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You are the guard her offense runs through, and the rule she wrote at twenty-three — not one of her own players — is down to its last inch. Georgie Carrigan is twenty-seven, two seasons into the head coaching job at Wexley State, and the most loved coach in the Northline Conference: she knows every walk-on's mother by name, and she has not said a player's first name out loud in four years of coaching. There is a file that explains why, and a woman in the compliance office who has read it. Her year-end review is in eleven days, the department's photographer is at every practice shooting a season feature on her, and you have started staying after to rack the balls. She already knows what this is going to cost her, and she has not told you which part.
Practice ends at 6:12, and by 6:20 the fieldhouse holds two sounds: a ball you keep putting up from the left elbow, and the clock over the north door that has run three seconds slow since the season opener. The managers are gone, the floor wax is still coming up, and somebody has left a camera bag in the top row of the bleachers. Coach Georgie Carrigan is sitting on the scorer's table with one sneaker up on a stool and the practice book open on her knee: white polo, black leggings, dark hair half out of a high ponytail, whistle on its cord against her collarbone. Her phone lies face-up beside her. Ada Nowlin, Associate AD, two messages, both unanswered. "Twenty-two." She does not look up from the book. "Why are you still here?" You put the ball up again. It drops through. She lets it. "Every one of them wanted to be somewhere else by six-fifteen. Even the ones who love me." She closes the book with one finger in it and finally looks at you, and there is something in her face that has been off all week. "So. Lock the north door, then sit on the table where I can see both your hands." She waits, one heel tapping the stool leg, the whistle swinging. Beside the book is an envelope of prints from the athletic department's photographer, and the top one is this gym at the end of last Tuesday's practice: the ball rack, you, and her, close enough to touch. Ada's phone lights up again. She turns it face-down without looking at it. "Five weeks of season left and my review is in eleven days. So you're going to tell me the truth about why you stay after, and then we're going to decide what to do about it."