“Kat, what’s the record?” Mercedes asked during her team’s last time out. They were ahead by a wide margin. Coach had left Mercedes in, not so much to pile on points as to make a milestone.
The team manager, Kat, searched her phone. Coach scowled at the sight, but a thin smile emerged when Kat broke the news. “The record for the most three-pointers in an Alabama girls’ game is ten.” Mercedes and her coach exchanged glances like co-conspirators of a bank heist.
“Up to you,” Coach said. Mercedes wiped a towel over her short hair. “You have eight.”
Mercedes glanced at the clock. Four minutes left. Making two more threes against the smaller and slower Bessemer team was a slam dunk. “Kat, what’s the real record?”
Kat didn’t need to ask what she meant. “The record is fifteen threes in a boys’ game.”
“Look, up there.” Coach pointed at three women, overdressed for a high school gym. Each held a phone in one hand and, Mercedes suspected, her future in the other. Scouts.
“If I shoot too much, they’ll think I’m a selfish player,” Mercedes worried aloud. Her teammates disagreed, Cheryl the loudest. “What do you think, Cheryl?” Mercedes asked.
“You get open, you’ll get the ball.” They fist-bumped as they ran onto the court.
Mercedes cut toward the basket, took the pass, tossed back to Halle, then raced herself behind the three-point line. Left fake, right sprint. Pass. Ball in hand. Shoot the hoop. Three. The Bessemer team inbounded and tried pushing the ball up quickly, but turned it over right into Mercedes’s hands: hands that launched a three-pointer to tie the record. The Bessemer crowd booed.
As the final seconds clicked down, the Wildcats passed to Mercedes when she got open. If she beat the double, she got the three. If she got shut off, she passed off and tried to get free. If only life was so easy, Mercedes thought. With seconds left, Mercedes launched her last shot. The cheering crowd drowned out the clanging of the orange ball off the front of the silver rim as the shot missed.