The attempted humor failed. Her mother heard it immediately. “Tell me.” Imani described the ball rack, the scrape, the official, and Coach Ward’s incident report. She left out how helpless it had felt to be moved like a piece of equipment.

Her mother asked the sensible questions first. Head, wrist, knees, pain. Then she fell quiet. “You know what I want you to remember?” Denise asked. “That basketball is a team sport.

That you don’t owe anybody a performance of anger. You owe yourself the chance to decide what matters. And if somebody touches you again, you tell your coach and the people responsible for keeping you safe. Being calm doesn’t mean keeping secrets.” Imani looked down at the pale turquoise stitching on the left tongue of her shoe.

Her mother had repaired it with a scrap of strong thread when new shoes weren’t in the budget. “I’m not keeping it secret.” she said. “Good. Then do the thing you came for.” When the call ended, Imani found a shallow groove in the bench with the toe of her right shoe and moved her foot along it.

Left, plant, right. The motion was so familiar that she had not realized she was doing it. Years ago, she’d learned to measure progress in empty gym repetitions while her mother finished late shifts. She had no secret professional coach, no hidden championship medal, and no talent that excused practice. What she had was hours of working through things she had once been bad at.

The right-handed bank shot was one of them. She could finish with her left through traffic, but when a defender cut off that side, her right hand still sometimes released the ball too hard. Coach Ward had given her a ridiculous instruction: imagine putting an envelope through a slot in a high door. Don’t throw it at the wall.

Place it where it belongs. Zora found Imani tracing the groove. You’re doing the envelope thing again. Coach says I throw it like a brick when I’m mad. Then stop getting mad.

Excellent coaching. Have you thought about a career? Absolutely. My fee is one orange sports drink. They grinned.

It would be easy to tell a story about how that grin erased the morning’s insult. It did not. Imani could still feel the padded rack against her back and hear laughter that stopped just before her coach arrived. But there was a basketball waiting. She could give the insult the whole court or let it have only the strip of rubber where she had landed.