“That was one of the most impressive second halves I’ve seen in all my years,” a tall woman with short, graying hair told Mercedes as she stood by the team bus.
“What?” Mercedes shouted, startled by the stranger. She leaned against the bus for safety.
“Do you have a minute?” the woman asked. Who was she? A scout? A cop? Those jobs have a lot in common, Mercedes thought. Old people with power judging young kids, deciding if they are “good” or “bad,” with the answer determining their future. Mercedes wondered if a gray area existed anywhere in the world.
“I’m Tina Franklin, Auburn.” Mercedes swallowed her smile. Auburn was only one hundred miles away, but the orange and blue Tigers seemed light-years away from her life in Birmingham.
“Have you talked to Coach?”
The woman smiled but didn’t answer her question. “I saw what kind of athlete you are, so tell me, what kind of student are you?”
Mercedes’s report card was a hive of Bs, except in math, where an A stood tall. Mercedes rattled off her good grades, but the Auburn envoy cut her off with a smile.
“I didn’t ask about your grades,” she said. “I asked, what kind of student are you?” One that doesn’t like quizzes or trick questions, Mercedes thought. Behind her, she heard teammates on the bus celebrating the win thanks to Mercedes’s twenty points in the second half.
“At Auburn, student athletes are students first and athletes second.” The woman reached out her hand. “If you can graduate college, you can play. That’s how it works at Auburn.”
Mercedes took the card and buried it in the pocket of her Dream hoodie, which seemed right. “Thanks.”
“You played like two different people out there,” the Auburn recruiter observed.
Mercedes agreed but didn’t tell her why. She’d just begun to understand it herself. If Callie was a broken stoplight, then Mercedes was stuck at a crossroads, not knowing what to do.