Chapter 12: Sparrow

I found her at the loading dock behind the arena, where the trucks backed in.

She was sitting on a road case with her headset still around her neck and her blazer over her knees.

She didn't look surprised to see me.

"You saw the reel," she said.

"I saw your hand."

She held it out and turned it over, the scar on top.

"Curling iron," she said. "I really was sixteen."

"You were Sparrow."

"For one season."

A forklift beeped somewhere inside, and neither of us said anything until it stopped.

"I was twenty when Crown signed me," she said. "The first woman to start in the Circuit."

"I didn't know that."

"Nobody knows that. I played with my face camera off the whole year."

"Why?"

"Because of what men wrote to me when it was on."

She said it flat.

"The broadcast only ever showed my hands," she said. "So that's all anybody saw."

"What happened?"

"The week before your first match, Moberly called me into the practice room."

"The one with the AC."

"It rattled the whole time he talked. Like a shopping cart."

She almost smiled.

"Your old coach stood behind him with his gum," she said. "Moberly told me a girl doesn't sell jerseys."

My hands had gone cold.

"He said they'd found a kid in Bakersfield who did," she said. "He was going to walk him out on the stage on Saturday."

"Me."

"You."

"They told me Sparrow quit to go to college," I said.

"They told everyone that. I didn't go to college. I went to every team in the league, and nobody wanted Crown's girl."