Fadeaway, by Rebekah Phillips

We were used, by now, to seeing Alice sit by herself. That was fine with us. She didn’t fit in, and she knew it. Every game, she would sidle in five minutes early, her backpack slung over her shoulder, and she would sit down by herself on the bleachers as far away from everyone as possible. Reaching into her backpack, she would draw out a biology textbook, put it on her lap, and proceed to look studious and turn pages until the game was over. Who studied at a basketball game? Who, but Alice Palmer?

Over time, she had become the brunt of our jokes. Whenever one of us stayed home on a Friday or a Saturday night to study instead of going out with us to the frat house, or the bar, or the club, sometimes one of our apartments, we’d say, “Sure, you and Alice both.” We had never seen her drink, at least, not to the point that she would slur her words and forget who she was and who she was with and actually open up to us as a person. Dillon had managed to drag her along to one house party, and she spent the entire time smiling as if it hurt.

Dillon hated when we made these jokes. “Why can’t you just leave her alone?” he asked us, as close as he ever got to being mad. Alice was his, had been for two months now. He had found her in a biology lab and dumped Katrina for her. We never really recovered from that. Katrina was the star of the Apostles’ volleyball team, whom he had been seeing on and off for two years: Alice was nice, but she wasn’t one of us. It was a foreign concept, for one of our own to be dating a geek. She did biology homework at basketball games, for Christ’s sake.

We got used to her, but we never got friendly. She never tried to get friendly with us, either. Every game, for two months, we’d find her with her biology book on her lap, a yellow highlighter spinning in her fingers. She only looked up when the coach played Dillon, but it was more of a half-eye—she was looking at Dillon, but her mind was still off with Charles Darwin. It wasn’t like it was hard to spot Dillon. He stood out. He was 6”5, our center, and to top that off, he shaved his head. He was the first person you’d spot out there on the court.

Why did he like her? We never understood that. We knew she was pretty, but she had no self-confidence. Everything about her screamed that she was trying too hard. High heels she couldn’t walk in, skinny jeans she kept tugging up at the waist but down at the knees, hair she was continually pushing out of her eyes. Why did she bother? But beyond her nervous, fidgety beauty, all there was to her was school. She could talk our ears off about revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, lab accidents, evolution. Alice never talked about anything else. Anything that mattered.

She didn’t even know how to play euchre.

Everyone has those little phases, where they fall for someone they shouldn’t. That was, we hoped, all there was to Dillon and Alice. A few weeks more, give or take, to let the spell she’d put on him wane, and the whole thing would run its course. He and Katrina would go right back to where they left off, and Alice would leave our lives forever. They had to be feeling the strain; how could a basketball star and a bookworm ever be happy together?

Something changed the night of our game against the Northern Timberwolves. We didn’t even notice the dynamic had shifted. The girls’ game had run late, and we were scrambling. The roads were bad, so the bleachers were emptier than usual. Shoes squeaked on the floor. The dance team pranced, their pasted smiles wide and lipstick-y. And Alice had a smile on her face we’d never seen before.

There was no book on her lap, for one thing. Her eyes were feverish and over-bright, focused as never before on the basketball court. But it wasn’t Dillon she was watching. Her eyes were on the opposing team, the Northern Timberwolves. Well, we thought, life will go back to normal once the game starts. Alice will pull out her textbook and whisper the names of different nucleic acids to herself. All will be as it should be.

The announcer introduced us to each other in the pre-game parade, our boys making a show of how vivacious they were, how high they could jump. Dillon never seemed as vibrant as he did then. We could see him laughing with the assistant coach, his face flushed with excitement and adrenaline. All men look like that, before the blow. The dance team left the floor, dropping their Barbie smiles and pulling out their cell phones. Rammstein filled the speaker systems, and the game began.

Plays came and went. Fouls were called. None of us noticed. We were watching Alice, who was watching the Timberwolves. There was still no book on her lap, and we realized, slowly, that no book would appear. Who was she watching? 12, the stocky African American we had nicknamed Fatass, because of how far he stuck his butt out when he took a shot? 24, the point guard? 5, with the dreadlocks? Her eyes were following someone. But the pace of the game was moving quickly, even for us, and as soon as we thought we had him, a buzzer would sound, a ref would whistle, the coach would start to shout and swear and would pull someone back onto the bench. And he, whoever he was, would be lost to us.

17-15. 20-20. Never once were we in the safe zone, the security ten points gives us; we were always hanging on by the skin of our teeth, neck and neck. 25-30. 26-32. And Alice Palmer—who we secretly thought didn’t understand anything about basketball—was following every play.

