Chapter 17
17
For the first time in months, the halls of Greenbelt Senior High were filled with people. It wasn’t development week yet, but teachers had flooded the dual-floored school for a late-summer meeting called by Principal Coleman. The meeting had been long and mostly boring, with the announcement of upcoming workshops and new changes for the year. They’d also gotten their new classroom assignments. Thankfully, Jade’s room hadn’t changed once in the years she’d been teaching there. So instead of seeking out the real estate of her new digs like many of her coworkers, she’d made her way to Landry’s office.
Earlier that morning, she’d gotten an email—rather than a text message, which was strange—from the man, asking that she meet with him after the staff gathering. That was all the information he’d provided—nothing more, nothing less. Jade had spent all morning trying to figure out what he wanted to speak with her about. The school year started in a couple of weeks, and their season opener was only a week after that. He hadn’t planned to name his successor until then, but maybe he’d decided to break the news early.
She felt like she was walking on a cloud as she floated down the hall, fully preparing herself to receive what would be the best news of her life.
Landry’s small office was on the basement level of the school, next to the large utility office the groundskeeper and maintenance staff worked out of. Like always, she entered without knocking. Landry was sitting at his desk, readers perched on his red nose as he typed at his computer.
From across the room, Jade could see that the man looked unhappy. She knew that the logistics were his least favorite part of the job. She also knew that there were quite a bit of logistics involved. Planning and scheduling, communicating with other coaches as well as their own principal, making sure stipends for the other coaches were handled appropriately, and dealing with the questions, concerns, and complaints of parents.
Taking on this job in addition to her current duties as a teacher would be grueling for a good part of the year. But she was ready for it. The constant emails, the late nights, grading and playmaking. She was hungry for it, even, salivating.
“Hey, Coach,” she said softly, trying not to startle him.
Landry looked away from the computer slowly, and Jade could immediately tell by the way he took his readers off and tossed them across his desk that he hadn’t called her in here for the reason she’d thought.
His face was contorted in frustration—no, anger. He’d never been angry with her, not once since she’d started working under him. In an instant, she felt like a child about to be scolded for doing something bad.
Only she had no idea what she’d done wrong.
“What in the hell were you thinking, Dunn?” His tone was furious.
“I—” Jade swallowed, racking her brain. “I don’t know what you mean, Coach.”
Landry picked up his phone, tapped a few things into the screen, then turned it around to face her. She had to walk over to him to get a closer look. The second she started to make out the image, her stomach seized up.
It was her at the West Beaufort game, sitting on the bleachers in her wig, not looking nearly as inconspicuous as she’d thought.
“Coach, I—” She broke off, wanting to explain, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Somebody sent me this clip of you snuck into one of their games dressed up like goddamn Batman.”
Landry handed her the device, and her throat dropped into her stomach when she saw herself on the screen. Even with the footage blurred and shaky and the wig firmly on her head, it looked exactly like her. She was embarrassed and ashamed. She felt incredibly silly. How could she have thought that had been a good idea?
Her pain was only made worse when she saw the text message that accompanied the footage. The gray bubble on Landry’s phone contained large black letters that read, “This is one of yours, right? See what happens when you let little girls on the field?”
It was a vile, disgusting string of words. So demeaning and degrading it made bile rise in her throat. She didn’t recognize the name of the man who’d sent it, but an intense hatred from him settled over her.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about that. Worry about the fact that I’m about five seconds away from kicking your ass off my coaching staff right now. Do you have any idea how this makes us look, Dunn?”
Tears immediately sprang to her eyes, and she had to blink rapidly to get them gone. “How it makes you look? Do you see those disgusting things he said about me ?”
“I got on him about that, trust me,” Landry argued. “He ain’t right for what he said, but…”
“‘But’?” Jade’s voice went steely. “What do you mean, ‘but’?”
“Maybe you aren’t ready for this after all, Dunn. This was a major fuckup. It makes me look bad, and it makes you look even worse.”
“I was just trying to see how they played,” she argued. “The pros do it all the time, studying their opponents’ game tapes.”
Landry sighed, tossing his phone on the desk next to his glasses. “This isn’t the pros, Dunn. This is Greenbelt.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“So why the disguise?”
Jade didn’t have an adequate answer for that.
“Exactly,” he said, heated. “Because you knew it was way out of bounds. Not only were you out of line, but you went behind my back with it.”
“Coach, I may have been out of line, but I wasn’t trying to go behind your back. I was… I was trying to show some initiative.”
“So why didn’t you immediately come to me with what you found?”
Jade winced. “I was waiting for the right time…”
When she said it out loud, it felt ridiculously insufficient. In her head, she’d had it all figured out. She was going to approach him before practice one day this week and tell him what she’d found. She imagined showing him her notes, and after he realized that they had all the tools necessary to win against West Beaufort, he’d be so overcome with joy that he’d give her the job right then and there.
Instead, Landry sat in front of her turning progressively redder in the face and neck, and she realized that she’d made a huge misstep. She started to sweat as she speculated about what he would do next. Was he going to fire her?
“Coach.” Jade choked the word out. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”
Landry held up a hand to stop her in her tracks. “Go home, Dunn. Don’t come to poker tomorrow night. I’ll figure out what to do with you on Friday at practice. Just—just go for now.”
Throat thick and tears welling up in the corners of her eyes, Jade all but ran from the office. She didn’t stop to say goodbye to any of her coworkers as she rushed to her car. Despite her lack of tinted windows, she pretended like no one could see her as she finally let her tears fall, head against the steering wheel.
