Chapter 5

Avery's POV

Coach Reyes posted the scrimmage teams on the whiteboard three days after I arrived, and my name sat at point guard for the second unit, across from Reagan running the starters. Underneath the two rosters he'd written a single line in block letters. STARTING FIVE DECIDED TODAY.

I felt the whole gym recalibrate around that sentence. Practice jerseys got pulled on a little tighter. Shoes got tied a second time. Whatever goodwill I'd earned from calling out a defensive gap two days earlier evaporated into something sharper, more competitive, because now I wasn't just the transfer with good eyes. I was a body standing between someone and a starting spot.

A boy I hadn't spoken to yet fell into step beside me as we walked onto the court, tall, steady, the kind of calm that read as captain even before I saw the C stitched onto his practice jersey.

"Ethan," he said, holding out a hand like this was a normal introduction and not the first day of a scrimmage that would decide who started varsity basketball. "Heard you've got a good eye for the floor."

"Trying to," I said.

"That's not what Reagan said." He almost smiled. "She said you called out our second unit's biggest weakness after watching four possessions. That's not trying. That's just seeing."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and Ethan seemed fine with the silence, jogging off toward the starters' side without pressing further. I appreciated that about him immediately, the way he offered respect without needing anything back in return for it.

The scrimmage started slow, both units feeling each other out, and for the first four possessions I did what I'd always done. I called out reads from the point, directing my unit toward gaps in the starters' defense, watching my teammates execute passes I'd mapped out a full second before the play developed. It worked. We scored twice in a row off reads I fed to a girl named Sara who'd barely spoken to me since I arrived.

Reagan brought the ball up on the other end, frustrated, and called something to her unit that I couldn't hear, and on the next defensive possession Westbridge's starters switched their coverage specifically to take away my voice from the play, doubling toward me on catches, cutting off my sightlines.

It should have worked. Six months ago it probably would have. But something in me had already started shifting since the hallway outside that locker room at Crestwood, something that no longer wanted to just see the gap and hand it to someone else to exploit.

I stopped calling out reads. I started taking them myself.

The next time a defender doubled toward me, I split the trap with a crossover I hadn't used in a real scrimmage in almost two years, the kind of move I used to practice alone in my driveway after film study, alone, unwatched, because showing it to anyone felt like showing too much. I drove the gap myself, drew the help defender, and instead of dishing the pass I'd been planning to make, I pulled up and buried the shot from the elbow.

The gym went quiet for a half second, the particular quiet of people recalibrating something they thought they already understood.

"Run it back," Coach Reyes called from the sideline, and I heard something different in his voice now, something closer to interest than instruction.

We ran it back. This time the starters adjusted, sending two defenders instead of one, collapsing the driving lane before I could split it. I read the second defender rotating a half beat before she committed, and instead of forcing the drive I'd already used once, I whipped a no look pass across the lane to Sara cutting backdoor, a pass that required seeing three moving pieces at once and trusting a teammate I'd known for exactly three days to be exactly where I expected her to be.

She was. The layup dropped clean.

Ethan, guarding the wing on that possession, jogged past me toward the other end and said, low enough that only I could hear it, "Okay. That wasn't just seeing either."

By the fourth quarter of the scrimmage, Reagan had stopped talking to the girl beside her between possessions and started watching me instead, the particular attention of a competitor recalculating a rival's ceiling in real time. I didn't slow down for her comfort. I'd spent two years slowing myself down for someone else's comfort, and something about that hallway, about tell coach this was your read, had burned that particular habit out of me completely.

With ninety seconds left in the scrimmage and the score even, I brought the ball up against Reagan directly, point guard against point guard, and felt something settle into my chest that I hadn't felt in longer than I wanted to admit. Not anxiety. Not the old instinct to shrink myself down and disappear into the background of somebody else's story. Something closer to hunger.

I read her hips drop half an inch too early, the tell of a defender anticipating a crossover instead of reacting to one, and I attacked straight instead, blowing past her on the right side before she could recover, finishing through contact at the rim while the whistle blew for the foul.

The gym made a sound I hadn't heard directed at me before, not at Crestwood, not anywhere, a low collective murmur of genuine surprise.

Coach Reyes blew the final whistle a few possessions later and gathered both units at half court, and I stood there breathing hard, sweat soaking through the jersey with the number nobody had wanted stitched across the front, and felt more like myself than I had in longer than two years.

"Starting five," Coach Reyes said, and read off four names before pausing, looking directly at me. "Point guard. Bennett."

Reagan's face didn't crumble the way I half expected it to. Instead she walked over, offered her hand, and said, with something like respect roughening her voice, "Good. Now I don't have to guard whoever's guarding you."

Ethan clapped my shoulder as the team broke toward the locker room. "Crestwood's not going to know what hit them."

I hadn't told anyone yet that Crestwood was exactly who I was thinking about, that somewhere across town Jace was probably running through drills without a single read whispered into his ear from the sideline, discovering in real time exactly how much of his game had quietly belonged to me all along.

Soon enough, he'd find out I'd taken it back for myself.