Five minutes before halftime, behind by two points, a small, lithe boy stole the ball from Dillon and shot it from outside the blue line. For a second it rolled around the hoop, deciding if it wanted to go in or not. We held our breath and prayed. Then, slowly, wavering, it went through. The Timberwolves fans screamed. Alice stood up, clapping as we had never seen her clap before. “Brr-ent Olivers, number 1, scoring there for three points,” the announcer rumbled.

Brent Olivers. He had a name now. Alice was cheering for Brent. On the court, Dillon rubbed his forehead, then wiped his hands on the soles of his shoes. Even from the bleachers, we could see that a lost look had come into his eyes. Dillon had noticed that his girlfriend was cheering for someone else.

At half-time the dance team came out again, all smiles and insincere charm. Usually we would split up, succumbing to the call of the concession stand, making a quick dash to the restroom, moving across the bleachers and striking up a conversation with a friend sitting far away. We did not do that this time. We were riveted, watching as Alice smiled at the dance team with her chin on her hand. Someone sitting nearby her said something, and she laughed—Alice! Laugh! She sparkled for the first time, and we started to see a little of the person Dillon had fallen for over those shared biology labs. But no matter how beautiful she looked as she sang and danced along to “Timber,” we knew the end of her time had come.

Dillon in the second half was angry, desperate. He made shots he shouldn’t have and missed them all. He got three personal fouls called against him in the space of ten minutes. Pull him out, we pleaded silently with the coach. Before he costs us the game. “Dillon, for God’s sake, watch it!” the coach howled. But Dillon stayed in the game. We could only watch as Brent dived under Dillon’s long arms, too short and fast to catch, and made shot after shot. Alice cheered for Brent, every time. Dillon would lick his lips, his eyes flickering to an oblivious Alice, and the cycle would repeat.

Dillon’s chance came as Brent dribbled the ball cross-court. Dillon caught him, and they fell to the floor, kicking and grabbing like animals. The refs blew the whistle, but still Dillon fought. “Fifth personal foul for number 33, Dillon Ratz,” the announcer said, as the refs finally got Dillon off of his rival. “Two penalty shots for the Timberwolves!”

The coach pulled Dillon aside and spoke sharply to him, but Dillon wasn’t listening. He kept looking helplessly at the bleachers, towards Alice, longing to go to her.

Was Alice looking back at him? We couldn’t tell. Dillon took a spot on “the bench”—really, just a couple of plush folding chairs—but he wasn’t watching the game anymore, even though we were losing by ten points. He sat there, jiggling his legs, bobbing his head, his hands clasped tightly in his lap. Every few seconds he would look over his shoulder, towards his wayward girlfriend. Alice, who had eyes only for Brent Oliver, who did not seem to notice or care that her boyfriend was anxious and that we were losing. Well, this was what came of dating your lab partner. Katrina puffed herself up and smiled, sending pointed looks in Dillon’s direction.

None of us had expected that, when the time finally came to call off this charade, Dillon would look so frightened. He reminded us of a child waiting for bad news. But what could we say? Alice was not like us. She would never be like us. It was better to end this now. We tore our eyes away from Dillon and from Alice and encouraged our team to make up for the damage Dillon had done—that Alice had done. All the while Dillon shifted, unable to keep still.

We lost the game by fifteen points. We sighed, stretching out our sore muscles, and cast nasty looks at the opposing team. On the bench, our boys stood up and slowly shuffled towards the other team to shake their hands and say, Good game. Good game. For the losers, these words are always a lie.

When Dillon stood in front of Brent we flinched and held our breath, unsure of what to expect. A muscle ticked in Dillon’s face, and Brent laughed. He shook Dillon’s hand amiably, unaware that anything was amiss, and then moved on. Dillon stood there frozen, his eyes again scanning the crowd for Alice. We did not know if he found her. The audience was standing up and moving, and we could not see Alice for the crowd. What we did see, however, was Brent turning around again after the end of the line-up and walking straight to Alice.

We knew what would happen before anyone else. Dillon saw him and went after him, his jaw tight, murder in his eyes. Brent didn’t notice; his eyes were light and monkey-ish, trained on Alice. The crowd had thinned enough that we could see her rise to greet him. “Brent,” we saw her say, her lips forming his name as if she had been intimate with it once. We rose, too.

Dillon put his hand on Brent’s shoulder and turned him around to face him. “What’s your problem?” he snarled, and we could hear him even where we were. Slowly we were closing ranks. Across court, the assistant coach jumped up as he saw what was about to happen.

 “Dillon!” we heard him cry.

 Brent shoved Dillon’s hand off his shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

“Dillon,” Alice said.

The assistant coach forced his way through the crowd, but we blocked him as best we could. Let Dillon have his out. He needed to prove to himself that he was still in control, that he was going to leave Alice, and not the other way around. We would not let him miss out on that chance.

