Beyond the Point(36)
“Closure?” Avery said. “How much more closure can you get? I told him it’s over.”
As one of her closest friends, Hannah had a front-row seat to Avery’s pattern of ups and downs, which started with Avery’s pronouncement that she’d found the one and ended with her sobbing in the fetal position, because the guy had decided to date a cheerleader—better known as a Rabble Rouser—instead. The drama had grown predictable, and Hannah worried constantly that Avery would get caught behind closed doors, putting her entire future at West Point in jeopardy.
“Don’t worry,” Avery had said that night as they’d walked back to the barracks. “I’ll take care of Collins. He won’t bother you anymore.”
IN THE SEMESTER that had passed since September 11, everything had changed at West Point.
As soon as the towers came down, West Point had increased security, outfitting every campus entrance with bomb-sniffing dogs and military police, fully armed with automatic rifles. Where once there had been open roads, spike strips now controlled the flow of traffic. Visitors used to be able to walk through the gates simply by showing their ID. Now they had to submit to background checks.
Conversation had changed too. Once a far-off land few could pinpoint on a map, Afghanistan had become the center of most discussions on campus. The name Osama bin Laden could be heard in the mess hall and between classes. At Grant Hall, cadets shared slices of pizza and opinions about military strategy. You couldn’t turn on the news without seeing grainy images of the world’s most wanted criminal: a thin, gray-bearded man seated in a cave. Whenever she saw Bin Laden’s face, Hannah shuddered. But her unease was always short-lived. Perhaps because she imagined men like her grandfather at the Pentagon planning the response, she felt confident that the U.S.-led retaliation would be over quickly. After all, America’s army was the strongest in the world. Its most recent military conflict, Desert Storm, had only lasted six months.
How long could it take to find and kill one lone terrorist?
But while headlines raged, the daily proceedings of college life had moved forward as usual. Professors went on teaching. Sports teams went right on practicing. Leaves fell into piles of gold on the ground, and soon, the sky turned the color of wool. With Dani still recovering from her surgery and the loss of last year’s class of seniors, Coach Jankovich promoted Hannah to the varsity team, along with Avery and Lisa Johnson. During a basketball game over the Thanksgiving holiday against Cornell University, Hannah scored twenty points, and Avery hit a half-court three-point shot in the last second to win the game. The entire arena had erupted in chaos. Hannah had never seen Avery’s face so lit up with joy. Even the Cornell fans celebrated, as if West Point’s ability to win a women’s basketball game somehow correlated with their future ability to take out terrorists.
When they weren’t on the road, they were in the gym, listening to the shrill sound of Coach Jankovich’s whistle reverberate across the court. Last year’s losing season meant this year, her antics had risen to a fever pitch. She was extremely hard on the plebes, Hannah thought, and had replaced her hatred for Avery with ceaseless criticism of Lisa Johnson.
“LISA!” she’d screamed a few weeks earlier, throwing her clipboard to the ground. “THOSE CORNROWS TOO TIGHT? Maybe if you’d loosen them, you could actually think!”
The more Jankovich yelled at Lisa, the more Dani crutched to the sidelines to give her teammate quiet pep talks. Hannah marveled at Dani’s ability to motivate her teammates, despite her injuries. She called out ideas for plays during time-outs, whispered tips to Hannah during games. And rather than see her as an asset, Coach Jankovich often sent Dani out of practice for speaking out of turn.
It didn’t make sense to Hannah. The fact that the players had respect for Dani didn’t mean they had less for their coach. Respect wasn’t pie. But Coach Jankovich’s unrelenting paranoia had turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Team morale had never been lower.
Even Hannah, who hated conflict, had ventured to ask for a change. Practices ran late every single day, leaving the girls little time to rush back to their dorm rooms before dinner. In January, when Hannah had asked Coach Jankovich to consider ending practice promptly at six o’clock, like other coaches, she’d offered only a thin-lipped smile in return.
“So you can spend more time IM-ing your boyfriend?” the coach had snapped.
Hannah didn’t have the heart to tell her coach that she didn’t have a boyfriend, and—as long as she was at West Point—probably never would.
It seemed ridiculous that while the world was on the brink of war, Hannah’s thoughts veered so often to guys, but she couldn’t help herself. Rooming with Avery during the spring semester had put a magnifying glass on Hannah’s chief worry: not a single guy had expressed an ounce of interest in her since she’d stepped foot on campus at West Point. Least of all, the one she wanted.
Ever since Colonel Bennett’s philosophy class, Tim Nesmith had been like the wind—blowing past, never knowing that he’d touched her. She’d see him in the library, poring over an Arabic textbook, refusing to look up from the page. In the fall, at home football games, cadets in the stands would point up at the sky while Tim parachuted with the rest of the skydiving team into the stadium. During Christmas dinner, held every year the week before cadets went home on break, a crew of cadets in Santa outfits had picked up a table off the floor, as five others holding evergreen branches climbed up and built a human Christmas tree on top. Sure enough, when Hannah turned to watch the spectacle, it was Tim, dressed as an angel, who crowned the tree. From that perch, he’d led the corps in a rousing rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” moving his arms like a conductor.