The Rival's Favorite

The Clash

Weston

I've been hearing about this tryout for three days, and I still don't understand why anyone thought I needed to sit through it.

"Scouting the competition," Marcus says, like that's supposed to mean something, like there's competition worth scouting in a walk-on tryout for a program that's already handed me a locker with my name stitched into it since sophomore year.

"I have a shootaround in forty minutes."

"You have forty minutes to kill, and I've got money on Delgado making the roster, so sit down and be useful."

I sat down. I am not useful. I spend the better part of an hour half-watching a gym full of girls circling each other like sharks that haven't decided yet whose prey, all of them hungry for the same twelve spots, all of them convinced their hunger is bigger than everyone else's.

I'm mostly watching Delgado, because Marcus's money has become, against my better judgment, a mild source of interest, when someone strips her clean at half-court and the whole gym seems to tilt half a degree toward her, like a compass finding north.

"Wait"

I didn't finish it. Something about the way she moves catches on me the way a hook catches skin, quick, unasked-for, impossible to shake loose without doing damage.

The girl who takes the ball doesn't celebrate. She doesn't even slow down. She's already gone, crossover, hesitation, gone again, moving like water finds the fastest crack in a wall, and the shot she lays in off the glass is so clean it barely makes a sound, like the rim itself decided not to argue with her.

"Who is that?" I hear myself say, sharper than I mean to, loud enough that Marcus glances over.

He checks his roster sheet like it'll have an answer. It doesn't. Whoever she is, she wasn't important enough for anyone to write her name down before this exact moment, and that fact sits wrong in my chest, an itch under a cast I can't reach.

I watch the rest of her group after that, more closely than I have any real reason to. She's not the biggest player on the floor, not the fastest, not even, if I'm being honest with myself, the most obviously gifted. What she has is worse than raw talent, in the sense that it's harder to prepare for — she reads the floor half a second before everyone else does, the way a hawk reads wind before it dives, and by the time you've caught up to what she's doing, she's already three steps past you, gone like smoke through a cracked window.

I've spent two years being told I'm the best thing to walk through this program's doors since it started fielding a team people cared about. I've had my jump shot broken down in six different scouting reports, dissected like something under glass. I know exactly how good I am, because I've had it confirmed by people whose job it is to confirm things like that for a living.

I don't like how much it bothers me that some walk-on nobody just made Delgado look like she was standing still.

Coach Alvarez reads the roster at the end of the session, twelve names in a flat, efficient voice, and I catch myself leaning toward one in particular before I've fully admitted to myself that I'm leaning at all.

Reese Calloway.

The name shouldn't mean anything to me. It should slide off me the way rain slides off a window, quick, forgettable, gone by morning. That's what I tell myself, anyway, right up until she looks at me across the gym.

She's not smiling , not at me, not for me, but there's something in the way she holds my gaze, steady as a held breath, like she clocked exactly what I said and decided it wasn't worth acknowledging out loud. Most people who hear my name flinch toward it, moths toward a porch light. She looks at me like I'm a door she hasn't decided whether to open yet.

I don't look away first. I'm not entirely sure why that matters to me, only that it does, and that irritates me more than the eye contact itself.

"Hey." I catch Marcus's sleeve before he can head for the door. "You know her? Calloway?"

He shrugs, already distracted, already mourning his hundred bucks. "Never heard of her before today. Why?"

"No reason."

"Sure." He says it the way he says most things that aren't actually agreement, and lets it go, which is more than I manage to do.

I watch her walk toward the locker room instead, some girl beside her talking fast enough for both of them, and I tell myself, with the kind of conviction I usually reserve for things I actually believe, that this is the last time today I think about her.

I believe that for almost a full week. It doesn't hold. It never really does, not with the things that snag.

It's Marcus, three days later, who tears the thread loose again.

"You've got to see this," he says, dropping onto the couch in my apartment with his laptop already open, tryout footage cued up on the screen like a crime he's about to report. "Somebody filmed the scrimmage. It's on the program's account."

"I don't care about walk-on highlights."

"You will."

I don't have a good reason for watching it. I tell myself it's diligence, new roster, worth knowing who's sharing the floor with me this season. That's a lie I can hold for about four seconds, which is roughly how long it takes the clip to load.

The footage is grainy, shot from the bleachers on somebody's phone, but it doesn't matter. I know exactly which possession I'm looking for before it happens, the way you know a storm is coming from the particular stillness of the air before the first branch bends.

Delgado has the ball. Reese Calloway is guarding her, weight low, hands active, watching Delgado's hips instead of her eyes, reading her the way you'd read a fault line for the tremor about to come. Delgado plants wrong. Calloway strips her clean, quick as a snake striking somewhere you weren't watching.

I rewind it. Watch it again.

The move that follows, crossover, hesitation, drive, cuts clean through the defense the way a blade goes through something that never had a chance to resist, footwork so drilled-in it doesn't look learned anymore, just inherited, like something passed down in blood instead of taught in a gym. I've seen that hesitation before. Not from her. From somewhere else, some other film session, some other gym, and the harder I reach for it, the further it slips, a word stuck just behind my teeth, close enough to taste and impossible to swallow.

"She's good," Marcus says, watching my face more than the screen. "Didn't think a walk-on would be that clean."

"It's one move."

"You've watched it four times."

"I've watched it twice."

"You've watched it four times," he says again, unbothered, closing the laptop before I can argue the number down further. "Anyway. Delgado's pissed. Says nobody even recruited her."

"Nobody recruited a lot of people."

"Nobody recruited her and she's that clean. That's the part that's weird." He shrugs, already moving on to whatever's next on his list of things to care about, which is apparently not this. "You'd think somebody would've found her before we did."

I don't say anything to that, because I don't have anything to say that doesn't sound like I've been thinking about it longer than I have — longer than I should have, for a hesitation move performed once, by a walk-on I've spoken to exactly zero times, in a scrimmage that shouldn't have meant anything to me at all.

I watch the clip one more time after Marcus leaves. Not for the shot. For the two dribbles before it, the specific rhythm of them, the way she sells the hesitation just enough to buy the half-step she needs and not a fraction more, economical, deliberate, the kind of movement that gets burned into muscle long before it ever gets tested in front of a crowd.

I know that footwork is the way you know a scar on your own hand: certain it's familiar, unable to say exactly where it came from.

I don't know where to go. And that, more than the steal, more than the shot, more than the fact that she held my stare across a gym like it cost her nothing, is the part I can't put down. It sits in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending out rings I can't stop watching.

Shootaround starts in twenty minutes. I'm still sitting on the couch with the laptop closed, running through every program, every camp, every scouting report I've ever half-paid attention to, and coming up with nothing that fits, a lock with no matching key, turning uselessly in my hand.

I text Marcus on my way out the door.

*Ask around. See if anyone's ever heard of Reese Calloway before this week.*

His reply comes back almost immediately, which means he was already expecting me to ask.

*Told you. You're thinking about her.*

I don't answer that either. I just grab my bag, and my keys, and the particular, unshakeable itch of a question I don't yet know I'm not going to like the answer to.