AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The team only had a roster of fifteen players in total, and only eight of them got regular minutes. Layne was the ninth player out, so to speak, and she seemed cool with that, which bothered Shay and some of the other players.
“Did she already leave?” Martin, who was actually Stacey Martin, asked as she packed up her bag and looked around the locker room where thirteen of the players were still packing their things.
“I guess so,” Shay replied and zipped up her bag.
“I don’t get her,” Martin said. “It’s like she’s perfectly content being the water girl, but she’s on the team. Why didn’t she just sign up to manage or something?”
“Maybe she’s just accepted that she’s not really going to start, and she’s cool with that,” Mary Hilton, their starting center, suggested. “Just leave her alone, Martin.”
“It’s her senior night, too,” Martin noted. “She didn’t even play.”
“We have seven seniors on this team, and we all start or come off the bench,” Hilton said right back. “If we’d been ahead, and this game didn’t matter, coach would’ve played her. It’s not like it’s Layne’s fault we needed this win to make the tournament and that we had to go to OT to get it.” Hilton slid her bag over her shoulder. “Take it easy on her, okay? We still have a tournament to win. We might need her.”
Shay listened to the conversation, slipped her own bag on her shoulder, and looked up just in time to see Layne walking around a wall that separated the showers and toilets from the rest of the locker room.
“Shit,” Shay whispered to herself.
Layne didn’t say anything as she walked over to her chair, found her bag that none of them had noticed was still there, picked it up, nodded in Shay’s direction, and left the room.
“Shit, Martin,” Shay said.
“What? I didn’t know she was still in here.”
“Just leave it until after the season, at least,” Shay requested. “And maybe go apologize to her.”
“I didn’t say anything bad; I was just wondering. She doesn’t talk much and has been hard to get to know. She shows up to practice and games but stays away when we all hang out.”
“Gee. I wonder why she might not like us that much,” Hilton said, glaring at Martin.
“Captain card,” Shay added, using the joke they had for whoever was captain. “Apologize.”
“You can’t just play the captain card whenever you want to,” Martin objected.
“Yes, I can. As long as I’m the captain and we have a chance to make the NCAA tourney, I’m playing the card when you do something stupid that could jeopardize that.”
“She doesn’t even play.”
“Now,” Shay ordered and pointed to the door to the locker room.
“Fine,” Martin replied and left the room.
CHAPTER 2
Layne walked from the bathroom to her single room carrying her toiletries container and wearing the worn, fuzzy robe her mom had gotten her years ago. Her hair was wet from the shower, and despite the win the other day and the decent practice earlier today, Layne was feeling pretty terrible. It was her senior year. She should be excited about being close to graduation. She should be happy that the team had made it to the conference tournament and that they had a real shot of making the big one, the NCAA tournament, where sixty-eight DivisionI teams would compete in a single elimination tournament. Six wins. That would be all any team would need to take home the biggest trophy in her sport.
She should be excited, but Layne hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the comments her teammates had made about her in the locker room; mainly Martin, who played in Layne’s position and had started for the past three years. Only Shay Amos had started more games than Martin. Shay would actually break Dunbar’s record with the next game. She’d gone without any major injuries, and since this was the first time the team had made it this far, Shay was about to break the record for the most starts by any player. She was also close to the scoring record, which had been achieved over twenty years ago when the team wasn’t yet in DivisionI. Shay already had the DivisionI record. Layne hadn’t seen anyone with a smoother three-point stroke than Shay Amos. She had a ridiculous three-pointer percentage, and her free-throw stat for this year had been ninety-four percent. Overall, in her four years at Dunbar, Shay had a ninety-one percent, and she got fouled a lot, so that meant something.
Layne knew all the records and all the stats for a couple of reasons. One, the Dunbar women’s basketball team wasn’t exactly known and couldn’t afford a big-time coaching staff like a lot of DivisionI schools, so bench players usually ended up with a clipboard and were tasked with taking notes on stats. They had graduate assistants who sometimes did this as well, but Layne didn’t mind doing it herself. The other reason was that Layne didn’t have dreams of playing in the WNBA like some of the other college players. She wanted to either be an agent for female athletes or be a scout for a team. She hadn’t officially decided yet, and she’d need to do so soon because, in June, she’d officially no longer be a student.
She made it back to her room, and just as she set her toiletries down on the floor, her phone rang. She checked the screen, and it was an unknown number, which previously, Layne wouldn’t have answered, but given that she was about to graduate and needed a job, she’d already put feelers out and had applied for a few internships and even jobs, hoping to get ahead of her fellow graduates, so she answered.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Layne Stoll, please?” a woman asked.
“This is she,” she said and sat down on her twin bed with its dark-green comforter.
“This is Catherine over at Edmond/Kline.”