“Stay away from my girlfriend,” Dillon snarled, and Brent laughed, looking from Alice to Dillon.

“I didn’t know she had a boyfriend.”

Dillon pushed up against him. “Now you do.”

“Dillon.” This from Alice.

The assistant coach made it to Dillon’s side and started to pull him away. Brent’s coach, too, was hopping chairs to get to Jersey Number 1. “She’s my girlfriend,” he shouted as he was dragged away.

 “What’s his problem?” Brent asked Alice, but his coach, too, had grabbed hold of him, and was dragging him to the locker room.

Who was Alice watching leave? Both men left through the same door. She stood there, quivering, and then turned to us. “We grew up together,” she said, her voice higher pitched than normal. “I…was he jealous? Why was he jealous?”

Smart girls don’t know anything about the things that matter.

“Because you’re his girlfriend.”

 “Not really. I…”

 “Then end it. End it now.” That was Katrina.

 “I didn’t think it would be a big deal—that he would notice, and start to think...He never seemed to want me here. He always acts so ashamed. Ashamed—of me.” Her wild eyes met ours, darting from face to face like a convicted prisoner. She did not like the answer she saw there. Alice grabbed her backpack and ran, awkwardly, towards the boy’s locker room. We followed. We had boyfriends of our own that would come looking for us soon; they would want our ears, to complain about bad calls and fouls and hate on Fatass and that Brent Oliver who ran so quickly. Katrina was smiling, smug and assured. Dillon was hers again.

“She messed up,” we all agreed.

So what if Brent was an old friend? She had cheered for him when she had never cheered for Dillon. Alice did not understand and never would understand. It was better that she just leave.

She waited there outside of the locker room with us, watching as our boys slowly filed out and put their arms around us, off to dinner. We had expected this. She would wait for him, and try to explain away her behavior, begging for forgiveness. It did not surprise us that she had fallen in love with Dillon; it surprised us that he had fallen for her. Her heart would mend. Probably.

Dillon came out into the hall, his eyes on the ground. He looked up once, involuntarily, and Alice stepped forward, making a strange noise in the back of her throat. He stopped, still trying to find an answer in the tiles beneath his feet. Two months they had been dating, and they were as awkward around each other as newborn kittens.

“What was that, Alice?” he said, finally. “What was that?”

“He’s an old friend. We went to high school together.”

 “We lost the game to them!”

Alice smiled faintly. “He was always good at basketball.”

Dillon looked at her, and he did not like what he saw. “I can’t handle this right now.”

“Then when?” Alice blocked him, as if she was a center herself, guarding the hoop. “We should talk about how you never seem to want me around—how ashamed you are of me—”

“Ashamed?” Dillon spat, running his hand over his smooth head. “Ashamed of you? Christ, Alice.”

She winced. Alice was Catholic, one of the few of us who went to Augustine University because of religion, and not just because she was offered sports scholarships.

“It’s not as if you weren’t showing off how much smarter you are than me. Up there in the stands, always studying. I’m just managing Bs in my forensics classes but you—you rub my face in it.”

Alice’s face twisted. “Are you saying I’m too smart for you?” She looked at us. “That I’m a snob?”

Dillon’s eyes raked over us, too, witnesses to Alice’s outsider status. “You didn’t seem happy. I didn’t think I was making you happy. I thought that if maybe it were different, if I was smarter—”

“Well, that’s both of us, then.”

He shook his head, licked his lips. “Do you like him, then? That Barney Olivander?”

We hadn’t realized how much Dillon loved her until he said that. Men never mangle other men’s names unless they are jealous and hurting. We looked at each other, wondering. Could he really be in love with that beautiful dancing girl? Could she really be in love with our Dillon?

She opened her mouth, but said nothing. We watched her swallow twice. Then she hung her head in defeat. Dillon nodded once, pursed his lips. That was a yes, wasn’t it? She liked that Timberwolf more than her boyfriend?

It was the pain in his eyes that made us do it (all of us but Katrina, anyway). We reached out and gave her a little push. She looked at us, as if to say, Are you sure this is right? We gave a little, imperceptible nod. “Dillon,” she said. And she stepped forward, closer and closer, until she threw her arms around Dillon. His long arms wrapped around her, and he whispered into her hair. He held her as if he wouldn’t let her go—and she held him as if he was the only thing she was sure of.

We saw them later that night. For a little while, at least. We were drinking in one of our apartments, with the music too loud, doing what we always did on Saturday nights. We had almost forgotten about Alice Palmer when she walked inside, holding Dillon’s hand. She smiled at us, and we smiled uncertainly back. Katrina scowled. Alice didn’t seem to notice. Her grin just grew even wider. And we got the feeling that we would be seeing an awful lot of this new, laughing Alice, who for so long had been hidden behind biology textbooks.