Page 9 of Ready to Score

This Saturday, Gene had picked up their meal from Minnie’s Diner. A classic fifties-style diner in the center of town, Minnie’s Diner had been a Greenbelt staple for longer than Jade had been alive. She’d spent plenty of postgame nights eating cobbler in the booths. She’d shared plenty of kisses in them too. But so had half the town. Everyone frequented the place. Even the mayor was known to heave himself off his high horse to stop by once a week for some of Minnie’s smothered pork chops.

This time, her father had gotten them a whole heap of fried catfish with coleslaw, green beans, and macaroni on the side. They even had some fried green tomatoes for good measure.

“How’s work been, Boo?” her father asked, covering his catfish in Louisiana Hot Sauce. It always made her feel warm to hear her childhood nickname from her parents.

“Oh, it’s been all right.” She picked at the coating on a fried tomato, trying to play it cool. “Coach Landry wants to give me the head coach position when he retires after this season.”

It wasn’t necessarily the truth, but it wasn’t really a lie either, was it? Her parents sat up straighter in their seats as soon as what she saidregistered, and Jade couldn’t help but puff her chest out a little bit at the obvious pride on their faces.

Her parents both loved the game, but her mother had been an absolute fanatic. A Clemson fan at her core, every week during Jade’s childhood, her mother had decked herself out in orange and purple and commandeered the living room to watch her team. Win or lose, Joyce was right there with them. Infallible, unshakable. As a child, Jade had been awed by this level of love and dedication. And by the obvious joy the sport had brought her mother. She’d been bred into football superfandom.

When she was seven, Jade had asked her mother when she could play football. She’d watched Joyce’s face fall as she told her daughter that they didn’t really allow girls to play. Jade had signed up for a powder-puff game a few months later, and while that experience had been a transformative one, one that she still carried with her, something about it felt like a consolation prize. She’d wanted to play with the big dawgs, and she just knew that there were plenty of other girls out there like her who wanted the same thing.

In the end, it hadn’t taken her long to realize that she wasn’t a star athlete. Her sophomore year in college, she’d taken over as coach for her school’s powder-puff team, and that was where she found her calling. She learned that she had a knack for leading. For encouraging players individually and teams as a whole. But while the road to coaching football as a woman may not have been as impossible as the road to playing football as one, it certainly felt like it sometimes.

Maybe it was because she was their only child, or maybe it was because they simply believed in her beyond reason, but her parents had never done anything but support Jade in her endeavors. Support, comfort, provide shoulders to sob into, Joyce and Gene had been there. The strange but beautiful united front they’d made had beenone of the only things to keep Jade going when said going got especially rough.

And here she was, hopefully about to bring everything full circle for her, for them. It filled her with more hope and joy than she knew what to do with.

“Head coach?” her mother asked. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Jade cleared her throat when the word came out shakily. “He told me the other day that he’s been eyeing me for the position for a while. He said none of the other guys even came close.”

Sure, she was embellishing, but when she saw the pride on their faces, she couldn’t even bring herself to feel guilty. Her love of football had been hand-fed to her at a young age by them both. They’d been nothing but supportive of her goal of being a teacher, but the outright pride had come in heavy when she’d gotten her coaching position. She didn’t just want this job for herself, she wanted it for them too.

Jade committed herself to coming out on top even more than she had before. That way, everything she was telling them now could pass as a prediction rather than a lie.

“I know that’s right.” Her father slapped his knee. “My baby’s going to make sure they’re champions again too.”

“And she’s going to do it as the first Black woman coach in Greenbelt’s history.” The buttons on her mother’s satin blouse damn near popped off from how far her chest puffed out.

Jade swallowed, her throat thicker than the macaroni and cheese she’d just had a bite of. She decided not to tell them about Ms. Lim. If the plan she was formulating in her head worked, things were probably about to get nasty. And not only did she not want them to see her that way, she also didn’t want them to know that she had any competition.

She wanted them to think the job was already hers. That all that was left for her to claim it was a bunch of red tape, instead of Jade having to scrape and claw her way to the top like the Disney villain her friends had told her to embody.

“I sure am,” she said, jaw clenched but smiling at the same time. “I’m about to change the game.”

4

No one had invited Franny to summer practice, but so what? It was a free world. The football field wasn’t situated behind gilded gates, and there was nothing she could find in the school employee handbook that stated she couldn’t be there just because she wasn’t on the team or coaching.

She’d done some Facebook stalking and found out that Monday practice started at 8:00A.M.Franny had shown up at 9:00. She wore a pair of running shorts and a loose-fitting tank top. Her long, dark hair was pulled back into a low bun at the nape of her neck, and her dollar store sunglasses sat snugly on her nose.

The sun was already high in the sky, beating down, making the eighty-five-degree heat even worse. Franny was happy to see that instead of being outfitted in their pads and uniforms, running drills in the sun, the boys sat on the twenty-yard line in regular workout clothes, water bottles in hand, as Coach Landry towered over them, speaking things she couldn’t hear from where she stood on the sidelines.

With her, she also had a folding chair she’d stolen from her parents’ house, a gallon of ice water, and a notebook and pencil. She set up her chair off-field, not far from the bleachers but not too close to the other coaches either.

Franny was situated for some time before anyone noticed her. Ifshe’d been forced to bet on who would be the first to see her—and get incensed about her presence—she would have won a cool ten dollars on the spot.

Jade Dunn’s stride toward her across the turf should have been accompanied by a war trumpet. The woman’s light brown face was too emotive to be stoic. Her dark, full eyebrows quirked on her forehead, and her lips were pinched. The way she walked was probably meant to be angry and intimidating, but all Franny could see was that her wide hips swayed perfectly, even under her knee-length khaki shorts. Franny started a little hum in her head to match their rhythm. It tickled her so silly that when Dunn finally stood in front of her, Franny was grinning.

“What are you doing here?” Dunn practically hissed.

Franny tilted her head to one side, sparing a glance at her water on the ground, then at the pen and paper in her lap. “I’m trying to write the next great American novel, obviously. It’s about a really mean, really lonely woman who spends all her time trying to destroy her colleague.” Franny moved her pen to the paper in front of her as if she were writing instead of drawing scribbles for dramatic effect. “I hope you don’t mind if I spoil the ending for you—”

Dunn cut her off. “It doesn’t matter whether you spoil it or not, I doubt you’ll even get the chance to finish it.”

“The mean lady doesn’t succeed,” Franny said, continuing as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “She ends up getting swallowed by a sinkhole, and her colleague takes her job and, like, wins hella awards and accolades, and everybody loves her more.”

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