She reminded herself of the first day, of what her mother had said, and what the team had earned. "You can still say what you saw." she replied. "There's no crowd here. It doesn't have to be a fight." Brielle took a small step back.
Her jaw hardened. "You really think this whole tournament turns around you?" “No. That’s why I keep trying to play it.” Brielle walked away without answering. Imani watched her join Harper at the corridor to corner.
The two girls leaned close. Harper laughed once, but Brielle did not. She turned to glance at Imani's bag where the school name had been painted by hand over a faded patch. When she looked away, something calculating had returned to her face. South Dock’s second-day group game was against a taller team from Ridgeview.
They had strong inside scoring and enough disciplined defenders to punish impatient guards. Imani spent the first half fighting herself. Each time she crossed midcourt, somebody shouted that she was scared of Brielle. Once she cut into the lane merely to prove them wrong and threw a wild pass straight into Ridgeview's hands. Ward immediately brought her out.
"What did you want on that possession?" the coach asked. "To make them stop talking." "And how did the pass help?" "It didn't." "What do we want instead?"
"A good shot." "For whom?" "Whoever has it." "Then find that player." Imani returned to the floor and began looking for where Ridgeview's taller center left her feet.
She stopped asking the crowd for permission to play. She played. Zora made two free throws. Marisol hit an open jumper. A younger guard called Mina, who had missed her first two tries, slipped under a screen and scored her first basket of the tournament.
South Dock won by five without any grand moment that could be cut into an impressive clip. Afterward Ward praised the team's adjustment and put a clear line through the word hero on her whiteboard. "We didn't need one," she said. "We needed five people making the next right choice." On their way out, Imani saw Harper and Lily standing over Brielle's phone in the lobby.
She heard only three words of their conversation through the noisy crowd. "Check her transfer." Lily looked up too quickly. Brielle closed the screen and shifted it into her pocket. Imani did not know what they meant.
She had transferred to South Dock after her mother moved across the river to a smaller apartment. Her name was on the roster. Her grades were good. She had attended every practice she could. All the same, she remembered the way Brielle had looked at the painted patch on her old bag.
Rumors could be shaped into accusations, even when they had very little to hold them up. Outside the field house, the rain had stopped. Denise was leaning against the bus shelter with two paper cups of hot chocolate, having traded her evening shift to another worker so she could watch South Dock’s game. She had made it in time for the final quarter. Imani told her about the win and the conversation in the hallway.
Her mother listened without interrupting. "People can ask a school to check records. That doesn't mean they get to invent what the records say. I wish I didn't have to think about any of it. I know you came to play, but being prepared for a problem isn't surrendering to it."
They boarded the bus together. Imani sat beside Zora, who was studying a photo of the bracket on her phone. One more group game would decide the semi-final seed. Beyond that was a blank space marked final, waiting for two teams nobody could name yet. Imani traced the edge of the photograph with her thumb and heard Coach Ward call from the front.
"Everybody home safe. Tomorrow we take care of the next game, Not the one after it. Imani, put the phone away. The tournament had started with somebody trying to move her off the court. Now other people were talking about moving her off a roster.
She could not yet see how the second threat would reach her. Only that the girls who had pushed her had stopped treating the shove as enough. On the third morning of the Metro Civic Classic, Harbor Ridge woke under a low gray sky and the South Dock gym opened an hour before sunrise. Coach Ward had not ordered anyone to come. She had posted a voluntary shooting time on the team chat and warned that nobody should miss breakfast or the bus just to prove determination.
Imani arrived at 6:15 with a banana in her coat pocket and a basketball tucked against her hip. Zora was already on the court working through slow-footed post moves under the dim lights. You sleep? Zora asked. A little.
Good. Because I'm not carrying your ghost through a semi-final. That's thoughtful of you. Imani shot from the right side of the lane. The first attempt clipped the square and bounced off.
She caught the rebound, corrected the angle of her shoulders, and made the next one. Zora watched for a minute without speaking. Tell me something. Zora said at last. When Brielle moved towards you, why didn't you shove her back? We both know coach would have taken me out.
That's not all. Imani held the ball at her waist. I wanted to. Right after I hit the rack, I wanted her to feel exactly how small I felt. I was scared if I touched anyone, I'd be the only one everybody remembered touching somebody. People remember what they want.
They do. But I get to remember what I did. Zora turned the answer over in her mind. "My little brother saw the clip," she admitted. "He asked if we were going to beat Mariner up."
"What did you tell him?" "I told him I was going to get some rebounds." Imani laughed so suddenly she lost her grip on the ball. It rolled across the floor and came to rest against the wall beneath the faded South Dock mascot. Zora retrieved it with a grin.