Chapter 3
3
Jade did not come out on top at poker night. But neither did Lim, so she was only marginally furious. By some ridiculous stroke of fate, Jeremy Bell made out with their money—all $400 of it. His skin was so sallow by the end of the night, Jade couldn’t even find it in herself to do anything but pat him on the back in congratulations.
The ride home in her beloved rusted 1984 Chevy Silverado—named Gladys—was a bumpy one. The roads in Greenbelt weren’t the best, and the truck’s suspension had seen better days. Holding on to the wheel for dear life, Jade thought about nothing but the cocky words Lim had spoken to her. She didn’t know if it made her angrier that Lim had said them in the first place or that she had managed to get the last word in. All she knew was that by the time she turned her engine off, her palms were red and raw.
Three days later, she was still thinking about it.
“I hate her,” she grumbled to her friends as they sat around Aja Owens’s dining room table. They were decorating sugar cookies, and if Jade had any talent for it, she’d have drawn Ms. Lim on one and smashed her to bits. “I’ve never hated anyone more than I hate her.”
Olivia was sitting next to her, trying and failing to draw an intricate orange tabby on one of her cookies. “This is about the art teacher, right?”
“Yes,” Jade hissed. “Ms. Lim.”
Miri barked out a laugh that startled them all. “Why do you say her name like you’re coming, though?”
“I do not! I say it like I hate her, which I do.”
Even Aja, with her sweet self, giggled.
“Oh, Ms. Lim,” Miri rubbed her hands over her breasts, throwing her head back in dramatic fashion. “Draw me like one of your French girls, Ms. Lim.”
“She probably doesn’t even draw real people,” Jade grumbled. “She probably just paints like… fruit bowls or something. And not pretty ones either. Shitty ones with rotting fruit. Because she’s rotten.”
“Awww, she’s probably not that bad,” Aja said gently. “Maybe she’s just shy.”
“She’s not shy, she’s evil, and she’s trying to take my job.”
“The coaching job?” Miri asked.
“Yes!” Jade threw her hands in the air. “You know the poker game I told y’all about?”
The girls nodded, pausing in their decorating.
“She wound up being there the other night. I’ve been coaching at that school for five years, practically running myself ragged to get to where I am. She didn’t even know Greenbelt existed two years ago, and she thinks she can just…” Jade trailed off, grinding her teeth.
“Well… how did she do?” Olivia asked.
“Not much better than me,” Jade admitted. “But it’s the principle of the thing. I just feel like I’m already over here working against so much to get what I want, and now somebody just threw a spiral straight at my chest. She’s so… Everybody likes her. Like, everyone. Even the cafeteria staff, and they hate everybody. Y’all know how political this stuff is. People love to pretend they’re impartial and only promote people because of merit, but that’s bullshit. That’s why they have that poker game every week. That’s why Landry has to schmooze the mayor to get new helmets for the team every year. If Landry ends up liking her… No, you know what, it’s more than that. If Landry thinks other people will like her more than they like me, she’s got a real shot at beating me here.”
She fell silent, the girls trading quiet glances as she watched. Finally, Aja spoke. “You know what? I don’t think this actually changes anything. She may have likability on her side, but you’ve got experience. And you’ve already cultivated a relationship with the team; those are your boys. You weren’t going to fight any less without her being there. You weren’t ever going to pull any punches, and you’re not going to now.”
“Exactly.” Miri pointed at Aja. “If anything, you might be at an advantage. You’ve told me about the other coaches, and even if Landry won’t admit it, you’re leagues above them, and you know it. If this girl is your only real competition, it won’t be so hard to get her out of there.”
“I don’t know… Something feels different with her. It’s like… when I talk to her, when I look in her eyes, I see the same thing I see in mine when I look in the mirror. She’s not going to give up.”
“And neither are you,” Miri said. “You just need to do what you do best and go on the offense.”
Jade sat back in her chair, cookies and frosting completely forgotten as she crossed her arms over her chest. Her mind started reeling. The head coaching job was right there, so close it was practically hers already. Jade had the ball tight in her grip, and Lim, in all her annoying, infuriating glory, was trying to take it from her.
Every bit of her wanted to sulk and grumble about it, but the reality was that she needed to scheme. She needed to figure out a way to cut Lim off at her pretty little knees.
Many people thought football was all about strength and brute force. They saw the running and hitting and assumed that everything happening on the field was pure coincidence. But Jade knew that it didn’t matter how fast your quarterback was or how hard your linebackers ran through—without a comprehensive strategy, a real win was next to impossible.
This was part of the reason she liked the sport so much. It wasn’t like math, where an equation had a set, specific answer. A team could employ the exact same strategy against the exact same team three times in a row and end up with three different outcomes. But each time, you’d learn something different about the players, about the game. You could search the gaps in the plan and spackle over them every time a new one appeared. It was problem-solving on a large scale. That was one of her greatest strengths as a coach.
“You’re right,” she told Miri, putting her elbows on the table and resting her chin in her hands. “I need to find a way to destroy her before she even knows I’m coming for her.”
Olivia’s eyes widened. “Could you sound any more like a villain right now?”
Jade gave the question a real ponder. “I mean, I could draw a hole on the side of a mountain and get her to try to run through it.”
“You could also create an evil version of her in a lab and make the two versions fight each other,” Miri suggested.
“Why don’t you just convince the big boss that she doesn’t know what she’s doing? That she’s totally incompetent?” Aja’s words were gentle compared to their content and spoken quietly, her eyes still intent on her cookie decorating.
“That’s so messed up,” Jade said. “But perfect… I just need to make her embarrass herself in front of the old man so bad that she never even considers showing her face on my field ever again.”
“Evil,” Olivia whispered.
“Genius,” Jade replied, taking an almost violent bite of cookie.
Jade’s parents had been divorced for thirty years of the thirty-two she’d been alive. They’d also lived together for just as long. The family resided in a large, beautiful house in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Greenbelt. Built in 1898, the place was three stories, not including the attic. The upper stories both had balconies and pristine white shutters on every window. The house looked like something out of historical Charleston was plopped in a random neighborhood. None of the other homes looked anything like it.
It was her parents’ pride and joy. Gene and Joyce Dunn had been married eleven years before they’d had their first and only child. They’d spent every bit of that time saving up for their dream home, and every red cent they had had gone into it. It was only natural for the baby to come after that. Two years into the life of their other most precious pride and joy, the two had realized that they did not enjoy being a couple as much as they’d previously thought.
Neither of them had been willing to give up the house, though. So a compromise was made.
Gene Dunn would make his life in the finished basement. His domain had started with uncomfortable carpet and a pool table and had since turned into a very lovely, if oddly decorated, apartment. Two bedrooms, a master suite, a living room and a kitchen. He even managed to keep the old pool table.
Joyce—who’d returned to her maiden name of Griggs—reigned over most of the rest of the house, under the agreement that she pay a greater sum of the mortgage.
For Jade, this had been life. She’d grown up knowing no different. Honestly, she’d grown up loving it. It was having to explain to friends and teachers and guests that yes, her parents were divorced, and yes, they did still live together that got old.
The annoyance never seemed to outweigh the easy access to her folks, though.
On Sundays, Joyce had a standing date with her “little friend” of fifteen years in Beaufort. Jade didn’t know how her mother found it satisfying enough to see her boyfriend only once a week, but she didn’t like to think too much about that situation anyway. This meant family dinners were on Saturdays.
At 5:00 P.M. sharp, Gene ventured up from the basement and joined his ex-wife and daughter at their grand oak dinner table. Not a single one of them was a good cook, so normally they got takeout.
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 said registered, 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 been one 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.”