The Rival's Favorite

What She's Proving

Reese

Three days after my name goes up on the roster, I walk out of my first official practice with my legs shaking like a rope bridge in wind, and my phone is already buzzing before I've even reached the parking lot.

Mom.

I answer it leaning against my car, the evening air doing nothing to cool the heat still radiating off me from two hours of drills, and before I can even get a full hello out, her voice comes through bright and a little too loud, the way it always is when she's been waiting all day to say something.

"You made it. Tell me everything."

"I made it," I say, and even now, three days later, the words still catch somewhere warm in my chest on the way out, like a match that hasn't quite gone cold. "Twelfth name called. I almost didn't hear it."

"I knew you would." She says it with the kind of certainty that isn't really about knowing anything , it's about choosing to believe, which is a different thing entirely, and one my mother has always been better at than most people I know.

She wasn't wrong to believe it, though. She just wasn't there for most of the reasons why.

I didn't grow up the way half my new teammates did, didn't have a private trainer running me through ladder drills before I could tie my own shoes, didn't have a father who used to play somewhere that mattered, feeding me stories about the game before I could dribble a ball in a straight line. What I had was a rec-center hoop with a rim that hung a little crooked, and a mother working two jobs who couldn't always drive me there, so I walked, most days, the mile and a half it took to get there and the mile and a half back.

What I had was time. Stubborn, unglamorous, unwitnessed time — years of it, spent building something out of nothing because nobody was going to build it for me. I taught myself to read a defender's hips off grainy YouTube clips buffering on a cracked phone screen. I ran suicides alone in an empty gym on Saturday mornings because nobody had signed me up for a travel team that could do it for me. Every ounce of what I did on that scrimmage floor three days ago didn't come from a bloodline or a program. It came from four thousand hours nobody clapped for.

That's the part people don't understand about walk-ons, I think. It isn't the absence of talent that makes people doubt you. It's the absence of a story, no famous last name attached to your game, no highlight reel that explains, in advance, why you're allowed to be good. You just show up, and you're good anyway, and people spend a long time trying to figure out where that came from before they're willing to believe it's simply yours.

"How's Priya?" Mom asks, already moving on, the way she does , she never lingers long on a compliment, mine or her own, like staying too long in a good feeling might use it up.

"Loud. Ecstatic. She screamed loud enough that Coach Alvarez actually laughed."

"Good. You need someone loud in your corner."

We talk for a while about nothing that matters, the drive back to my apartment, whether I've been eating enough, a coworker of hers who keeps microwaving fish in the break room, which is apparently still, after four years, a source of genuine daily outrage. It's easy, the kind of conversation that doesn't ask anything hard of either of us, and I let myself sink into it the way you sink into a couch at the end of a long day.

It's easy enough that I don't think twice before I ask the question. It slips out sideways, riding on the tail end of something else entirely, the way questions do when you've stopped bracing for them to matter.

"Hey — did my dad ever play? Basketball, I mean. Just wondering if that's where the hips thing came from."

The silence that follows isn't long. Maybe two seconds, three at most. But I've known my mother's voice my whole life, every register of it, every seam where it changes shape, and I hear the exact moment something in her goes careful.

"Oh — I don't really know, honey. It was a long time ago." A beat. Then, too smoothly, too fast: "Did I tell you Aunt Carla's finally getting that kitchen redone? After everything with the flooding last spring —"

And we're gone. Just like that, steered somewhere else entirely, the way a car gets steered hard around something in the road you're not meant to look at too closely.

I let her talk about the kitchen. I make the right sounds in the right places l, a laugh here, an oh no there, while some quieter part of me sits very still, turning the last thirty seconds over like a stone I'm checking for something sharp on the underside.

I don't push. I've learned, over twenty-one years, exactly how far that particular door opens before it shuts, and I've learned not to put my hand in the gap when it does. My mother has never lied to me, not once that I know of. But she has entire rooms in her she doesn't walk me through, and this , my father, whatever the word actually means in our house, which has never been much more than a blank space where a name should go — has always been one of them.

I used to ask more, when I was younger. I stopped somewhere around thirteen, not because I stopped wondering, but because I got tired of watching her face do this exact thing, this careful, practiced turn, like a door swinging shut on a spring, smooth enough that you'd almost miss the click if you weren't listening for it.

I'm listening to it now. I've been listening to it, apparently, longer than I realized.

"I should let you go," she says eventually, after Aunt Carla's kitchen has been thoroughly exhausted as a topic. "You've got an early practice, don't you?"

"Six a.m."

"Go to sleep, then. I'm proud of you, Reese. I mean that."

"I know," I say, and I do know it, that part isn't in question, has never once been in question, not for as long as I can remember. "Love you."

"Love you too, baby."

The call ends, and I stay leaning against my car a while longer, phone still warm in my hand, the parking lot emptying out around me in the particular blue quiet of early evening. Somewhere behind me, inside the gym, someone's still running a ball off the backboard, the sound of it hollow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat that isn't mine.

I think about the volunteer at check-in, the flicker that crossed her face at my name before she caught herself. I think about my mother's voice going careful over a question I've asked, in one form or another, more times than I can count, always met with the same smooth, practiced turn.

Two people, three days apart, both flinching at the exact same word.

Calloway.

I don't know what it means yet. I'm not even sure it means anything, maybe I'm building a shape out of nothing, the way you can convince yourself a shadow on the wall is a face if you stare at it long enough in the dark. But some small, stubborn part of me, the same part that walked a mile and a half to a crooked rim because nobody was going to drive me, files it away instead of letting it go.

Not tonight. I don't have the energy for it tonight, not after two hours of drills and a phone call that left more questions standing in the room than it answered.

But someday. Someday, I'm going to ask again, and I'm not going to let the door swing shut so easily the next time.

I get in my car, and I drive home, and I tell myself, the way I've told myself a hundred times before, that it's probably nothing.

I don't quite believe it. I haven't, really, since I was thirteen.