This entire time, she’d thought that it would be some outside force that would ultimately keep her from her dream. Lim’s mere presence, the opinions of the good ol’ boys up top, even Landry himself deciding she wasn’t ready. Instead, she had turned out to be the maker of her own demise.
What had she been thinking?
She hadn’t had an answer to that question when Landry had asked her mere minutes ago, and she didn’t have one now, not really.
She supposed she’d just been trying to give herself and her team an edge. She hadn’t thought about the consequences. She hadn’t even anticipated that Landry would react in any way other than thankful.
She banged her forehead against the steering wheel a couple of times, only stopping when it seemed like she might do actual damage to the skin of her forehead. Pulling herself up, she sniffed, wiped her nose with one of the fast-food napkins she kept in her glove box, and blinked her tears away.
Jade spent the entire drive back to her house choking on her own bad decisions.
Later that evening, she sat in the living room of her little house, surrounded by her friends. Miri was next to her on the couch, Olivia sat in the patterned chair on the other side of the coffee table, and Aja sprawled out on the floor in front of them. They’d just finished massively overeating a large Chinese food feast, and Jade was so full of dumplings and spare ribs that her tears had finally managed to dry up.
“I literally fucked my entire life up with a wig.” She spoke the words into a small tub of sweet-and-sour sauce. “And then had the nerve to wear it to the club like I’d really done something.”
“You did not fuck your life up,” Miri argued. “Nothing’s happened yet.”
“You should have seen the way Landry looked at me. I’ve never had someone be so disappointed with me in my entire life.”
Her friends exchanged a few knowing glances with one another before Miri took a big, heaving sigh. “Jade, you know you can’t actually do everything right, don’t you?”
Her brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“She means,” Aja interjected, “that fucking up is a natural part of life. You can’t avoid it.”
“I could have avoided this.”
Aja shrugged. “Sure, but the fact of the matter is that you haven’t actually ruined your life; you just feel like you have. Which, to be fair, is valid. But you didn’t hurt anyone. You didn’t scam anyone.”
“I could have hurt the team,” Jade said, distressed.
“We’re not saying that’s not true,” Miri cut in. “We’re not even saying you were in the right here. We just don’t want you to beat yourself to death over one little mistake.”
Jade bit down on her lip, unsure of what to say but almost completely disagreeing with her friends’ assessment of the situation. Her entire life, she’d been able to clearly see every option laid out in front of her. She could see the paths she would need to take to get where she wanted. Hell, a lot of the time, she could accurately predict the obstacles in her way.
Now when she closed her eyes and tried to imagine a way forward, it was dark. Nothing but blackness behind her eyes. Everything felt so bleak. Her heart had been in her stomach since early that afternoon, and she had no idea how to get it out.
Without this dream, she didn’t fully know who she was or what she was doing. This had been a lifelong goal, yes, but for the past five years, she’d been so single-mindedly focused on it that she hadn’t made much room in her life for anything else. She’d eschewed everything, choosing to eat, live, and breathe her dream. As a result, once the carpet seemed to be getting pulled out from under her, she was left to consider the fact that she had nothing to fall back on. Not love or romantic prospects, not even a real plan B.
It was so bizarre, when your dream wasn’t tied to financial success or ruin. Money had never been the motivating factor for her, not in this. Largely because the head coach’s yearly stipend would be barely enough to put a down payment on a new car. It was all pride and glory. Somehow, that made it even worse.
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do if he fires me,” she said, voice wobbly.
“Have you considered coaching for another team?” Olivia asked.
Jade shook her head profusely. “I could never. Greenbelt is my home. It’s my team. I could never see myself coaching anywhere else.”
The tears were back again as she thought about the boys and their sweating faces staring up at her, eager and expectant. She knew every single one of them by name. Vonte with his anxious smiles and big laughs, Alonzo with his kind eyes, Jaxon and the way he seemed to move everywhere by running.
She knew their families, what their home lives were like, what their GPAs were. Many of them had been with her for years; they had real relationships. How was she supposed to give that up?
Aja, ever sweet and optimistic, smiled at her gently. “Your boss hasn’t made any decisions yet, remember? You haven’t lost anything as of now.”
That should have been a comfort to her, but it wasn’t. Jade probably would have preferred it if he’d just cut the cord in that moment. Instead, she’d been left to wait with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Nothing was worse than anticipation. Being as tight as a drum and left to wait and wait and wait. Especially when the thing you were waiting for was earth-shatteringly bad news.
“Yeah.” Jade’s voice was ragged. She didn’t know what else to say.
Miri reached over and wrapped an arm around Jade’s shoulders, pulling her in until Jade put her head in the other woman’s lap.
“Everything is going to be okay, Jadey,” she said, her fingers running gently along Jade’s eyebrows. “No matter what happens, everything is going to be okay.”
Jade closed her eyes slowly, suddenly feeling incredibly tired. It was as if she’d just run a mile in the summer heat with cinder blocks strapped to her ankles. And it felt like she’d been doing it for months. Briefly, an image of Forrest Gump flashed in her mind. With those raggedy tennis shoes and that big beard, he hadn’t seemed nearly as tired as she felt.
Her entire body felt warm and weighed down, and the beginning of a fitful sleep started to descend upon her. She wanted to fight it, to sit up and scream and yell and cry some more. But she didn’t have the strength to do anything but lie there in her best friend’s arms.
“I’m scared,” she mumbled before she dozed off. “I’m just so scared.”