Page 27 of One on One
“Thanks. Is this a personal meeting?” I ask.
“Uh,” Kendall says, turning back to Ben. I want him to be the one to answer, but he’s glowering at me silently, his eyes like the stubborn coals at the end of a campfire.
“Because I need to talk to you. About work.”
He doesn’t say anything. Under the fluorescent lights of his office, I’m starting to feel obvious. My face is hot. I ate a wrap for dinner and forgot to check my teeth in the mirrorafter, so I slide my tongue across my top teeth. Maybe I should withdraw into the dark hallway like a ghost.
Kendall is not the type of person to allow a silence to linger. “He’s helping me with a project for one of my classes. It’s about free lunch for low-income students.”
“What?” This makes no sense. Ben doesn’t know anything about free lunch for low-income students. “Students who play basketball?”
Finally Ben speaks, his voice resigned. “Her topic is related to my master’s thesis.”
“I can email you. I don’t want to keep you from your work,” Kendall says to him. Her laptop clicks as she shuts it.
While she gathers her things, I say, “Next time you can keep the door open. I’m the only other one here, don’t worry about disturbing me.”
I wait until I can no longer hear Kendall’s keys jangling down the hallway before I speak again. “You went to grad school?”
He rubs his face and puts the calculator in a drawer. “I did a master’s in applied statistics here. I was a grad assistant for a year before I started this job.” His stubble is verging on scruffy for once, and he has purple-gray hollows under his eyes.
“Ah.” It makes sense. After I left, Coach Maynard stuck around for one more year. If a spot for a grad assistant coach was available, Ben was the obvious choice.
Ben must really love numbers, or Ardwyn, or both. A grad assistant position is a temporary gig, but it could’ve put him on track to a more permanent coaching job somewhere by now. As director of analytics, he’s not a coach, and that’snot just semantics. There are a lot of things he can’t do in his current position, according to the NCAA: give instruction or feedback to the players, help with recruiting. Things he’d be good at, that I’d have thought he wanted to do.
Right now, though, it looks like what he wants is to throw me out of his office. “Why did you do that? My door was shut for a reason. You can’t barge in.”
“It’s nice that you’re helping her, but this is work-related.”
“And did you know I wasn’t doing work when you busted in here without knocking, or did you not care?”
“But you weren’t doing work.”
He gives his monitor a dark longing look, like he’d rather jump into it and tuck himself into cell A1 of a spreadsheet, any spreadsheet, even one full of circular references and formula errors, if the alternative is sitting here talking to me. “What do you want?”
“We need to do the interview. For your profile.” Not my primary motivation for barging in, but it is true. “It was supposed to go up a week ago, I keep having to come up with new excuses, and we can’t put it off any longer. Let’s film it tonight.”
“I’m busy.” It’s the third time he’s given me this excuse. “I need to finish some lineup analysis.”
Bullshit. He doesn’t need to do that tonight. Tomorrow’s lineup is set, and then we have the long break.
“Yeah, well, I have work to do too. This interview. It’s part of my job, and this series was Coach Thomas’s idea in the first place, so it’s part of your job too.”
“Annie. Not tonight.”
Case closed, apparently. His voice sounds particularlyfirm when he says it. I wish I could teleport to the green room at my apartment and lie on the turf, talking to Mona Lisa Vito while the ceiling fan spins.Mona Lisa,I’d say.Can you believe he said that? In that voice.Mona Lisa would shake her head. She’d get it right away.The voice of the patriarchy,she’d say. Maybe not in those exact words, but the sentiment would come through.
I haven’t been able to get him to cooperate by being polite, and I haven’t been able to get him to cooperate by being assertive. Probably I could get my way by crying, or not even a full cry, just blinking wet eyes and a shaky voice, but I’m tired and righteous and I can’t afford the tears. I’m an hour behind on my water bottle.
I retreat, like I did the last two times I tried to get his interview done. Back to my cryogenic chamber, where the chill hits me harder than usual after all the stress-induced sweating I did in Ben’s office.
Before I round the corner of the desk, I spin back to grab my wearable blanket. And to add injury to insult, my elbow smashes into the filing cabinet.
“Fuck,” I hiss, but it comes out as unintelligible air. I screw up my face and my fists as the pain radiates everywhere. Now my eyes are actually watering. Something inside me snaps, and I hear Dad’s voice in my head:Don’t be afraid to take up space in the paint.
It’s something he used to say all the time when I started out at Ardwyn as a tentative, intimidated freshman, unsure how to make myself valuable to the team.He takes up space in the paintis normally a charitable way of talking about a player the size of a sequoia who doesn’t do much other thanget in the other team’s way. But it’s not a complete knock. Standing there, ensuring that others need to factor in your presence, is important.
Don’t make yourself small, that’s what Dad meant.
