Beyond the Point(21)
Coach Jankovich walked in, wearing a navy pantsuit and black high heels. A rush of cold air entered the locker room with her. Without speaking a word, she taped two white pieces of paper to the cinder-block wall by the door, and then left the way she came—in silence.
THE GIRLS STOOD like statues, each afraid to be the first to speak.
“Well I’ll look,” said Avery. Ignoring the growing dread in her stomach, she walked to the wall as if she didn’t give a damn and stared at the papers, covered in Coach Jankovich’s barely legible handwriting. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” asked Hannah.
At that moment, Dani walked out of the shower wrapped in a towel, surrounded by a cloud of steam. She wiped the inside of her ear with her pointer finger. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“They’re . . .” Hannah had walked up behind Avery and was staring at the pages, her voice full of shock. “. . . rosters.”
Avery laughed sardonically, turned to grab her gym bag, and shook her head at Dani, who stood stunned in the middle of the room.
“Glad to know I survived Beast for this shit.”
The two pages fluttered as Avery blew past them and out the door. The first page had “JV” written at the top, and below it, a long column of names. The other page said “Varsity” and listed only one.
BY EARLY OCTOBER, the trees on campus had turned from green to orange, like the whole place had been lit up in flames. At breakfast, Avery took her seat at her table and stabbed at her eggs with murderous rage.
“Someone piss in your pancakes, princess?”
The upperclassman at the head of the table, John Collins, offered her a wide smile. A Spanish major with green eyes and wavy black hair, Collins was handsome, funny, and extremely bored it seemed, since he was surrounded by a table of plebes who weren’t allowed to talk.
“No excuse, sir.” Avery faked a smile, took an oversized bite of eggs.
But she did have an excuse. She had a million excuses.
After the first few varsity basketball games, Dani McNalley had become something of a celebrity on campus. Avery didn’t need a crystal ball to predict how her career as an NCAA athlete was going to unfold. Dani was going to secure every possible minute of playing time for the season—maybe even all four years. Avery would ride the bench.
She felt trapped, like Coach Jankovich had promised her a place on the team, only to abandon her to the sidelines. In light of her rejection, everything about West Point chafed against her. She had to check the hall for upperclassmen before darting from her dorm room. Plebes were forced to walk like Pac-Man, in straight lines, only taking right-angled turns. You could spot plebes at West Point, walking along the perimeter of the hallways, squaring off with their eyes straight ahead, trying not to be noticed. By contrast, upperclassmen walked wherever they wanted and spoke freely among themselves. It was enough to drive Avery crazy, watching them flaunt their freedom. Every time someone yelled at her, the voice inside Avery’s head repeated their instructions with an added layer of sarcasm.
“Adams, move to the wall!”
You move to the wall, she would rant in her inner dialogue.
“New Cadet, stop right there and recite the ‘Alma Mater.’”
You recite the fucking alma mater!
Instead, she’d bite her tongue and do as she was told, allowing the anger to boil inside of her, unsure of when it might explode.
Avery placed her fork on her plate.
“Okay,” Collins announced suddenly, breaking the silence. “New rules. As long as you use your radio, you can talk. New Cadet Willis,” Collins said, addressing the plebe who sat across from Avery midbite. “Your call sign is Trojan, because you’ll never need one.”
Avery fought back a laugh. He went down the table, assigning nicknames. When he got to Avery, he stopped, looked her up and down. “Adams. Your name is About-Face, because all you ever do is sulk, and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get you to smile.”
“Chhhhhh—ah, Eagle for About-Face. Come in, About-Face,” he started, pretending to hold a radio in his hand. “What’s your twenty?”
Avery rolled her eyes.
“Chhhh—sorry, About-Face, I’m not getting that. Check your radio.”
With her hand curled around an imaginary radio, Avery decided to play along.
“Chhhh—roger that, Eagle, I’m downwind of Trojan. Smells like he’s looking for a place to defecate, sir. Over and out.”
The table erupted in laughter, Trojan included. Satisfied, Avery offered a flirtatious wink to Collins, then picked up her fork and kept eating.
MIDTERMS SWALLOWED WHOLE weeks of October. Cadets attended nonstop review sessions and banged out sixteen-page research papers, and a chemistry exam nearly flattened Avery with its intensity. When she wasn’t at basketball practice with the JV team, Avery was buried beneath her books, trying desperately to stay afloat. Her GPA was a sorry 3.2, and with that, Avery was happy. Then all the leaves detached from their branches, glittering through the air like falling gold. They’d gathered in rotting piles on the ground before Avery could appreciate the beauty of their death.
After that, campus went gray. People had warned her about this: during the winter, West Point was a depressing palette of black and white. Charcoal river, stone buildings and roads, slate uniforms, cloudy skies. Barren and lifeless, the whole place felt like Siberia, and the thin wool coat Avery had been issued over the summer suddenly didn’t stand a chance against the wind chill.