Not that I was jealous of Marcena. Certainly not. I was a modern woman, after all, and a feminist, and I didn’t compete with other women for any man’s affection. But Morrell and Love had the intimacy that comes from a long-shared past. When they started laughing and talking I felt excluded. And, well, okay, jealous.
A fight under one of the baskets reminded me to keep my attention on the court. As usual, it was between April Czernin and Celine Jackman, my gangbanger forward. They were the two best players on the team, but figuring out how to get them to play together was only one of the exhausting challenges the girls presented. At times like this it was just as well I was a street fighter. I separated them and organized squads for scrimmage.
We took a break at three-thirty, by which time everyone was sweating freely, including me. During the break, I was able to serve the team Gatorade, thanks to a donation from one of my corporate clients. While the other girls drank theirs, Sancia Valdéz, my center, climbed up the bleachers to make sure her baby got its bottle and to have some kind of conversation with its father—so far I hadn’t heard him do more than mumble incomprehensibly.
Marcena began interviewing a couple of the girls, choosing them at random, or maybe by color—one blonde, one Latina, one African-American. The rest clamored around her, jealous for attention.
I saw that Marcena was recording them, using a neat little red device, about the size and shape of a fountain pen. I’d admired it the first time I saw it—it was a digital gizmo, of course, and could hold eight hours of talk in its tiny head. And unless Marcena told people, they didn’t know they were being recorded. She hadn’t told the girls she was taping them, but I decided not to make an issue of it—chances were, they’d be flattered, not offended.
I let it go on for fifteen minutes, then brought over the board and began drawing play routes on it. Marcena was a good sport—when she saw the team would rather talk to her than listen to me she put her recorder away and said she’d finish after practice.
I sent two squads to the floor for an actual scrimmage. Marcena watched for a few minutes, then climbed up the rickety bleachers to my center’s boyfriend. He sat up straighter and at one point actually seemed to speak with real animation. This distracted Sancia so much that she muffed a routine pass and let the second team get an easy score.
“Head in the game, Sancia,” I barked in my best Coach McFarlane imitation, but I was still relieved when the reporter climbed down from the bleachers and ambled out of the gym: everyone got more focused on what was happening on the court.
Last night at dinner, when Marcena proposed coming with me this afternoon, I’d tried to talk her out of it. South Chicago is a long way from anywhere, and I warned her I couldn’t take a break to drive her downtown if she got bored.
Love had laughed. “I have a high boredom threshold. You know the series I’m doing for the Guardian on the America that Europeans don’t see? I have to start somewhere, and who could be more invisible than the girls you’re coaching? By your account, they’re never going to be Olympic stars or Nobel Prize winners, they come from rough neighborhoods, they have babies—”
“In other words, just like the girls in South London,” Morrell had interrupted. “I don’t think you’ve got a world-beating story there, Love.”
“But going down there might suggest a story,” she said. “Maybe a profile of an American detective returning to her roots. Everyone likes detective stories.”
“You could follow the team,” I agreed with fake enthusiasm. “It could be one of those tearjerkers where this bunch of girls who don’t have enough balls or uniforms comes together under my inspired leadership to be state champs. But, you know, practice goes on for two hours, and I have an appointment with a local business leader afterward. We’ll be in the armpit of the city—if you do get bored, there won’t be a lot for you to do.”
“I can always leave,” Love said.
“Onto the street with the highest murder rate in the city.”
She laughed again. “I’ve just come from Baghdad. I’ve covered Sarajevo, Rwanda, and Ramallah. I can’t imagine Chicago is more terrifying than any of those places.”
I’d agreed, of course: I had to. It was only because Love rubbed me the wrong way—because I was jealous, or insecure, or just a South Side street fighter with a chip on her shoulder—that I hadn’t wanted to bring her. If the team could get some print space, even overseas, maybe someone would pay attention to them and help in my quest to find a corporate sponsor.