Chapter 4

Avery's POV

Westbridge Prep's gym smelled different than Crestwood's. Newer paint, older equipment, the kind of place that worked twice as hard to matter half as much in the league standings. I stood in the doorway of the locker room on my first morning holding a duffel bag that still had a Crestwood patch sewn into the side pocket, and I felt every single eye in that room find me and then look away just as fast.

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Then a tall girl near the back, sharp ponytail, arms crossed, said what everyone else was clearly thinking. "So you're the transfer."

"Avery," I said.

"We heard." She said it like the words themselves were unimpressed. "Crestwood's girl. The one who used to sit on the bench with a notebook."

I didn't correct her. I'd learned by now that corrections offered too early only made people dig into their first impression harder, the same way a defense that gets called out on a weakness in the first quarter tends to overcorrect and create a new one somewhere else. I set my bag down on the empty bench and said nothing, and the silence in the room stretched thin and uncomfortable until Coach Reyes walked in.

He didn't waste time on introductions. "This is Avery Bennett. She transferred in from Crestwood. She's not here to sit on a bench with a notebook." His eyes flicked toward the ponytail girl just briefly enough to let her know he'd heard exactly what she'd said. "She's here to play. Starting today."

A few players exchanged glances. I felt the room's skepticism settle over me like a second layer of clothing, heavier than the first, and I understood that whatever I'd built at Crestwood meant nothing here. At Westbridge I wasn't the quiet girl who mattered more than anyone realized. I was simply unproven, an unknown variable nobody had a reason to trust yet.

Coach Reyes handed me a folded practice jersey without ceremony. "We don't have a lot of numbers left," he said. "Most of the good ones went early in the season."

I unfolded it and looked down at the single digit stitched onto the front. Zero.

Nobody wanted zero. I understood that immediately, the way you understand things that don't need to be explained out loud. Zero was the number nobody fought for in the equipment room, the number that sounded like nothing, like absence, like a placeholder waiting for someone more important to claim it eventually.

"Nobody's worn it in two seasons," Coach Reyes said, watching my face carefully, the way he seemed to watch everything. "You can trade for a different one if you want. I've got a couple options in the back."

I turned the jersey over in my hands. Somewhere behind me I heard the ponytail girl, whose name I would later learn was Reagan, mutter something low to the girl beside her, something I didn't need to hear clearly to understand the shape of it.

"I'll keep it," I said.

Coach Reyes's eyebrows lifted slightly, the smallest flicker of interest crossing his face. "You sure?"

"I'm sure," I said, and pulled the jersey on over my shirt, and something about the weight of the fabric against my shoulders felt strangely correct, like putting on a name that fit better than the one I'd been using for years.

Practice started twenty minutes later, and I spent the first half hour exactly where I expected to spend it, running drills with a team that hadn't decided whether I deserved their attention yet. Reagan ran point during the scrimmage portion, calling plays with the easy confidence of someone who'd earned her spot through three seasons of proving it, and I hung back at the perimeter, watching, the same way I'd watched a hundred opposing defenses from a folding chair at Crestwood.

I saw it within four possessions. Westbridge's second unit ran a high screen that left their weak side wing wide open every time the defender helped early, and nobody on the floor seemed to notice they were leaving the same gap unpunished over and over.

I could have said nothing. Six months ago I would have said nothing, would have folded the observation away quietly and let someone else discover it eventually, would have made myself smaller in a gym full of strangers who already thought I was smaller than I was.

I didn't fold it away.

"Reagan," I called out during the next dead ball, loud enough to be heard, my voice steadier than I expected it to be. "Your screener's setting up too early. Their weak side defender is helping before the catch every time. If you delay the screen half a second, the corner opens up completely."

The gym went quiet in that particular way gyms go quiet when someone unexpected says something that lands. Reagan looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable crossing her face, somewhere between annoyance and reluctant curiosity.

"Prove it," she said.

So I did.

On the next possession I told her exactly when to call for the screen, exactly which half second to wait, and when the play unfolded precisely the way I'd described it, the corner opened wide and clean, and Reagan's teammate buried the shot without a hand anywhere near her.

Nobody said anything at first. Then Coach Reyes, standing at half court with his arms crossed, said quietly, "Run it again."

We ran it again. It worked again.

By the end of practice something in the room had shifted, not fully, not into trust exactly, but into something adjacent to it, a willingness to look at me a second time instead of writing me off after the first glance. Reagan didn't apologize for the comment about the notebook. She didn't need to. She simply started calling my name during water breaks to ask what I saw on the far side of the floor, and that, I understood, was its own kind of apology.

Coach Reyes caught me on my way out of the gym, holding the equipment room door open with one shoulder.

"You've got good eyes," he said. "Better than good, honestly. Question is whether you're willing to let people see you use them, or whether you're going to keep handing your reads to somebody else's game plan."

I thought about Jace, about two years of quiet contributions folded into someone else's legend, about a hallway where a girl I barely knew had said she'd lose her mind if she knew.

"I'm done handing anything to anybody," I said. "This one's mine."

Coach Reyes almost smiled, the closest thing to approval I'd seen from him since I'd walked through the door that morning. "Number Zero," he said, glancing at the jersey still hanging loose over my shoulders. "Nobody's ever made that number mean much around here. Might be time somebody did."

I looked down at the single digit stitched into the fabric, the number nobody had wanted, the number that used to sound like absence, and for the first time since the hallway outside the boys' locker room, I felt something settle into place inside my chest that didn't feel like loss at all.

It felt like the beginning of something Jace Carter had never once seen coming.