Chapter 3

Avery's POV

I told Jace during the ten minutes before practice, in the strip of hallway outside the gym where the noise from the locker room made it easy to keep my voice low and still be heard.

"I'm transferring," I said. "Westbridge Prep. It's already done."

He laughed first, an actual laugh, short and disbelieving, like I'd told him a joke that hadn't landed. Then he saw my face and the laugh died somewhere in his throat.

"Wait," he said. "Wait, what? Since when do you transfer schools?"

"Since yesterday," I said. "The paperwork's signed."

"You didn't even talk to me about this."

I looked at him for a long moment, and something inside me that had been holding very still finally moved. "I talked to you about everything for two years, Jace. Every strategy, every read, every weakness I found on every team we played. I don't think I owe you a conversation about my own school."

His face shifted through confusion into something closer to alarm, the particular alarm of a person realizing the ground under him isn't as solid as he assumed. "This is because of last night. Because I didn't answer your texts fast enough or something. Avery, come on, I had reporters on me for like an hour after that game."

"It's not about texts," I said.

"Then what is it about?"

I could have told him right there. I could have pulled up the recording, watched his face collapse in real time, given him the confrontation he clearly thought he deserved an explanation for. But I thought about the hallway again, about his voice saying don't tell her about the defensive rotations thing, that one's still working, and I understood that he hadn't earned my explanation. He'd earned my silence and my exit, nothing more.

"Westbridge offered me a spot on their team," I said instead. "I took it."

"Their team," he repeated, and something in his tone made it clear exactly how small he thought that word was when it came out of my mouth. "Avery, you don't even... I mean, you help me with strategy sometimes. That's different from actually playing."

There it was. Two years distilled into one sentence, spoken without any awareness of what it revealed. Sometimes. Help. As though the countless nights I'd spent breaking down film until my eyes ached had been a hobby I dabbled in around the edges of his real life, instead of the architecture holding up everything he called his instinct.

"Sometimes," I said quietly.

"You know what I mean," he said, backpedaling slightly at whatever he saw in my expression. "You're good at the numbers stuff. The film stuff. That's not the same as being a player."

I thought about the eleven seconds of video in my phone. I thought about how easy it would be to let it play right there in that hallway, to watch him understand in real time exactly how much I actually knew about being a player, about reading a defense in real time instead of secondhand off a screen. I didn't do it. Not yet. Some part of me, the part that had learned patience from a thousand hours of film study, understood that the moment for that video hadn't arrived, and that using it too early would waste it.

"I have to get to practice," I said, and walked past him into the gym.

Practice was its own kind of strange, sitting on the bench in my usual spot with my notebook open, watching drills I would never run again for this team. Coach Daniels hadn't been told yet. Only Coach Reyes and I knew, and I intended to keep it that way for as long as I could manage.

I watched Jace during scrimmage, watched him miss the exact read I would have given him against the second unit's zone, watched him force a pass into traffic that got picked off because nobody had told him the weak side was rotating late. He looked over at me on the bench, the old habit clearly still alive in him, some reflex expecting me to lean forward with the answer.

I didn't move.

He turned the ball over twice more in the next five minutes.

I found Maya after practice in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of her car the way she always did when she was waiting for someone to finally talk. I told her everything then. Not the small careful version I'd given Jace, but the whole thing, the hallway, the kiss, the sentence about the notebook, the recording sitting quietly in my phone.

Maya went very still and very pale, and then very angry, in that order. "He said that? About your notebook?"

"He said I'd lose my mind if I knew how much he shows her," I said. "So yes. He said that."

"Avery." Her voice cracked slightly. "How long have you been carrying this by yourself?"

"Since last night."

"No," she said. "I mean the rest of it. The strategies. The film study. All of it. How long have you been doing his work and letting him take the credit?"

I opened my mouth to answer with something small, something that would make it sound less significant than it was, and then I stopped myself, because that instinct, the one that made everything I did look smaller than it actually was, was exactly the instinct that had built the last two years into something I never wanted.

"Since freshman year," I said instead, plainly, without softening it. "Almost three years."

Maya shook her head slowly, and I watched her doing the math the way I had done it the night before, counting up every quiet contribution, every late night, every moment I'd chosen to disappear a little further into the background so that Jace could stand a little taller in the light.

"You're better than him," she said. "You know that, right? Not at supporting him. At the actual game."

I sat with that for a moment, turning it over, testing whether it felt true the way a fact should feel true, solid and unshakable. And it did. It felt true in a way I'd never allowed myself to examine too closely, because examining it meant admitting how much I'd given away for someone who called my work his instinct.

"I know that now," I said. "I think some part of me has always known it. I just kept making myself smaller because it was easier than finding out what happened if I stopped."

"So stop," Maya said simply. "Starting now. Starting at Westbridge."

I looked back toward the gym, at the windows still lit from inside where Jace was probably still running through the same drills, still missing the reads I used to hand him without a second thought.

"I'm done hiding what I can do," I said, and the words felt strange and new in my mouth, like a language I hadn't spoken in years but somehow still remembered fluently. "Westbridge is getting the real version. Not the quiet girlfriend in the third row. The girl who's been running the numbers the whole time."

Maya smiled, small and fierce. "Number Zero is going to wish it never got assigned to anyone else."

I didn't know yet what number they'd give me at Westbridge. I only knew, standing in that parking lot with the gym lights fading behind me, that whatever it was, it was going to mean something different than it had ever meant before.