hit seventy percent of her free throws.”

  Avery cleared her throat, trying to regain her confidence. “That’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. Dani. I’d like a chance to play against her. I mean, she’s great. I know that. But I’ve improved a lot since September. And I think if you gave me a shot, you’d be—”

  “We don’t reward players for being the most improved,” Coach Jankovich replied. “We reward players for being the best.”

  “Okay,” Avery said, swallowing the hurt. She’d never not been the best. The words that came next sounded foreign coming out of her mouth. “So what do I need to do?”

  “Well, Avery, you just don’t have the edge. And unfortunately, that’s not something I can teach.”

  The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Staring at this woman—this person who had convinced her that West Point was the best option available—Avery felt something deflate inside of her. “So that’s it?”

  Avery couldn’t fight the tears any longer. “I’m sorry, but, if you’re not going to give me a chance to play, why am I even here?”

  Coach Jankovich crossed her arms over her chest and sighed. “To be frank, Avery, we assumed one of you would quit during basic training.” She held out a tissue box, but Avery refused to take it from her. “I’m just being honest with you. With McNalley here I doubt you’ll see much of the court. That’s just the way it is. So you can come, participate in practice, and be part of the JV team. Or you can quit now, take a red shirt, and transfer to some other school, where you can play in a year or two. It’s your choice.”

  The coach handed Avery the paper printout, then turned to look at her computer.

  “Send in whoever’s next.”

  AVERY EXPLODED OUT of the Holleder Center into the wintry air, breathless and angry. We assumed one of you would quit. Was that what she was to them? A backup plan? Not worth coaching? You just don’t have the edge. What did that even mean?

  Avery had ignored Hannah on the way out of the Holleder Center and ran back to cadet area, letting the wind freeze the tears on her cheeks. It’s just not enough. That’s what Coach J had said. And she was right. As fast as Avery was, there would always be someone faster. As pretty as she was, there would always be someone like Hannah, who was downright angelic. What was the point of trying to be good? She’d tried. And she was tired of trying.

  When she found her way back to the barracks, Avery knew exactly what she was doing. It didn’t matter that she was covered in sweat and tears and that she hadn’t showered. His room was two floors above hers, she knew because she’d delivered his laundry just last week. If she was lucky, he would be there when she arrived, rules be damned.

  She stood in the
hallway outside of his door, her heart racing in her chest, looking to her left and to her right before she raised a fist to knock. If his roommate answered, she would be ruined. She had no way to explain why she, a plebe, needed to see Collins, a Cow, at ten thirty on a Tuesday night. But thankfully, when the door opened, the green eyes and half smile of her table leader were there, accompanied by a half-hearted laugh.

  “About-Face?” he said, shocked. “What are you . . .”

  Avery peered behind him, saw that his roommate was not there, and then stepped into his room, closed the door, and turned the lock. Breathless, she pulled her shirt off over her head, and savored the look on his face as his eyes dropped in awe.

  “Get undressed, Collins,” she ordered.

  And he obeyed.

  6

  Spring 2001 // West Point, New York

  I assume you’re all ready for today’s discussion?”

  There was a quiet murmur of assent from all of the cadets in the room.

  Hannah sat front and center, wearing BDUs and lining up her pens in a perfect row like soldiers. Red for the most important notes. A highlighter for text in the book. Black gel for transcribing portions of Colonel Bennett’s lecture. There was little about West Point that Hannah could control, but at least in the classroom, she knew how to excel. The spiral notebook in front of her was full of notes from the semester, with dates written in perfect cursive handwriting at the top right of each page.

  “Good, good.” The professor dropped a copy of Plato’s The Republic on his podium and smiled. “Before we cut into this juicy piece of philosophical goodness, let me check with our section marcher. Mr. Arant?”

  While the cadet in charge looked around the room to take roll, Hannah looked at Colonel Bennett. He wore a green uniform with an eagle emblem on the lapel, showing his rank. He was in his midfifties, with peppery brown hair and the clean-shaven face of a man who’d been in the military for most of his life. At the beginning of the semester, when Hannah had walked into his classroom, she’d immediately recognized him. Colonel Bennett and his wife, Wendy, the couple that had hosted her family the night before R-Day, also had season tickets to all of West Point’s home basketball games. During the varsity games, the JV players sat in the bleachers in the row just in front of the Bennetts.